Archive - History of Black Writing Blog

Thanks to a Digital Extension Grant of $150,000 from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Project on the History of Black Writing is advancing our Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) and making more Black novels digitally available. Read more here. Congratulations to the BBIP team!..

Kristen Lillvis’s  Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination explores posthumanism’s fusion of the body, flesh, gender and race through the works of various neo-slave narratives and contemporary performance artists. This “assemblage of ideas, material, and beings” speculates the future and positionality of the Black female imagination. Lillivis quotes bell hook’s definition of postmodern blackness as “the overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstances” ..

We are, quite likely, familiar with the statement, “If I have seen far, it is because I am perched upon the shoulders of giants.” Dr. Ward (HBW Board Member Emeritus) pinpoints seven of several pillars whose writing could be thought to undergird the work the Project on the History of Black Writing has accomplished throughout its 35-year existence. He notes also the “culture of professional civility” maintained and advanced within HBW in an effort to create truly collegial space for students and scholars all along the academic continuum, a hallmark of the project, and goes on to enumerate many of the projects HBW has undertaken, from bibliographic work to current efforts to digitize its holdings, making them key-word searchable. Dr. Ward’s assertions present a kind of paradox: they at once anchor HBW in the rich African American literary tradition while also acknowledging its unique culture, its deft alignments and realignments, and an undaunted spirit of evolving purpose that constitute a fabric of purposeful dynamism.

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This year was my inaugural experience at the 78th Annual College Language Association convention. I was in constant awe—every panel I went to struck me as something new, expanding my horizons. But perhaps no panel stood at the center of the crossroads between scholarship and dynamic engagement with black literature and black history than the panel entitled “Chicago Dreamers: Literary and Life Legacies of a Migratory Magnet,” chaired by Dr. Daryl Cumber Dance with panelists Dr. Trudier Harris, Dr. Joanne V. Gabbin, Dr. Sandra Y. Govan, and poet Opal Moore.

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I last delivered a paper 20 years ago: an academic talk as an undergraduate fellow with the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM). I discussed the contributions of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston to the Harlem Renaissance. Since then, I’ve raised a family and worked in public education. ..

Sometimes you read books that make you think, and then sometimes you read books that make you feel; this one does both...

If no other moment during my time in Lawrence has shown me what freedom of expression and freedom of speech means, including how positionalities directly influence their manifestation, Dr. Eve L. Ewing’s recent visit to KU did so...

On Day 6 & 7 of our “Ode to #BlackExcellence” series we are celebrating the newest release from Tayari Jones An American Marriage. Oprah’s newest book club pick, An American Marriage masterfully intertwines love, suspense, and racial injustice through the story of Roy Hamilton and Celestial Davenport. KU Visiting Scholar and HBW Affiliate Lili Wong got a chance to speak with Jones about the new novel, as well as her upbringing and literary influences. Check out the interview below.

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African American Vernacular English constitutes a crucial element of Charles W. Chestnutt’s short fiction– a distinctive linguistic feature of his southern character. Light enough to “pass” as white, he never did so and always openly identified as African American. You can read more about his novels and short stories in our Black Literary Suite feature “Histories of African American Short Stories: a Digital Humanities Exhibit“

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Novelist and essayist Ernest Gaines weaves the powerful traditions of storytelling and oral history throughout his works. Accentuating Black life in the rural South, Gaines does not shy away from confronting the racial overtones of our collective history.

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