Archive - History of Black Writing Blog
The Banner image for the HBW Blog, which was published from 2011-2021.
Black Literary History Making
The HBW Blog published regularly for ten years from 2011-2021 at the URL https://projecthbw.ku.edu. During that time, it served as a major forum for the exchange of information and ideas, as well as a robust network for scholars, teachers, and students from different disciplines around the world.
Guest contributors include leading scholars and writers, but most of the posts were conceived of, researched, and written by HBW's staff of undergraduate and graduate students. Its content consists of feature editorials, book reviews, memorials, and coverage of HBW programming. Altogether, 95 writers contributed more than 750 posts.
The HBW Blog Archive is searchable by topic, month and year, and contributor name.
| Blog Post/Link | Date |
|---|---|
| Roots: The Good, Bad, and Ugly For four days after Memorial Day, 2016, American viewers gave studied attention to a remake of Roots, the 1977 blockbuster film that captured our hearts and minds. Those born after the Roots phenomenon can hardly comprehend what those eight days of television history felt like. .. | |
| Remembering James Alan McPherson (September 16, 1943 – July 27, 2016) In “On Becoming an American Writer,” James Alan McPherson once wrote, “I believe that if one can experience diversity, touch a variety of its people, laugh at its craziness, distill wisdom from its tragedies, and attempt to synthesize all this inside oneself without going crazy, one will have earned the right to call oneself ‘citizen of the United States.'”.. | |
| ICYMI: The Last Week in Black Writing and Culture (7/23-7/29) Writer James Alan McPherson, the first African American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, passed away at the age of 72. In his career, McPherson was also awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and was named a MacArthur Fellow... | |
| Homegoing – A Tale of One Tree and its Many Branches “This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others….But now we come upon the problem of conflicting stories…we believe the one who has the power. He is the one who get to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that you must find that story too. From there you begin to get a clearer picture, yet still imperfect, picture”.. | |
| African and African American Tensions In a recent review of Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing in The New York Times, Isabel Wilkerson gives voice to the sometimes whispered tensions between Africans and African Americans... | |
| ICYMI: The Last Week in Black Writing and Culture (7/16-7/22) Troy Wiggins of Book Riot created a reading list titled, “The Effects of Racism.” Making the list is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Margo Jefferson’s Negroland, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. Click the link above to view to rest of the list!.. | |
| Toward a History of the Black Book Interactive Project At the 2014 Modern Language Association (MLA), Professor Warren Carson moderated the panel, “Words, Works, and New Archives: Studying African American Literature in the Twenty-First Century,” that included professors Dana Williams, Regina Bradley, and me. In my presentations, “The Black Book: Creating an Interactive Research Environment,” I discussed my ongoing work with a metadata collection project I founded as Digital Initiative Coordinator for HBW.. | |
| Reverse Passing: From Rachel Dolezal to Vijay Chokalingam | |
| ICYMI: The Last Week in Black Writing and Culture (7/9-7/15) This past Sunday evening at South Park in Lawrence, KS, hundreds gathered for a candlelight vigil to mourn the two latest victims of police shootings, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Participants were encouraged to share stories and give their condolences... | |
| On the origins of the HBW Blog In June 2009, I met Maryemma Graham at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I was a summer fellow at the Schomburg-Humanities summer institute, and she was one of more than a dozen renowned artists and scholars, including Nikkey Finney, Alondra Nelson, William Strickland, James Stewart, and Benjamin Talton, who came to present their research and interact with participants... |