Black Southern Voices Revisited
Posted on April 5, 2012 | No Comments
Grandt, Jürgen E. Shaping Words to Fit the Soul: The Southern Ritual Grounds of Afro-Modernism. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009.
In his introduction for the anthology Black Southern Voices (1992), John Oliver Killens quoted an observation Richard Wright made in 12 Million Black Voices: “…you usually take us for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem”(3). Killens knew, and Grandt has learned by virtue of highly principled scholarship, that it is suicidal to take Black South cultural expressions for granted. One valuable function of Shaping Words to Fit the Soul is its reminding post-whatever literary theorists and critics that history is not dead, that recovering histories is a crucial gesture in interpretation.
Grandt’s exploration of Afro-modernism ( in the sense that Houston A. Baker, Jr. articulates that concept in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance ) led him to examine it as “modernism with a historical conscience” and, thus, to avoid being hit by the boomerang of post-modernism. Grandt is as savvy as any post-modernist I know, but he exercises remarkable common sense in reconfiguring “southern ritual grounds as situated in time and mind rather than in time and place”(9). The key word is mind. Indeed, such Black South writers as Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and Tayari Jones are noteworthy for how they have artfully inscribed their minds upon the page. Overmuch attention to the mythology of Southern place obscures the genius of their artistry.
Grandt makes a fine contribution to Wright studies in Chapter 3 — “Roll Call: Richard Wright’s ‘Long Black Song’ and the Betrayal of Music.” I urge Wright scholars to revitalize historical conscience by reading all of Shaping Words to Fit the Soul and giving special attention to the chapter on Wright. Grandt makes a good case for reconfiguring how we study the clash and cooperation of genres in Black South cultural expressions, including the contemporary hip hop representations of the “Dirty South.” But what he does in his commentary on “Long Black Song” is invaluable, because it validates the unending quest for the pre-future in our study of Richard Wright. Read Shaping Words to Fit the Soul and be renewed.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
April 4, 2012
New Publication
Posted on March 6, 2012 | No Comments
The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932-1950 by Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage was released in late 2011 by Rutgers University Press.
This dynamic reappraisal of a neglected period in African American cultural history examines Black Chicago’s “Renaissance” through richly anecdotal profiles of such figures as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Charles White, Gordon Parks, Horace Cayton, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, and Katherine Dunham. Coming of age during the hard Depression years and in the wake of the Great Migration, these artists and intellectuals produced works of literature, music, and visual art fully comparable in distinction and scope to the achievements of their counterparts in 1920s Harlem.
The Muse in Bronzeville will interest both the scholar and general reader and is suitable for use in twentieth-century American and African American studies courses.
The book is available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online booksellers, but the best price for the paperback is $23.96, when ordered directly from Rutgers UP. Order online at http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/the_muse_of_bronzeville.html. Enter discount code 02AAAA11 . That code entitles you to free shipping and 20% off the list price of $29.95. There is also an electronic edition in Kindle, available from Amazon and priced at $16.47.
Early responses to the book have been very positive:
• Charles Bethea, curator of the DuSable Museum of African American History, comments: “Finally setting the record straight, the book brings to the forefront the cultural awakening of black consciousness exploding in the Midwest during the first half of the 20th-century. Bone and Courage masterfully blend the history of Chicago’s South Side as the incubator of cultural expression and the black aesthetic in page-turning prose.”
• Eminent historian David Levering Lewis writes: “Richard Courage’s monumental The Muse in Bronzeville completes Robert Bone’s ambitious Chicago project and provides a shift of focus in African American literary scholarship. Chicago finally emerges as the vibrant counterpart of the Harlem Renaissance.”
• Distinguished literary scholar Amritjit Singh observes: “The Muse synthesizes wide-ranging material . . . into a compelling critical narrative. . . . Bone and Courage move astutely from close readings of novels and poems to richly informative analyses of musical performances and visual works of art. . . . The authors have unearthed historical gems that extend or challenge our understanding of how various actors situated themselves during this turbulent period.”
Richard Wright Screen Test for “Native Son”
Posted on October 20, 2011 | No Comments
Richard Wright’s screen test for the role of “Bigger Thomas” in Native Son (1948).
3 scenes, 2 takes each, approximately 7 1/2 minutes
“Black Boy and American Hunger: Richard Wright, Revision, and Narrative Systems”
Posted on October 20, 2011 | No Comments
John Young, Professor of English at Marshall University, shares the abstract of the paper he will present at the forthcoming MLA Annual Convention, January 5-8, 2012.
For 32 years, everyone read the wrong version of Black Boy. The only publicly available version was that which Wright revised at the request of the Book-of-the-Month Club and his influential editor at Harper & Brothers. American Hunger, originally the second half of Wright’s autobiography, finally appeared on its own in 1977 (though sections had been serialized in 1944 and 1945, surrounding Black Boy’s original publication in the last year of the war). HarperCollins, the current instantiation of Wright’s original publisher, now issues the “Restored” Black Boy, with revisions for the first editions now relegated to notes. While the rhetorical marker of a “Restored” edition bestows agency on the editor’s recovery of a lost original, the “Abridged” designation elides the Book Club’s consistent muting of Wright’s sexual and political content, as if the manuscripts had simply run long.
Zen and the Art of Richard Wright
Posted on October 2, 2011 | No Comments
The Wright Connection is pleased to present the essay “Zen and the Art of Richard Wright” by Terri Havens. Mr. Havens is currently completing his undergraduate work at Wyoming Correctional Facility, under the direction of Professor Robert Butler, Canisius College, Buffalo, New York. When he is released from prison, Mr. Havens intends to pursue graduate work.
An excerpt from “Zen and the Art of Richard Wright”:
Time exists for us because we measure it vicariously by observing the movement of things. Consequently, however, we arbitrarily designate point As and point Bs along a seemingly linear construct. And herein lies the problem: we tend to merge these pairs of points and make out of them destinations—that follow one after the other in endless procession—instead of admiring the transitions and transformations these junctions actually represent. Through words Richard Wright would ultimately find freedom, but when we look at his mind’s—and subsequently his craft’s—journey through the metamorphoses of understanding the magic, power, and catharsis of literary expression, we can see a very logical progression that redirects his journey inward with nary a destination in sight.
Through a succession of experiences involving the assimilation and employment of words—or lack thereof, as in the beginning of Black Boy (American Hunger)—Wright shows us this transformation in stark detail albeit with the benefit of hindsight. By focusing on seemingly separate instances throughout his autobiography, the reader can holistically discern a ‘quasi-Sidharthean’ quest for enlightenment. For Wright this takes varying forms and degrees of freedom from an alternation of oppressive environments contained in an early twentieth-century South, an urbanized North of the Twenties and Thirties, and self as positioned not only against environment, but also against his own understanding of self—a oneness only hinted at in Existentialism and exemplified in Zen Buddhism. This transition, and thus his autobiography, would end not in American Hunger but in the thousands of haiku poems he would pen in the last eighteen months of his life under the auspices of self-imposed exile in France.
Read the entire essay: Zen and the Art of Richard Wright by Terri Havens
More on Professor Robert Butler’s experience teaching Wright to correctional facility inmates.
Teaching Richard Wright in Prison
Posted on September 19, 2011 | No Comments
Guest blogger Professor Robert Butler joins us from Canisius College in Buffalo, New York.
Since 1976 Canisius College, along with Niagara University and Daemen College, have sponsored a degree-granting college program in prison called the Consortium of the Niagara Frontier. For many years we had sites at Attica, Collins, and Wyoming correctional facilities but budget cuts from state and federal governments have now reduced our program to a single site at Wyoming Correctional Facility, a medium security prison located directly in back of Attica Correctional Facility.
Since 1977 I have taught on a very regular basis in this program, offering a wide variety of courses ranging from English 101 and 102 to Modern American Literature, The City in American Literature, and American Autobiography. I have frequently taught works by Richard Wright in all of these courses and have been richly rewarded as a teacher by the insight and passion which these prison students bring to their study of Wright’s books, especially Native Son, Black Boy (American Hunger), and “The Man Who Lived Underground.” Over the years, I have come to believe strongly that Consortium students have a special understanding of Wright’s writing and I have learned much about Wright from them.
In Native Son Wright had Bigger Thomas characterize his life as “like living in jail” (20). And in Black Boy (American Hunger) he remarked that the South was a place that trapped him in a world “ringed by walls” (296) and also “imprisoned” the “soul” (40) of his father. But his own ambitious program of self-education which enabled him to read books by writers such as Dreiser, Mencken, Dostoevsky, Zola, and Conrad, released him from this prison, providing him with “new ways of looking and seeing” (294), creating a liberating “new life” (296) for him. Many of the students whom I have taught in prison have described their participation in our college program in strikingly similar terms. Stephen Fraley, who completed his bachelor’s degree at Attica, once revealed in an essay on Native Son that “I was rescued in prison. I came back from the dead.” Lawrence Wilson, who also completed his college program at Attica, revealed in a graduation address that “The education we receive in the college program at Attica is an education that is experienced, not from afar, but as an intimate part of our being and living.” Hassan Linnen, who received his college diploma while incarcerated at Collins Correctional Facility noted in his graduation address that
The Consortium is more than a program, more than a school. It is a place I shall always remember as a safe harbor in the sea that my ignorance reigned over with its tidal waves of hopelessness and shame. I could have spent my time in the yard playing basketball or lifting weights. But, no! I spent my time in the cocoon which determination, opportunity, and the Consortium had spun.
New Publication
Posted on August 10, 2011 | No Comments
The Wright Connection is pleased to announce the publication of Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century, edited by Alice Mikal Craven and William E. Dow (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Gathering some of the most important Wright scholarship in the world, along with perspectives from emerging Wright critics, Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century, explores new themes and theoretical orientations.
Essays center on modernism, racism and spatial dimensions, the transnational and political Wright, Wright and class, Wright and the American 1950s and 1960s, and some of the first analyses of Wright’s recently published A Father’s Law (2008). This dynamic collection combines literary and cultural theory with methods of archival research to provide an expanded vision of Wright’s impact on thinking in the twenty-first century.
Wright Bibliography Resumes
Posted on June 30, 2011 | No Comments
The Richard Wright Circle is pleased to announce its resumption of providing updated Wright bibliography for users of the WRIGHT CONNECTION. Both the Circle and the Project on the History of Black Writing are very grateful to Marilyn Lee, Serials Librarian at Xavier University (New Orleans), for her initiative in continuing the bibliographic work begun by Keneth Kinnamon , who until his death was the Circle’s official bibliographer.
The new bibliography will continue to reflect Kinnamon’s belief that all published mentions of Richard Wright and his works must be documented.
We invite users of WRIGHT CONNECTION to submit complete citations in MLA format for items not listed here for the period 2004-2011. Contributors will be acknowledged by having their initials appear after the entry or entries they send. Entries may be sent to wrightconnection@ku.edu
Sincerely,
Maryemma Graham and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. for the Richard Wright Circle
South Carolina students connect with Black Boy
Posted on June 29, 2011 | No Comments
Byron Brown, Summer 2010 Wright Connection Institute participant, and his students connect to Black Boy in South Carolina:
During the fall semester of 2010, I had the opportunity to teach Black Boy to my students at Scott’s Branch High School. I teach students who are on poverty level and below actual reading grade levels. We began exploring Black Boy by the teacher writing the word “hunger” on the board. As the leading facilitator in the room, I asked each student to say what comes to mind when they hear the word “hunger.” I wrote each word on the blackboard that the students called: “poverty,” “homeless,” “fatherless,” “struggles” and “deprived” were the popular concepts being stated. Then, I asked what it means to be hungry. Several students answered: “to be without,” “to desire something greater,” and “having an urge for something.” As the teacher, I then said “good” to all the students. I told them that we were going to read about a man who had undergone basically everything they stated. Immediately the students’ interest rose.
Half Centennial Tribute Poster
Posted on June 16, 2011 | No Comments
November 30, 2010 marked the 50th anniversary of the passing of Richard Wright. In Paris, France, where he died, many gathered at his former home, his favorite places and his burial site at Pere Lachaise Cemetery. Julia Browne, CEO and Founder of Walking the Spirit Tours, collected images from some of those in Paris to celebrate Wright’s half centennial and created this Wright Tribute Poster from that event.