Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text

[By Jerry Ward]

Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic.  For example,   Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be.  On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that “when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the surface demands a reckoning.

Condemnation & Redemption: The Works of Donald Goines

[By Jerry Ward]

Addison Gayle, Jr. was not a signifying monkey.   Many contemporary scholars and critics ignore his existence; they dismiss his insights as strident sub-literary talk, noise not to invite to dinner at the Academic Big House.  A few critics of my generation refuse to erase him.  We do not embrace Gayle’s views without question.  We do, however, respect the historical importance and contemporary relevance of his thought.  We find his exploration of fiction in The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (1975) to be bracing.  We find useful insights in the essays he collected in The Black Situation (1970), and one of those essays “Revolutionary Philosophy” seems poignant in the midst of debates about the status of the gun in the United States.  Rereading that essay casts light on issues explored in Word Hustle.

“They’ve Done Taken My Blues and Gone:” Listening to Langston Hughes: a New Year’s Resolution

[By Maryemma Graham]

Like most people, I have been looking back over the year these last few days, thinking especially about the spikes in the news.  It’s easy to be political, given the November election, putting Obama in the White House for a second term, giving him and the nation another first.

But since 2013 is the thirtieth anniversary for the Project on the History of Black Writing, I want to stick closer to home, to what I know and do best.

America’s Soul Unchained

[By Jerry Ward]

Django Unchained is the most patriotic American film of 2012, because Quentin Tarantino plunged into the system of Dante’s Inferno and brought up the bloody, violent and unchained soul of the myth of the United States of America.  He succeeds in making viewers frustrated, angry, and anxious to debate the merits of reducing Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung to a soap opera and ending a fragmented black love story with Broomhilda and Django riding off into the bliss of fugitive darkness.