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 |
|---|---|
| Black Writing: A New Orleans Example Seldom is the interrelated difference of black writing and black literature a topic of conversation or a point of sustained discussion in undergraduate and graduate courses. Black writing in the United States of America includes the sounds and visual combinations (graphology) that represent the contours and nuances of African American thought. Black literature is the body of work squeezed from black writing, filtered and otherwise processed by scholarship and criticism, poured into anthologies, and offered up to Culture as a consecrated wine. Black writing is free from the rituals and niceties of wine-tasting. It is just the robust wine that it is. .. | |
| Reading 2015: Part I Having abandoned the bad faith of making New Year’s Resolutions, I am determined in 2015 to pursue three priorities.. | |
| On a Novel by Caryl Phillips Toni Morrison’s Beloved deftly exposes the psychology of enslavement in North America, but it is Dessa Rose by Sherley Anne Williams that succeeds best in exposing the narratological features of a female slave’s “story,” namely the verbal strategies she uses to impede the extent to which her story (herstory versus history) can be stolen. Caryl Phillips, however, ought to be valued as much as Williams and Morrison from the angle of post-colonial witnessing. In his novel Cambridge, he “films” the tragic irony of the metanarrative of the enslaver and the enslaved, bringing to fiction what Hegel brought to philosophy. .. | |
| Reading List: 3 More Staff Recommendations for Winter Reading Last Wednesday, the HBW Blog Editor Meredith Wiggins shared her list of five recent black-authored books to check out over the winter break. .. | |
| Farewell to Dean of KU Libraries Lorraine Haricombe On Friday, December 12, HBW founder Maryemma Graham and current staff members met with Dean of Libraries Lorraine Haricombe on her final day at KU. .. | |
| Reading List: 5 Books for the Winter Break The Fall 2014 semester is drawing to a close and winter break is rapidly coming upon us, which means it’s almost the time of year when we here at HBW get to to indulge in more pleasure-reading than is always possible in the thick of the school year. .. | |
| Considering and Reconsidering Black Studies: A Dialogue Between Jerry Ward and Abdul Alkalimat In July, we shared a post by Jerry Ward on the main HBW website regarding Introduction to Afro-American Studies: A People’s College Primer (1973) and African American Studies 2013: A National Web-Based Survey (2013). This post has since invited a response from Abdul Alkalimat, primary author of both documents. The HBW Blog would like to share this dialogue and open it up for further commentary from the authors and from readers of the HBW Blog. .. | |
| Continuing Ferguson’s Literary History After the fatal shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014, staff and contributors of Avidly put together a list of texts that they called “Ferguson’s Literary History” – books, essays, and poems that offer context for the continuing climate of racism and racial violence in the United States. .. | |
| African-American Studies in China: The 2nd International Symposium on Ethnic Literature I was shocked as I sat among a room of Chinese students intently reading, listening to, and discussing lectures on African-American Studies. I was given the outstanding opportunity to attend the 2nd International Symposium on Ethnic Literature, hosted at Central China Normal University of Wuhan. In just two days, my ideas about how the Chinese perceived African-Americans were dramatically reconstructed... | |
| Black Men Must Be Bionic In any situation, if a white police officer is moved to kill me, he knows he could do so with impunity. He knows this. He’s known it for many years. His socialization in these United States taught him the ways of race relations at an early age. With them, it’s an implicit understanding. He knows if we are engaged in any kind of non-lethal struggle, or if I dared to react in a way that is displeasing to him, he’d be free to take my life without consequence from the law. My innocence doesn’t matter. He understands that, for me, being unarmed doesn’t matter. Standing over my blood-soaked and bullet-riddled body, he’d be justified in his actions. After all, I was black and I was bionic. .. |