Ramcat Reads #4
Allen, Jeffery Renard. Song
of the Shank: A Novel. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014. Like James
McBride’s The Good Lord Bird (2013),
Allen’s most recent book signals how innovations in the twenty-first century
African American historical novel challenge the American penchant for the
ahistorical. Judicious criticism of Allen’s novel depends in part on knowing
the real life history of the musical genius Thomas Greene Wiggins (“Blind Tom”)
and in part on struggling to know how M. M. Bakhtin’s ideas about the dialogic
imagination and speech acts might be joined with Georg Lukacs’s thinking about
the role of the historical novel in the production of consciousness. Let it
suffice, for the moment, that Allen has offered us an exemplary model of what
purposeful black writing can accomplish.
Ali, Shahrazad. The
Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman. Philadelphia: Civilized
Publications, 1989. Ali’s confessions of a woman’s low valuation of self was
sternly critiqued in Confusion By Any
Other Name: Essays Exploring the Negative Impact of The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman (Chicago:
Third World Press, 1990), edited by Haki R. Madhubuti. Anyone who wishes to
analyze contemporary “reality television” and the progressive pathology of
American mass media in general can acquire historical perspectives from reading
or rereading these two books.
Boyd, Herb. Baldwin’s
Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin.
New York: Atria Books, 2008. Boyd’s survey of Baldwin’s intellectual
engagements with such figures as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Norman
Mailer, and Harold Cruse is judiciously provocative.
Brown, Leonard L., ed. John
Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
This collection of thoughtful essays lends credibility to T. J.
Anderson’s assertion that “all creative artists are cultural anthropologists,
documenters and interpreters of culture” (vi) and to Coltrane’s informing Don
DeMicheal in a letter of June 2, 1962: “We have absolutely no reason to worry
about lack of positive and affirmative philosophy. It’s built in us. The
phrasing, the sound of the music attest this fact” (17).
Cobb, Charles E., Jr. This
Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement
Possible. New York: Basic Books, 2014. An important
contribution to revisionist history of the Civil Rights Movement.
Greene, Brian. The
Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. Greene provides charming and readable explanations
for non-scientists of theories regarding observations of how subatomic
particles behave. The aesthetic results of his intellectual adventures,
however, must be tempered by consideration of human judgment and its limits, by
the corrective arguments necessary for critical thinking about the acquisition
of scientific knowledge. Thus, reading David Faust’s The Limits of Scientific Reasoning (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984) helps us to remember the “inherent limitations of
scientific judgment.”
Jeffers, Trellie James.
Up and Down the Greenwood. San Bernardino, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing
Platform, 2014. In this novella, Jeffers
demonstrates that strong ideas derived from late 19th century
nationalism can inform 21st century fiction.
Koritz, Amy and George J. Sanchez, eds. Civic
Engagement in the Wake of Katrina.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Arts-based initiatives
can simultaneously fail and succeed as they address issues generated by the
processes of urbanization and gentrification.
Lewis, Peirce F. New
Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape. 2nd ed. Santa Fe, NM:
Center for American Places, 2003. This
book supplements Lawrence N. Powell’s The
Accidental City: Improvising New
Orleans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). Read together, these books create a sobering
perspective on how histories, the Mississippi River, and the social geography
of New Orleans dovetail with racial tensions and encrusted mythologies which
make the city a place of blissful abnormalities.
Ludwig, Samuel, ed. On
the Aesthetic Legacy of Ishmael Reed.
Huntington Beach, CA: Parade Books, 2013. The essays in this collection
are provocative assessments of works by one of America’s most provocative
intellectuals.
Thomas, Ebony E. and Shanesha R. F. Brooks-Tatum, eds. Reading African American Experiences in the
Obama Era. New York: Peter Lang,
2012. These essays are rigorous critiques of metanarratives that shape social
thinking and policy.
White, Jane Barber. Lessons
Learned from a Poet’s Garden: The Restoration of the Historic Garden of Harlem
Renaissance Poet Anne Spencer. Lynchburg, VA: Blackwell Press, 2011. Rich with poems written long after the Harlem
Renaissance transitioned into social reality and extensive photographic
documentation of Spencer’s family, house, and famous garden, this excellent
book is required reading for anyone who wants to know who Anne Spencer
(1882-1975) was as poet, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr.
July 14, 2014
