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 |
|---|---|
| Outfaulknering Faulkner: Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth When I reencountered Faulkner as a graduate student, it was in a class that juxtaposed his work with that of 20th Century Black writers. Where I had previously admired him for the way The Sound and The Fury exposed the ugly side of a white Southern aristocratic family, I now came to him with a fuller understanding of the real history of the South, the unromanticized version of the South so rarely acknowledged by whites. I now knew much more about the history of race relations in the South. And so, Faulkner’s questioning of the race binary that pervades Southern thought became especially clear as I began to compare the implicit commentary on the social construction of race in his Light in August with Wright’s Black Boy. .. | |
| Black Men and Informal Educational Networks Over the past two weeks, I have explored how issues related to literacy and access as central thematic concerns in books by African American writers. Here is a list of novels, ranging from 1852-2006, mentioned so far: .. | |
| Wright Connection Virtual Seminar To celebrate the re-launch of the Wright Connection, we encourage HBW followers to our Virtual Seminar on Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 10:00 a.m. CST, featuring Jennifer Wallach, Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Texas. .. | |
| Making the Wright Connection Website Re-launch The HBW is pleased to announce the re-launch of our Wright Connection website. The Wright Connection is an online community of scholars and teachers of the works of Richard Wright (1908-1960), the author of such major works as Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, and Black Boy... | |
| Professor Jerry Ward Observes National Poetry Month 30 BOOKS FOR THE “CRUELEST MONTH” .. | |
| Black Writing and Hoodoo It is no rhetorical stretch to say that there has been a strong presence of religion in Black writing. Internal genres spanning from uplift literature to contemporary fiction have deep ties with the church and its various attachments to worship. However, Christianity is not the only faith system featured within the pages; there is also a strong presence of Hoodoo. .. | |
| A Synopsis and Notes on Rendered Invisible: Stories of Blacks and Whites, Love and Death, by Frank E. Dobson, Jr. Rendered Invisible is a work of historical fiction that focuses on issues of race, class and gender. Much of the narrative, which is told through various voices, depicts people—both black and white–seeking safety, justice, and solace. .. | |
| Literary Traditions: Education and Political Activism I first encountered Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave during my sophomore year at Morehouse College in Atlanta. At the time, I had read his slave narrative and become thoroughly familiar with his pursuits of literacy despite great social, economic, and racial barriers. Reading his novella, though, gave me a chance to reconsider the links between literacy and emancipation from physical bondage. .. | |
| Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru (New World Diasporas) By Tanya Golash-Boza Yo Soy Negro is the first book in English—in fact, the first book in any language in more than two decades—to address what it means to be black in Peru... | |
| Erasure and the state of black writing Percival Everett’s Erasure functions both as a skillful meta-narrative, and as a postmodern critique on the state of Black writing. The work is reflexive of Everett’s own experience trying to break into the writing game and with the cultural and popular Powers That Be, those who could either grease his passage into the literary imagination or leave him stagnating in obscurity. The novel’s protagonist, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, is often criticized for his isolation within the intellectual ivory tower, and his distance from “authentic” black writing... |