Archive - History of Black Writing Blog

“Break It Down” is a new HBW Literary Blog initiative that strives to offer critical interpretations of song lyrics, excerpts from novels, and poems.

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In the same way that threats of violence did not always dissuade slaves’ attempts to escape, the threat of injury or even death was not enough to keep many African Americans quiet. In some instances, African Americans made the pen mightier than the whip.

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Tony Bolden, author of Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture, proposes “vernacular cultures are always dialogic relative to dominant cultures, so they are never static but rather always in flux…writers (artists) who appropriate the vernacular must confront the constant risk of erasure” (26). Bolden’s concept of the ever-changing vernacular culture helps to explain frequent reimagings of slavery and struggles for liberation by black literary artists.
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Every time I talk or write about Toni Cade Bambara I laugh thinking about how a graduate school professor attempted to convince me her work was too narrow for a dissertation topic. Bambara would certainly have chuckled at his ignorance. Anyone who knows a little bit about her work is aware of how her work embraces many elements at one time. Indeed her vision is what literary critic Joyce A. Joyce once called “a panoramic” because she explores the full scope of Black life and culture in her fiction from history, feminism, and geology to blues, jazz, clairvoyance, spiritual renewal, religion, cinematography and physics. A Black Arts movement writer, her use of West African religions, and African and African American folk culture reflect African American literary scholars such as myself are interested in exploring: (1) how social, historical, and political conditions frame and have framed production; or (2) how African descended peoples in the United States and throughout the African Diaspora have produced texts.
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In The Gift of Black Folk (1924), W. E. B. DuBois asserted that the meek in the new world “not only inherited the earth but made their heritage a thing of questing for eternal youth, of fruitful labor, or joy and music, of the free spirit and of the ministering hand, of wide and poignant sympathy with men in their struggle to live and love which is, after all, the end of being.” Strip DuBois’s sentimental prose of flowers and sugar, and one comes to the core: the descendents of African peoples in the United States gave this nation the gift of humanity, a gift that burns the hands of people who have no color. Those who chirp endlessly about their sympathy for peoples of color have much to learn from Ishmael Reed.

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John Edgar Wideman is arguably one of the most serious living writers in the Americas, and one might dream that the Nobel Prize folk will recognize his value. Remembering where the wealth that finances Nobel Prizes came from, one might decide to kill the dream and return to the more noble space where genuine respect for Wideman’s achievement can breathe...

What are the aesthetic, social and political messages of hip-hop music? Although much has been written—and continues to be written—on the “tremendous potential” of this musical art-form for social criticism and change (perhaps even revolution), the vast majority of it centers on the more overtly ‘socially conscious’, ‘politically oriented’ groups and MCs (a few examples: Dead Prez, Black Star, KRS-One, and, most notably, the late Tupac and the now defunct Public Enemy). ..

“Man is capable of doing what he is incapable of imagining. His head tills the galaxy of the absurd.”..

One of the trenchant criticisms of the hip-hop generation—generally, those born after the Civil Rights Era, coming of age between 1970 and 1980—and post hip-hop generation—those born after 1980, coming of age in an era in which hip-hop has become a world wide phenomena—has been that these generations lack the attention span of the previous generations as well as the dedication and work ethic to hone the details of craft. ..

There are few jazz artists that have been written about as much as John Coltrane. On one hand, there are his many musical accomplishments that changed jazz forever. Born September 23, 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina, Coltrane went from a side-man in Philadelphia based blues bands to performing with legends of jazz such as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, to leading an illustrious solo career with his own quartet. Along with an infamous victory over drug and alcohol abuse, Coltrane was able to remain on the cutting edge of jazz’s evolution right up until his death in 1967 from liver disease...