CLA, April 6, 2018 Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW: Negotiating the Ideas of Seven Writers [1] Founded in 1983 by Dr. Maryemma Graham, "The Afro-American Novel Project" (AANP) had the initial goal of identifying all published novels written by African Americans from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. AANP became The Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) in 1990 to reflect an enlarged vision and a more ambitious aim. PHBW want to make a substantial contribution to what we then spoke of as our "Profession" by organizing bibliographic information and databases, sponsoring institutes and seminars, and by encouraging our colleagues to have rigorous engagements with all genres of black (African American) "writing" within frames of historical inquiry. The Project's working frame was an adaptation of the paradigm of unity in African American Studies , f
Reading Notes for September 23, 2019 Eighteen years after the tragedy of 9/11 as I re-read Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" (2001), two meanderings occur: 1) a chance temptation to ask what the term "pro-Semitic" can mean in the contexts of (a) Israeli and world politics and (b) to what extent the amount of foreign aid the USA donates to Israel truly matters, and 2) a more focused temptation to ask if Morrison's Playing in the Dark sheds light on the motives that govern projects devoted to discussions of slavery beginning with 1619. I suspect those projects are at once very literary and very political. Such speculations arose during a September 12 conversation with one of my former UNCF/Mellon mentees whose research on redemption now teaches me, the former mentor, a few things about the urgency of scholarship in the twenty-first century. The journey forth happens in the cognitive territory of "universal enslavement,"
KWANZAA 2019 / NOTES 1. UMOJA (unity) ---Face it. Striving for unity in the family, the community, the nation, and the race is praiseworthy. Notice, however, the results of striving are contingent. Forces beyond our control are operative. Erosion of will power leads wretchedness; systemic racism is an abstract equivalent of nuclear warfare; benign genocide, a staple in education, flourishes; bad choices and self-hatred maintain dysfunction. Family is not necessarily a traditional unit of parents, children, and assorted relatives. "The community" is an ungainly trope. It is useful in moments of extreme crisis. At other times the phrase fails to provoke rigorous analysis of how we organize ourselves and our contradictions "The Nation" is most certainly only "unified" in stories of inclusion and excluding , the object of many revisions; some of these revisions tell us more about diversity and deconstructive gestures
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