Archive - History of Black Writing Blog

On behalf of the Project on the History of Black Writing (3114 Wescoe), let me welcome newcomers and returning students to KU for the 2017-2018 school year. You know by now we at KU are in the midst of heated debates, but you should also know that this is the reality of academia.

..

– HBW collected tributes from a number of important writers and scholars to bid farewell to Chancellor Bob Hemenway, who – among many other accomplishments – wrote a foundational literary biography of Zora Neale Hurston.

..

With widespread interest in Western literature in the early 1980s, Chinese literary scholars began to actively engage American writers, giving rise to a boom in the translation of American literature. This boom also generated a reciprocal relationship between African-American women writers and China. The introduction of African-American women writers and the translation of their works soon became a central component of Chinese literary criticism, resulting in a significant body of work, both books and articles. Currently, literary criticism on African-American women writers represents a major branch of American literature studies in mainland China.

..

This summer, HBW Board Member and KU Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Dr. Ayesha Hardison sat down with KCUR to discuss the blockbuster Wonder Woman, feminism, and much more.

..

Compiled by Kathleen E. Bethel, African American Studies Librarian & Liaison for Gender & Sexuality Studies – Northwestern University Libraries*..

Selected by Kathleen E. Bethel, African American Studies Librarian – Northwestern University Libraries

..

Anthony Boynton, HBW Staffer and PhD student in English at the University of Kansas, has penned a response to JAY-Z’s recent 4:44. Check out his latest over at Medium and put it in conversation with Candice Benbow’s 4:43.

..

In a chapter on Shakespeare’s Richard II, James Boyd White proposed “that every claim of authority we can make, on any subject and in any language, should be regarded as marked by a kind of structural tentativeness, for every claim implies its counter within its language and every language implies a host of others answering it” ( Acts of Hope: Creating Authority in Literature, Law and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994: 77). If there is validity in this positioning of claim and language, it is obvious that our speaking, our struggles to transform the actual into the materiality of American English sounds, is a defense mechanism (either a learned motion or an instinctive reflex) to conquer abject insanity. White’s statement may reduce fear of political language, but it intensifies dread of devastating political action. Should we commend White for arming our minds to deal with the disconnection of language and action since January 20, 2017?
..

Fannie Lou Hamer, who would now be 100 were she alive, became a tireless fighter for social justice. Who can forget her bold proclamation: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Mrs. Hamer refused to be silent. She registered to vote in Mississippi, barely escaping death at the hands of those who feared her actions would move others to civil disobedience. We continue to ignore what she and others instinctively knew: silence makes us complicit in bringing about our own demise. Because social, political, and, yes, institutional issues always imply a power imbalance, our silence ensures that the most vulnerable among us will face new forms of oppression, guaranteeing the persistence of inequality. Silence normalizes indifference. Inequality and indifference are a lethal combination. That lethal combination becomes a terrifying reality when we add guns on campus.

..