Break It Down: Flight To Canada

[By Alysha Griffin]

“Break It Down” is a new HBW Literary Blog initiative that strives to offer critical interpretations of song lyrics, excerpts from novels, and poems.

This week, Blog Contributor Alysha Griffin has analyzed Ishmael Reed’s poem, “Flight to Canada.”

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5 Rebel Writers During Slavery

 [By Alysha Griffin]

In the same way that threats of violence did not always dissuade  slaves’ attempts to escape, the threat of injury or even death was not enough to keep many African Americans quiet. In some instances, African Americans made the pen mightier than the whip.

Struggles for Freedom: Kanye West and Toni Morrison’s Artistic Renderings of Flight

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[By Kenton Rambsy]

Tony Bolden, author of Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture, proposes “vernacular cultures are always dialogic relative to dominant cultures, so they are never static but rather always in flux...writers (artists) who appropriate the vernacular must confront the constant risk of erasure” (26). Bolden’s concept of the ever-changing vernacular culture helps to explain frequent reimagings of slavery and struggles for liberation by black literary artists.

Black writers, musicians, and other artists working in a range of genres use vernacular language to re-envision history and re-image the legacy of enslaved persons. Defiantly, against most popular appraisals of history, these artists validate the independence, intelligence, and ingenuity of their enslaved ancestors through their artistic renderings.

Notes on Toni Cade Bambara

Thabiti Lewis is the author of Ballers of the New School: Race and Sports in America (Third World Press, 2010) and of the forthcoming edited book, Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara (University Press of Mississippi, Spring 2012)

Every time I talk or write about Toni Cade Bambara I laugh thinking about how a graduate school professor attempted to convince me her work was too narrow for a dissertation topic.  Bambara would certainly have chuckled at his ignorance. Anyone who knows a little bit about her work is aware of how her work embraces many elements at one time.  Indeed her vision is what literary critic Joyce A. Joyce once called “a panoramic” because she explores the full scope of Black life and culture in her fiction from history, feminism, and geology to blues, jazz, clairvoyance, spiritual renewal, religion, cinematography and physics. A Black Arts movement writer, her use of  West African religions, and African and African American folk culture reflect African American literary scholars such as myself are interested in exploring: (1) how social, historical, and political conditions frame and have framed production; or (2) how African descended peoples in the United States and throughout the African Diaspora have produced texts.