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Carlene Hatcher Polite, associate professor emerita of English and one of the most important artists to emerge from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, died Dec. 7 at the age of 77 in Hospice Buffalo, Cheektowaga.
A novelist, essayist, dancer, civil rights activist and educator, Polite was the author of two influential and much-praised novels, “The Flagellants” (1966) and “Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play” (1975), cited by critic A. Robert Lee as “a free-form jazz text of the black female body caught between possession and autonomy.”
Her experimentation with literary form and her attention to the rhythms and dialects of African American oral expression strongly influenced the development of postmodern black fiction, as did such innovators as Gayl Jones and Ishmael Reed.
Polite was born in Detroit in 1932, the daughter of John and Lillian Cook Hatcher, international representatives of United Auto Workers/Congress of Industrial Organizations (UAW/CIO).
She attended the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance and from 1955 to 1963 pursued a career as a professional dancer, performing with New York City’s Concert Dance Theater (1955-59) and the Detroit Equity Theatre and Vanguard Playhouse (1960-62). She taught modern dance and the Martha Graham technique at the Detroit YWCA (1960-62) and YMCA (1962-63) and as a visiting instructor at Wayne State University.
In the early 1960s, Polite joined many African-American artists and intellectuals in turning to political organizing and civil rights activism, and in 1962 was elected to the Michigan State Central Committee of the Democratic Party.
She coordinated the Detroit Council for Human Rights and participated in the historic June 1963 Walk for Freedom and the November 1963 Freedom Now Rally to protest the Birmingham church bombings. In 1963, Polite organized the Northern Negro Leadership Conference, and also was active in the NAACP.
In 1964, Polite moved to Paris, where the influential French editor Dominique de Roux encouraged her writing; her first book, “The Flagellants,” was published in French by Christian Bourgois in 1966.
A lyrical and much-praised protest of the limited gender roles available to African-American women and men, it was one of the first works of African-American fiction to move beyond the conventions of realism. It garnered major critical attention and distinguished Polite as a member of the first important African-American arts movement since the Harlem Renaissance. The book was published in English the following year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Polite received a National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship in 1967 and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1968.
She joined the faculty of the UB Department of English in 1971, where she taught creative writing.
Her second novel, “Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play,” considered a “scalding” novel of social protest, was published in 1975, and like her first, exhibited her talent for stylistic innovation and helped earn her a place among leading African-American literary creative writers.
Funeral services were held last week in Detroit.
Services were held last week in Michigan for Muriel Hebert Wolf, UB professor emeritus of music who taught voice and directed the successful UB Opera Studio. Wolf died Dec. 10 at her home in Rochester Hills, Mich. She was 84.
An influential member of the Western New York music community, Wolf served on the UB music faculty from 1965 until her retirement in 1993. She taught, produced and directed opera in the Buffalo area during that time, including two productions a year at UB.
Wolf eschewed exclusive concentration on 19th century opera and her credits extended over a wide range of traditional, American and contemporary works. She commissioned an opera to celebrate the American bicentennial and mounted major productions with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and at Artpark and the Shaw Festival Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. An educator to the bone, she also made it a practice to prepare opera scenes for presentation in area schools.
In the early 1980s, she began to use innovative techniques like amplified sound and the inclusion of bits of film in her productions—years before it became a practice of such institutions as the Metropolitan Opera.
“The university should be a laboratory for the creation of new works, new concepts,” she said, insisting that human experience and extreme emotions addressed by opera made it “terribly relevant” to contemporary life. When properly presented, she noted, opera had the same gripping power as soap opera.
She demonstrated as much with “Psychopera or Madness in Opera,” a series of lectures she developed in the 1980s with UB psychiatrist Stuart Keill in which the two presented opera as psychological thriller. Wolf discussed the opera’s composer, plot and such troubled operatic figures as Shostakovich’s “Lady MacBeth of Minsk,” Othello, Mimi, Tosca, Lucia di Lammermoor and Madame Butterfly.
Performers sang arias that demonstrated psychopathologies that Keill claimed were inherent in the characters. He pleaded insanity on behalf of many of the operatic killers and the audience served as a jury. They presented their lectures in Buffalo and were a big hit at the 1984 American Psychiatric Association meeting. They also put together a special series for UB graduate students.
Wolf was the founder and director of Music Theater Advocates Inc., an organization that worked to establish a permanent opera company on the Niagara Frontier and was an associate editor of Opera Quarterly, the journal of the National Opera Association.
A native of New England, Wolf held master’s degrees in voice and musicology from the New England Conservatory, where she met and married her first husband, the late flutist and composer Anton Wolf.
She spent two years as a Fulbright Fellow at the Max Reinhardt Seminar for Theatre Arts at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts, and the university’s Mozarteum in Salzberg.
Wolf taught many successful vocal artists, including Ellen Lang, a touring soloist who performed with the Metropolitan Opera Chorus and other major venues.
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