Blog2.14.2021 The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. Isaiah 11:6 Humble yourself and follow the lead of the child, but first teach the child to read. Reading narratives to the child while it is still in the womb is a project for preparing children who will be born in the 21st century for what they are condemned to expect: the heavy burdens of history as narrative prior to history's becoming equipment for daily life, instruments for probing inevitable uncertainties. Always discuss with the child the centrality of narrative in the state of being human. If this sounds to you like dream-work and platitude your hearing is accurate. As what we once knew as American democracy slowly becomes a fascist desert, we must arm ourselves and our children to do battle with inconvenient truth. ...
VIOLENCE AND AMERICAN MALE LIFE HISTORIES Our constructions of "reality" convince us, a bit too easily, that violence is an essential feature in the lives of American males and as "natural" as is the history of violence in the founding of our nation. The same constructions sponsor the myth of gender, allowing us to contend that women are naturally less violent than men. We are socialized in the United States to be gullible, to be worshippers of under-examined truths and full-blown lies. This seems to be our fate, our destiny, our normalizing of cowshit and bullshit . We can imagine relatively violence-free male visions, as did Clifton Taulbert in Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored and subsequent installments of his autobiography, but the aesthetics of hubris retard our doing so. The American majority has an unholy, acquired taste for the sounds of explosions and gun-fire and the lurid patterns of blood leaking...
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. ...
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