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 |
|---|---|
| Break It Down: Their Eyes Were Watching God “Break It Down” is a new HBW Literary Blog initiative that strives to offer critical interpretations of song lyrics, excerpts from novels, and poems. .. | |
| Barefoot and Laughin’: Black Women’s Humor and Male-Female Relationships The absence of black women as academic subjects in studies on humor does not mean that black women have sat cross-legged and silently watched while others slung of verbal insults. .. | |
| Protest and Organized Resistance in 5 Black Novels Representations of organized resistance efforts have appeared in noted works by black writers for over 100 years. Similar to organizers for Occupy Wall Street, some black novelists have sought to present large numbers of people protesting unfair or unjust practices. As previously mentioned, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man offers one take one a figure becoming involved in protest movements. The following 5 novels also depict organized struggle. .. | |
| Occupy Wall Street and Ralph Ellison: African American Novels and Organized Resistance Although many commentators have noted that protests related to Occupy Wall Street have not included large numbers of black people, it is worth noting that historically speaking social protests do have a strong presence in African American literature. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), not unlike the sentiments of OWS, seems to capture the growing frustration and discontent of American citizens with the great disparities between the rich and the poor... | |
| 100 Novels Project Revisted Although research on African American literature has flourished over the last three decades, there have been almost no quantitative studies on black novels. For instance, of the wide ranging body of novels published prior to the Harlem Renaissance, how many remain in print? What geographic region produces the greatest number of major novelists? Among one hundred select major black novels, how many were reviewed in the New York Times? .. | |
| Break It Down: Strange Fruit “Break It Down” is a new HBW Literary Blog initiative that strives to offer critical interpretations of song lyrics, excerpts from novels, and poems. .. | |
| Theorizing Black Music, Theorizing Black Poetry Last semester, I had the privilege of taking a course entitled Theorizing Black Music, Theorizing Black Poetry. My curiosity was sparked throughout the course as significant connections were made between themes in blues lyrics and those in African-American poetry. Given the long history of the black oral tradition, the African-American musical tradition has merely been an extension of that narrative and has impacted the writing of many African-Americans. .. | |
| It Was All A Dream: Liner Notes and 1990s Hip Hop Print and Media Culture “It was all a dream I used to read Word Up! magazine …” – opening line from “Juicy” by Notorious B.I.G. .. | |
| Contemporary Toasts By Black Women in Music The space for women to enter into Hip Hop is a small one. However, once through, female singers and emcees have held their own against the objectifying and misogynistic nature of Hip Hop culture. Although few have entered on the Hip Hop stage, many have established their lyrical dominance and street credibility. For this, HBW salutes contemporary, female “toast masters.” .. | |
| Toasts, Black Women, and Hip Hop The canon of African American literature overflows with stories of Stagolees, Shines, and Signifying Monkeys. These antiheroic figures in African American culture created the paradigm for the poetic form known as the toast. Derived from black folklore, toasts are narratives in which a character overcomes a sequence of events. In doing so, they illustrate their extraordinary physical and lyrical abilities. Usually told by male personas, they function to attest to one’s street credibility and physical abilities. .. |