Archive - History of Black Writing Blog


The Banner image for the HBW Blog, which was published from 2011-2021.
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.

Date posted
Blog Post/Link
Studying Black Yin
Blackness as we know it today cannot escape the white vs. black/ good vs. bad/ righteousness vs. evil dichotomy that upholds the idea of white supremacy...
Disney and Diversity in the 21st Century: Part 1
Diversity has become a vexed issue in the 21st century. Once it was a priority in our corporate and education sectors, with accountability for its implementation built in. Today, it has become that carefully crafted phrase one sees on websites, usually so watered down we pay scarce attention...
Black Poetry Bears Witness
Black poetry paints and writes our stories– records our histories and reveals truths. ..
On Keyword Searches and Indexed Data
Janine Solberg’s article “Googling the Archive: Digital Tools and the Practice of History” (2012) reflects on the epistemological implications of accessing digital archives for research purposes...
On the importance of open-source literature
Matthew Jockers, Matthew Sag, and Jason Schultz’s article “Don’t let copyright block data mining,” which appeared in Nature magazine in 2012, brings to light perhaps one of the biggest roadblocks in the field of Digital Humanities: copyright law...
On the State of Digital Humanities and Black Literature
As part of an ongoing project here at HBW, in the coming months I will be reviewing a large swath of publications related to the field of Digital Humanities...
International Exchanges
Professor Tsunehiko Kato’s eloquent essay on the Japan Black
Studies Association (JBSA) provides relief from the glut of always already
interpellations of the face (and other body parts) of the Other who occupies an
interstitial transnational location in the postcolonial diasporic interrogation
which is a simulacrum for academic discourses in conversation with postmodern
debris of gendered desires. In Professor Kato’s essay, one hears the voice of a
human being speaking to human beings about a subject that is dear to his heart
and that he invites us to share.
..
About Japan Black Studies Association since 1954
The Project on the History of Black Writing is pleased to welcome our
colleagues from the Japanese Black Studies Association, one of the
oldest professional organizations in the field...
Tribute to Amiri Baraka
I was assigned William J. Harris’s very well-organized The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader for Maria Damon’s African-American Poetries class, and until that point his names meant nothing to me. Now, this is in some ways an indictment of my undergraduate coursework in English...
GOODNIGHT, SWEET PRINCE AND FLIGHTS OF ANGELS SING THEE TO THY REST: A FEW NOTES ON AMIRI BARAKA
“If my letter re your poem sounded crusader and
contentious I’m sorry. But I have gone deep, and gotten caught with images of
the world, that exists, or that will be here after we go. I have not the
exquisite objectivity of circumstance. The calm precise mind of Luxury. . . . I
can’t sleep. And I do not believe in all this relative shit. There is a right
and a wrong. A good and a bad. And it’s up to me, you, all of the so called
minds, to find out. It is only knowledge of things that will bring this ‘moral
earnestness’.”

–Amiri Baraka to Edward
Dorn, 1961..