Entering Another World

Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Professor of English at Dillard University, is the author of The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery (UNO Press, 2008). Professor Ward has been a faithful guest blogger for the HBW

 

Just as Camille T. Dungy’s Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009) invites us to be more attentive to how black poets have reflected on ecological spaces, The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku, edited by Jianqing Zheng, invites us to reassess Wright’s “fascination with haiku and Zen Buddhism” as a sign of his “global mindshift that reflects a significant aspect of his reception of and sensibility to other cultures” (ix). Zheng’s phrase “global mindshift” is critical for any understanding of the totality of Wright’s aesthetic imagination.

            The ten essays Zheng has gathered to enlighten us about Wright’s creation of haiku mark an important moment in Wright studies, because they demand that we think again about Wright’s critique and destruction of an American black/white binary in poetry. Thomas L. Morgan, one of the contributors, cleverly directs us to Wright’s comment in a 1955 L’Express interview: “If my writing has any aim, it is to try to reveal that which is human on both sides, to affirm the essential unity of man on earth” (95).  Wright identified the “sides” as the Western world and its enemies.  Forcing the West to listen, “Wright integrated a Western mind into an Eastern poetic form,” Zheng argues, “to enlarge his or our sense of human complexity and human union or reunion with nature” (xviii).

A Recap of Entries by Kenton Rambsy

Kenton Rambsy serves as the editor and lead contributor for the HBW Blog. Over the course of the semester, he has provided entries ranging on black migration and educational development in African American novels. Below are a collection of his entries for the past semester:

Richard Wright’s Formal and Informal Networks 

How Richard Wright’s Mother and Grandmother Taught him to Revere the Imaginative

 

Disrupting and Expanding the Notion of "Self-Taught"

 

Education and Revolution: Reading the novels of Sutton E. Griggs and Toni Morrison

 

Black Men and Informal Educational Networks

 

Literary Traditions: Education and Political Activism

 

Black Men, Education, and Political Activism

 

Men and Migration--Revisited 

 

Oprah Winfrey and Black Literature 

 

The Great Migration

 

100 Novels: Trend Analyses Project

Literary Vantage Points: Multiple Perspectives of Richard Wright

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 goal of these interviews is to reveal the diverse nature of African American literature. These three scholars provide very different responses about how they became acquainted with Richard Wright and the aesthetic value of his work. Please join us as we begin a new chapter of HBW history.

Of Literature and Humanity

            

Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Professor of English at Dillard University, is the author of The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery (UNO Press, 2008). Professor Ward has been a faithful guest blogger for the HBW.

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.

The wickedness of my premise must be challenged by thoughtful readings of Charles Johnson’s Being & Race: Black Writing since 1970 (Indiana UP, 1988), Dear Chester, Dear John: Letters between Chester Himes and John A. Williams (Wayne State UP, 2008) and Lawrence P. Jackson’s The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 (Princeton UP, 2011). The concept of human literature, as it is articulated on the playgrounds of some American universities and of the influential publishing industry, seems to be linked in odds ways to ideas about progress, the ahistorical disappearance of Jim Crow from the American body politic, amnesia of memory, and transcendental miracles in the practice of everyday life.  In the actual world of readers, no one doubts that Reginald Martin’s Everybody Know What Time It Is (2010 edition), Eileen Myles’s Inferno (A Poet’s Novel), John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale, Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King are instances of human literature. The virus of doubt thrives best in combat zones peopled by ideologues, people who reinvent reality in their own images.

            Charles Johnson uses the phrase “human literature” strategically in “Progress in Literature,” posted on May 8, 2011 on E. Ethelbert Miller’s E-Channel: http://ethelbert-miller.blogspot.com Johnson lends credibility to Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (Harvard UP, 2011) when he asserts that early 21^st century black literature “can be said to have progressed to the stage of being seen now as simply human literature.”  Who is doing the seeing is my immediate question. People who are suddenly emancipated from Plato’s cave?

Autobiographical Elements of Richard Wright’s Haiku: Last Virtual Seminar of the Semester

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 17^th at 6:00 p.m. CST.

Abstract:  95.7 per cent of Wright’s haiku carry a season word. It was easier for Wright to return to his childhood memory of Mississippi, which was full of trees and flowers, than to use images taken from Paris. Sick in bed in Paris, Wright must have been trying to find a season word without going out, recalling his childhood days in Mississippi, which was “a whole world of emotion, of sounds and scents and colours.” Composing haiku, Wright returned not only to his childhood, but also to Chicago and New York days. Accordingly, his haiku comprise quite a few autobiographical elements in them. This lecture makes clear how Wright include his autobiographical factors in the composition of his haiku.

Please feel free to e-mail questions in advance for Professor Kiuchi to the Wright Connection (wrightconnection@ku.edu)  

 To attend the virtual seminar:

1) Go to https://desktopconnect.ku.edu/kiuchi

2) Select “Enter as a Guest”

3) Type your name in the box

4) Click on “Enter Room”

5) The virtual seminar “room” will open at the start time of the seminar.  If you try to enter before then, you will see a message that reads:  The meeting has not yet started.  You will be able to access the meeting once the host arrives.  Please wait.

All participants will need a Flash-based web browser and an Internet connection to access the virtual seminar.  Please feel free to email Keah Cunningham (keah@ku.edu) with any technical questions or issues. 

Additional information at www.wrightconnection.ku.edu

Richard Wright’s Formal and Informal Networks

[By Kenton Rambsy]

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.

Hazel Rowley writes in Richard Wright: The Life and Times that attending Jim Hill gave Wright entry into another world since “The Jim Hill students belonged to the black middle class—if not in income, at least in their outlook on life” (21). For Wright and the other students at the school, the small black professional community of lawyers and doctors in Jackson, Mississippi “were held up to the students as models” and constantly interacted with the students to encourage their educational pursuits (21).

Literary Vantage Points: Multiple Perspectives of Zora Neale Hurston

 

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.

The goal of these interviews is to reveal the diverse nature of African American literature. These three scholars provide very different responses about how they became acquainted with Zora Neale Hurston and the aesthetic value of her work. Please join us as we begin a new chapter of HBW history.

Memory and Remembering in Black Writing Revisted

[By Crystal Boson]           

 After exploring the heavier side ofmemory, it is equally as important to look at its decolonizing aspects.  It is evident that in a large body of Black Writing, memory serves as a tie that strengthens both individuals and communities.  This memory can serve as an embodied family lineage, as is evident in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or as a larger cultural narrative, as represented in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, and Alex Haley’s Roots. 

Tradition and Acknowledgement in Combat Zones

Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Professor of English at Dillard University, is the author of The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery (UNO Press, 2008). Professor Ward has been a faithful guest blogger for the HBW offering literary criticism on Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and creative writing entries.

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. 

          

How Richard Wright’s Mother and Grandmother Taught him to Revere the Imaginative

[By Kenton Rambsy]

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.   

Hazel Rowley writes in Richard Wright: The Life and Times that Wright’s mother Ella Wilson Wright was a significant figure in his educational development by teaching her son how to read at an early age when his father abandoned the family, and it became Wright’s responsibility to run errands around their neighborhood, leading him to develop his educational abilities (21). Since Wright’s mother was aware of the fact that her son did not have access to schooling year-round, she tutored him to ensure that he would have the basic knowledge to be a fully functional person in a literate society.

Literary Vantage Points: Multiple Perspectives of James Baldwin

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.

The goal of these interviews is to reveal the diverse nature of African American literature. These three scholars provide very different responses about how they became acquainted with James Baldwin and the aesthetic value of her work. Please join us as we begin a new chapter of HBW history.

Video Editing: Howard Rambsy Sr.
Video Concept: Kenton Rambsy
Video Footage: Crystal Boson and Yuan Ding