Archive - History of Black Writing Blog

In our fourth installment of Literary Vantage Points, we have collected brief interviews from a number of professors to get their perspectives about various authors. In this particular feature, we asked three literary scholars—Professors Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, Bob Butler, and Aldon Lynn Nielsen—to describe their initial impressions of author Richard Wright and discuss the legacy of hiis work...

The overall importance of RichardWright in African American literary and intellectual history makes it vital to consider his background and educational development in order to fully appreciate how he became such a significant figure. Wright’s move to Mississippi as a adolescent and his enrollment at Jim Hill Primary School were key factors in the expansion of his life chances and opportunities.
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Having been informed recently by a young philosopher that metaphysics has been banished from the realm of serious philosophy, I shall assume the premature death of African American literature is complemented by the premature rebirth of human literature. What did not perish in a white fire to be reborn as if it were an amoral phoenix is African American or black writing.
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Please join us for a Making the (Richard) Wright Connection virtual seminar – “Autobiographical Elements of Richard Wright’s Haiku” – led by Toru Kiuchi, Professor of English at Nihon University, Japan on Tuesday, May 17th at 6:00 p.m. CST.
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In our third installment of Literary Vantage Points, we have collected brief interviews from a number of professors to get their perspectives about various authors. In this particular feature, we asked three literary scholars—Professors Sandra Govan, Opal Moore, and Aldon Lynn Nielsen—to describe their initial impressions of author Zora Neale Hurston and discuss the legacy of her work...

Our tradition of black writing is coterminous with the tradition of black literature; whether we speak of literature or of writing depends on how we choose to the position our necessary and creative acts of expression. Writing refers to specific uses of verbal literacy either in script (handwriting) or print (mechanical reproduction). On the other hand, literature (which embraces a dimension named orature or oral literature) refers to deliberately isolated instances of writing. Typical examples of writing are emails or letters between friends, captions linked to images, folklore, personal statements attached to applications, blogs and legal documents. Literature is constituted by fiction and non-fiction, play scripts and screenplays, poems, the sound-crafting of lyrics by Billie Holiday, Alberta Hunter, Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone or Marvin Gaye, and blurred genres in want of adequate description. Our rich, robust traditions cause problems in the conduct of everyday life, not because they are arbitrary but because we make them interchangeable in varying degrees.
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A consideration of Richard Wright’s childhood provides an opportunity for continuing to unpack the often hidden baggage associated with “self-taught” education. Wright’s maternal grandmother and mother were likely key and early contributors to the young Wright’s intellectual development.
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In our second installment of Literary Vantage Points, we have collected brief interviews from a number of professors to get their perspectives about various authors. In this particular feature, we asked three literary scholars—Professors Sandra Govan, Jerry Ward, and Bob Butler—to describe their initial impressions of author James Baldwin and discuss the legacy of her work...

Please join us for a Virtual Seminar – “Facing Death: The Fear of Death vs. the Death of Fear” – led by Abdul JanMohamed, Professor of English at the University of California (Berkeley) on Saturday, April 30 at 11:00 a.m. CST.
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