ICYMI: The Last Few Weeks in Black Writing

The world morns on the 14th anniversary of 9/11.

KU’s very own Danny Cain wrote a piece on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.


Spike Lee, writer and director of the 1989 film “Do the Right Thing,” will be presented with an honorary Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.


Lori Tharps reviewed Tamara Harris’s book The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America, in which Harris attempts to break the stereotype of the broken black woman.


Last month, Barnes and Noble revisited Edwidge Dantacat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their Discover Great New Writers Program.

William H. Grier, psychologist and co-author of the 1968 book Black Rage, passed away on September 3. Through case studies, the book offered an examination of how the legacy of slavery continued to cause societal unrest in the United States.


Gethsemane Herron performed the moving story “All Black Everything,” a powerful narrative that illustrates the fetishization of the black female body.

The world celebrated the 25th anniversary of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air."

Centennials

Thanks to the troublesome "magic" of instant communication which informs us about what happened prior to its spatial and temporal manifestations, we might welcome the rest and recuperation that a centennial can offer. Yet, remembering and reassessing what happened one hundred years ago can only  make going from the new frying pan to an old skillet a paradoxical exercise in hopeful despair.

Consider this year's Margaret Walker Centennial, the shuttling between the strengthening message of "For My People" and the agony-laden news of "Jackson State, May 15, 1970." Implacable, absurdly hungry Death triumphs over the godless trinity of class, race, and gender in the twenty-first century. Rereading Walker is to suffer knowing our young are "Not rich with gold but priceless truths of life and death, of/ giving self and sharing love for this is all there is." Lives of all colors matter, with or without hash tags, dog tags, car tags or tags period. Margaret Walker was one of many poet/bridges between the oral traditions of the enslaved Africans and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the multi-ethnic break beat voices of 2015.  All, including refugees straight out of Syria, Palestine and Iraq, are compelled to voice and revoice Walker's closing stanza from "Jackson State...":

This week in ICYMI: Project HBW Remembers Katrina 10 Years Later

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the gulf coast, displacing hundreds of thousands of people in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. New Orleans, a city with an average elevation 6 feet below sea level, was at a particular risk of flooding. By the time the storm subsided, Katrina had claimed almost 2,000 lives.

Project HBW is honored to present to you guest blogger Danny Caine, who gives us a glimpse of the literature that arose from Katrina's destructive path:

Two of the first books I read about Katrina and its aftermath are Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun and Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge. Both bring to gritty light the struggles and grief of the chaos in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, and I think both are fine pieces of journalism. In addition, both are compulsively readable, feeling more like novels than the well-reported journalistic nonfiction they are.

William Shakespeare and Amiri Baraka

Many years ago at a dinner party I proposed that Shakespeare got too much attention, that commentary on this Elizabethan writer was just so much bardolatry, that  Shakespeare's contemporaries and other writers deserved generous critical attention.  The honored guest at dinner happened to be a famous, very erudite Marxist.  He fixed his bright dark eyes on me, saying "Young man, Shakespeare has been read and misread, but he can never be read too much nor sufficiently."  The instructive arrow, shot by C. L. R. James,  is still lodged in my memory. Bold superficiality is one of the banes of youth.

For James, as Aldon L. Nielsen intimates in C. L. R. James: An Introduction, reading Shakespeare included making challenging theses and discovering how form in  great English language texts is not a mirror "but a metamorphosing lens revealing that which is invisible to the naked eye, and that  which is yet to come "(39).  Perhaps James chided my young Self for its want of transformative attention, and now my old Self profits from his spoken words and from his published criticism, especially of Herman Melville, just as it has gained much from Sterling Stuckey's enlightening commentaries on Melville.  From both James and Stuckey, those remarkable historians,  literary criticism ought to learn lessons about its own peculiar, dynamic  functions.  The seminal texts are Stuckey's  African Culture and Melville's Art: The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick and James's Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and The World We Live In.