On the sermons of Tyrone Williams
A lay preacher, as well as the distinguished poet, critic, and English professor I had known him to be, Tyrone had delivered the sermons at the Winton Community Free Methodist Church in Cincinnati, where he worshipped from 1987, when he began teaching full time at Xavier, until he took his position as a distinguished chair in the English Department at Buffalo in Spring 2022.
Six months after Tyrone Williams died from cancer at age seventy on March 11, 2024, I accessed the texts of seventeen sermons he had composed and that were now housed in the “Theological, 2001-2021” section of his archive at SUNY Buffalo.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña: Poyesis genética and the Aztec ethno-cyborg
For decades, performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña has been curating an ongoing, serial “Ethno-Cyberpunk Trading Post,” a provocation with bio-poetic undercurrents. His phantasmagoric essays, poems, manifestoes, and theater pieces all offer up a mutant, cross-splicing take on race, just as his “genetically engineered Mexicans” and “ethno-cyborgs” use the language of bio-manipulation and robotics to undermine prefabricated notions of racial “belonging.” In such work, the human figure “enhanced with prosthetic implants” is a recurring trope for neocolonial incursions and resistance to such incursions at once. This is achieved by way of a Fourth-World “virtual barrio” of an ethnoscape trying to take back the rhetoric of “borderlessness” from the profiteering of the post-national, corporate world.
For decades, performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña has been curating an ongoing, serial “Ethno-Cyberpunk Trading Post,” a provocation with bio-poetic undercurrents.