[by Meredith Wiggins]




On Wednesday, February 25, from 3 - 4:30 p.m., HBW and the KU Libraries co-hosted Black Literary Suites: Black Writers with a Kansas Connection.

The kick-off event featured a poster display, a self-guided audio tour, a display of relevant books from HBW's collections, and a preview of HBW's video tribute to John A. Williams.


 








Over the course of the 90-minute event, dozens of students, faculty, staff, and community members gathered to learn more about the history of black writers like Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank Marshall Davis, and Langston Hughes in the Sunflower State.












The BLS poster display will remain up in Watson Library's fourth-floor Hallway Gallery through most of March, so if you haven't gotten a chance to visit yet, there's still time! 










Many thanks to all those who attended the event - and especially to the KU Libraries for their generous support of HBW's programming!

[by Thabiti Lewis]

50 years ago, in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was signed. This also happens to be the year that Watts went up flames.

The Watts uprising in California left 1000 people injured and 34 people dead, and it led to more than 3900 arrests because of years of police brutality. In 2014, in cities across the United States--from Ferguson and St. Louis to Chicago and New York--there was unrest as people organized to protest police brutality and a justice system that repeatedly refused to indict police officers that killed unarmed black men (black women, too, have not been immune to murder at the hands of police).

Sam Greenlee’s 1969 novel The Spook Who Sat By the Door captured the spirit of the many revolts in the 1960s, leveling a harsh critique of America’s failure to deliver on its democratic ideals and promises to black folk. The revolt in Chicago that explodes at the end of Greenlee’s novel and catches fire in cities across America mirrored the racial disturbances in major cities in 1964, 1965, and 1967, and the uprisings in more than 100 cities across the country when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968.  It also mirrors Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown was murdered. The Spook is a unique novel because it is more than a response to the contradictions of American democracy. It is calculated art, void of blindness or naiveté, offering an effective example of discourse of black protest for the future.


Greenlee’s novel does more than aptly capture the explosion of black anger over continuing oppression despite victories of the civil rights movement—it provides an action plan. The art of Greenlee’s protagonist Dan Freeman embodied the aesthetic Black Arts and politics of the era. Freeman, a black man whose identity is clear, constantly strategizes to overthrow America’s power structure (writers such as Ishmael Reed, Chester Himes, John A. Williams and James Baldwin displayed similar anger) in a quiet systematic fashion on the surface, while training young revolutionaries for war against the government. The Spook was published the same year as John A. Williams’ Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light, and Edwin Corley’s Siege, but what sets Greenlee’s novel apart is how he expands previous notions of protest while embracing a Black Aesthetic ideology that called for revolution after exhausting notions of peaceful solutions. The Spook is steeped in both Black Arts Movement and the Black Power Movement notions of self-definition and black community. Greenlee’s art and aesthetic sensibilities emanate from the local responses of cities like Watts and his own city, Chicago. 

Greenlee’s novel received a lukewarm reception from some critics, some of whom were unimpressed with its overall literary quality and others who were unimpressed with Greenlee’s handbook on how to become a successful revolutionary by beating the system at its own game. However, some reviewers actually liked the novel. Those embracing it thought that Greenlee successfully balanced militant fervor and his anger with a satirical portrait of the foolishness of whites, which marked a deep departure from black authors appealing to whites. Despite the mixed critical response, the novel exploded on the underground scene, especially among grassroots activists, and in black communities across the country.  From this sector, the book drew rave reviews and a very positive reception.

It was so popular, in fact, that a film adaptation emerged a few years later. Greenlee was part of producing this film, which also carried the title of the novel. (It too was a grassroots effort). The film was equally popular, drawing sold-out audiences in independent movie houses across the country.  However, the dangerous message of the film and the book seemed to limit mainstream distribution of the film, despite the overwhelming demand for it. In the mid-1980s, when I was a sophomore at the University of Rochester, a fellow student, William Lee, managed to get a copy of the film to screen for our weekly Coffee House group.  It blew us away!  The film and novel’s appeal during the late 1970s and at our Coffee House gathering stemmed from its call for impatient but revolutionary action that involved strategically taking justice, rather than waiting or hoping for justice to be served. It followed the edicts of its era, the Black Arts Movement (BAM), that called for art with an openly political impetus.

What is undeniable is that both the novel and film were a huge hit in the Black community—especially on the grassroots level. It touched a nerve. So much so that Mr. Greenlee paid a price for his truthful art that perhaps exposed too much. 

In a 2008 interview that I conducted with Mr. Greenlee, he explained to me that the advice of the grandfather character in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man was a driving force for his own novel.  According to Greenlee:

“[The grandfather explains] how to survive in the context of racist white America [living with one's head in the lion's mouth]. I took the concept one step further. You don’t just try to survive. You kiss ass to kick ass. Every one of our great revolutionaries kissed ass to kick ass. The novel is not intended to be a refutation of Ellison but to move the grandfather’s comments to a different level. The novel [The Spook Who Sat By the Door] is also a response to standing and fighting instead of being the nigger boy running . . . You hit them [enemies] on the flanks and the rear then when they coalesce you run and disappear.”

The Spook Who Sat By the Door was a BAM anthem, rising to the Black Power calls to challenge and repudiate the values, morals, and ethics of the white majority. Greenlee’s form of masking, along with his adherence to BAM ideals, allowed him to produce art tied to the black community that fostered social change. The art or aesthetics in The Spook concurs with the BAM mantra of creating a revolution in all realms: streets, intellect, and culture.  Thus the ideology driving the novel has synergy with Black life and cultural traditions like blues and jazz. Greenlee culls from Ellison’s collection of jazz and blues men found in Invisible Man, then folds them into the singular persona of his protagonist Dan Freeman, making him a blues/jazz figure who is fully aware of the different registers or tensions he must play simultaneously over and around.

Greenlee explained to me that he created Dan Freeman to fill a void he believed existed in black literature at the time: “All the protagonists like Ellison’s invisible protagonist want to be seen as equal to whites. Dan Freeman does not care whether they see him as equal. He considers them to be inferior. He thinks they are fools and uses them as fools.” Indeed, his protagonist never ponders any diametric opposition to the black community or his true identity because it is the community that inspires him to act.

Near the end of my interview with Greenlee, I pushed him to compare his novel to Ellison’s and other black novelists.  He cut me off and said:

“Look, The Spook is a departure from traditional black protest fiction. He [Dan Freemen] is not concerned with being seen as equal. He will accept the racist status quo to do this; that is what differentiates him from the protagonist in The Man Who Cried I Am and Bigger Thomas [Native Son]. The novel is not intended to be a refutation of Ellison but to move the grandfather’s comments to a different level. I have seen people destroyed because they did not say ‘no.’ The only two choices we have is to run or fight.”

Perhaps more strident and strategic in his attack against white liberalism than Ellison, Greenlee, like the youth protesting in the 1960s and right now, has less faith in a truly democratic, post-racial society. His fiction depicts the truth about a government filled with contradictions, injustice and failed democracy—similar issues plaguing society in the present moment.
 
Greenlee chose not to arm his protagonist with mere vernacular protest—the power of language.  Instead, he keeps Dan silent, speaking mostly through action: a multifaceted fight with his mind, hands, and, at times, a gun.  Greenlee holds up Dan as the new model of protest. What Greenlee advocates for in the post-1960s era are new revolutionaries. People who, like Dan Freeman, can be silent, but orchestrate the tensions of the music of the revolt, conducting the action from within and in the streets that makes it a reality.

In this way, Greenlee achieved a unique and perhaps under-appreciated literary jazz expression that offered readers a new perspective of revolution. Today, 50 years after Watts and six months after Ferguson, The Spook Who Sat By the Door is worthy of reexamination by contemporary readers.


Thabiti Lewis is associate professor of English and Critical Culture Gender and Race at Washington State University Vancouver. He is the author of Ballers of the New School: Race and Sports in America and editor of Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara. He writes about mid-twentieth century American literature and popular culture.

- KU Ph.D. student Amanda M. Sladek considers Toussaint L'Ouverture and the problematic "slave narrative" genre for the HBW Emerging Scholars series.

- Jerry W. Ward, Jr. remembered his former classmate Anne Moody, author of the memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi.

- HBW recapped the kick-off of the Black Literary Suite: Black Writers with a Kansas Connection.

- Thabiti Lewis considered Sam Greenlee's novel The Spook Who Sat by the Doorin the context of the urban revolts of the 1960s and today.

- Inspired by Joel Christian Gill's #28daysarenotenough, Book Riot's Derek Attig gave suggestions for Black History Books for the Whole Year.

- Poet and memoirist Maya Angelou is to be honored with a U.S. Post Office "forever" stamp.

- Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X and co-author of the new young adult novel X, wonders what her father would have to say about today's activists.

- Not strictly "writing," but too wonderful not to include: Derrick Clifton talks about the "Because of Them We Can" ad campaign that dresses black children up as their inspirations.

- KU Associate Professor of English Giselle Anatol discussed her new book, The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora, with KU News.

- Tickets are still available for the final three performances of KU Theatre's production of A Raisin in the Sun on March 6-8.

[by Hoke Glover]

The world of poetry is like many of those integrated worlds that exist in America. There a careful balance is kept between the minority percentages and the hidden rules that govern the overall image of the enterprise. It is a neighborhood of sorts. If the amount of Blacks involved reaches 40 percent, there is a tipping point of sorts and some whites leave as they feel uncomfortable, and suddenly it becomes a Black neighborhood.

I am not sure the above scenario has ever occurred in the world of poetry.


 

There, it seems, we have only recently been integrated into the prestigious world of literary tradition. God knows, we rarely get to be anywhere near 50 percent in those rooms. There is little white flight in places where our presence is known and designated as "intergrated" but numerically small enough to spark the fears of the great darkness. In those small numbers we can be "discovered," engaged, and promoted as anomolies of our race--characterizations that, when combined with a endorsement of discpline, craft, and nuance, seem to root themselves in a need to distance ourselves from the negative connotations associated with Blackness in regards to work ethic.

I am always fond of the "discovery" story of our great poet Langston Hughes, who was ushered into the world of American poetry when he slid some of his poems across the table to Vachel Lindsay at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. Oddly enough, the scene of this "discovery" is used as the narrative to brand the popular D.C. activist restaurant Busboys and Poets. It could even be that the placement of this narrative on the commercial operation is an idea spawned from the mind of someone who lives in a Black skin themselves. I'll let the common narrative speak for itself and simply say "discovery" is centered in myths of Columbus and white supremacy and, no matter how ludicrous, is tactically advantageous for the one "discovered." Those outside the discovery zone are regulated to an anonymity that is normal for those confronted by the empire of ideas that often forms the literary landscape.

Black Institutions are essential in an environment where we are represented as minorities or in places where we are majority without the infrastructure and apparatus to promote our own ideas. A Black enterprise attempting to legitimately reconcile our dynamic use of language with the forms and standards mandated by the larger society can easily be viewed as alternative or simply not dedicated to the true spirit of the literature. I assume this is why folks created hip-hop and other African American art forms. Our goal has been not to avoid standards, but instead to create, manage, and maintain our own in communication with a Black audience who knows those nuances.

Though many poets themselves do not aspire to power, they are smart enough to read a room, industry, or institution and know where power is. The statement that words are power or that poetry constitutes some type of power works only in conjunction with the power of awards, the power of prestige, and the power to publish. It is there the writer submits with hopes of being accepted.

For African Americans, it could be that the idea of a Black Institution is the true measure of the post-racial world. In a world of immigrants, we contemplate our forced integration. Whether or not we have the glue that has held communities together and fostered their remembering and economic growth is a question up for debate. We can say this: rarely do we seek to build institutions which manage the prestige, power, and awards.

The Hurston/Wright Foundation's Legacy Awards are notable in this respect. These awards are given by an organization run and founded by Marita Golden. The power of the awards is to lend prestige to writers from the African Diaspora. The prestige is a different and uncommon one among the realm of literary awards. Cave Canem is also notable in this regard. Of course, there are others. We operate in a relatively small industry with little financial rewards. Sustainability by way of capital is the true difficulty.

In contrast with what others may think, it is not to difficult to publish a book, journal or the work of other poets. The true challenge is to manage that institution over many years. In this regard, no one even stands close to Dr. Charles Rowell, who has managed the Callaloo institution for over 40 years.

I would argue it is as important to study these literary institutions as it is to support them. African American poets and writers are producing a wide variety of work in a technological society that gives us easy access to tools which can be used to distribute literary works to significant audiences.

The world of the binary is difficult to navigate. I would suggest hidden in the deep recesses of one's mind is the shadow of the white audience. One knows the difference between being published by a white institution and a Black one. One clearly knows the difference between being employed by a white institution and a Black one. The tension is usually reconciled by proscribing the white institutions as above and beyond the categories of race, though without race their power and prestige in the industry would not be so rooted. This American world is a spinning world of thoughts, ideas, and yes, economics. Even in the non-profit world, the funding sources are often managed by individuals who are not well versed in the ways and ideas of African American culture. There can be unity in those places, but too often, their job may be different from ours.

It is a strange time in America, with African American poetry gaining a fair amount of recognition and publicity on the national stage. The President is Black, and the race is confronted with the same and constant difficulties of imprisonment, drug abuse, poverty, and access to education.

Our poets, those worshippers of craft, have bitten the apple of discipline, hard work, and devotion to poetry better than most. We wore it like a badge. As advertisement, these attributes work in concert with the negative connotations attached to Blacks. There are hints of spoken word, hip-hop, and the journaling coffee shop poets as examples of the opposite of those who seek out the "true" literary expression. We write in forms. We are well versed in form. We don't go ebonics. We investigate the bi-racial and the mulatto. We are Black not Black. Our terrain is the terrain of race, and within that terrain we seek to distinguish ourselves as significantly different by pointing to our devotion and discipline.

Yet, I imagine this. The spirituals themselves reflect something which defies these ideas--the blues, too. Definitely hip-hop and jazz. One must remember these art forms were created by African Americans without the guidance of whites. To suggest that they in any way lacked discipline, craft, or form is ridiculous.

The complexities of an education in America can be debilitating. In many environments, it involves code-switching and the capacity to ignore the blatant lies and worship of ideals and stories that simply don't include us. Best to stay focused.  Keep your eyes on the prize.

African American literary artists are challenged with a destiny that demands more Black Institutions. It may be that the more successful, the less likely are folks to do this. The literary landscape by virtue of its name alone shows how integral it is to the ship that enslaved us. The English language is somehow branded and copy-written by the British and the Americans. Within those walls one will find difficulty employing it as our own.

Yet the best examples of this ability do not come from the skilled world of Academics. The reservoir of techniques comes from the world of everyday Black folks who work the language constantly into some form that tones, tints, and colors the expression to the particulars of our reality. If one wants to study power, language, and engineering within the confines of the English language, it is probably best to begin with Black people--I might add, most likely with those who are uneducated. With those who speak, but may have not been taught by the masters of the language how to speak.

This post originally appeared on Free Black Space. It is re-printed here by permission of the author.

[by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.]

Crafting a biography of Richard Wright places special demands on a biographer.  Wright was a genius, a man who embodied profound intelligence and creative vision, but Mississippi in the early twentieth century wasn’t the place for nurturing his kind of genius. 

Gertrude Stein seems to have appreciated the irony that blooms when a native daughter and a native son share the status of exile.  There was something surpassing mere hyperbole when, after reading Black Boy, Stein wrote to Wright:  “Dear Richard, It is obvious that you and I are the only two geniuses of this era.”  Stein’s words constitute a sophisticated joke because genius manifests itself in many forms that cannot be reduced to comedy (Stein’s maximum playfulness) or tragedy (Wright’s maximum seriousness).  Margaret Walker, the native daughter who did not choose exile, anatomized the facets of genius  in how she wrote about the dreams she and Wright dared to come true.


 

All of Wright’s major biographers--Constance Webb, Michel Fabre, Addison Gayle, Hazel Rowley, and Walker--have had to deal with his genius, with what his writings (published and unpublished) suggest can be said about the evolving of his innate brilliance and consciousness.  Herself a genius, Walker brought first-hand experience and knowledge of language, psychology, and environments to the job of crafting Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, A Critical Look at His Work(1988).

The keywords in the title of the biography are not arbitrary.  There are as many ways of writing biography as there are lives to be written about. The approach Margaret Walker used in her critical study opened Wright’s life, work, and ideas for reflection and reconsideration.  To the extent that writing is an act of opening and discovering, Walker also opened herself.  Some of Richard Wright’s most orthodox critics are unnerved by Daemonic Genius.  They are ill-equipped to grasp or decidedly hostile to the symbiosis Walker made of biographical portrait and autobiographical confession.  Even in today’s world where everything and anything is permitted generically, some people cannot endure the awesome fire of genius that smolders in the biography that Walker built. To play a riff on one of the most enigmatic sentences in Native Son--“What I killed for I am”--one might say that what Walker wrote for she was. We shall return to this point shortly in a brief remark about the awesome qualities of daemonic genius.

Walker was aware, as she told us in the biography’s preface, that Wright’s “intellectual development and his Weltanschauung, or worldview, place him in the forefront of twentieth-century life and culture…”  The biography sought to break ground in this area.  Walker was also aware that Wright’s primary conception of the world began in Mississippi.  It is difficult to understand Richard Wright unless one understands the crucial role of his earliest environment in shaping his life and his thinking about the function of writing in the world.  The primal role of the South is implicit in Walker’s assertion that the threefold purpose of the biography is “to define Richard Wright, to analyze and assess his work, and to show the correlation between the man and his work.”  “Wright is too important,” she added, “to be lost in the confusion of race and politics and racist literary history and criticism so evident in the twentieth century.” 

Walker subjected herself to the stern discipline of making an innovative critical biography.  Such a book has to be devastatingly honest about the psychology of the subject and all the forces that went into making the subject who he was, including the force of his own creations.  Although historically determined gender differences must be accounted for, what was true about Wright as the subject was true about Walker as the biographer.

Walker blended artistry and relevant data into a very readable book.  The biography is the kind of text in which one genius portrays another genius by using creative scholarship.  When one reads Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius from dedication and epigram all the way through to Walker’s keynote speech for the International Symposium on Richard Wright, held at the University of Mississippi on November 22, 1985, one more deeply appreciates how “the real significance of Richard Wright is in the world of his ideas placed in the context of his times, and his human condition” (Daemonic Genius 404).

Walker divided Wright’s life span into five phases: the Southern years (1908-1927); the Chicago years (1927-1937); the New York years (1937-1947); the Paris years (1947-1957); and the final years (1957-1960).  In accounting for what Wright thought, felt, suffered, and wrote about during those 52 years, Walker provided a quite challenging discussion of the essentials in what Michel Fabre called Wright’s  “unfinished quest.”  The quest was necessitated by Wright’s compulsive intelligence and his anger in the face of the world’s absurd injustices.  As Walker brought her own brand of psychoanalysis to the task of writing, she explored Wright’s psychosexual spectrum and unmasked, in a small degree, her own psychosexuality.  She imitated in biography what a physicist would do in making a spectrographic analysis; she exposed the quality and quantity of parts. If the portrait of Wright that emerges from the biography is not pretty, it is at least a genuine depiction of what Walker saw of Wright’s life in her own mind.

Walker’s study of Wright rests on an elaborate premise about what is to be accounted for in biography. The beginning is Wright’s suffering:

the psychic wound of racism, that irrational world of race prejudice and class bigotry, of religious fanaticism and sexual confusion, inversion and revulsion….This neurotic anger and fear grew in Wright from a pit to a peak of rage, but it was part of his unconscious, which he could never understand though he constantly sought to express it.  Out of these two angers a daemonic genius of great creative strength and power was born, his tremendous creative drive to write and to express himself, his daemonic demi-urges, his deepest and most suffering self. (Daemonic Genius 43-44).

Like earlier studies of Wright, Walker’s biography drew attention to his anger, ambivalence, and alienation, to his complex personality. She provided still-powerful grounds for continuing inquiry  about his aesthetics, his relationship to Marxism, Pan-Africanism, and existential philosophy; for continuing inquiry about Wright’s ability to synthesize the great ideas of the twentieth century in his writing and to have an uncanny vision of what human beings are giving birth to in the twenty-first century. Daemonic Genius is truly a foundational work.

Walker had a special advantage over other Wright scholars.  She was one of his contemporaries and knew him during some of his most formative years.  Second, she grew up in the South and knew from experience the impact of its sociopolitical climate on the sensitive intelligence of the artist.  She wrote about Wright with incontrovertible authority, and her writing was fueled by her own daemonic genius.

Walker did provide a clear blueprint for the crafting of Wright’s biography in her keynote address for the 1985 International Wright Symposium, but in a 1982 interview with Claudia Tate, Walker made some decidedly Margaret Walker statements about genius.  These are exceptionally important, because Tate caught Walker in unguarded moments.  Walker got some ideas about Wright’s anger from Allison Davis in 1971 as he:

talked about the neurotic anger that Wright could neither understand nor control.  He said nobody can tell what the wellsprings of any man’s creativity are.  You can only guess.  The more I thought about it, being a creative person myself, the more I understood.  That’s why I selected the title, The Daemonic Genius of Richard Wright.  There are different kinds of geniuses: demonic, intuitive, brooding, and orphic.  Perhaps Faulkner had all four.  Wright was definitely demonic.  It’s more than an idea of devils. It’s the idea of creativity coming out of anger, madness, out of frustration, rage. Creativity comes out of the madness that borders on lunacy and genius. (Conversations with Margaret Walker 65)

Earlier in this interview, Walker made a comment that psychoanalysis would allow us to connect with a seven-page, single-spaced letter she wrote to Richard Wright on Wednesday, June 7, 1939, now archived in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. Walker said to Tate in 1982:

I felt Wright wanted me to write his biography because nobody is going to be more sympathetic and understanding than I.  I was in love with him, and he knew it.  He could not marry me.  I was not what he could marry.  That’s the whole truth of that.  You can’t say he didn’t love me: I know he did. (Conversations 62).

In 1939, Walker’s love of talking let words fly from her mouth that deeply wounded Wright and led him to terminate their warm and sympathetic friendship.  Walker’s June 7 letter to Wright was a poignant apology as well as an explanatory defense of her integrity.   Walker sang a sorrow song when she wrote that she had to believe in Wright in order to believe in herself. The letter has many clues about just what kind of love compelled Walker to craft a biography that casts much light on Wright’s genius.

If Richard Wright created out of anger, Margaret Walker created out of frustration.  If his genius was daemonic, hers was brooding and orphic.  The four kinds of genius Walker mentioned to Tate (and several kinds she didn’t) are embedded in Walker’s crafting of Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius.  The biography is a labor of critical love.  In the book we find an intellectual unification of biography and autobiography.  Walker’s writing of Wright’s biography is an exploration of literary history; Wright’s biography is a discovery moment for reflection on Walker’s unfinished autobiography.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
February 24, 2015

- Hoke Glover pondered poetry's artistic segregation and the role of Black institutions.

- Jerry W. Ward, Jr., considered how Margaret Walker's biography of Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius, revealed Walker's genius, as well.


- John Lewis, representative of Georgia's District 5, took part in the original march in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.  He was back in Selma for the march's 50th anniversary, live-tweeting his experience for #Selma50.

- After MSNBC's Morning Joe blamed SAE members' racist chant on rap music, Black Twitter created #RapAlbumsThatCausedSlavery.

- Rebecca Gross interviewed Toni Morrison about the importance of taking artistic risks, even when those risks may fail.

- Inspired by #BlackOutDay on Twitter and Tumblr, Kelly Jensen spotlights three YA novels whose cover art features black characters.  

[by Stefanie Torres and Jennifer Colatosi]

On February 11, 2015, Hall Center Research Fellow and KU English Ph.D. candidate Kenton Rambsy presented on notable outcomes of his dissertation research in his interdisciplinary graduate research workshop, “Characteristics of Negro Expression: Digital Humanities and African American Short Stories,” at the University of Kansas.




Rambsy’s work employs a digital humanities approach through text-mining software to understand African American short stories. Rambsy began his research by examining the more recent work of Edward P. Jones, finding that the word “street” comes up 42 times in his story “Bad Neighbors.” This observation led him to examine other canonical African American short story writers, particularly those he deems "The Big Seven": Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Charles Chesnutt, Ralph Ellison, Toni Cade Bambara, and Alice Walker. The Big Seven are authors whose stories appear most frequently across a sample of 100 anthologies. Rambsy’s research considers the prevalence of geography and place in a practice that he calls “geo-tagging,” or when authors use particular language in order to mark specific or regional locations in their work.

In text-mining the stories of Edward P. Jones, Rambsy was able to identify not only the frequency of the word “street” but also the manners in which it is used. The data allowed him to track and compare when “street” is written as a subject in a dependent clause to indicate that a character is moving to or through that street versus when it is used as the main subject of a sentence. He concludes that in this way, the language of Jones’s stories charts the specifics of the city’s environment. Looking at the pieces together, Jones’s stories indicate the multiplicity of black experience in Washington, D.C.

In the work of The Big Seven, Rambsy identifies three common geographic settings: New York City, the Black South, and the Black/White South. Stories set in New York City often pinpoint specific geographic locations, such as Lenox Avenue and Greenwich Village in Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” However, in the South as anthologized in black literature, specific naming of places is often avoided; states are mentioned, but cities and towns are not usually named, which enables readers encountering the story to understand it as a general black southern experience. The distinction Rambsy draws between the Black South and the Black/White South rests on the nature of the central conflict driving the story. For example, in the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, the stories are not driven by black/white interaction, as opposed to Ellison, Wright, and Baldwin’s stories.

Rambsy’s work underscores the value of a data-driven approach to understanding literature and its shaping. Text-mining allows us to study linguistic features specific to black literature, such as black vernacular and the significance of place language. Rambsy argues that digital humanities is not a replacement for traditional scholarship. Rather, it invites new and different questions about the texts we study.


Stefanie Torres grew up in Austin, Texas, before moving to Lawrence for graduate school at the University of Kansas. She has worked on the graduate student-run journal Beecher's since its inception and served as co-editor-in-chief for two years. Her work has appeared in The Whistling Fire. She holds an MFA from KU and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in nonfiction creative writing at the same institution.

Jennifer Colatosti is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas specializing in American Literature and Fiction Writing. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Sequestrum, Southeast Review, and The MacGuffin, among other journals.

[by Meredith Wiggins]

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey spoke and read poems about art, family, and race as part of the Hall Center for the Humanities 2014-2015 Humanities Lecture Series on Tuesday, March 3.

All her poetry begins with a question she wants to answer, Trethewey said. In the case of 2012's Thrall, her most recent collection, the primary question was how Enlightenment thinking has shaped the current language of race, including the language that her father, a white poet, used to describe his biracial daughter.

Trethewey conceived of Thrall as a conversation with her father. They used to give readings together, she said, where her father would sometimes read a poem titled "Her Swing," which described his biracial daughter as "a crossbreed"--something, she added, "that it is not possible for a person to be."

Trethewey always felt unsettled by the poem, which she said made her feel like the Venus Hottentot, body on display for an audience's eyes. Her father loved her and encouraged her to a be a poet, she said, but he also dreaded it "because he knew I would set the story straight."

 

The poems that Trethewey read attempted to do just that. Drawing heavily from Thrall as well as from earlier works, Trethewey highlighted poetry that illuminates the complex interweavings of race, gender, science, and language.

One such poem is “Enlightenment,” which recounts a trip with her father to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation.  For many years, Trethewey said, her father had firmly believed that Jefferson could not have fathered any children by his enslaved mistress Sally Hemings.  In 18 stanzas of three lines each, Trethewey considers "the subtext / of our story": "this history / that links us - white father, black daughter - / even as it renders us other to each other."

After finishing her formal reading, Trethewey took audience questions.  She spoke about how she gets ideas for her poetry, the uses of various poetic forms to express meaning, the poetry she’s been recommending in her New Yorker column, and what it was like to hold open “office hours” as Poet Laureate.






“People are always saying poetry is dead, but poetry is everywhere,” Trethewey said, citing the popularity of the office hours as proof.

Maryemma Graham, KU professor of English, introduced Trethewey’s talk, formally titled “Poetry and History: An Evening with U.S. Poet Laureate (2012-2014) Natasha Trethewey.”  Graham called Trethewey “our foremost scholar-poet” and “a literary archaeologist,” one who looks to the past to help explain the present and the future.

Trethewey, she added, wants to use her poetry “to create a shared history that connects people across time and space to each other.”



Sally Utech, the Hall Center’s associate director, told Lawrence.com’s Joanna Hlavacek that Trethewey’s poetry goes to the heart of the American experience. “It’s not just about having a famous poet here,” Utech said. “It’s about having someone who can open up a dialogue that we should be having anyway as a society.”


Thanks to Alyse Bensel for providing additional notes on the talk.

ETA: An earlier version of this post mistakenly used the term "half-breed" instead of "crossbreed" in reference to Eric Trethewey's poem "Her Swing." HBW apologizes for the error.

- Stefanie Torres and Jennifer Colatosti recapped Kenton Rambsy's Hall Center talk, "'Characteristics of Negro Expression': Digital Humanities and African American Short Stories."

- Early in March at KU, former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey read poetry exploring the intersections of race, gender, science, and family.

- Buzzfeed staff member Tracy Clayton compiled some of Black Twitter's best responses to Starbucks' Race Together Initiative with #NewStarbucksDrinks.

- Book Riot recommended nonfiction reads for people who loved Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah.

- Caryl Phillips (the subject of Jerry Ward's post on Cambridge) talked to NPR about his new novel, The Lost Child, an updated take on Wuthering Heights.

- Toni Morrison urged artists to create even under difficult and painful social conditions in an article for The Nation's 150th anniversary issue.

[by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.]

Despite my having “performed” Richard Wright with a modicum of success some years ago in a Chautauqua series sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council, I know virtually nothing about performance theory as an “interdisciplinary area of study and critical method,” as it is discussed in the recent book Black Performance Theory (2014), edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez. For me, performing Wright was a matter of absorbing what I could of his personality and changing states of mind from his writings, listening to his recorded voice, and praying that on some spiritual level Wright would channel my imagination. I am not an actor, so I just gathered courage and, one magical night, I did become Richard Wright. At least, that was what several people in the audience told me.





Tonight I had the opportunity to witness the performance of a project conceptualized by Dr. Ross Louis, a professor in Xavier University of Louisiana’s Department of Communication Studies, that used “haiku as a performance aesthetic to prompt questions about Richard Wright, his haiku, Native Son and Black Boy.  The project was titled “This Other World" after the 1989 published collection of 817 of Wright's haiku (selected from approximately 4,000 he wrote in the last two years of his life). For this project, Louis did substantial research in the Richard Wright Papers at Yale University, then wove a small number of haiku and Julia Wright’s introduction to Haiku: This Other World together with excerpts from Native Son, Black Boy (especially the young Richard’s inquiries about race, his catalog of very poetic discovery images, and the moment of verbal paralysis in a school room), “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” and “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born.”

It is important that Wright’s collection has been most recently published as Haiku: The Last Poems of an American Icon because the change of title is itself a publishing “performance” with consequences for our reception of Wright’s work. Louis directed two Xavier students, Thomas James Nash II and Mia Selena Ruffin, in using their voices and bodies to perform a quite challenging sketch of Wright’s creativity at the end of his life. Presented in the outdoor sculpture garden of Xavier’s Art Village, the experiment succeeded in dealing with two questions: 1) How does Wright represent place within his haiku, especially rural Southern places? and 2) How do the values of the haiku genre guide decisions about space, time and movement in a performance of Wright’s work? The experiment raises enormous questions about our motives in transforming Wright’s poetry into sound and motion and spectacle in 2015.

As the sun set over New Orleans and Xavier on a breezy spring evening with the background musicality of construction noises, I was at once pleased with the originality of the experiment and disturbed that the performance was not followed by some dialogue among the audience, the director, and the performers. The originality consisted in putting Wright’s haiku--or projections in the haiku manner--into Nature (the site specificity of New Orleans) and saluting the Japanese spirit of creating a certain kind of poetic experience. This was far more satisfying than flawed adaptations of Wright’s works for the stage, the movies, and the television screen. However, without clarifying dialogue about what was absent--especially a clear connection between Wright’s early proletarian poetry and his late, very American projections of haiku--I think the quality of aesthetic experience for the audience depended overmuch on how much people knew about Richard Wright and about a kind of Japanese poetry that is internationally very popular but only lately getting critical notice in Wright studies, by way of such books as The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku (2011), edited by Jianqing Zheng, and Yoshinobu Hakutani’s Richard Wright and Haiku (2014). Already Zheng and Hakutani have been challenged (in Dean Anthony Brink’s article on Wright’s search for a counter-hegemonic genre in Textual Practice 28.6) for giving insufficient attention to Wright’s use of anamorphic possibilities in writing haiku. The performance at Xavier was a very rich exposition of the problems of anamorphism, but the audience did not have an opportunity to begin exploring that topic.

I applaud Dr. Ross Louis and the student performers for their genuine effort to pay tribute to a portion of Richard Wright’s legacy to world literature. I had a great experience because I know Wright’s works well. I do know that one other spectator had a less felicitous experience in following the spaced arrangement of the project’s content. I must insist, in light of that fact , that the Xavier Performance Studies Laboratory have a public discussion of exactly what it performed in its “This Other World” presentation. It is not perverse to ask, borrowing language from DeFrantz and Gonzalez, whether Xavier’s quite specific “experimentation with form and ingenuity” is “part of what has been called ‘the black aesthetic’" (10). It is likely that Richard Wright would urge us to have just that discussion in order to grasp the ineluctable complexity of everyday multicultural phenomena in New Orleans and to determine why his works, haiku and all, are such powerful tools for shaping critical consciousness of everyday life.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.   
March 27, 2015

Image via Jackson State University's Margaret Walker Center.

[by Creighton Nicholas Brown]

University of Kansas Professor of English Giselle Anatol spoke about and read from her newly published book, Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora to a packed audience at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas on Thursday, April 2.

Reflecting on the genesis of her project, Anatol said,  “When I was a child, my mother, aunts and uncles, and grandmother regaled me with stories of the soucouyant, a demonic figure from Trinidadian folk culture.” During the day the soucouyant appeared as an old woman, but when night fell, she “peeled off her skin, transformed into a ball of fire, and flew from house to house, where she sucked the blood of her unsuspecting neighbors.” The soucouyant is also known as Ole-Higue or Loogaroo in other Caribbean cultures.






Anatol noted folklore is often employed as cautionary tales for children. Folklore tells girls how to conduct themselves and boys what can lay claim to. Anatol observed that the tale of the soucouyant exposed deeper cultural beliefs about women, sexuality, and power.

Connecting the act of biting and sucking blood of her victims to acts of sexual penetration, the soucouyant, according to Anatol, can be read as not only depicting female sexual agency, but also and equally a masculine violence toward the female soucouyant. The surest way to catch a soucouyant is to strike the ball of fire with a stick, so when she returns to her skin during the day, she can be identified by her bruises. Woe to the lightning bugs!

After finishing her presentation, Anatol took questions from the audience. She spoke of the lasting legacy of colonization and slavery in Caribbean, which contributed to the diversity of soucouyant traditions in the Caribbean and parts of the southern United States. 

Susan Earle, Curator of European and American Art at the Spencer Museum of Art, introduced Anatol’s discussion, formerly titled “Giselle Anatol: Vampires in Caribbean and African Diaspora Literature.” Earle suggested that while “[Anatol's] book focuses on the literary arts, it also opens discussion of the visual arts.”

This event also featured Colère, a painting by Salnave Philippe-Auguste, which provides the cover image for Things That Fly in the Night. Colère is part of the Spencer Museum of Art’s permanent collection of Haitian art, which is one of the largest collections in the country.

[by C. Liegh McInnis]

Before I can discuss how “For My People” speaks to people today, I must begin by discussing the manner in which Dr. Alexander began her writing career by providing her readers with a literary manifesto, which shows that Dr. Alexander understood poetry to be an engagement of critical thinking through which societal ills can be resolved through creative approaches.  With “I Want to Write,” Margaret Walker Alexander provides her literary manifesto that she wants to produce well-crafted poetry that shows African people how beautiful they are, which will encourage or inspire them to continue the struggle against white supremacy and toward the fulfillment of their humanity and citizenship.




The manifesto is two-fold statement.  She declares that she wants to write well, which means to master literary device--more specifically imagery, repetition, and the cadence of the black Baptist preacher--and she wants that writing to be used in the upliftment of African peoples.  With “I Want to Write” and later with all of her works, Dr. Alexander affirms and achieves W. E. B. DuBois’s notion that “in the final analysis all art is propaganda.”  Yet, Dr. Alexander also affirms that utilitarian art must be well-crafted art; in fact, the only way that art can be utilitarian, which is to cause the desired catharsis, is that it must be well-crafted.  The how (literary device) and the what (subject matter) of the creative work must be given equal attention by the writer.  Since “I Want to Write” is not an essay but a poem, she does not describe (tell) the literary devices that she plans to use but rather provides (shows) them as sonic examples of the imagery, repetition, and cadence of the black Baptist preacher that will be the core elements of all her creative works.

“I want to catch the last floating strains from their sob-torn throats. I want to frame their
dreams into words; their souls into notes. I want to catch their sunshine laughter in a bowl; fling dark hands to a darker sky and fill them full of stars then crush and mix such lights till they become a mirrored pool of brilliance in the dawn.”

The image of “sob-torn throats” functions as an adverbial explaining to what extent African people have suffered.  They have not merely suffered, but their suffering has been to an extent that the suffering itself, and not just the cause (white supremacy) of the suffering, is negatively impacting the physical, emotional, and psychological state of African people.  And, yet, taken in context of the poem, “sob-torn throats” has a dual meaning in that African people have suffered and moaned for so long that they soon will be unable to voice the pain of that suffering because their “sob-torn” throats will be unable to voice that pain.  So, the existence of “sob-torn throats” must also be seen as a precursor to a point or moment when African people shift from moaning to some other way of expressing their pain and frustration.  The “sob-torn throats” must exist before one becomes sick and tire of being sick and tired.  Then, once one becomes sick and tired of being sick and tired, the only natural occurrences left are implosion or explosion.  African people will either implode (die of depression from carrying what Hughes, in his poem "Harlem," categorized as a “heavy load”) or they will explode (which is to manifest Hughes’ final option, which prophesizes the coming of the Black Power Movement.)  And by connecting Dr. Alexander’s image with the moment of Fannie Lou Hamer at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, readers can realize that the image of the “sob-torn throats” is as much a warning as it is a statement of fact, which is a meta-textual connection and affirmation of the warnings of “Harlem” and Native Son (about which Richard Wright warned that he created the novel to scare the hell out of America so that it would not continue to create and maintain conditions that produced millions of Bigger Thomases).  To this point, readers must be both empathetic and wary of the race that has suffered to the point of having “sob-torn throats” because the image implies that something else is on the verge or edge of occurring.

Next, Dr. Alexander’s poetic act of framing black people’s dreams into words and framing their souls into notes is an act of making them human by showing African people as critical and creative beings with desires to transcend the arresting of their natural human development and fulfill their human potential.  With this image she is, again, troping Hughes’s “Harlem” and, in doing so, is affirming Hughes’ notion that arresting the development of any people is a crime against humanity and an act that will only lead to chaos and human destruction.  The only reason that anyone places anything into a frame is because one deems it worthy of display, perceiving it as aesthetically beautifully and culturally and personally significant.  The act of framing anything is the act of telling everyone who enters one’s house, “Look at this thing that I have framed.  It is beautiful.  It is wonderful.  It is valuable!  You must see it!”  This is what Dr. Alexander does to and for the dreams and souls of black folks.  She just doesn’t indicate that black folks have souls and dreams; she shows that their souls and dreams are equal to the beauty of anyone.  As such, any act or law that inhibits those souls and dreams from flowering is, again, a crime against humanity and against the Creator.  Further, this act of framing is designed to convince black folks of their own worth and beauty, which is necessary for them to be successful in liberating themselves from the oppression of white supremacy.  If one does not feel worthy of success, then one will never accomplish success.  A woman in an abusive relationship will never leave that relationship until she realizes that she is worthy of more.  As such, Dr. Alexander’s framing of the dreams and souls of black folks informs them that they are worth much more than for what they are settling.

The final multiple image affirms and symbolizes her desire to craft poetry that will allow African people to see and realize just how beautiful they are.  What is most brilliant about this last image—other than its being well-crafted—is that Dr. Alexander illuminates the brilliance of African people by showing their ability to overcome their internal and external struggles.  In all of her work that follows “I Want to Write,” she never presents pristine characters.  For Dr. Alexander, a hero or role model is not one who has never struggled or failed but one who has overcome internal and external hurdles to survive and thrive.  This tension, juxtaposition, and resolution of the internal and external struggle is a major device in all of Dr. Alexander’s work because her goal is not to deify African people but to enable them to see that they are “wonderfully made” creatures, despite their circumstances and their own dysfunction that often enables white supremacy to arrest their development.  To be the “mirrored pool of” brilliant shining lights is to have been well-made by the Master and then polished by the trials of life so that their lives are now glowing examples to others trying to survive.

These three types of images and their ideals are evident in all of Dr. Alexander’s work, especially “For My People,” which is the perfect example of a work that fulfills the manifesto proposed in “I Want to Write.”  The imagery of “For my People” paints a vivid picture that forces readers to face the horrors of black life while also being encouraged by its beauties and successes, as the repetition and cadence is an inspiring drumbeat, marching readers through the photo collage of black life and toward the mission of surviving and thriving.  Dr. Alexander achieves her imagery using the poetic structure of the Hebrew psalm, which is called the “balance of ideas” by which she provides several affirming or contrasting ideas or behaviors that are symbolic of specific ideas that become more meaningful when they are combined with other behaviors.  By themselves these actions or behaviors are not “ideas,” per se, but connected to the other behaviors or circumstances, they become poetic ideas that serve to symbolize the internal and external struggle of African people.  One example of this is her use of “hair.”  Alone, the word is meaningless, but when contextualized within the historical collage of black life, the word “hair” becomes an idea or a symbol of the most tangible struggle of black people against white supremacy and self-hatred.

Stanza eight is a good example of this.  It begins by detailing the dysfunction or misguided efforts of African Americans, but Dr. Alexander layers the behaviors with the excellent use of alliteration so that the reader does not recognize the shift or change of blame until it is too late to see that although African people often engage in negative or dysfunction behavior, it is because they have been “deceived” and “devoured” by the man-eating machines—“money hungry glory-craving leeches…”  Now, their dysfunction or misguided efforts are not just understood but contextualized, which fulfills Alexander’s desire to create poetry that is an example of critical thinking or poetry that forces readers to think critically, which is why the poem is not just a barrage of lamentations over white evil.  The poem is a well-constructed—objective—examination of the internal (self-inflected) and external (white supremacy) elements that must be overcome before African people can reach their human potential.  Racism, slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, etc. are complex issues that demand that one seek to identify multifactorial elements of cause rather than the big “one” cause and solution.  Through her layering of the internal and external struggles of African people, Dr. Alexander is demanding that her readers not only read with a critical eye but engage life and its problems with that same critical eye.  Black self-hatred is a symptom of white supremacy.  There is, then, no way to cure the self-destructive actions of black self-hatred without acknowledging its root of white supremacy.

Yet, to be clear, Dr. Alexander is not concerned about going to or begging white people for help because she lays the responsibility of improving black life at the feet of black people.  For Dr. Alexander, the problem with black life is not the institutions of black life but the misuse of those institutions.  In stanza eight, she is not denouncing the institutions but the poor use of them.  “…blundering and groping and floundering in the dark of churches and schools and clubs and societies and associations, and councils and committees and conventions…” As a professor of a university, an officer of a church and several social organizations, and an active delegate in a political party, Dr. Alexander often waged war to make those institutions do and be more than status symbols.  This is her charge to her readers:  stop being mindlessly led by these organizations and develop the courage and work ethic to use them to improve the community.

The goal of “For my People” is to simultaneously soothe, inspire, and chastise black people.  The goal is not to create an overly romantic and unrealistic celebration of black people but to explain to black people that although they have the ability to seize control of their own destiny, they continue to dismantle their own liberation.  As Claude McKay stated in defense of Home to Harlem, he wanted to create human beings not gods: “I will leave no subject, however degraded, untouched…I make my Negro character yarn and backbite and [fornicate] like people the world over” (McKay xv, xvi).  In a similar fashion of showing the totality of the African-American struggle, at the core of “For My People” is the tension between intellectual ability and moral conviction.  Dr. Alexander shows that black folks clearly have the intellectual ability to be masters of their own fate but that by relinquishing their moral conviction they are perpetuating the demise that has been established by their oppressors.

So, on a certain level, Dr. Alexander is engaged in psychological warfare, attempting to do as Frantz Fanon did when suggesting that African people discard the oppressor in their minds so that they can no longer suffer and be limited by what DuBois called double consciousness.  (Much of the current art, especially much of reality television, which now passes for or is accepted as art, does the opposite; rather than fighting to liberate African people from dysfunctional behavior, much of reality television works to perpetuate the mental enslavement of African people by perpetuating/glorifying dysfunctional behavior.)  To this end, stanzas six and seven unflinchingly shows the elements that must be discarded from African-American life and how those elements enable the oppressor to control the race.  Specifically, Dr. Alexander focuses on man’s rejection of the intellectual and spiritual and embracing of physical pleasure as a primary demise of the race:  “filling the cabarets and taverns and other people’s pockets…drinking when hopeless.”  To this end, she declares that the people, like the biblical Israelites, are “lost disinherited dispossessed” people who need to reject their oppressors' ways because they need “land and money and something—something all our own.”  Like the biblical Israelites, it becomes clear that, to Dr. Alexander, her people, black people, are in a negative circumstance, wandering in the wilderness of white supremacy because they have misused their intellectual prowess and rejected moral righteousness.

In an effort to discard the oppressor that has been inscribed within the minds of African people, Dr. Alexander stresses the importance of formal and informal education in stanzas three and four.  The issue for Dr. Alexander is: with what are African people shaping their minds—nihilism or righteousness?  As it relates to informal or the cultural education that must occur within the home and community, in stanza three Dr. Alexander is showing that the home and community education, indoctrination, and blueprint are equally if not more important than one’s formal academic education.  Thus, what children play informs and becomes an example of their aspirations.  The “playing baptizing and preacher and doctor and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss Choomby and company” show the manner in which children internalize and manifest what the community adults provide for them.  The games that they play provide constructive sensibilities on which to build life.  Even in the playing of cops and robbers, for these children the maintenance of law and order is the goal.  Now, some 50 years after its publication, many of today’s children play hustler and thug and video vixen and drug dealer, all provided and glorified by their community adults.  Then, in stanza four, Dr. Alexander is showing the importance of education as a transformative device or tool:  “the cramp bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where…” At the core of her discussion of formal education, she is highlighting that all education, especially one’s formal academic education must allow for self-discovery and must provide one the tools needed to be a socio-political philosopher (problem solver) so that one’s education does not perpetuate one’s negative circumstance.  Ultimately, by emphasizing the inquisitive nature of academic education, she is informing readers that education must serve to create people as leaders and completers of their own fate and destiny, and not create them as followers to be slave labor.  They went to school with the purpose to know the world, to know life, so that they could master it.  Today, “For my People” is asking if we—all of us—still have the notion of school, and, if so, how has changing that notion or understanding of school helped us?

Finally, Dr. Alexander ends with the imagery of transcending the physical and embracing the metaphysical or spiritual.  Go to God, but don’t go to God blindly or meekly.  Go to God with the wisdom of Solomon, the critical thinking of Paul, and the fighting spirit of David.  The first nine stanzas make it clear that, for Dr. Alexander, one’s belief in God is something that must manifest itself in one’s daily socio-political life.  So, by the time readers arrive at stanza 10, they know that she’s not just offering “pie in the sky” theology but rather that she’s reminding, affirming, and demanding that the readers, especially African Americans, realize that “faith without work is dead.”  As James 2:14-22 states, “If you have a friend who is in need of food and clothing, and you say to him ‘Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,’ and then don’t give him clothes or food, what good does that do?”

Now readers feel the full effect of the poetic layering of the first nine stanzas.  Dr. Alexander is calling for a warfare of righteousness.  And it will be a warfare that must entail the fashioning of a “bloody peace.”  There is work that must be done, not just praying, and this work entails engaging enemies of justice and righteousness no matter who they are.  With the imagery of stanza 10, Dr. Alexander is not just troping the book of Revelations; she is troping the core teachings of Christ, that only love can save humanity, no matter how evil one’s attacker or oppressor may be.  Thus, she makes clear that the struggle of African people to liberate themselves from white supremacy is itself but a trope or metaphor of humanity’s struggle to liberate itself from its jail of selfishness so that we will be able to “fashion a world that will all the people/ all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations.”

Originally presented on March 26, 2015, at Medgar Evers Library as part of the series of events presented by the JSU MWA Research Center and the Jackson-Hinds Library System to Celebrate Dr. Alexander’s Centennial.  Re-printed here by permission of the author.



Bibliography

Brown, Carolyn J.  Song of my Life:  A Biography of Margaret Walker.  Jackson:  University
    Press of Mississippi, 2014.

Fanon, Frantz.  Black Skin, White Masks.  New York:  Atlantic/Grove, 1952.

Fanon, Frantz.  The Wretched of the Earth.  New York:  Atlantic/Grove, 1963.

Graham, Maryemma, ed.  Fields Watered with Blood.  Athens:  University of Georgia Press,
    2001.

Graham, Maryemma.  “‘I Want to Write/I Want to Write the Songs of my People.’  Voice and
Vision in the Poetry of Margaret Walker.”  Internet Poetry Archive.  2006.  March 1, 2015.  http://ibiblio.org/ipa/walker.php.

Holy Bible.  Wheaton:  Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1971.

Hughes, Langston.  “Harlem” and “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”  The Norton
Anthology of African American Literature.  Eds. Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay.  New York:  W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. 

McKay, Claude.  Home to Harlem.  Boston:  Northeastern University Press, 1987.

Senghor, Leopold.  “Prayer to the Masks.”  World Literature: An Anthology of Great Short
Stories, Poetry, and Drama.  Ed. Donna Rosenberg.  New York:  McGraw Hill/Glencoe, 2004.

Smethurst, James.  “The Popular Front, the Rural Folk, and Neomodernism: The Case of
Margaret Walker.”  The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.  Reprinted at Modern American Poetry.  http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/walker/smethurst.htm.

Walker, Margaret.  “I Want to Write.”  Internet Poetry Archive.  2006.  March 1, 2015. 
    http://ibiblio.org/ipa/walker.php.  (Originally published in The Crisis in 1934).

Walker, Margaret.  This Is My Century.  Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1989.

“What Is Poetry?”  Poetry.org.  2005.  March 1, 2015.  http://www.poetry.org/whatis.htm.

Wright, Richard.  Native Son.  New York:  Perennial Classics, 1998.

[by Meredith Wiggins]

KU's Langston Hughes Center sponsored a screening of recent Best Picture nominee Selma followed by a panel discussion about the film and its resonances to current-day issues on Wednesday, March 25.  More than 200 students, faculty, and community members attended the screening in Wescoe Hall.

Selma depicts the 1965 civil rights marches from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery, and Dr. Shawn Alexander, an associate professor in the Department of African and African-American Studies and director of the LHC, noted that he picked March 25 for the screening because that was the date when marchers actually arrived in Montgomery.

After the screening, a panelist of three scholars from KU--independent filmmaker and professor of film and media studies Kevin Willmott, assistant professor of American studies Elizabeth Esch, and African and African American studies graduate student Melissa Foree--responded to the film and engaged audience questions about the continued relevance of civil rights work today.



Foree spoke first, discussing how the film draws attention to aspects of the Civil Rights Movement frequently overlooked in history books, like the incredible violence the protesters faced from police and white citizens and the decades of local organizing that preceded the events of the film.  Foree drew specific parallels with issues of social justice today, particularly the 2013 Supreme Court decision about the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that allowed states to change their voting laws without requiring federal oversight.

Esch focused on providing additional historical context for the film, emphasizing that it took place a full decade after many "wins" of the CRM--a decision which speaks to the hollowness of many whites' advice that civil rights progress was inevitable but would "just take time."  Selma points instead to a line-in-the-sand moment, when sides had to be taken, Esch said.

Willmott closed out the panelists' remarks by discussing the way Selma was constructed by filmmakers. American audiences are so used to the sight of violence, Willmott said, that it is hard to shock them; shooting the violence in beautiful, balletic slow-motion acts to set it off from the rest of the film's straightforwardly realistic style and fully engage audiences.  Similarly, portraying Martin Luther King, Jr.'s extramarital affairs brings the actions of a man sometimes thought of as "of somewhere else, not of us" back to a human level.


A number of the audience questions focused on how Selma speaks to continuing issues of social justice.  One audience member asked about the likelihood of a new CRM and the new challenges such a movement would face.  Willmott said that the challenge of such a movement would be to create an organizational structure that repeats and replaces itself, saying that he "doesn't quite see" movements like Black Lives Matter reaching that level yet.  (At least one audience member clearly disagreed, audibly asserting, "It is.  It is.")

Foree said that today's more sophisticated surveillance technology and a prevalent though inaccurate belief in a post-racial climate are new challenges that must be engaged by any civil rights work undertaken today.  What were once very obvious techniques of intimidation and oppression, Willmott added, now have to be found out and identified in more subtle ways.

"I almost wish it were segregated again for a week," Willmott said, so that these issues could be crystallized for the public.

- Jerry Ward, Jr. wrote about seeing Richard Wright's haiku in performance at Xavier University of Louisiana.

- Jackson State University's Margaret Walker Center is sponsoring a year of Walker-centric programming, This is My Century: 100 Years of Margaret Walker, 1915-2015.

-  C. Liegh McInnis contributed to our Margaret Walker coverage with a consideration of Walker's famous poem "For My People" as the fulfillment of her literary manifesto.

- KU English Ph.D. student Creighton N. Brown recapped Dr. Giselle Anatol's recent talk about her new book, Things That Fly in the Night.

- We also recapped the Langston Hughes Center's screening of Selma and its KU scholars' panel discussion about the film.  (You can watch director Ava DuVernay's keynote from the South by Southwest Film festival here.)

- Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher announce the publication of Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright, Modern Indonesia, and the Bandung Conference, forthcoming from Duke University Press in spring 2016.  Indonesian Notebook contains a newly discovered Indonesian lecture by Richard Wright, "The Artist and His Problems."  (Read an excerpt of the project published in PMLA here.)

- Novelist Marlon James won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings.  The Anisfield-Wolf awards are "for literature that confronts racism and examines diversity."

- With the publication of God Help the Child just a few days away, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah profiled Toni Morrison for the New York Times.  Read that article here, then listen to Morrison read an excerpt from her new novel here.

[by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.]

Such recent dedicated scholarship as Mary Helen Washington’s The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s and William J. Maxwell’s F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature serve as a warrant for thinking of contemporary literary and cultural studies as components of a mega-surveillance machine. Readers and critics cooperate, often unwittingly, with publishing conglomerates and official agencies of detection in panoptical activities that exceed the scrutiny imagined by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish or by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism.  Technological progress encourages us to abandon dreams of a liberated future and to accept dystopia as self-evidently “normal.”

For Richard Wright scholars, the forthcoming 2016 publication of Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright, Modern Indonesia, and the Bandung Conference, by Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher, will create an opportunity for more speculation about the function of journalism in Wright’s imagination, as well as raising devastating questions about how the journalism of Ida B. Wells and Ishmael Reed assist us in understanding what was and is African American literature. We do need to explore Black print cultures more thoroughly in relation to the production of Black literatures.  In this sense, Earle V. Bryant’s long-awaited Byline Richard Wright: Articles from The Daily Worker and New Masses has a significant mediating function.




Perhaps financial exigencies are responsible for the University of Missouri Press’s delayed printing of Bryant’s editing and commentary on a number of Wright’s Daily Worker articles from 1937 and the New Masses'essays “Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite” (1935) and “High Tide in Harlem: Joe Louis as a Symbol of Freedom” (1938).  Bryant, a Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, had been working on this project, very quietly, for more than a decade. The delayed publication does not compromise his effort to map underexplored territory in Wright Studies.  It does, unfortunately, increase the likelihood that his work will get less attention than it deserves.

Giving notice to time and space, as Thadious M. Davis does in Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature (2011), reifies the value of chronology in examining Wright’s growth.  Her methodological choices ensure that we link Wright’s emergence as a journalist with his assignments in subdivisions of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), especially the Illinois Writers Project, without diminishing notice of his simultaneous participation in Chicago’s South Side Writers group and brief membership (1934-35) in the John Reed Club. However, Bryant chose to arrange the Daily Worker articles by theme--urban conditions in New York, war in Spain and China, heroism, Marxist interest in the Scottsboro case, and art in the service of life. By avoiding strict chronology, Bryant is able to foreground his insightful analyses of political implications and aesthetic qualities in Wright’s journalism to tell us many things about the strengths and weaknesses of Wright’s accomplishments. Byline is Bryant’s effort “to bring Wright’s early newspaper work out of obscurity and into the light where it can be read and appreciated” (10).

There is a mixed blessing in Bryant’s book being in our hands after the works by Washington, Maxwell, and Davis, as the rigor of their scholarship sets the bar for critical attention to Wright very high.  Bryant’s work provides an opportunity to think about how African American and left-leaning journalism has been necessarily subversive and critical of efforts to sell the American Dream.  To be sure, Byline encourages more thinking about how subversion operates under surveillance. The minor failure in Bryant’s scholarship, however, lies in his decision not to supply a full listing of all the Daily Worker articles Wright wrote and glosses or explanatory footnotes for the articles selected from the full range of what is available.  Yes, students and scholars who might use Bryant’s book can surf the Internet to get information about topical references in the articles, but Bryant would have enhanced the value of his book by supplying them in the text.  For example, it is odd that Bryant chose to say nothing about what Wright might have learned from Frank Marshall Davis about the art of journalism.  It is even odder that H. L. Mencken is not mentioned in Byline because Wright made a special point of acknowledging his discovery of Mencken in a Memphis newspaper and his indebtedness to the work of Mencken as one of America’s most influential journalists, prose stylists, and social critics. And it is baffling that Bryant seems to attribute the claim “All art is propaganda” to Wright on page 215, when it is a widely known that W. E. B. DuBois used that wording in his essay “Criteria of Negro Art” in the October 1926 issue of Crisis.

Shortcomings notwithstanding, Byline Richard Wright: Articles from The Daily Worker and New Masses can quicken interest in exploring more profoundly the journalistic aspects of Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain and Richard Wright’s bracing subversiveness. Wright deserves more credit for his prophetic panopticism.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
April 11, 2015

[by Meredith Wiggins]

The 2015 College Language Association Conference for 2015 was held April 8-11, 2015, in Dallas, Texas, with the theme of "Expanding Frontiers: Freedom, Resistance, and Transnational Identities in Languages and Literatures."

CLA is always a challenging and welcoming community of scholars of African American literature and culture. This year, however, was especially exciting, as 2015 marked the 75th annual meeting of CLA's conference.

As has become tradition, representatives from HBW and from KU were out in full force - tabling, giving presentations, and generally having a great time!





This marked the second year HBW has sponsored the New Scholars Panel. Last year's panel was made up exclusively of graduate students from the University of Kansas, but this year HBW pulled from a wider range of colleges and universities.  We also paired each student presenter with a dedicated respondent.  On Friday, April 9, the morning kicked off with "Writing and Reading Beyond the Boundaries," chaired by Dr. Darryl Dickson-Carr of Southern Methodist University.  The panel featured presentations by:

• Alexis McGee, University of Texas at San Antonio - "Minaj's "Anaconda" and Black Feminisms in the Classroom," responded to by Dr. Joanne Gabbin, James Madison University
• Reanna Roby, University of Texas at San Antonio - "The Unacknowledged Roles of Science in Black Feminist Social Media," responded to by Dr. DoVeanna Fulton, University of Houston, Downtown
• Simone Savannah, University of Kansas - "The Politics of Genre, Race, and Gender in Ann Petry's The Street," responded to by Dr. Ayesha Hardison, Ohio University
• Mudiwa Pettus, The Pennsylvania State University - "Beyond the Domestic: Nineteenth-Century Black Clubwomen and their (Re)Definition of Community," responded to by Dr. Gwendolyn Pough, Syracuse University
• Anthony Boynton, Georgia College & State University - "Solidarity and Aesthetic: Black Uplift in Gwendolyn Brooks's Primer for Blacks," responded to by Dr. Doretha Williams, George Washington University

 


At the same time, HBW founder Maryemma Graham, former HBW staff member Kenton Rambsy, and lead HBW guest blogger Jerry Ward gave a digital humanities exhibit and presentation on "The Histories of African American Short Stories."

HBW tabled throughout the day on Thursday and Friday, spreading the word about our mission and projects and seeking applicants for KU's Jayhawk Sneak Peek events. 

 (Know someone who might be interested in taking part in a similar event in the future?  Contact the KU English Department for more details!)









Friday night was the annual CLA banquet, when attendees put on their finest garb and join together to share a meal, recognize the CLA Executive Committee, announce the winners of CLA's awards and scholarships, and enjoy a keynote address from a notable speaker.  This year we were fortunate to hear author NoViolet Bulawayo read from her acclaimed novel We Need New Names. Bulawayo noted that CLA was her "first time at a conference where people look like me" and spoke about the need for transnational writers to maintain their voices and stories through resistance to dominant English narrative.










 HBW concluded its business at CLA on Saturday, holding our annual board meeting.  A group of 10 staff, board members, and outside supporters gathered to check in on the year's accomplishments, discuss future directions for growth, and generally touch base on where the organization is and where we want it to go.  In the coming weeks and months, we'll be sharing some of those plans with you.



All in all, HBW had a great showing at #CLA2015.  Until next year!

- Jerry Ward reviewed Earle V. Bryant's Byline Richard Wright, which collects pieces from Wright's journalism career.

- HBW visited #CLA2015, and we've got the recap (with pictures).

 - Kara Walker reviewed God Help the Child, Toni Morrison's newest novel. Walker celebrates "Morrison's obvious joy in language" but writes that the novel "left [her] hungering for warmth."
 
- Michael Eric Dyson published a controversial take on Cornel West in the New Republic.  (Colorlines posted a survey of responses to the piece here and links to West's response here.) 

- Karen Grigsby Brown used the verbal sparring between Dyson and West as the jumping-off point for "A History of Beef Between Black Artists, Writers, and Intellectuals."

- Last year, Morgan Jenkins asked Junot Diaz for advice about how to survive as a black writer in a "blindingly white MFA program," and he responded with a thoughtful and empathetic message. In "To Junot Diaz," Jenkins wrote about what's happened since.

- Playwright Katori Hall talked about creating plays by and for black women in the Washington Post.

- After leaked e-mails revealed that Ben Affleck pressured producers to remove an slave-owning ancestor from his segment on Find Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. announced that he'll be writing about the full story in his forthcoming book.  (Gene Demby, lead blogger for NPR's Code Switch, talked about the story on Morning Edition, and Affleck offered up his take here.)

- In a 44-page document, the family of Michael Brown filed a lawsuit against the city of Ferguson.

- Traci Currie of the Phoenix Rising Collective wrote about interviewing--or trying to interview--Jamaican lesbian poet Staceyann Chin and what it taught her about the "life-changing interviews [that] occur during the silent moments."

- In the greatest news ever to be great, 7-year-old Natalie McGriff (and her mother Angie Nixon) created a comic book about a young girl who gets magic powers from her Afro puffs, The Adventures of Moxie Girl, and won over $16,000 to publish it.

HBW introduced its #ICYMI posts a while back to give our readers a chance to catch up on some of the most interesting stories in black writing each week. But the internet is vast, and like anyone else, sometimes we miss out on great content. So today, instead of a regular post, we've got a round-up of stories we missed the first time around. Enjoy!



- NPR's Code Switch blog interviewed James McGrath Morris about his new book Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, First Lady of the Black Press, about pioneering African American journalist Ethel Payne.

- Val James, the first black U.S.-born player in the National Hockey League, wrote about the tremendous racism he faced in his 13-year career in his new autobiography Black Ice: The Val James Story.

- New Yorker theatre critic Hilton Als pays tribute to the art and politics of actor and activist Paul Robeson.

- Ayana Mathis and Pankaj Mishra discussed now-infamous James Baldwin's characterization of Native Sonas a "protest novel."

- Marlon James, recent winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, shared his story of the challenges of growing up gay in Jamaica and finding himself in Minnesota.

- HBW's own Jerry Ward isn't the only person loving Empire. Book Riot offered up some suggestions about what to read while we count the days until season 2.

- Obie Award-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins discussed his "obligation" to confront race and history in an interview with All Things Considered.

- The New York Times talked with author Paul Beatty, who just published the novel The Sellout, about looking for humor in writing about race.  A lot of race discussion, Beatty said, is "either too down-homey or too earnest or too something.  Too a lot of things."

- And finally, here's the full transcript of President Obama's speech from Selma, Alabama, on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.