Archive - History of Black Writing Blog

If Sherman Alexie had remembered good advice from Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince when he was deliberating about what to include in The Best American Poetry 2015, there would be no discussion in American poetry circles of the Yi-Fen Chou Affair.  Alexie would have used a universal truth, one that is useful in political practice and literary negotiations and especially powerful in dealing with the regressive conditions of life in the United States in 2015...

Ishmael Reed’s new novel Juice! (2011) focuses on the American media and, dissecting their exploitation of the O.J. Simpson criminal trial, its manipulation of public consciousness. By tracking years of news and commentaries in media, Reed shows the segregated media’s sick obsession with O. J. and the black male image, and uncovers the hypocrisy of “post-race” racial politics. Under his scrutiny, the reader finds that with the social climate turning right and more conservative, media discourse is becoming more totalitarian under corporate operation. Reed dissolves the traditional novel plot and juxtaposes reality and imagination by using news clips, cartoons, scientific documents, and court transcripts. The novel includes both human and animal characters connecting Reed’s work to thousands of years of North American storytelling. Reed’s grandmother on his father’s side was a Cherokee Indian. He constructs a narrative space to question the segregated media’s bias and racism...

On August 14, the 19 honorees for the 2014 American Book Awards were announced. Among them was Jamaica Kincaid, the Antiguan-American semi-autobiographical novelist and essayist recognized for See Now Then (2013), her first novel since 2002’s Mr. Potter.

..

In 2011, Kenton Rambsy created the HBW Blog with the aim of “extend[ing] the efforts of HBW by identifying and highlighting topics related to African American and America literature.” He particularly wanted to draw attention to “black literary history, contemporary developments in the production of black writing, digital humanities, and literary scholarship that pertains to African American writers.”

..

On Monday, August 25, students, faculty and staff from KU took part in a #HandsUpWalkOut Demonstration in honor of Michael Brown. Megan Kaminski, assistant professor in the English department, organized the event. Kaminski read an excerpt from Audre Lorde’s poem “For Each of You,” published in Lorde’s collection From a Land Where Other People Live (1973).

..

Dreams of harmony and peace or absurd visions of the end of time are
legitimate constructions of human imagination. If you are dealing with
pure cinema, they are effective. Such spectacles appear to confirm the
implacable universality of violence, the murky origins of terrorism, and
the marriage of reason with insanity. ..

i
sing Birthday praises to
Dr.
Mama Diva-Poet Margaret Walker
who
spoke so they might hear in
the
miasmic air of Mississippi who
wrote
so we could get clear on
who
we are from Alabama to New Haven.
i
want to sing of her like she did of
Kissie
Lee, and claim her as my literary
auntie..

As I continue to explore Black American writers in Scandinavia, some delightful and interesting surprises have been revealed. Here is a short report. Recently, with funding from Kennesaw State University, I travelled in Sweden for two weeks in May 2014. My research focused on the American deserter community of the 1970s as I continued to study materials to support my novel, “Burn the House,” about an African American deserter and his struggle with identity and adjustment to Swedish life. Most of my time was spent reading in the archives of the Labor Movements Library, which has two collections of deserter materials, but there was also time to meet with Afro-Swedes and talk about literary matters.


..

The Black Caucus of the
American Library Association, Inc. (BCALA) announces the winners of the 2014
BCALA Literary Awards during the Midwinter Meeting of the American Library
Association in Philadelphia,
PA. The awards recognize
excellence in adult fiction and nonfiction by African American authors
published in 2013, including an award for Best Poetry and a citation for
Outstanding Contribution to Publishing. The recipients will receive the awards
during the 2014 Annual Conference of the American Library Association in Las Vegas, NV...

Should America become adult enough to read Southern literature, become wise enough to call out Southern mythology for the honeycomb of prevarication that it is, and become intelligent enough to take the blood pressure of the real thing in a Southern story —– should that improbability occur, America will value Larry Brown more than it currently does. It will value the exercise of dealing with his South, my South, and our South...