ICYMI: The Last Week in Black Writing and Culture (6/4-6-10)

KU professor John Edgar Tidwell spoke about Langston  Hughes's unpublished story, "Seven People Dancing": "This is a very interesting piece because it provides us new information to ponder as we seek to interrogate Hughes' complexity in the early 1960s...As for the modernist features in the short story, Tidwell said there are subtle shifts in narrative viewpoint, including a paragraph where the white woman character Joan describes herself and explains what she is doing."

Check out the live tweeting of the "Space and Place in Africana/Black Studies" conference hosted by Purdue University. #NEHBlackspace. HBW's very own Kenton Rambsy presented his research on text-mining. 

Muhammad Ali, world renowned boxer, died Friday at the age of 74. Apart from boxing, Ali was known for his poetry, predicting in which round he would knock out his opponent. His death came less than two months after the death of Prince Rogers Nelson. Look out for a tribute to Prince coming soon.

Annalisa Quinn reviewed The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner. Lerner argues that we expect too much from poetry, and this "inevitable failure of poems to live up to their sublime promise generates a kind of contempt."

Kwame Dawes spoke on directing the African Poetry Book Fund. Dawes founded the project after noticing that there were no publishers exclusively dedicated to publishing African poets.

Harry Belafonte spoke on how one trip to Africa in the early 80s changed his life. It wasn't the trip itself, Belafonte said, but witnessing famine and drought while the rest of the world sat by with indifference. 

The New York Post is excited about these 10 books for this summer and fall.

Isabel Wilkerson reviewed Yaa Giasi's Homegoing, about the effects of slavery on family and lineage. In the novel, two half sisters are separated at birth and sold into slavery and remain unaware of each other and the six generations that follow each sister.

Dr. Maryemma Graham wrote on the remake of Roots in "Roots: The Good, Bad, and Ugly."

Carol Memmott of the Washington Post reviewed Terry McMillan's newest novel, I Almost Forgot about You. 

Roots: The Good, Bad, and Ugly

For four days after Memorial Day, 2016, American viewers gave studied attention to a remake of Roots, the 1977 blockbuster film that captured our hearts and minds. Those born after the Roots phenomenon can hardly comprehend what those eight days of television history felt like. We were still reeling from the Watergate scandal (1974) and the end of the Vietnam War (1975), with mixed emotions about whether to celebrate the American Bicentennial (1976). We needed something to call our own. Watching the film became a family affair and the recovery of family history everybody’s business. Although scenes of racial violence on television are now commonplace, Roots placed this violence in the context of an American story bringing past and current social practices together. The author of the book on which the TV miniseries was based, Alex Haley, became our hero with his special gift, the ability to serve two masters well. He had found the perfect venue for feeding our souls, the lucrative entertainment genre, and succeeded in moving black history to the foreground of popular culture. The record of Roots’ viewers—100 million or more—has yet to be broken.

Haley reportedly signed 500 copies of the book daily, speaking to an average of 6,000 people at events. Numerous TV and radio talk shows brought public confessions of appreciation on the lecture circuit. If the novel was faction, the subsequent film, which was in production long before the book’s release, was edutainment. Such a worthy subject would make millions of dollars for all who were involved, Doubleday, ABC, and Haley himself, to name a few. To then National Urban League executive director Vernon Jordon,) Roots was “the single most spectacular educational experience in race relations in America.”

In fact, the creation and production of Roots as novel and film were so successful that the charges of plagiarism and other issues brought against Haley hardly registered in the public consciousness. And yet one by one, Haley’s challengers began to unravel the threads of a very different story on both sides of the Atlantic. British journalist Mark Ottaway questioned the authenticity of Haley’s research in The Sunday Times. Margaret Walker was the first and Harold Courlander the second to sue Haley for plagiarism. Walker identified 156 instances from her 1966 novel Jubilee, outlining them in her journals, in the transcript of her lawsuit, and in a later speech at Wayne State University. She lost her legal suit in a ruling by Judge Marvin Frankel. In the wake of Haley’s vehement denial, she was reviled, tried in the court of public opinion as nothing other than a hater.

ICYMI: The Last Week in Black Writing and Culture (5/28-6/3)

Tamara Best of the New York Times wrote on the social advocacy of writer Ralph Ellison and photographer Gordon Parks, both of whom used their talents to address racial injustice.

Todd Steven Burroughs recapped the James Baldwin International Conference held in Paris from May 26-28th.

Thomas Chatterton Williams explored the life of Albert Murray and his complex analysis of art. Paul Devlin's new book Murray Talks Music is a collection of compiled interviews of Murray. Murray was a novelist, literary critic, and a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Jamie Poniewozik reviewed the new remake of the "Roots," which premiered earlier this week, in "'Roots" for a Black Lives Matter Era." Similarly, the Huffington Post highlighted a "Roots Syllabus" created by Black Twitter with a list of essential readings on slavery.

Dr. Natalie Cort spoke about succeeding as a person of color in a predominately white institution.

In local news, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas has named its first associate dean who will oversee diversity, equity, and inclusion programming. Dr. Jennifer Hamer will be in charge of strengthening the retention rates of underrepresented students.

OUR BONES/OUR ASHES/OUR MINDS

In his nicely crafted review essay "The Anger of Ta-Nahesi Coates" (New York Review of Books, February 11, 2016 issue), Darryl Pinckney raises the penultimate question of our day:

"Which is better: to believe that blacks will achieve full equality in American society or to realize that white racism is so deep that meaningful integration can never happen, so make other plans?"

In the first choice of response, the word "equality" really ought to be "power," so that the second choice would appear with better advantage. Moreover, the word "power" might provoke certain neoliberal, colorblinded readers to have epiphanies. We recognize, of course, that Pinckney is writing for the NYRB audience, and some liberties of vision are simply forbidden. One must not trample on the tender sensibilities of an august readership. For the 1% of the readership that has achieved post-humanity, even the common sense phrase "white racism" will be deemed micro-transgressive.