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 |
|---|---|
| A Poetry for Ordinary Use We are condemned to live with the seven deadly insanities of the 21st century, but we can choose to find bright moments of sanity in the poetry of Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and other writers who knew dross often conceals gold. .. | |
| Reading Sterling D. Plumpp In March 1995 I spoke about Sterling Plumpp in the PASSWORDS series at Poets House, proud to be a Mississippian in New York speaking about a Mississippian. .. | |
| Against Academic Tyranny Although the Django Unchained syndrome will have a short life, it should convey a powerful lesson to scholars who teach American literature and culture: Americans are exercising their First Amendment rights and speaking slantwise against the tyranny of literary and cultural criticism. The particulars of the syndrome will evaporate with the advent of Women’s History Month 2013... | |
| Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928–22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic. For example, Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be... | |
| Condemnation & Redemption: The Works of Donald Goines Addison Gayle, Jr. was not a signifying monkey. Many contemporary scholars and critics ignore his existence; they dismiss his insights as strident sub-literary talk, noise not to invite to dinner at the Academic Big House... | |
| “They’ve Done Taken My Blues and Gone:” Listening to Langston Hughes: a New Year’s Resolution Like most people, I have been looking back over the year these last few days, thinking especially about the spikes in the news. It’s easy to be political, given the November election, putting Obama in the White House for a second term, giving him and the nation another first... | |
| America’s Soul Unchained Django Unchained is the most patriotic American film of 2012, because Quentin Tarantino plunged into the system of Dante’s Inferno and brought up the bloody, violent and unchained soul of the myth of the United States of America. .. | |
| The Death of African American Literature Most scholars, writers, and readers might agree that African American literature consists of orature (oral literary creations) and writings by people of African descent in the United States from the colonial period to the present. Once we move beyond so simple a definition, we forced to navigate a swamp of competing claims... | |
| 4 Novels: Veterans in African American Literature Recently, I noticed the connections between Toni Morrison’s Sula and her newest novel, Home. In both novels, Morrison captures both the pain and sheer violence that African American veterans still endure many years after they have returned home from combat... | |
| Reading List: 5 African American Books for the Winter Holidays With the holiday season fast approaching, I have begun to compile my reading list for the Christmas and New Years break. Ranging from Jesmyn Ward to Percival Everett, my reading list is comprised of black writers whose work seeks to expand our conception of how black identity is constructed and how we conceive of those persons living on the margins of society... |