Tribute for Aubert and Baraka

Remembering Alvin Aubert and Amiri Baraka

My introduction to Leroi Jones was reading “The End of Man is His Beauty” and “A Poem for Democrats” in 1963 in Rosey E. Pool’s anthology Beyond the Blues (Hand and Flower Press 1962).  In the head note, Jones asserted that writing “beautiful poems full of mystical sociology and abstract politics” was among his ambitions. Five years later at Fort Knox, I read the anthology Black Fire, a confirmation that focused anger has purpose.  When I began teaching at Tougaloo College in the fall of 1970, Home: Social Essays by LeRoi Jones was one of the textbooks in my freshman composition course. My students had to debate why Negro literature was a myth and what black writing should be. Reading Jones before and after he became Amiri Baraka and using the terrible beauty of his mind as a touchstone for engaged cultural work was simply normal for me. Keeping up with his prodigious output was mission impossible; deciding how to deal with his ideological shifts and transformations of identity was hard work. But he was teaching me constantly that nothing worth having in our tradition of perpetual struggle comes easily, I can’t mark the year in the 1980s when I finally meet Baraka, but I was relieved to discover this intellectual giant was not a man to be feared but a man with whom I could have civil discourses, with whom I could laugh and joke, with whom I could celebrate the complexities of being human. It sufficed that he would lend me his ear as I struggled with the immense range of his creativity. He was the master craftsman  and teacher who taught me invaluable lessons about tradition and commitment. Baraka far exceeded his early ambitions and gave America a matchless body of engaged writing.

I learned much about our literary and cultural traditions from Alvin Aubert too, and our shared Saint James Parish, Louisiana heritage, such mutual friends as Ahmos Zu-Bolton, Pinkie Gordon Lane, Arthenia Bates Millican, Lorenzo Thomas and Tom Dent, and our devotion to teaching and writing made it easy to have a felicitous relationship. I met Aubert in 1972 during one of the annual poetry festivals at Southern University in Baton Rouge.  When he founded OBSIDIAN, he invited me to serve on the editorial board. He took the risk of publishing my short story “David” and gave me generous advice about improving my jazzy poetry.  We did a joint reading for E. Ethelbert Miller’s  “Ascension Series” and maintained humorous correspondence for at least two decades. He arranged for me to be a visiting professor at Wayne State for a few weeks in 1987-88.  Although we had a happy reunion at the 2004 Furious Flower Conference, our perspectives on literature had drifted apart and our relationship chilled. We retreated into silence.  Nevertheless, I still have deep respect for Aubert’s excellence as a poet  and gratitude for his generous support of  emerging writers and of my struggles to find my creative voice and critical voices.

I am saddened that Alvin Aubert ( March 12, 1930-January 7, 2014) and Amiri Baraka ( October 7, 1934-January 9, 2014),  poets  and thinkers who had great influence on my work have died within days of one another. This is a great loss for the United States of America , for world literature, and for me. I am resigned, however, to honor their lives and works by continuing the traditions which they were devoted to enhancing. I listen carefully to their imperatives.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

January 9, 2014

Advice for a young Chinese scholar

Revising “Self-discovery in Racialized Space: Comparative Study of The Outsider and Invisible Man”

Commentary for a young Chinese scholar

 

Your comparative study of novels by Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison is a worthwhile project, especially in light of an intertextuality between Invisible Man and The Outsider that is not immediately apparent. Despite his denial of artistic indebtedness to Wright’s novella “The Man Who Lived Underground,” Ellison did elaborate some features of Wright’s story.  Use of the underground or the underworld as a location (or space) for gaining knowledge that is unavailable on the surface of the earth is a very old strategy in world literature.  Ellison made good use of the strategy to create a frame for his nameless narrator’s journey of discoveries and a site for reflection on the episodes that constitute the journey. Although Wright and Ellison both use urban space, the city, for African American male characters to make self-discoveries, it must be noted that Ellison employed a rural space to begin discussion about race and abuse of power in Invisible Man. That choice was necessary, because the consequences of South to North migration are so important in his novel.  Wright, on the other hand, used a less iconic form of migration (Cross Damon’s flight from Chicago to New York) as a background for his main character’s existential quest for “absolute freedom” in shaping his identity and destiny against those imposed upon him by racialized American society.

The vastly different intentions Wright and Ellison had in writing their novels must be accounted  for through close reading of their texts, careful structural analysis, and interpretation that is informed by knowledge about the diverse ways African Americans negotiated their “space-time experiences” in racialized and segregated spaces. I stress the importance of close reading of the text prior to selecting any theory as a guide for interpretation. You have claimed in your abstract that you endeavor “to analyze black people’s self-discovery in racialized space from the perspective of Foucault’s space theory, in an attempt to revel the black writers’ effort of seeking identity and national cultural way for the black through the struggle of power in spatial practices.”  Your claim is based on a dreadful belief that theory can do what it cannot do. African Americans like Chinese peoples  are tremendously diverse; they are not a unified group that can be explained by one theory or another. Provision conclusions about how individuals from an ethnic group arrive at “self-discovery” have to be derived by using reliable methods from the domains of psychology and sociology not from methods employed in literary and cultural studies.  Moreover, literature may engender ideas that people use in making “self-discoveries,” but literature does not give us directives for resolving the entanglements of the human condition.  Your claim is in need of radical surgery.

 Efforts to use identity theories  (the Self and the Other) and space theories as articulated by Michel Foucault and others can produce blindness rather than desirable insights about how Wright, Ellison, and other African American novelists have fictionalized the historical experiences of black people. And when such theories are yoked with DuBois’s now much abused and outdated theory of “double consciousness,” the probability of producing dazzling nonsense is increased. It is crucial to refer to how in his book The Practice of Everyday Life,  Michel de Certeau challenges Foucault’s thinking about space.  It is even more crucial in dealing with Ellison and Wright to know what Valerie Smith “theorized” in Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Harvard University Press 1987), what Farah Jasmine Griffin said about navigating the urban landscape in “Who Set You Flowin’?: The African American Migration Narrative  (Oxford University Press 1995) , what Abdul R. JanMohamed explored in The-Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (Duke University Press 2005) and what Robert O’Meally  revealed about Ellison’s narrative techniques in The Craft of Ralph Ellison (Harvard University Press 1980). Attention to Eurocentric theory without giving notice to what African American scholars have contributed to our understanding of Wright and Ellison is tantamount to asking a chicken to plead for its life in a court in which the judge and the jury are foxes.

 

In a 1977 interview on truth and power, Foucault himself said something we need to keep in mind as we engage in scholarship and criticism.  Referring to the questions raised by “the political status of science and the ideological functions which it could serve,” Foucault said “…a whole number of interesting questions were provoked.  These can all be summed up in two word: power and knowledge.” He then commented on why dealing with theoretical physics or organic chemistry and “ its relations with the political and economic structures of society” might invite one to pose “an excessively complicated question.”  The question, he proposed is easier to resolve if one focused on “a form of knowledge (savoir) like psychiatry.” (See Foucault,  Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon, 1980).  Foucault was talking specifically about science in general and  his planning as he prepared to write Madness and Civilization. There is a noteworthy lesson to be learned from what he says about questions.

 

 I urge you to concentrate on “self-discovery” in a literary work as a form of knowledge rather than trying to deal the impossibly large problem of “racialized space in America,” which requires empirical investigation and which ought not be reduced to a simple black/white binary.  For several hundred years, indigenous peoples (Native Americans), European Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans have negotiated space both separately and jointly, and space theory is an afterthought about what they were doing historically. Theory has to be corrected by history.  Or, how could one talk about racialized space and ignore that women function in those spaces?  Generalized discussion of “heterotopias” casts dim light on gender issues.   Both Ellison and Wright wrote masculine fictions that, according to feminist thinkers, keep women in the shadows or objectify them.  We can’t talk about Ellison and Wright and ignore gender. Remember that Foucault warned us to avoid the “excessively complicated question.”

 

Rethinking what you need to say in your abstract

 

First, if you focus on the use of space in the novels by Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, you must understand that Ellison refers to action in rural space (an imagined Alabama) and urban space (the city --New York) and that Wright deals exclusively with urban space (the cities of Chicago and New York).  It is unfortunate that you do not know enough about African American novels and space to detect that Ellison’s book reminds us of what Paul Laurence Dunbar did with rural and urban spaces and the matter of migration from the South to the North in The Sport of the Gods (1902). The discussion has to focus on how the two authors use real, historical, American racialized spaces as opposed to the theorizing about the abstract concept of space promoted by Foucault and others.  Despite all the shortcomings that have been noted about Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), that book describes American cultural geography (racialized spaces) in terms which were a part of Wright and Ellison’s lived experiences. One of the dangers of theory is its power to seduce thinkers and make them forget history.

 

 In your abstract, you need to specify very concisely what is your research question. How to frame and refine the research question is handled with precision in The Craft of Research (1995) by Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb, and Joseph Williams, the book I use when I offer research seminars at Central China Normal University. The research question usually takes the form

 

 

I am studying (X)

 

because I want to find out (Y)

 

in order to help my reader understand better  (Z)

 

If “X” is African American Self-discovery in Racialized Space, you have to be aware that conclusions about self-discovery in The Outsider and Invisible Man apply only to Cross Damon and the nameless narrator. Any conclusions that you reach do not describe the behaviors of real African American males.  What is depicted in novels is merely a refraction of real actions not a reflection of what has occurred in real time to real human beings. An attempt to argue or  suggest otherwise is a confusion of literary representation with vulgar, imprecise sociology. Literature generates questions that have to be answered by non-literary disciplines.  I leave identification of what is Y and Z to you.

 

 I urge you to attend very carefully what is being said about “heterotopia” in the following commentary, as you analyze the texts of the novels.  It is important that you match the various spaces referred to in the novels with the types of heterotopia they may represent.  Doing so will help you with formulating a new outline for your chapter.

 

 

Heterotopia (space)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2010)

Heterotopia is a concept in human geography elaborated by philosopher Michel Foucault to describe places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions. These are spaces of otherness, which are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and mental, such as the space of a phone call or the moment when you see yourself in the mirror.
A utopia is an idea or an image that is not real but represents a perfected version of society, such as Thomas More’s book or Le Corbusier’s drawings. Foucault uses the term heterotopia to describe spaces that have more layers of meaning or relationships to other places than immediately meet the eye. In general, a heterotopia is a physical representation or approximation of a utopia, or a parallel space that contains undesirable bodies to make a real utopian space possible (like a prison).
Foucault uses the idea of a mirror as a metaphor for the duality and contradictions, the reality and the unreality of utopian projects. A mirror is metaphor for utopia because the image that you see in it does not exist, but it is also a heterotopia because the mirror is a real object that shapes the way you relate to your own image.
Foucault articulates several possible types of heterotopia or spaces that exhibit dual meanings:

·         A ‘crisis heterotopia’ is a separate space like a boarding school or a motel room where activities like coming of age or a honeymoon take place out of sight.

·         ‘Heterotopias of deviation’ are institutions where we place individuals whose behavior is outside the norm (hospitals, asylums, prisons, rest homes, cemetery).

·         Heterotopia can be a single real place that juxtaposes several spaces. A garden is a heterotopia because it is a real space meant to be a microcosm of different environments with plants from around the world.

·         'Heterotopias of time' such as museums enclose in one place objects from all times and styles. They exist in time but also exist outside of time because they are built and preserved to be physically insusceptible to time’s ravages.

·         'Heterotopias of ritual or purification' are spaces that are isolated and penetrable yet not freely accessible like a public place. To get in one must have permission and make certain gestures such as in a sauna or a hammin.

·         'Heterotopia has a function in relation to all of the remaining spaces. The two functions are: heterotopia of illusion creates a space of illusion that exposes every real space, and the heterotopia of compensation is to create a real space--a space that is other.

·          

Human geographers often connected to the postmodernist school have been using the term (and the author's propositions) to help understand the contemporary emergence of (cultural, social, political, economic) difference and identity as a central issue in larger multicultural cities. The idea of place (more often related to ethnicity and gender and less often to the social class issue) as a heterotopic entity has been gaining attention in the current context of postmodern, post-structuralist theoretical discussion (and political practice) in Geography and other spatial social sciences. The concept of a heterotopia has also been discussed in relation to the space that learning takes place in (Blair, 2009). There is an extensive debate with theorists, such as David Harvey, that remain focused on the matter of class domination as the central determinant of social heteronomy.

Foucault's elaborations on heterotopias were published in an article entitled Des espaces autres (Of Other Spaces). The philosopher calls for a society with many heterotopias, not only as a space with several places of/for the affirmation of difference, but also as a means of escape from authoritarianism and repression, stating metaphorically that if we take the ship as the utmost heterotopia, a society without ships is inherently a repressive one, in a clear reference to Stalinism.
The geographer Edward Soja has worked with this concept in dialogue with the works of Henri Lefebvre concerning urban space in the book Thirdspace.

In Utopia and The Village in South Asian Literatures, Anupama Mohan extends and reworks Foucault's concept of heterotopia as a way to understand the impulses of 21st century literatures of South Asia that are focused on the village or the rural as a literary trope. Mohan revives the conceptual ambivalence latent in utopia as good-place and no-place in order to theorize key ruptures within Foucault's explanations of heterotopia. For Mohan, heterotopia helps to recuperate as well as distinguish utopia from what she calls homotopia, or visions of social collectivization whose claims to utopia are built on homogenizing features or bases such as a common religion, language, or culture.
Heterotopian Studies is a website launched May 2012 and devoted to exploring Foucault's ideas on heterotopia.

Rethinking your introduction and discussions of the novels

It is no surprise that Foucault does not enable you to define “racialized space.”  You will find a model for creating the definition in Chapter 3 of Griffin’s “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African American Migration Narrative.

I find that the current organization of your chapter can be much improved by not trying to talk about Other, self-discovery, and resistance as subtopics.  Instead, I recommend that  after presenting an introductory discussion of the focus on cities or urban spaces in African American literature and the challenges one might find in the novels of Wright and Ellison, you should write about each novel separately and then write about your tentative conclusions in a third segment.  The new organization might assume this form----

I.                     Introduction

II.                   Self-discovery and racialized space in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)

III.                 Self-discovery and racialized space in Richard Wright’s The Outsider (1953)

IV.                Unanswered questions about integration and nihilism generated by Ellison and Wright

V.                  Conclusion

 

 Your chapter should analyze (1) how Ellison frames his narrative with the underground prologue and epilogue, but situates the unnamed narrator's quest to understand who he is rural and urban spaces and (2) how Wright depicts Cross Damon's existential journey from Chicago (where he has a defined identity in the spaces of home and labor) to New York (where he uses lies and deceptions to fashion a new identity for himself in the arena of radical politics; it is relatively easy to fashion multiple identities in a space where one is virtually unknown ). After the discussions of Invisible Man and The Outsider, the third segment of the chapter must deal with the two novels as catalysts for continuing exploration of race, new forms of segregation in the United States, and space.

 

 

January 5, 2014

Using cultural literacy

 Cultural Literacy and the New York Times

 

One of the few newspapers in America that still addresses readers who believe in old-fashioned cultural literacy, the New York Times deserves applause for its December 19, 2013 edition.  Reminding us yet again that we are at once subjects and objects of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the paper tempers the sting of anxiety, dread, and a winter of discontent by publishing articles by Ishmael Reed and Charles M. Blow.  In the online edition, one finds Reed’s “The President of the Cool” in the Editors’ Picks section and Blow’s “Defining Moments and Crystal Stairs” at the top of the Op-Ed segment.  Bravo.

Reed uses his considerable musical literacy to suggest that “cool musicians carried themselves with a regal bearing.”  By associating President Obama with such legendary figures as Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn, Stan Getz, Milt Jackson, and Miles Davis, pays a fine tribute to the President’s mastering of the aesthetics of the cool.  And Reed puts icing on the proverbial cake when he quotes the President’s gratitude to Theodore Walter “Sonny” Rollins.  Two of the most culturally literate, cool people I know return the favor by saying “Reed is the epitome of cool” (Ja Jahannes) and “Loved this article.  Clearly folks continue to mistake cool with swagger” (Frank X. Walker). [Emails from Jahannes and Walker to Ward, 19 Dec 2013]

There is no hint of swagger in Blow’s desire to share racial wisdom with America’s youth regarding how to remain cool while remembering the deaths of James Byrd, Jr., Emmett Till, and Trayvon Martin as defining moments of how racial hatred thrives in perpetuity in the United States of America, a nation that often promotes itself as the moral center of the planet.  On the contrary, there is a cool, generous, and rational measure of cultural literacy in Blow’s reminding young people (and all of us) of the need to read and absorb Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son.” I would add that Blow’s excellent advice can only be supplemented by internalizing Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” It is crucial to know of ignorant armies clashing night and day.

In these articles, the writers use cultural literacy to champion the ethics of balance.

Patience is platinum.  To my knowledge, no African American has every played the Edward Snowden card.  Let us salute Charles Blow and Langston Hughes for reminding us why that is the case.  Indeed, the only acts of black treason were performed when Uncle Y hastened to alert Master Z that his fellow-slaves were plotting to be free!

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 19, 2013

Note to imprisoned writers

Send your manuscripts to Random House.  The market for pain is very active, and you might earn enough money to purchase your freedom.

---

December 15, 2013, 2:30 pm2 Comments

Random House Acquires 1800s Prison Memoir

By JULIE BOSMAN

The recently discovered manuscript believed to be the first prison memoir by an African-American was swiftly acquired by Random House, the publisher said on Sunday. The 304-page manuscript, by Austin Reed, was recently authenticated by scholars at Yale University.
Titled “The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, or the Inmate of a Gloomy Prison”, it traces Reed’s story of imprisonment and harsh punishment while he was at a state prison in upstate New York from the 1830s to the 1850s. After details of the manuscript were disclosed last week, Random House snapped up the rights to publish it, offering a mid-six-figure sum, according to a person with knowledge of the negotiations who was not authorized to speak publicly. (A spokeswoman for Random House declined to comment on the advance.)
The book is expected to be released in early 2016, with a foreword by David Blight, a professor of American history at Yale, and an introduction by Caleb Smith, an English professor at Yale. “It is the story of a hard life, told with anger and with irony, exploring some of the deep connections between race and incarceration in America,” Mr. Smith said in a statement. David Ebershoff, an executive editor at Random House, will edit the book.

The Gifts of Black Prisoners

The Gifts of Black Prisoners

 

Just as DuBois’s The Gifts of Black Folk (1924) is overshadowed by The Souls of Black Folk (1903 ), the long shadows of our classic slave narratives obscure the importance of studying other autobiographical forms in efforts to write more expansive histories of how African Americans have used literacy and literature or black writing in English since the 18^th century.  Accidental “discoveries” of lost materials are special moments in the growth of scholarship, enabling us to enlarge the body of black writing and to conduct archival projects to refocus our perspectives. Julie Bosman’s article Prison Memoir of a Black Man in the 1850s - NYTimes.com  notifies us that a special moment is in the offing.

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s acquisition of Austin Reed’s “The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, or the Inmate of a Gloomy Prison,” dated 1858, is a great find if the memoir is indeed authentic and not a parody written by a white prisoner or white prison guard in the 1850s, by a person who wished to exploit the popularity of slave narratives. We do not need yet another example of bogus black writing.  We are still in a state of uncertainty about whether Hannah Craft’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative is truly what we have been told it is. We do need a 19th century bit of prison writing that is beyond dispute, that can be analyzed in some framework of African American autobiography and set against the literary/non-literary qualities of, let us say, George Jackson's Blood in My Eye and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson and other writings by the imprisoned (e.g. the early poetry of Etheridge Knight).  It is better to err in the direction of extreme skepticism than to be duped.

Contemporary literary and cultural studies often play deadly games with African American intellectual property, and I think it is prudent for the Project on the History of Black Writing to issue a caution regarding what Bosman described as “the first recovered memoir written in prison by an African-American.” Thus, I sent the following e-mail to Professor Caleb Smith:

 

 

 

From:	Jerry Ward (jerry.ward31@hotmail.com)
Sent:	Thu 12/12/13 1:56 PM
To:	caleb.smith@yale.edu (caleb.smith@yale.edu)

Dear Professor Smith:

As a member of the Project on the History of Black Writing advisory board, I was pleased to read in today's New York Times that you will prepare Austin Reed's manuscript for publication. This project extends, and perhaps deepens, your previous studies of incarceration. I am confident you will provide judicious contextualization for our analysis and interpretation of the memoir. Those of us who have special interest in African American literacy and literature welcome the challenge of dealing with the literary and non-literary aspects of "recovered" works. This example of 19th century prison writing raises questions about autobiography in general and African American autobiography in particular and about how the genre functions in a multi-layered national literature.

I do hope that Christine McKay and others used the most exacting scientific principles in establishing the authenticity of the memoir for the Beinecke. What we do not need is to discover, after publication, that the memoir is a devastatingly clever imitation of 19th century black writing. Use of the most rigorous standards of authentication and bibliographic or textual scholarship must provide the evidence that inspires confidence.

Please accept my thanks for your helping us to create more precise literary histories of African American writing.

Sincerely yours,

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Distinguished Overseas Professor
Central China Normal University (Wuhan)

 

Professor Smith graciously answered within a few hours, assuring me that  “The Reed manuscript really is a haunting text. We have worked very hard to piece together the facts of Reed's life and the circumstances of his writing. I expect that the publication will be just the beginning of a long conversation.” (Email from Smith to Ward, December 12, 2013)  We should anticipate that the “long conversation” will give birth to a rich discourse about genres, the possibility of deconstructing incarceration as enslavement in American historical contexts, canons, and the aims of scholarship inside and beyond the fragile boundaries of American higher education. We may, despite ourselves, be once more enlightened by the gifts of black prisoners and by the assertions of Americans who do not know the kinship they share with the imprisoned.

 

 

 

 

Judicial Water

JUDICIAL WATER

 

You regret

Quare square molecule

The error

Morphing to meditate

 

Why is this so

Lately soon

A blues rupture

 

Eyes seeing eyes through stars

Haunting mood

Indigo and indigenous

 

Morphing to mediate

The terror

Fractal failures

You regret

 

So this is why

Sponge spoon

Detains a myth

Too cold to freeze

 

Wisdom coiled

Blind might

Delight neither pond nor sea.

 

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 8, 2013

 

Reading

Collins, Lisa Gail and Margo Natalie Crawford, eds. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006.  Divided into three sections ---I. Cities and Sites,  II. Genre and Ideologies, III. Predecessors, Peers, and Legacies, this collection of essays uses fresh research to deepen understanding of one of the most important periods in African American literature, art, and culture. These inquiries expose the lame tendentiousness of efforts, in certain sectors of literary theory and criticism, to dismiss the value of the Black Arts Movement in our nation’s literary history.

 

Davis, Thadious M. Southscapes:  Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Discussions of “place” have long been a staple of commentaries on Southern literature, but Davis explores previously uncharted territories in her impressive, sustained twofold argument: “First, African Americans who wish to have a regional identity as southern can and increasingly are claiming that right. Second, the traditional literature of the South has begun to acknowledge more fully the presence of blacks and other minority groups within its ranks, including the previously overlooked remaining southern Native American and Chinese populations or the growing newer communities of Latinos, Vietnamese, and South Asians” (19).  Davis’s intervention is timely, because it casts light on the discrepancy between the evolving of literature and the regressive social and political actions which do not bode well for a future in the American South.

 

Elam, Michele. The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium.  Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2011.  Elam exposes the deceptiveness of “post-racial” claims.  She “takes as a given the political nature, versus a presumed taxonomic neutrality, of mixed race, beginning with the assumption that mixed race is no fait accompli but still very much a category under construction”(6-7).

 

Fowler, Doreen. Drawing the Line: The Father Reimagined in Faulkner, Wright, O’Connor, and Morrison. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. This book is a good example of how lost in the critical wilderness one becomes by following psychoanalytic maps of non-referentiality.  Some critics find psychoanalytic theories to be useful in reading texts, because those theories sanction language being in conversation with language. One need not deal with the messiness of referentiality that fiction and non-fiction invite. One can momentarily escape the horror of knowing that signifiers co-exist with the material presences which negate signification. What works for commentary on the magic realism of Faulkner, O’Connor, and Morrison fails when it is applied to Wright’s scathing realism. Fowler’s chapter “Crossing a Racial Border: Richard Wright’s Native Son” is disappointment.  Fowler travels into the dense terrain of Native Son by following paths mapped by Freud, Lacan and Kristeva, but she ignores the roadways Wright paved in The Long Dream and A Father’s Law.  Failure to discuss novels wherein Wright painstakingly “reimagined” fathers and sons is poor scholarship.

 

Gotham, Kevin Fox. Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy.  New York: New York University Press, 2007. Many books have tried to explain New Orleans as a locus of virtue and vice. Lawrence N. Powell’s The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), for example, focuses on risk and inventiveness as key aspects of the city’s origins. But Gotham takes improvisation to a new level with his surgical examination of how tourism creates and destroys the idea of the city’s authenticity. Indeed, this study is quite the tool needed for assessing the unique racism of New Orleans and why the post-Katrina “new New Orleans” is an Eden for the rich and hell for the displaced, the marginalized, and the working class.

 

 

Gwin, Minrose. Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013.  Like her ground-cracking novel The Queen of Palmyra (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), Gwin’s five essays provide extraordinary insights about the discipline of history and about absorbing the significance of Medgar Wiley Evers in the unfinished struggles of civil and human rights in the State of Mississippi. Gwin’s sensibility as a creative writer who is also a scholar enables her to make keen judgments about literary works by James Baldwin, Margaret Walker, and Eudora Welty ; the aesthetic tensions among the Jackson Advocate, the Mississippi Free Press, the Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News; the importance of Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) and Myrlie Evers-Williams’s For Us , the Living (1967); the preservation and transformation of memory in music; the commendable achievement of Frank X. Walker’s Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (2013). Gwin’s essays and bibliography are valuable resources for remembering or for learning why struggles for humanity are always unfinished. This book should be read in tandem with Michael Vincent Williams’s superb biography Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2011).

 

 

 

Haile, James B., ed. Philosophical Meditations on Richard Wright. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. These seven meditations comment on Richard Wright’s incorporation of existentialist, ontological, and phenomenological ideas in his fiction and non-fiction.  They expose facets of Wright’s intellectual imagination which are usually ignored or blurred in “traditional” literary readings of his works.

 

Holloway, Jonathan Scott. Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory & Identity in Black America since 1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.  Threaded with astute references to the works of Richard Wright, Jim Crow Wisdom is a refreshing meditation on the uses of memory and forgetting in the United States. Given the current trend of visualizing enslavement and minstrelsy, Holloway’s comments on the filmmaker William Greaves, a pioneering black documentarian, are invaluable. Holloway’s conclusion is empowering: “…’home’ is a place where the possible and impossible can commingle, where contradiction makes more sense than tidy narratives that speak of unflinching progress, and where the psychological shelter of the figurative can offer protection that is as real as the roof over one’s head” (229).

 

Mullen, Harryette.  The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012.   One of our most innovative poets and scholars, Mullen possesses an independent spirit (do not confuse with “free spirit”) which enables her to walk in balance with the arbitrary options of languages and identities, to write poems and essays that do not bear the onus of predictability.  Her essays and interviews tease us into profound reflection on ideas derived from her flexible locations within African American, global and womanist traditions.  Her burnished, critical independence validates her choice “to explore diversity and variety rather than universality or consistence” (262). It is reasonable to hazard that the essays “Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem: Wislawa Szymborska in the Dialogue of Creative and Critical Thinkers” (35-43) and “The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Stretching the Dialogue of African American Poetry” (68-76) are exceptional prose photographs of Mullen’s mind at work.

 

Norris, Keenan, ed. Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2014.  Norris’s penetrating article “The Dark Role of Excess in the Literary Marketplace and the Genesis and Evolution of Urban Literature” in JEAL: Journal of Ethnic American Literature, Issue 1 (2011): 9-30 was a forecast for his editing of this anthology of critical perspectives on Street Literature.  He and the contributors rupture dated notions regarding popular African American fiction and nonfiction, challenging us to recognize the urbanity of the urban and to reexamine the bottomless well of African American oral traditions. Thus, this anthology invites revised thinking about narrow, purely academic canons of African American literature and why large numbers of readers may find uncanonized works to be of great significance, to be empowering equipment for the vexed navigations of everyday life. Omar Tyree’s “Foreword” is itself a rewarding commentary on progressive creativity; along with Norris’s pointed introduction, it provides a framework for dealing with repressed dynamics in the evaluations of African American literature.  Street Lit extends the discourse on urban literature represented in Word Hustle: Critical Essay and Reflections on the Works of Donald Goines (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2011), edited by L. H. Stallings and Greg Thomas.

 

Osbey, Brenda Marie. History and Other Poems. St. Louis, MO: Time Being Books, 2012. Anointed with complexities, History and Other Poems is superbly executed.  Brenda Marie Osbey’s poems invite exploration of the chaos and créolité of history.  They urge us to attend to their nuances, to be renewed by radical, rich aesthetic permutations.  In her previous collections ---- Ceremony for Minneconjoux, In These Houses, All Saints: New and Selected Poems, and Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman, Osbey acknowledged her sustained research and investments in history. History and Other Poems confirms her poetic mastery of time, space, and narrative, her authority to guide us in the process of becoming enlightened by the profound structures of existence.  This is a rare book that secures our participation in and control of the dialogic imagination.

 

Redmond, Eugene B. Arkansippi Memwars: Poetry, Prose & Chants 1962-2012.  Chicago: Third World Press, 2013. Redmond’s fame for his seminal work Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry (1976) and for his photographs as cultural documents (see Howard Rambsy, “Eugene B. Redmond, The Critical Cultural Witness.” JEAL, Issue 1 (2011): 69-89) often overshadows his achievements as a sound-driven poet, founding editor of Drumvoices Revue, and creator of the “kwansaba,” a demanding poetic form.  Arkansippi Memwars makes fifty years (1962-2012) of Redmond’s contributions to literature and culture available for critical assessments.

 

 

Rowell, Charles Henry, ed. Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry.  New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. This anthology suggests that rap and hip hop/spoken word creations have no place in contemporary poetry, and the Callaloo-canonized work included presents a naïve view of dynamics in the field of poetry.  Rowell’s belief that publication history should trump autobiographical history is a major flaw, because it misinforms readers about complexity and partisan contradictions.  Equally flawed is his effort to assert that poetry of the Black Arts period lacked “literary” importance, an effort that merits non-academic  condemnation. Rowell would avoided glaring flaws of explanation had he read Eugene Redmond’s Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry (1976),  Kalamu ya Salaam’s What Is Life?: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self (1994)and  Lorenzo Thomas’s Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2000) very carefully before compiling and editing Angles of Ascent.

 

 

Wilder, Craig Steven. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). In this exceptionally informative inquiry about the bloody origins of American higher education, Wilder has constructed a brilliant model of what scholarship should be. Just as Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013) enhances the importance of Robert H. Brinkmeyer’s The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), Wilder’s work lends an urgency to serious engagement with Gene Andrew Jarrett’s Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2011) and John Ernest’s Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Critical attention to the dazzling “funk” of variety and accomplishment in contemporary African American literature should be balanced by scholarly attention to texts which are generic foundations for the forms and content of black writing from 2000 to the present. To increase the possibility of having a larger selection of informed African American literary histories, it is essential that younger scholars be encouraged by the majesty of Ebony and Ivy  to do archival work and to discover the problematic and enlightening pleasures of documents which are crucial for understanding the conditions of the twenty-first century .

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

 

December 7, 2013