Who's Afraid of George Walker

Who’s Afraid of George Walker?

George “Nash” Walker (1872-1911) was born in the aftermath of The Civil War in Lawrence, Kansas, the launching point of John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in the fall of 1859 and site of Quantril’s Raid in the summer of 1863. The post-Civil War demographics and abolitionist politics of the region empowered Walker in historically unprecedented ways and compelled him to transcend the limited expectations of Black people in the United States. He left Lawrence in 1893 with a medicine show and met Bert A. Williams (1874-1922) in San Francisco, California later that year. Soon after forming a partnership that would last seventeen years, the two were hired to appear as Africans in what was essentially a human zoo as part of the Midwinter Exposition in San Francisco until the “Real” Africans arrived from Dahomey.

In meeting the Dahomeans, George Walker and Bert Williams experienced majesty, sovereignty and beauty from an African point of view, one that did not acknowledge White exceptionalism or superiority. This inspired them to, in the words of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, “wear the mask,” and embrace the moniker of, "The Two Real Coons." In place of the luxury of preference, this choice was designed to draw in crowds and utilize the liminality of the dramatic stage to subversively exploit the contextual difference between the satire of their brand of comedy and the mockery of the minstrel tradition. Under the cloak of entertainment, this philosophy provided space to erode White exceptionalism that was/is a feedback loop of ignorance informed by the arrogance of unearned privilege. When people paid to see minstrel-style cooning, they surely got it and much more. The “more” was George’s understandably problematic, yet unprecedented insistence that audiences receive curated, Black entertainment that was full of universal examples of the human condition told from a uniquely Afro-American perspective.

GOOD OMENS FOR SCHOLARSHIP

The MLA Handbook, Eighth Edition (2016), bids us to consider the probability of having a single "set of guidelines, which writers can apply to any type of source" (Handbook, rear cover). This new edition may be less intimidating than the Seventh or the Sixth, and it may minimize anxiety about scrupulous documentation in the age of the digital. Nevertheless, we should not put older editions of the Handbook out to pasture, because the new one seems more a supplement than a replacement. It lacks the solid advice about research and writing we found in Chapter 1 of the Seventh, and not all of us want to visit The MLA Style Center, the open access online companion. Neither in documentation nor in the vast range of scholarship is it prudent to drift with the wind.

Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), edited by Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher, is a good omen that scholars who refuse to get lost in the brothels and mazes of theory-whipping can be productive long-distance runners. Roberts and Foulcher have used impeccable literary historical scholarship in producing a book that maps new territory for studies of Richard Wright's life, works, and prophetic acumen. Indonesian Notebook is exceptionally valuable for anyone, including political scientists and historians, who is interested in what world literature created during the Cold War period actually challenges us to interpret.

When we truly revisit Wright's The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956), armed with the generous amount of contextualizing matter that Roberts and Foulcher translated from the Indonesian, we are stimulated to ask just what did Wright see and hear at the conference and during his conversations with Indonesian intellectuals. What inspired Wright to quite accurately speculate that the world of 1955 was a crucible for multiple forms of terrorism rooted in religion? And what did Wright reveal in his lecture "The Artist and His Problems" (published as "Seniman dan Masalaahnja" in Indonesia Raya on May 22, 1955) that might have informed his decisions about what essays to include in White Man, Listen! (1957)? The winding path of scholarship may take us to Ethan Michaeli's The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) to discover why John Sengstacke assigned Ethel Payne to cover Bandung for the Chicago Defender and to James McGrath Morris's Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press (New York: Amistad, 2015) for a choice bit of information about how the U.S. government used CIA funds to enable Payne and Wright to attend an Asian-African conference. I shall soon write at greater length about Indonesian Notebook which, as Amritjit Singh aptly remarks, "reminds us that the quest for equality must confront the stubborn local socio-economic realities throughout the globe" (Indonesian Notebook, rear cover blurb), because I do want to confront the stubborn actualities of political designs and literary meanings. Fortunately, there is no single set of guidelines for that task.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr. 

April 14, 201

Conference Report: College Language Association, 2016

This year's 76th College Language Association convention was held in Houston, TX at the Hyatt Regency, April 6-9. Hosted by Texas Southern University, the University of Houston and Prairie View, the theme for this year, "Dialogues between Africa and African Diaspora in Languages, Literatures, and Films" brought hundreds to present papers and engage in discussions. CLA was founded in 1937 to provide faculty from HBCU's with a professional outlet since they were excluded from MLA and other professional organizations. CLA also affords HBW the opportunity to convene its annual board meeting.

Board members Doretha Williams (George Washington University),
Howard Rambsy (Southern Illinois University), Amy Earhart (Texas A&M University),
Maryemma Graham (University of Kansas), and Daryl Dance (University of Richmond)

Chair Daryl Dance, Orrieann Florious (Howard University),
and Portia Owusu (University of London)

HBW hosted two New scholars panels this year, including “Reading and Writing the African/Diaspora: Africa and the Caribbean” featuring Portia Owusu and Orrieann Florious, and “What’s Race Got to Do with It? – Then and Now” with Matthew Broussard, Nathan Moore, and Jessica Wicks. The former panel addressed themes of silence in literary works, and the latter looked at representations of race in various genres such as comic books, children's books, and film.

Jessica Wicks (Howard University), Matthew Broussard (University of Kansas),
 and Nathan Moore (SUNY Buffalo)

More than eighty concurrent panels and events over the three days indicate the vibrancy in the study of diaspora literatures and cultural expression. Highlights of the conference included a panel on "Margaret Walker’s Jubilee Revisited," "Revolutionary Love: Black Women Resistance Writers," "#FrederickDouglass: Using Technology to Advance African American Studies," "Blackening the Books of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton in Africanist Tongues," "The Physics of Blackness: Questioning 'Blackness' Here and Now," and "Zora Neale Hurston, The Wizard of Oz, and Conjuring Cultural Practices." The conference screened a number of films, including Furious Flower III: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, and culminated on Saturday, April 9th with BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez.

John Edgar Tidwell (University of Kansas), Matthew Broussard,
and Portia Owusu

HBW tabled throughout the day, recruiting for KU's annual Sneak Peek, HBW's NEH funded Black Book Interactive Project, and spreading the word about our mission and projects.

Author Daniel Black (Clark Atlanta University)

The reception this year was held at TSU's University Museum. Daniel Black, author of six novels, read from The Coming, which traces a family's journey through the middle passage and the strength and resolve of the African spirit that arises after being stripped of everything.








At the annual banquet on Friday night, Maryemma Graham was awarded the CLA Lifetime Achievement Award. KU doctoral student and HBW staff member Kris Coffey was awarded the Margaret Walker Creative Writing Award for fiction.

Maryemma Graham and John Edgar Tidwell

Despite the perception of a field in decline, as the humanities struggles to reinvent itself, CLA is in growth mode. Its conferences are consistently diverse, with robust debate and social engagement with a purpose. Three sessions gave attention to the digital humanities, for example, which CLA is actively promoting among its member institutions. If one wants to know what is African American and Diaspora Literature, as the oldest organization in the field, CLA is definitely the place to go. Next stop - the University of Missouri, Columbia—MIZZOU in 2017.