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.
Baraka, Amiri. S O S: Poems 1961-2013. Selected by Paul
Vangelisti. New York: Grove, 2014. This
book is a prelude to a “definitive collection” of Baraka’s poetry, one which
the newly founded Amiri Baraka Society (May 2015) might desire to begin
planning. Of course, it is unlikely that
we can have truly definitive collections of work by twentieth-century writers,
but making some attempt to gather all of Baraka’s works and to present them
with the quality of scholarship Arnold Rampersad has brought to works by
Richard Wright and Langston Hughes and John Edgar Tidwell as applied in
presenting the poetry and prose of Frank Marshall Davis would be a fitting
tribute to Baraka’s importance for now and a future. In the “Foreword” for Eulogies (New York: Marsilio, 1996), Baraka wrote of the people he
honored:
In describing these lives, I was trying to provide a
record of their contributions, their sensibilities, their artistic intentions
or their ideals, but also the world they lived in. In offering this collection, I want to help
pass on what needs to live on not just in the archive but on the sidewalk of
Afro-America itself.
Robust, rigorous scholarship and criticism can ensure that
Baraka will “live on.”
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).
Bryant, Earle V.,
ed. Byline Richard Wright: Articles from The
Daily Worker and New Masses. Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 2015.
Such recent dedicated scholarship as Mary Helen Washington’s The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the
1950s and William J. Maxwell’s F.B.
Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s
Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature serves as a warrant for
thinking of contemporary literary and cultural studies as components of a mega-surveillance
machine. Readers and critics cooperate, often unwittingly, with publishing
conglomerates and official agencies of detection in panoptical activities that
exceed the scrutiny imagined by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish or by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism.
Technological progress encourages us to abandon dreams of a liberated
future and to accept dystopia as self-evidently “normal.” For Richard Wright
scholars, the publication of Indonesian
Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright, Modern Indonesia, and the Bandung
Conference (Duke University Press, Spring 2016) by Brian Russell Roberts
and Keith Foulcher will create an opportunity for more speculation about the
function of journalism in Wright’s imagination as well as raising devastating
questions about how the journalism of Ida B. Wells and Ishmael Reed assist us
to understand what was and is African American literature. We do need to explore
Black print cultures more thoroughly in relation to the production of Black
literatures. In this sense, Earle V.
Bryant’s long-awaited Byline Richard
Wright has a significant mediating function.
Perhaps financial exigencies are responsible for the
University of Missouri Press’s delayed printing of Bryant’s editing and
commentary on a number of Wright’s Daily
Worker articles from 1937 and the essays “Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite”
(1935) and “High Tide in Harlem: Joe Louis as a Symbol of Freedom” (1938) from New Masses. Bryant, a Professor of English at the
University of New Orleans, had been working on this project, very quietly, for
more than a decade. The delayed publication does not compromise his effort to
map underexplored territory in Wright Studies.
It does, unfortunately, increase the likelihood that his work will get
less attention than it deserves.
Giving notice to time and space, as Thadious M. Davis does
in Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature (2011), reifies the value of chronology in examining
Wright’s growth. Her methodological
choices ensure that we link Wright’s emergence as a journalist with his
assignments in subdivisions of the Works Progress Administration (WPA),
especially the Illinois Writers Project, without diminishing notice of his simultaneous
participation in Chicago’s South Side Writers group and brief membership
(1934-35) in the John Reed Club. On the other hand, Bryant chose to arrange the
Daily Worker articles by theme
---urban conditions in New York, war in Spain and China, heroism, Marxist
interest in the Scottsboro case, and art in the service of life. By avoiding
strict chronology, Bryant is able to foreground his insightful analyses of
political implications and aesthetic qualities in Wright’s journalism, to tell
us many things about the strengths and weaknesses of Wright’s accomplishments. Byline is Bryant’s effort “to bring
Wright’s early newspaper work out of obscurity and into the light where it can
be read and appreciated” (10).
There is a mixed blessing in Bryant’s book being in our
hands after the works by Washington, Maxwell, and Davis, because the rigor of
their scholarship sets the bar for critical attention to Wright very high. Bryant’s work provides an opportunity to
think about how African American and left-leaning journalism has been necessarily
subversive and critical of efforts to sell the American Dream. To be sure, Byline encourages more thinking about how subversion operates under
surveillance. The minor failure in Bryant’s scholarship, however, is his not
supplying a full listing of all the Daily
Worker articles Wright wrote and glosses or explanatory footnotes for the
articles selected from the full range of what is available. Yes, students and scholars who might use
Bryant’s book can surf the Internet to get information about topical references
in the articles, but Bryant would have enhanced the value of his book by
supplying them in the text. It is odd
that Bryant chose to say nothing about what Wright might have learned from
Frank Marshall Davis about the art of journalism. It is even odder that H. L. Mencken is not
mentioned in Byline, because Wright
made a special point of acknowledging his discovery of Mencken in a Memphis
newspaper and his indebtedness to the work of Mencken as one of America’s most
influential journalists, prose stylists, and social critics. It is baffling why
Bryant seems to attribute the claim “All art is propaganda” to Wright on page
215, when it is a widely known that W. E. B. DuBois used that wording in his
essay “Criteria of Negro Art” in the October 1926 issue of Crisis. Shortcomings notwithstanding, Byline Richard Wright: Articles from The Daily Worker and New Masses
can quicken interest in exploring more profoundly the journalistic aspects of Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain and Richard Wright’s bracing
subversiveness. Wright deserves more credit for his prophetic panopticism.
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.
Feynman, Richard. The Character of Physical Law. 1965. New
York: Modern Library, 1994. Feynman’s
lectures on gravitation, time, mathematics and physics, symmetry, conservation,
probability and uncertainty are quite reader-friendly. They are especially valuable for what they
tell us about the impossibility of having conclusive explanations of anything.
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.
Plumpp, Sterling D.
Home/Bass. Plumpp is our best living blues/jazz
poet. Home/Bass, his 12th collection of poems, does not
disappoint. In poems that are tributes
to the Mississippi/Chicago blues musician Willie Kent (1936-2006), he maximizes
the fracturing of words and recombination of particles in short lines in order
to surprise readers into consciousness
of the pain-shot courage always behind
and under the blues.
Rampersad, Arnold and David Roessel, eds. Selected
Letters of Langston Hughes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015. Beginning with Hughes’s September 5, 1921
letter to his father and ending with his letter of April 22, 1967 to Arna
Bontemps, this collection provides a sweeping view of why Hughes is one of the
most cosmopolitan and beloved writers of the twentieth century. If one is of a certain age, one reads these
letters with pangs of nostalgia and some regret that the art of writing letters
is so rarely cultivated in the twenty-first century. Hughes’s letters are as captivating as his
poems and stories, and they reveal a great amount of information about American
and international literary and cultural histories.
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.
June 7, 2015
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