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 |
|---|---|
| The Mischief of Memory and Making the Self: Thoughts on Lucille Clifton’s Conceptual Construct of Memory in Generations In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Sethe states, “Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay…What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened” (P. 43). Recent studies in (re)memory, oral histories, and uncovering lost literatures have demonstrated that linear narratives and singular testimonies are problematic. Often, singular narratives are an insufficient means of conveying the past. .. | |
| Break It Down: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye “Break It Down” is an HBW Literary Blog initiative that strives to offer critical interpretations of song lyrics, excerpts from novels, and poems. .. | |
| Where are the Girls? : 5 Novels That Focus on Black Girls In my last post, I mentioned Toni Morrison’s motivation and sense of urgency for writing The Bluest Eye as stemming from her concern that far too many novels failed to acknowledge and fully develop young black girls as central characters. An exploration of African American novels that place attention on young black girls, such as Pecola Breedlove, present readers with both similar and dissimilar literary representations of the pressures that mold and shape black girls... | |
| Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye: Black Girls as Central Figures The same year The Bluest Eye (1970) was published, the Black Power Movement and other black struggles for liberation of the 1960s had influenced black literature significantly. Central to those movements’ message was the emphasis of loving and valuing blackness. Because of this, Toni Morrison describes in a interview why The Bluest Eye having “a little hurt black girl at the center of this story” instead of the stereotypical strong black woman is substantial, and even, groundbreaking in a landscape known for its essentialist representations. .. | |
| Playing in the Sunlight: Colors of Imagination, or Toni Morrison Revisited Having made proposals about the continual and continuous Africanist presence in the American literary imagination, Toni Morrison positions herself to be questioned about the invisible presence of an other, neither black nor white, which does or should haunt the American use of language... | |
| The Race for Theory: Black Women’s Literary Contributions Barbara Christian’s 1988 essay, “The Race for Theory” calls for black women’s writing to be included, to a greater extent, in critical discourse. Christian explains, “For me, literary criticism is promotion as well as understanding, a response to the writer to whom there is often no response, to folk who need the writing as much as they need anything. I know, from literary history, that writing disappears unless there is a response to it.” .. | |
| The Uncommon Intellect of the Amistad Rebels: Kevin Young’s Ardency Kevin Young’s Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels about the famous slave ship revolt and aftermath is a powerful work—a strong volume of poetry and historical document. Among other attributes, Ardency raises awareness about the intellectual capabilities of the Mendi people of Sierra Leone. .. | |
| The Other Side of the Ship: Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage In 1997, the film Amistad was released. The film retold the story of the 1839 ship rebellion in which freshly captured slaves took over the ship and the ensuing legal battle in the United States. Despite historical inaccuracies and harsh critiques of the film’s representations of black men, I credit the film for providing an accessible image of the Middle Passage. This image forces audiences to revisit the often forgotten spot in our memories. .. | |
| The Coverage Of…Daniel Rasmussen’s—American Uprising Daniel Rasmussen’s—American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt is the riveting and long-neglected story of this elaborate plot, the rebel army’s dramatic march on the city, and its shocking conclusion. No North American slave uprising—not Gabriel Prosser’s, not Denmark Vesey’s, not Nat Turner’s—has rivaled the scale of this rebellion either in terms of the number of the slaves involved or the number who were killed. More than one hundred slaves were slaughtered by federal troops and French planters, who then sought to write the event out of history and prevent the spread of the slaves’ revolutionary philosophy. With the Haitian revolution a recent memory and the War of 1812 looming on the horizon, the revolt had epic consequences for America. .. | |
| What If Phillis Wheatley Was a Black Nerd? |