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 |
|---|---|
| Flashback, Fast Forward: Michael Brown as America’s Brute Negro* Like many people, I have been hard pressed to make sense of the senseless, to believe the unbelievable. Darren Wilson shot again and again and ultimately killed unarmed college-bound Michael Brown. Wilson, due to the opinion of the Ferguson grand jury, will not face criminal charges. There was no probable cause to indict Wilson, they concluded... | |
| Reflections on #Ferguson: Baldwin’s “The American Dream and the American Negro” Today, in the wake of the grand jury decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for killing unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, the HBW Blog turns, as so many have done, to the words of the prophet James Baldwin: .. | |
| Of Nature, Nation, and the Ethnic Body To echo a famous twentieth-century statement, the mind should prompt the mouth to say A BODY IS A BODY IS A BODY, aware that the voiced words refer to and locate an indivisible subject and object. Or perhaps the utterance dislocates the invisible to bring into view, into perspective, a something in the world that the world is determined to impale with the idea that the “something” is ethnic and different and to be talked about. If the something that is so embodied speaks, especially in terms of accepting its ethnicity, the something that is a human being may be contemplating its relationship to nature and to its properties and privileges as a constituent of a nation. .. | |
| Celebrating Toni Cade Bambara at 75 African American letters lost one of its brightest lights in 1995 when Black feminist author, filmmaker and activist Toni Cade Bambara passed away at the age of 56 after being diagnosed with colon cancer. .. | |
| HBW Emerging Scholars: Edwidge Danticat and the Collective Self Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian–American writer well known for her fiction, including her award-winning books Breath, Eyes, Memory, The Dew Breaker, and Krik? Krak! However, 2007’s Brother, I’m Dying tells her own story, or so it seems. Though the book has been labeled “autobiography,” Danticat concentrates primarily on the lives of her family members rather than on her own. .. | |
| Celebrating Ernest J. Gaines, 50 Years On 2014 is an exciting year for readers and scholars interested in the work of Ernest J. Gaines. It’s the 50th anniversary of the award-winning author’s first novel, Catherine Carmier, which set the stage for the Gaines’s later, better-known fiction, including 1971’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, 1983’s A Gathering of Old Men, and 1993’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated A Lesson Before Dying... | |
| “Of Maids and Ladies”: Dr. Ayesha Hardison on Living Jane Crow On Thursday, October 30, 2014, Langston Hughes Visiting Professor Ayesha Hardison examined the oppressive situation faced by women of color after the Civil War and through the Jim Crow Era in a talk entitled “Of Maids and Ladies: The Ethics of Living Jane Crow” at The University of Kansas. .. | |
| From the HBW Archives: The Works of John A. Williams, Novelist and Journalist Last year, HBW inaugurated the GEMS Project, an initiative designed to bring renewed critical interest to older, living African American authors who have received less scholarly attention in recent years than their works should merit. .. | |
| A Good Influence: Writers on the Authors and Texts that Influenced Them The pleasures of Shay Youngblood’s Black Girl in Paris (2000) are many and vast, but one of the most prominent is the chance to follow along as main character Eden, a would-be writer, attempts to grapple with the literary legacy of James Baldwin, whose writing inspired her to move to Paris. The novel is rich with references to Baldwin and his body of work; he even appears briefly as a character, wordlessly blessing Eden’s efforts as a writer. .. | |
| Teaching Black Writing in Wuhan Teaching graduate students in the School of Foreign Languages at Central China Normal University is rewarding. They are less jaded and more receptive than their American peers, more conscious that a university education is a privilege rather than an entitlement dispensed by a secular god. Lacking familiarity with our democratic hypocrisies and noteworthy disdain for humanistic inquiry, most Chinese students bring innocence to the study of foreign literatures.. |