Archive - History of Black Writing Blog
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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 |
|---|---|
| ICYMI: This Week in Black Writing (4/24 – 4/30) – HBW kicked off the week by rounding up some of the best news stories in black writing from the past few months in a special We-Totally-Missed-It Edition of our weekly #ICYMI. .. | |
| Toni Morrison: A Full Circle in Motion Abraham Lincoln’s surmising that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin begat the War Between the States is a folkloric salute to the power of language and imagination. Stowe used a lot of sugar to advance the cause of abolition... | |
| Bonus ICYMI: The We-Totally-Missed-It Edition 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! .. | |
| ICYMI: This Week in Black Writing (4/17 – 4/23) – Jerry Ward reviewed Earle V. Bryant’s Byline Richard Wright, which collects pieces from Wright’s journalism career. .. | |
| Conference Report: College Language Association Convention, 2015 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. .. | |
| Subversive Journalism: A Review of Earle V. Bryant’s BYLINE RICHARD WRIGHT: ARTICLES FROM THE DAILY WORKER AND NEW MASSES (2015) 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.”.. | |
| ICYMI: The Last 3 Weeks in Black Writing (3/27 – 4/16) – Jerry Ward, Jr. wrote about seeing Richard Wright’s haiku in performance at Xavier University of Louisiana. .. | |
| Langston Hughes Center Present: SELMA Panel Discussion 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.. | |
| 'For My People' as the Fulfillment of Margaret Walker Alexander’s Literary Manifesto 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... | |
| Of Folklore, Feminism, and Fire: An Afternoon with KU Associate Professor of English Giselle Anatol 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. .. |