Situation Report from a Culture of Reading: Part 2

Editor's note: two weeks ago we posted Situation Report from a Culture of Reading: Part 1. Below is part 2 of the post. 



To the slave, revolution is an imperative, a love-inspired, conscious act of desperation. It’s aggressive. It isn’t “cool” or cautious. It’s bold, audacious, violent, an expression of icy, disdainful hatred! It can hardly be any other way without raising a fundamental contradiction.

George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (1972)

Serendipity allows you to happen upon humorous insights.  Ralph Ellison was one of the most elegant prose writers of the twentieth-century. You find aesthetic pleasure in his writing as well as less than obvious evidence of self-contradiction. From time to time, Ellison was out to brunch. In his essay “Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction” (1960), Ellison justly praised Crane for looking “steadily at the wholeness of American life” and for discovering “far-reaching symbolic equivalents for its unceasing state of civil war.”

Situation Report from a Culture of Reading: Part I

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
And all the clouds that low’r’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
- Richard III

Unlike Richard, contemporary readers need not be “subtle, false and treacherous” unto themselves and the worlds they inhabit. They need not pretend those worlds are either peaceful or private spaces, immune to terrors made with alacrity by other, literate human beings. The hyperbole of Reginald Martin’s title Everybody Knows What Time It Is becomes a truism in the process of daily reading, especially if what you are reading is not a political document, an analysis of skills, prowess, and trash talk in one sport or another, a scientific treatise, or an essay informed by valid evidence. That is to say, if you are reading what proclaims itself to be “literature,” you are counting privileged nanoseconds of duration. People who read “writing” count plain minutes of time. I value writing more than literature because writing is a more accurate representation (gesture) of how historical consciousness marks off trails. Writing that empowers is often excluded from lists of bestsellers. So be it.

The writing that is important for my culture of reading does not fit into any single canon because it follows the Drinking Gourd and quits the merely fashionable, post-whatever plantations of the Western academy and looks for sanctuary elsewhere.

The Serious Commitments of Jerry W. Ward, Jr. & William J. Harris

[by Howard Rambsy]

Dr. Rambsy is an associate professor of English
at Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville 

By the time I met my undergraduate professor Jerry W. Ward, Jr. in the mid 1990s, he had been studying Richard Wright for about 30 years. And when I met my graduate school professor William J. Harris in 1999, he had been studying Amiri Baraka for nearly 40 years. Today in 2015, in other words, Professor Ward and Professor Harris have been studying Wright and Baraka for more than 50 years.

Those are some serious commitments.

A Great American Protest Novel

A spiritual inheritor to Agee, says Ward.

[by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.]

“There is in Southern white man, distributed almost as thickly as the dialect,” James Agee wrote in 1936, “an epidemic capability of sadism which you would have to go as far to match and whose chief basis is possibly, but only possibly, and only one among many, a fear of the Negro, deeper and more terrible than any brief accounting can suggest or explain. The flaw of sadism can turn its victims loose into extremities which the gaudiest reports have only begun to suggest.”

These surgical words come from the conclusion of “Cotton Tenants: Three Families,” a report Fortune magazine would not publish. Cotton Tenants did not see print until 2013. Agee indicted his race in a way his race dared not acknowledge, for to have done so would have been tantamount to staring into Medusa’s eyes. Agee’s people understood that “Southern white man” was identical with “American man” and that “fear of the Negro” was a sly allusion to a Yankee idea represented through a Spanish character in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno.”

Agee knew his race well.

In Toni Morrison's Latest Novel, Black (Children's) Lives Matter

 [by Portia Owusu]


In her review of Toni Morrison’s eighth novel, Love, English writer Hilary Mantel asserts: “when Morrison writes at her best, you can feel the workings of history through her prose.” An accurate description, if ever there was one, for the novelist who is often described as the voice of America’s conscience.

For many, it is Morrison’s achievements in Beloved, the Pulitzer prize-winning novel that examines the impact of slavery as trauma affecting both individual and collective African-American identity, that make all labels of praise worthwhile and deserving. Of course, since Beloved, Morrison has written other novels (six, including the latest). All have been critically acclaimed and all have touched on different stages of American history and the role of black Americans within it.


In her latest work, God Help the Child, Morrison returns to both familiar and different terrains.

Toni Morrison: A Full Circle in Motion

[by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.]

Abraham Lincoln’s surmising that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin begat the War Between the States is a folkloric salute to the power of language and imagination. Stowe used a lot of sugar to advance the cause of abolition.

Superior to Stowe and members of her liberal tribe, Toni Morrison has avoided traffic in sugar or kindred flavorings. She is a realist. The proof is in the astringent quality of her fiction and nonfiction. From the thick descriptions that lend heft to The Bluest Eye (1970) to the control of perspectives which justify the deceptive “thinness” of God Help the Child (2015), Morrison has challenged her fellow citizens to deconstruct historical process and its consequences. Morrison’s being true unto herself has been no balm from Gilead for the most sensitive, hypocritical, self-deluded nerves of the American body politic. She has earned respect, but not love, for exposing systemic ailments that are beyond cure.

Subversive Journalism: A Review of Earle V. Bryant's BYLINE RICHARD WRIGHT: ARTICLES FROM THE DAILY WORKER AND NEW MASSES (2015)

[by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.]

Such recent dedicated scholarship as Mary Helen Washington’s The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s and William J. Maxwell’s F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature serve as a warrant for thinking of contemporary literary and cultural studies as components of a mega-surveillance machine. Readers and critics cooperate, often unwittingly, with publishing conglomerates and official agencies of detection in panoptical activities that exceed the scrutiny imagined by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish or by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism.  Technological progress encourages us to abandon dreams of a liberated future and to accept dystopia as self-evidently “normal.”

For Richard Wright scholars, the forthcoming 2016 publication of Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright, Modern Indonesia, and the Bandung Conference, by Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher, will create an opportunity for more speculation about the function of journalism in Wright’s imagination, as well as raising devastating questions about how the journalism of Ida B. Wells and Ishmael Reed assist us in understanding what was and is African American literature. We do need to explore Black print cultures more thoroughly in relation to the production of Black literatures.  In this sense, Earle V. Bryant’s long-awaited Byline Richard Wright: Articles from The Daily Worker and New Masses has a significant mediating function.

"For My People" as the Fulfillment of Margaret Walker Alexander's Literary Manifesto

[by C. Liegh McInnis]

Before I can discuss how “For My People” speaks to people today, I must begin by discussing the manner in which Dr. Alexander began her writing career by providing her readers with a literary manifesto, which shows that Dr. Alexander understood poetry to be an engagement of critical thinking through which societal ills can be resolved through creative approaches.  With “I Want to Write,” Margaret Walker Alexander provides her literary manifesto that she wants to produce well-crafted poetry that shows African people how beautiful they are, which will encourage or inspire them to continue the struggle against white supremacy and toward the fulfillment of their humanity and citizenship.

Of Folklore, Feminism, and Fire: An Afternoon with KU Associate Professor of English Giselle Anatol

[by Creighton Nicholas Brown]

University of Kansas Professor of English Giselle Anatol spoke about and read from her newly published book, Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora to a packed audience at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas on Thursday, April 2.

Reflecting on the genesis of her project, Anatol said,  “When I was a child, my mother, aunts and uncles, and grandmother regaled me with stories of the soucouyant, a demonic figure from Trinidadian folk culture.” During the day the soucouyant appeared as an old woman, but when night fell, she “peeled off her skin, transformed into a ball of fire, and flew from house to house, where she sucked the blood of her unsuspecting neighbors.” The soucouyant is also known as Ole-Higue or Loogaroo in other Caribbean cultures.

Performance: Richard Wright in 2015

[by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.]

Despite my having “performed” Richard Wright with a modicum of success some years ago in a Chautauqua series sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council, I know virtually nothing about performance theory as an “interdisciplinary area of study and critical method,” as it is discussed in the recent book Black Performance Theory (2014), edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez. For me, performing Wright was a matter of absorbing what I could of his personality and changing states of mind from his writings, listening to his recorded voice, and praying that on some spiritual level Wright would channel my imagination. I am not an actor, so I just gathered courage and, one magical night, I did become Richard Wright. At least, that was what several people in the audience told me.

“Characteristics of Negro Expression”: Kenton Rambsy on the Importance of Digital Humanities in the Study of African American Short Stories

[by Stefanie Torres and Jennifer Colatosi]

On February 11, 2015, Hall Center Research Fellow and KU English Ph.D. candidate Kenton Rambsy presented on notable outcomes of his dissertation research in his interdisciplinary graduate research workshop, “Characteristics of Negro Expression: Digital Humanities and African American Short Stories,” at the University of Kansas.

Genius and DAEMONIC GENIUS: Crafting a Biography of Richard Wright

[by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.]

Crafting a biography of Richard Wright places special demands on a biographer.  Wright was a genius, a man who embodied profound intelligence and creative vision, but Mississippi in the early twentieth century wasn’t the place for nurturing his kind of genius. 

Gertrude Stein seems to have appreciated the irony that blooms when a native daughter and a native son share the status of exile.  There was something surpassing mere hyperbole when, after reading Black Boy, Stein wrote to Wright:  “Dear Richard, It is obvious that you and I are the only two geniuses of this era.”  Stein’s words constitute a sophisticated joke because genius manifests itself in many forms that cannot be reduced to comedy (Stein’s maximum playfulness) or tragedy (Wright’s maximum seriousness).  Margaret Walker, the native daughter who did not choose exile, anatomized the facets of genius  in how she wrote about the dreams she and Wright dared to come true.

Poet Notes #1

[by Hoke Glover]

The world of poetry is like many of those integrated worlds that exist in America. There a careful balance is kept between the minority percentages and the hidden rules that govern the overall image of the enterprise. It is a neighborhood of sorts. If the amount of Blacks involved reaches 40 percent, there is a tipping point of sorts and some whites leave as they feel uncomfortable, and suddenly it becomes a Black neighborhood.

I am not sure the above scenario has ever occurred in the world of poetry.

Sam Greenlee's THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR, Urban Revolts of the 1960s, and Beyond

[by Thabiti Lewis]

50 years ago, in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was signed. This also happens to be the year that Watts went up flames.

The Watts uprising in California left 1000 people injured and 34 people dead, and it led to more than 3900 arrests because of years of police brutality. In 2014, in cities across the United States--from Ferguson and St. Louis to Chicago and New York--there was unrest as people organized to protest police brutality and a justice system that repeatedly refused to indict police officers that killed unarmed black men (black women, too, have not been immune to murder at the hands of police).

Sam Greenlee’s 1969 novel The Spook Who Sat By the Door captured the spirit of the many revolts in the 1960s, leveling a harsh critique of America’s failure to deliver on its democratic ideals and promises to black folk. The revolt in Chicago that explodes at the end of Greenlee’s novel and catches fire in cities across America mirrored the racial disturbances in major cities in 1964, 1965, and 1967, and the uprisings in more than 100 cities across the country when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968.  It also mirrors Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown was murdered. The Spook is a unique novel because it is more than a response to the contradictions of American democracy. It is calculated art, void of blindness or naiveté, offering an effective example of discourse of black protest for the future.

Remembering Anne Moody (Sept. 15, 1940 - Feb. 5, 2015)

[by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.]

Four years after graduating from Tougaloo College, the young Anne Moody published Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968).  It is noteworthy that this autobiography has been “in-print” and acclaimed since its initial publication.  Similar life histories of civil rights workers, both autobiography and biography, have come and gone, getting enthusiastic receptions when they first appear.  But after a few years, enthusiasm wears thin. The eagerly received life histories age rapidly and virtually disappear.

Moody’s autobiography escaped this fate. 

HBW Emerging Scholars: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the "Slave Narrative" Genre

[by Amanda M. Sladek]

The HBW Emerging Scholars series offers graduate student scholars the chance to share pieces that speak to their own critical interests in more depth than usual blog posts. Today's post is by University of Kansas graduate student Amanda M. Sladek, currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition.


Toussaint L’Ouverture is known as the father of Haitian independence and the leader of the most successful slave rebellion in world history. He is also considered one of the most prolific writers of the Haitian Revolution, authoring hundreds of letters and political documents. Foremost among these documents is The Memoir of General Toussaint L’Ouverture. Today, this text is often regarded as an example of the “slave narrative” genre, but this label reflects the history of American abolitionism more than L’Ouverture’s own life and legacy.

Shakespeare: His Blackwashing

FOX's "Empire" rewrites King Lear for 21st-century viewers.

[by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.]

Many years ago, most people who earned a Ph.D. in English had to study the works of William Shakespeare. That was a good thing. The requirement ensured that a British-rooted variety of cultural literacy would circulate in the Profession. It could trickle down, through the public schools and Classic Comics, to the American common reader.

The wheel of Fortune has turned.

Trojan Flags for Cultural Study

[by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.]

When policemen turn their backs to a mayor at the funeral of a police officer slain in the line of duty, is this symbolic act to be “read” as a sign of anger, disrespect, and resentment? Is it the equivalent of a jazz musician’s turning his back to an audience as he produces exquisite sounds? Is this positioning of the body in uniform, an embodiment of law and order, subject to decoding? The gesture is broadcast in the public sphere of television. Is it to be interpreted as a warning that American social dynamics are minimizing prospects for civic communication? Is ours a society wherein anything is everything? Is the turning of the back actually a turning back to a pre-history?

Black Writing and Blues Allegory

[by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.]

American politics will popularize exegesis in 2015, and so too might the publication of Toni Morrison’s eleventh novel, God Help the Child.

Scheduled for release in April by Alfred A. Knopf, the novel rebroadcasts the title of a song written in 1939 by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog, Jr., “God Bless the Child,” and recorded for the Okeh label in May 1941. The wheels of ideological state apparatus turn so rapidly that several commentators have confused the two titles as they assure us that Morrison’s novel is an instant classic. The pre-publication “leak” from Knopf contains a tantalizing summary of plot and characters. It encourages Morrison scholars and other critical readers to sharpen their tools and to engage the novel by way of allegorical readings.

Martin Luther King 2015: A Different Kind of Eulogy

[by Maryemma Graham]

When Sojourner Truth took the podium at the Women’s Rights convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851, she became in an instant the quintessential symbol of triple jeopardy: she was a former slave, she was black and she was a woman. She made women and the anti-slavery community uncomfortable because she refused to keep the issues of slavery and women’s rights separate. Exposing her breasts to punctuate her womanhood, she left an indelible imprint on history. The words “Ain’t I a woman?” remain that continuous reminder that building a more equitable society is our ongoing work.  Truth was relentless and fearless, traits that are hard to come by.