Archive - History of Black Writing Blog

The outcome and aftermath of the recent presidential election have unleashed upon the world an enervating, extremist public discourse rooted in divisiveness, intolerance, and discord. In this language, the moral imperatives of civility, mutual respect, and common sense have been sacrificed to political cant and ethnocentrism. The politics of insincerity and expediency have become poor substitutes for compassion and statesmanship. Truth and reason have come under assault by “alternative facts” and irrationality. All of this begs the question Black feminist June Jordan raised in 1978: “Where is the love?” While many have answered Jordan’s query—including, among others, the richly symbolic Toni Morrison and Michael S. Harper and the more popular Terry McMillan and E. Lynn Harris—Sterling A. Brown* anticipates with unerring insight the concerns of today’s chorus of quite diverse voices.

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How do you celebrate a writer who shook the ground beneath her feet? Who created worlds, manipulated space and time, and walked boldly into unchartered territory?

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Juneteenth is the oldest celebration in America commemorating the abolition of slavery in America. Originating in Galveston, TX, on June. 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger announced the emancipation of slaves—two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. As this tradition has grown in importance and stature throughout history, Black communities across the country continue to celebrate Juneteenth with great festivity and ceremony.

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Gwendolyn Brooks would have turned 100 this week and we’re out supporting BROOKSFEST in Topeka, KS. This centennial celebration of her life and legacy features HBW friend Kevin Young, a poetry walk, children’s activities, and much more.

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It might be argued that Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971) can make readers more attentive to combinations of words and music and to the issues of response and interpretation broached in Stephen Henderson’s Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References (New York: William Morrow, 1973)...

Q: Should one give critical attention to a stylistically and rhetorically flawed book by a self-proclaimed left-wing Conservative?

A: Yes...

Since January 20, 2017, it is quite fashionable to talk about Donald J. Trump under the influence of reading dystopian or apocalyptic fictions. There is the possibility that what fifty years ago was accepted as “the news” is now a blatant form of social fiction. Broadcast from every ideological angle, what seems to be the news is replete with alternative facts and unacknowledged projections of imagination. There is a thin line between description of actuality and its reception in various media. And many readers hop across the line without benefit of thought. Reading is simply automatic, a reflex action.

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From a pre-future vantage, one can discover the joy of refusing. Refusing or resisting is neither an innate virtue nor a vice, despite the fact that one must ultimately account for the moral properties of one’s actions . Refusing is an opportunity to live with the alternatives that might better identify one’s historicity. Consider the outcomes of refusing to read such commercially promoted books as:


[By: Jerry W. Ward Jr.]

From a pre-future vantage, one can discover the joy of refusing. Refusing or resisting is neither an innate virtue nor a vice, despite the fact that one must ultimately account for the moral properties of one’s actions . Refusing is an opportunity to live with the alternatives that might better identify one’s historicity. Consider the outcomes of refusing to read such commercially promoted books as:

Gyasi, Yaa. Homegoing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.
Unigwe, Chika. On Black Sisters Street. New York: Random House, 2009.
Parker, Nate, ed. The Birth of a Nation: Nat Turner and the Making of a Movement. New York: Atria, 2016.

One profits from viewing displacement at some distance. For example, Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, a place that is not free to forget its association with segregation and slavery; Unigwe was born in Nigeria and now lives in Belgium, a place condemned to remember the obscene crimes it committed in Africa; Parker, who was born in Norfolk, Virginia, complies an official movie tie-in for his cinematic effort to manufacture ironies by partial deconstruction of D. W. Griffin’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, an iconic visual monument to American racism, and of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, a literary tribute to the making of “whiteness.” Refusing to engage the two novels and the film allows one to “buy” time for evaluation at some distance from the dubious race to be au courant. Chosen ignorance is not bliss but a Trump-like signal of independence. It marks one’s being partially immune to the gestures of the herd or the culture-consuming mob...

WRBH Reading Radio in New Orleans sat down with Dr. Jerry Ward to talk about his scholarship, travels throughout China, and new poetry collection, FRACTAL SONG. Head over to WRBH for the interview.

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