Entering Another World

Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Professor of English at Dillard University, is the author of The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery (UNO Press, 2008). Professor Ward has been a faithful guest blogger for the HBW

 

Just as Camille T. Dungy’s Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009) invites us to be more attentive to how black poets have reflected on ecological spaces, The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku, edited by Jianqing Zheng, invites us to reassess Wright’s “fascination with haiku and Zen Buddhism” as a sign of his “global mindshift that reflects a significant aspect of his reception of and sensibility to other cultures” (ix). Zheng’s phrase “global mindshift” is critical for any understanding of the totality of Wright’s aesthetic imagination.

            The ten essays Zheng has gathered to enlighten us about Wright’s creation of haiku mark an important moment in Wright studies, because they demand that we think again about Wright’s critique and destruction of an American black/white binary in poetry. Thomas L. Morgan, one of the contributors, cleverly directs us to Wright’s comment in a 1955 L’Express interview: “If my writing has any aim, it is to try to reveal that which is human on both sides, to affirm the essential unity of man on earth” (95).  Wright identified the “sides” as the Western world and its enemies.  Forcing the West to listen, “Wright integrated a Western mind into an Eastern poetic form,” Zheng argues, “to enlarge his or our sense of human complexity and human union or reunion with nature” (xviii).

A Recap of Entries by Kenton Rambsy

Kenton Rambsy serves as the editor and lead contributor for the HBW Blog. Over the course of the semester, he has provided entries ranging on black migration and educational development in African American novels. Below are a collection of his entries for the past semester:

Richard Wright’s Formal and Informal Networks 

How Richard Wright’s Mother and Grandmother Taught him to Revere the Imaginative

 

Disrupting and Expanding the Notion of "Self-Taught"

 

Education and Revolution: Reading the novels of Sutton E. Griggs and Toni Morrison

 

Black Men and Informal Educational Networks

 

Literary Traditions: Education and Political Activism

 

Black Men, Education, and Political Activism

 

Men and Migration--Revisited 

 

Oprah Winfrey and Black Literature 

 

The Great Migration

 

100 Novels: Trend Analyses Project

Literary Vantage Points: Multiple Perspectives of Richard Wright

In our fourth installment of Literary Vantage Points, we have collected brief interviews from a number of professors to get their perspectives about various authors. In this particular feature, we asked three literary scholars—Professors Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, Bob Butler, and Aldon Lynn Nielsen—to describe their initial impressions of author Richard Wright and discuss the legacy of hiis work.

The goal of these interviews is to reveal the diverse nature of African American literature. These three scholars provide very different responses about how they became acquainted with Richard Wright and the aesthetic value of his work. Please join us as we begin a new chapter of HBW history.

Of Literature and Humanity

            

Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Professor of English at Dillard University, is the author of The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery (UNO Press, 2008). Professor Ward has been a faithful guest blogger for the HBW.

Having been informed recently by a young philosopher that metaphysics has been banished from the realm of serious philosophy, I shall assume the premature death of African American literature is complemented by the premature rebirth of human literature. What did not perish in a white fire to be reborn as if it were an amoral phoenix is African American or black writing.

The wickedness of my premise must be challenged by thoughtful readings of Charles Johnson’s Being & Race: Black Writing since 1970 (Indiana UP, 1988), Dear Chester, Dear John: Letters between Chester Himes and John A. Williams (Wayne State UP, 2008) and Lawrence P. Jackson’s The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 (Princeton UP, 2011). The concept of human literature, as it is articulated on the playgrounds of some American universities and of the influential publishing industry, seems to be linked in odds ways to ideas about progress, the ahistorical disappearance of Jim Crow from the American body politic, amnesia of memory, and transcendental miracles in the practice of everyday life.  In the actual world of readers, no one doubts that Reginald Martin’s Everybody Know What Time It Is (2010 edition), Eileen Myles’s Inferno (A Poet’s Novel), John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale, Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King are instances of human literature. The virus of doubt thrives best in combat zones peopled by ideologues, people who reinvent reality in their own images.

            Charles Johnson uses the phrase “human literature” strategically in “Progress in Literature,” posted on May 8, 2011 on E. Ethelbert Miller’s E-Channel: http://ethelbert-miller.blogspot.com Johnson lends credibility to Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (Harvard UP, 2011) when he asserts that early 21^st century black literature “can be said to have progressed to the stage of being seen now as simply human literature.”  Who is doing the seeing is my immediate question. People who are suddenly emancipated from Plato’s cave?