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 |
|---|---|
| Jay-Z, Zora Neale Hurston, and Rap Genius: African American Expressive Culture and “Swag” In “Public Service Announcement” Jay-Z raps, “Check out my hat yo, peep the way I wear it/Check out my swag’ yo, I walk like a ballplayer.” Jay-Z’s reference to “Swag” has deeper cultural roots for African Americans. Even though the word “swag” has been made wildly popular by rappers in recent years, back in 1934 Zora Neale Hurston was already theorizing about this concept in her essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” In Hurston’s essay, she explains the distinct ways that Black people have come to articulate and dramatize their lives through storytelling and other artistic practices such as negro folklore, imitation, and dialect. .. | |
| 5 Reasons Gayl Jones’ Eva’s Man is an Important Novel to Read | |
| Biomythography in the Life Narrative and the Poems of Audre Lorde This semester, I am enrolled in Dr. Maryemma Graham’s “Life Writing: Contemporary Autobiography—Theory and Practice Course”. Many of the texts we have read this semester interestingly complicate the concepts of autobiography and memoir. For example, Audre Lorde refers to her life narrative as a biomythography. In “Self-Representation: Instabilities in Gender, Genre, and Identity,” Leigh Gilmore writes, “…self/life/writing—is exchanged for the terrain of biomythography” (27) in Zami. That is, the text represents a space in which “homes, identities, and names have mythic qualities” (27). Examining her text closely, one can claim that biomythography is a combination of myth, history, and biography. .. | |
| Black Writing, Culture and Memory To focus on black writing rather than black literature, it might be argued, is to attend with greater passion to dynamics of literacy within our culture. .. | |
| Poetry in 1988: A Research Note Twenty-five years ago, Naomi Long Madgett edited and published A Milestone Sampler: 15th Anniversary Anthology (Detroit: Lotus Press, 1988). The book is a collector’s item. Pictured on the front cover are Lotus Press poets who participated in the fifteenth anniversary celebration in Detroit, June 25-27, 1987... | |
| Follow Up: 7 Links That Demonstrate RapGenius’s Connection To Digital African American Literary Scholarship On yesterday, I posted a list of “7 Ways that RapGenius Assists Digital African American Literary Scholarship.” Today, I decided to do a follow up post to illustrate exactly what I meant by providing actual examples on the RapGenius website. RapGenius’s crowd-sourced, multimedia platform helps users to fuse social networking and online databases to create digital resources to study black writing... | |
| 7 Ways that RapGenius Assists Digital African American Literary Scholarship I said it once and I’ll say it again: Rap Genius is not just for Rap fans. In my post, Rap Genius and Black Literature, I wrote about how the website “helps clarify the importance of language usage, historical context, and thematic content in poems, speeches, essays, and novels.”.. | |
| Poetry in First World: An April Meditation After Johnson Publications abruptly discontinued Black World in 1976, Hoyt W. Fuller and others founded First World Foundation in Atlanta and began to publish First World: An International Journal of Black Thought. In The Black Arts Movement (2005), James Smethurst does not associate the demise of Black World and the birth of First World with Watergate (1974), but future studies of African American poetry will have to account for how the covert activities of Richard Nixon’s administration intensified divisions and decline within the evolving of Black cultural nationalism... | |
| Rap Genius and Black Literature Rap Genius is not just for rap fans. The website, made popular for its explanations of rap music, has now ventured into providing detailed explanations for literary texts. Using the same crowd-sourced annotation platform, Rap Genius allows for its users to break down literary texts and help clarify the importance of language usage, historical context, and thematic content in poems, speeches, essays, and novels... | |
| Black Drama and the Alarm Clock In the early 1970s, people in what was then the Black Community took some interest in the April issues of Black World, a rich source of cultural information edited by Hoyt W. Fuller. Those issues were devoted to reporting and commentary on Black drama; they satisfied our desire to know what was happening in Black theater. We had a broad sense of how Black playwrights and directors were dealing with themes and influencing inquiry about the state of Black America. .. |