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 |
|---|---|
| Race No More??? As the term post racial gains widespread acceptance, I am reminded of George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) the uproariously funny satire about a black man who becomes white through a Black No More process invented by a one Dr. Junius Crookman. The book is truly instructive. As a cautionary tale, by showing how absurd, self-serving, and easily exploitable our constructions of race can be, Schuyler points to the difficulty of quick fixes that easily mask our ignorance of history and deny racism as our national shame. .. | |
| Transformation of Black Fiction into Film Transformation of fiction into film necessitates deformations. Some transformations may enhance a flawed story, but they frequently cheapen the nuances of strong fiction. Viewers who have not read the source may logically think the film is excellent. Readers who move from the source to the film may have a quite different opinion, for they know that the probable intentions of the fiction writer have been murdered... | |
| Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s Critical Memory Houston Baker’s Critical Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2001) is a meditation on how, why and where his values are grounded. .. | |
| Black Literary Images (1) A key figure during the Harlem Renaissance and author of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Zora Neale Hurston’s interests in folklore and intra-racial conflicts served as the basis for the majority of her anthropological studies, short stories, and novels... | |
| Ann Petry and Langston Hughes: Representations of Black Motherhood After my mother passed, I found in the pages of her journal—the story of a woman’s life I had little understood. She was consumed by self-hatred, and could not face life as an unloved overweight woman. Much of her life was spent caring for eight children she had by six men she thought loved her. The contradiction between her negative self-images and her undying commitment to her children have provided the motivation to study the lives of black women, the stories we write about them, and the practices associated with sexism and racism in our society. .. | |
| Nikki Giovanni’s “When I Die:” Forgiveness and Revolution I have always had a hard time with the idea of forgiveness. So, naturally, my God-mother constantly reminds me to “Let go of the past and forgive. Holding on to pain, anger, and hurt that has been inflicted by others (or that you’ve inflicted on yourself) prevents healing and blocks new, positive energy from your life. Embrace the present by releasing the past. Let go.” But, what does forgiveness really mean when it comes to political matters and revolution? .. | |
| Wesley Brown Revisited Like the walking bodies in our country that are in a slow hurry to advertise the fine art of tattooing, we best be asking hard questions about keeping Black real compared to what... | |
| Incriminating Evidence and Interpretation Negative and positive responses to Django Unchained and other commodities illuminate the complexity of popular disagreement in the United States. .. | |
| A Blues Moment in Dusk of Dawn: A Note on Autobiography W. E. B. DuBois’s writing in The Souls of Black Folk (1901) is spiritual, and Dusk of Dawn (1940) complements the first installment of his autobiographical project with a secular sorrow song, with the blues. .. | |
| Inaugural Poems: Touching Bones of Consciousness Rudolph Lewis, publisher of the online journal ChickenBones, has suggested that we welcome Richard Blanco’s use of proletarian elements in “One Today.” I concur. .. |