[ By: Morgan McComb ] Last fall, during HBW’s 2020 Black Literary Suite “Black Writing in Reel Time,” we received the news from Julia Wright, regarding the forthcoming publication of unpublished novel by her father Richard Wright (1908-1960). A portion of that novel had first appeared in 1942, but most readers first learned of it in Wright’s short story collection, “Eight Men” (1960). We are […]
In August 2020, members of the Richard Wright family wrote statements regarding the social unrest our country has faced and shared them in the “Richard Wright News Bulletin.” In honor of Richard Wright’s 112th birthday on September 4, 2020, HBW begins a three-part series as an inter-generational family tribute to Wright’s legacy. Part II I am grateful to George Floyd for reminding me of an […]
In August 2020, members of the Richard Wright family wrote statements regarding the social unrest our country has faced and shared them in the “Richard Wright News Bulletin.” In honor of Richard Wright’s 112th birthday on September 4, 2020, HBW begins a three-part series as an inter-generational family tribute to Wright’s legacy. Part I A world ago, before COVID-19, before Ahmaud Arbery, before Breonna Taylor, […]
[By: DeAsia Paige] On Tuesday, February 18, Harper Perennial released a new edition of Richard Wright’s classic memoir Black Boy to commemorate the 75th anniversary of that work’s publication. The coming-of-age story, originally published in 1945, chronicles Wright’s upbringing in the Jim Crow South, his eventual move to Chicago and evolution as a major writer through his involvement with the Communist Party. Black Boy explores […]
[By: Jerry W. Ward, Jr.] Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States, celebrated his 208th birthday on February 12, 2017. He did not fail to inform everyone that he was of the party of Donald John Trump. In the first half of the 20th century, a number of Negroes and their non-Negro allies esteemed Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. They possessed fewer facts about Lincoln’s dream that the […]
[By Jerry W. Ward, Jr.] Professor Tsunehiko Kato’s eloquent essay on the Japan Black Studies Association (JBSA) provides relief from the glut of always already interpellations of the face (and other body parts) of the Other who occupies an interstitial transnational location in the postcolonial diasporic interrogation which is a simulacrum for academic discourses in conversation with postmodern debris of gendered desires. In Professor Kato’s […]
The Project on the History of Black Writing is pleased to welcome our colleagues from the Japanese Black Studies Association, one of the oldest professional organizations in the field. [By Tsunehiko Kato] Japan Black Studies Association was founded in 1954, the year of the Supreme Court decision in America. But it was not the founders’ intention to be timely. Rather, the establishment had its own […]