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 |
|---|---|
| Encountering Richard Wright & Jerry Ward In July of 1996, shortly after completing my first year of undergrad at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, I was on a bus traveling from Paris to Dijon, France, where I would be taking summer courses. As I settled into the bus ride, I decided to look over reading material that I carried—the 1993 reissue of Richard Wright’s Black Boy... | |
| Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. and Custodial Clowns Several times during his September 20, 2012 lecture on “The Crisis of Black Leadership” at the University of Kansas, Eddie Glaude, author of In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (2007), used the phrases “custodial politics” and “democratic perfectionism.” “Democratic perfection” is so critical a concept in political theory that it is virtually invisible in the everyday practices of American politics. The high visibility of “custodial politics,” on the other hand, is an agonizing pain in the butt... | |
| Eddie Glaude: Prophetic Witness and Black Leadership I was fortunate to witness two powerful and thought-provoking lectures given by Eddie Glaude Jr., the William S. Todd Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Princeton University... | |
| On Being Cool: A Cold Announcement In the later years of the last century, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) broadcast clear signals about the misdeeds of humanistic disciplines in the United States, the British Commonwealth, and the theoretical centers of Europe. .. | |
| Toi Derricotte’s Open Confession Open confession — public broadcasting of once private spiritual desire and/or agony — may be good for the soul. As far as contemporary American poetry goes, whether open confession is a many splendid thing or a depressing invitation to tour another person’s dread and suffering is debatable... | |
| Witherspoon: A Novel by Lance Jeffers (1983)* Reading Witherspoon, one is moved by its aesthetic and its morality. Lance Jeffers does not depend on mutilation of language, allusion to the arcane, or puzzles in logic to achieve effects... | |
| Gil Scott-Heron and a Hint-filled Detail “Gil Scott-Heron was one of [the] most insightful thinkers of the late twentieth century,” Tony Bolden writes in Chapter 22 of The Cambridge History of African American Literature, “yet few critics have considered him a serious artist” (552). Few have commented on Scott-Heron’s serious artistry in the novel The Nigger Factory (New York: Dial, 1972; Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2010). This work of vernacular realism fell through the cracks... | |
| The Ethnic Ethical Turn Nature extracts a high cost for beauty. From an amoral aesthetic perspective, Hurricane Isaac’s performance of a logarithmic spiral is beautiful. The sublime beauty of a hurricane kills people. Does the beauty of our cultural studies and theories participate in such murder?.. | |
| Stitching Rifts: Finney Mends American Environmentalism | |
| Nikky Finney: The Role of the Writer and Critic On Thursday, September 6, U.S. National Book Award-winning poet, Nikky Finney visited the University of Kansas to deliver a lecture on “Making Poetry in Our Anthropocene Age.” I was eager to attend the lecture to find out what angle Finney would take in bridging the literary world to issues of environmentalism... |