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
Russell Atkins: On the Life & Work of an American Master