[By: Dr. Maryemma Graham] Toni Morrison is the greatest novelist of our times, but more and more, I find myself drawn to the wisdom in her essays, like those in Playing in the Dark or earlier works like The Site of Memory and the brutal honesty revealed in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken.” The Origin of Others is her latest testament to the truth of our time, reaffirming her […]
[By: Jennifer M. Wilmot] Recently, KU became embroiled in a public debate over free speech and public art when Governor Jeff Colyer demanded an art installation at The Commons (Spooner Hall) be removed, which Chancellor Douglas Girod then complied. The piece “Untitled (Flag 2)” by German-born, New York-based artist Josephine Meckseper, was met with fierce and swift backlash from conservative politicians across the state. Proclaiming […]
Thanks to a Digital Extension Grant of $150,000 from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Project on the History of Black Writing is advancing our Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) and making more Black novels digitally available. Read more here. Congratulations to the BBIP team!
[By: Christopher Peace] Lillvis, Kristen. Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination. University of Georgia Press, 2017. Kristen Lillvis’s Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination explores posthumanism’s fusion of the body, flesh, gender and race through the works of various neo-slave narratives and contemporary performance artists. This “assemblage of ideas, material, and beings” speculates the future and positionality of the Black female imagination. Lillivis […]
[by: Tony Harris] We are, quite likely, familiar with the statement, “If I have seen far, it is because I am perched upon the shoulders of giants.” Dr. Ward (HBW Board Member Emeritus) pinpoints seven of several pillars whose writing could be thought to undergird the work the Project on the History of Black Writing has accomplished throughout its 35-year existence. He notes also the […]
[by: Morgan McComb] Before you head to Hanif Abdurraqib’s reading tonight, check out this review of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us and get your tickets here. Sometimes you read books that make you think, and then sometimes you read books that make you feel; this one does both. Abdurraqib’s essays give you just enough of the personal, but once he draws you in, […]
[By: Anthony Boynton] If no other moment during my time in Lawrence has shown me what freedom of expression and freedom of speech means, including how positionalities directly influence their manifestation, Dr. Eve L. Ewing’s recent visit to KU did so. On January. 30th, the Lawrence community gathered together in some amazing ways to share and celebrate poetry at “Mic Supremacy” which featured the award-winning […]