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 |
|---|---|
| Don’t Deny My Voice: Virtual Seminars and Public Access Over the past month, the Project on The History of Black Writing and Don’t Deny My Voice NEH Institute have hosted three virtual seminars on black poetry. The first webinar, moderated by Professor Opal Moore, featured award-winning poet, Nikki Giovanni. Within an hour, Giovanni covered topics ranging from black churches, music, jazz, science and technology, poetry, space, and of course, poetry... | |
| Gordon Parks: Photography and Intervention The “Gordon Parks: Making of an Argument” exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art provides a fine lesson about the art of photography and socially conscious discursive interventions. The argument in question refers to “Harlem Gang Leader,” Life, November 1, 1948, pages 97-104, 106. The article was based on Park’s photographs of Leonard “Red” Jackson and members of the Midtowner’s gang, but the text was written by unnamed Life Magazine editors. There is a delicate tension between the text and the many photographs Parks shot over a period of four weeks. .. | |
| Ntozake Shange and The Role of Language By now, many of you may have read the piece on Ntozake Shange by the New York Times. But, if you have not, then it is definitely worth the read. In the interview, Shange talked about her latest book of “choreoessays” turned theatrical show, “Lost in language and Sound: Or How I Found My Way to the Arts.” By now, many of you may have read the piece on Ntozake Shange by the New York Times. But, if you have not, then it is definitely worth the read. In the interview, Shange talked about her latest book of “choreoessays” turned theatrical show, “Lost in language and Sound: Or How I Found My Way to the Arts.” .. | |
| A Footnote for A Work-in-Progress Doreen Fowler’s Drawing the Line: The Father Reimagined in Faulkner, Wright, O’Connor, and Morrison (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013) is a prime example of how lost in the wilderness one becomes by following psychoanalytic maps of non-referentiality. Some critics find psychoanalytic theories to be useful in reading texts, because those theories sanction language being in conversation with language. One need not deal with the messiness of referentiality fiction and non-fiction invite. One can momentarily escape the horror of knowing that signifiers co-exist with the material presences which negate signification. .. | |
| Loss and The Katrina Papers In her afterword to David Eng and David Kazanjian’s edited collection of essays entitled, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Judith Butler notes, “On the one hand, there is the loss of place and the loss of time, a loss that cannot be recovered or recuperated but that leaves its enigmatic trace.”.. | |
| Rita Dove, Edwidge Danticat, and the New York Times Reality evaporates, and a quark restores reality. The change escapes notice. Good. The reaction allows writing to produce stasis, the five-dimensional space in which we write. .. | |
| Lucille Clifton: The People’s Poet The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 (BOA Editions, 2012), edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser, makes available “all the poems Lucille Clifton published in book form during her lifetime” as well as a significant amount of her unpublished poetry (xxvii)... | |
| History Redux 2013: Umbra and FST Two symposia, “Talkin Revolution,” (New Orleans, October 17-20) and “Celebrating the Umbra Workshop,” (New York, November 1) will cast light on the matter of history redux, the ways people remember and reconfigure specific moments of cultural development. .. | |
| We Want the Funk In preparation for our discussion of Funk, and specifically Afrofuturist elements of Funk music primarily by Parliament, the students read some background information on the musical genre and the different productions by Parliament... | |
| C. Leigh McInnis and the sounds of Black Poetry If you have never heard/seen C. Leigh McInnis’s powerful performance/reading of his work(s) “Manhood,” “What Good Are Poems?” or any of his poems for that matter, then you are missing out on a hidden gem. .. |