Archive - History of Black Writing Blog
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.
| Blog Post/Link | Date |
|---|---|
| Remembering Alvin Aubert and Amiri Baraka My introduction to Leroi Jones was reading “The End of Man is His Beauty” and “A Poem for Democrats” in 1963 in Rosey E. Pool’s anthology Beyond the Blues (Hand and Flower Press 1962)... | |
| Black Literature and Digital Humanities: The Black Book Interactive Project The Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) is the oldest, continuously running digital humanities project working exclusively on African American literature. Founded in 1983 at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, it parallels the evolution of the field itself. Today, thirty years later, HBW continues to engage in scholarship focusing on the study of African American literature and digital software... | |
| The Black Book Project: Why is it important? Since the study/teaching of black literature is very often dictated by what is current or what authors will attract students to a course, most of what we know about black fiction is based on a very small sample of texts... | |
| The Black Book Project: What kinds of important research questions are we asking? Based on our collection of some 2000 novels, most of which are neither widely read nor taught, we see the digital medium as a way to provide new levels of access, consolidate a large amount of data and invite new questions... | |
| The Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) Overview The Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) focuses on African American novels published from the mid-19th through the early 20th century novels, creating a tool that allows a comparison of thematic and stylistic elements, ideas and language use. .. | |
| The Gifts of Black Prisoners Just as DuBois’s The Gifts of Black Folk (1924) is overshadowed by The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the long shadows of our classic slave narratives obscure the importance of studying other autobiographical forms in efforts to write more expansive histories of how African Americans have used literary and literature or black writing in English since the 18th century. .. | |
| Mirror of Violence: Charles Fuller’s Zooman and the Sign It is a truth, widely recognized, that blue-blooded and red-blooded Americans love violence. To be sure, it is deemed unpatriotic to detest violence, which along with “race” is a permanent fixture in the minds of Americans. Like esteemed works of ancient world literature, contemporary American literature idolizes violence. Literary and cultural critics who condemn violence in art and in life are naive candidates for mental asylums, because unquestioned embrace of violence is the sign of one’s 21st century humanity... | |
| African American Literature and Humanism For quite some time now, I have been thinking critically about African American Literature and Religion. Drawing largely upon the works of James Baldwin, I have found this enterprise to be fascinating and complex. Given the historical context and religious experiences of black people in America, it is no surprise that traces of religion appear a great deal in black writing. .. | |
| Amoebic Motion in Literature and Culture Imagine that you have the good fortune of getting a job interview at the MLA Convention for a position as “Assistant Professor of African American and Diaspora Literature.” You feel secure. You defended your dissertation on “Signifying and the Blues in the Detective Novels of Chester Himes” with honors. You have read Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Gayatri Spivak, John Cullen Gruesser, and most of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. .. | |
| Up Close and Personal When my hometown was placed under federal mandate to desegregate the schools, my mother was selected as the first black teacher to move to an all white school. I say “selected” because as we know from Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, these are carefully orchestrated moments. She had taught at a rural school up to that point, loved the students, their parents and the community that grew up around the school, but recognized this as a charge she would have to keep. .. |