Haley Reading Group: “The Lost Girls”

[The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2016)]

By Rae’Jean Spears

“Women with autism are fundamentally different from men with autism. Autism’s core deficits may be the same for both, but when the symptoms intersect with gender, the lived experience of a woman with autism can be dramatically different from that of a man with the same condition.” 

This quote by Aporva Mandavilli, from her article “The Lost Girls,” discusses how medical professionals came to recognize that men and women who have autism are affected in different ways.

As Mandavilli’s above quote reveals, autism becomes different for individuals once gender is added to the equation. This was noteworthy as it provided the aim of the entire piece: the difference of autism between men and women is a major issue that has only recently started gaining the attention of medical professionals for research.

After reading Mandavilli’s article, what about Maya’s case with autism stood out to you? Or, what got your attention concerning gender differences and autism? Please provide a page number citation.

Digital Humanities Club: Weekly reflections Spring 2018

Each week Rae'Jean Spears, a graduate student working with our digital humanities club, produces reflections about the activities.

[Related: 2017 weekly reflections]

Week #3 reflection:

It was another exciting week with the weekly Digital Humanities Club. Because the students who are participating in the program have been with us for nearly five months, we are seeing ways each week to improve the individual experience of each student. This week, students were strategically paired with undergraduate students and there was a breakthrough in some of the audio produced as a result. I look forward to seeing how we continue to better understand the students so that we can ensure that they are receiving the most out of their own individual experiences.

Week #2 reflection:

This week proved to be another good week for the Digital Humanities Club. Students in the room worked on two different projects, but all had the same goal of combining audio and poetry. This week, we had students listen to other samples before beginning their own which seemed to pull out a competitive spirit in them. They worked really hard to try and “beat” what they heard and kept asking if their sound was better. We can definitely conclude that they push themselves a bit harder when it seems as if there is a competition at hand.

Week #1 reflection:

Week 1 back with the students in the Digital Humanities club went well. At first glance, it seemed as if they were quite excited about returning back for the program and it's fulfilling to know that we have created an enjoyable space for them. Also, when it came to creating mixed audio files, they all seemed to be a bit more outspoken than last semester by offering suggestions for the future. After this week's session, I'm excited to continue this semester and watch how their creative geniuses continue to grow.

Related:
• The East St. Louis Digital Humanities Club Spring 2018

Black boys and audio production

High school student participating in DH after-school program

Until I started receiving guidance from my younger brother Kenton about his experiences studying and teaching rap courses, I hadn't paid close enough attention to producers in rap. I teach rap courses too, but my training in literary studies and my background in poetry perhaps led me to privilege the lyrics and downplay production. Thankfully, with Kenton's nudging, my considerations of production began evolving.

Back in the day, when I would meet with collegiate black men and black boys at the high school where I volunteer, I would ask "how many of you write raps?" Some hands would go up here and there. Now, I ask an additional question: "how many of you produce music and beats?" That question creates new openings and is ultimately more inclusive of the diverse artistic practices of the guys.

Since last fall, I've been working with East St. Louis Digital Humanities Club -- an after-school program for high school students that raises awareness concerning technology. We've been primarily working with audio production. I present recordings of African American poets reading their works, and participating high school students create mixes featuring the poems and poem excerpts using beats and special effects.

High school student editing audio

The core participants are black boys, and on some occasions a black girl attends as well. Only one of the boys considers himself a rapper, but now all of the guys have been inclined to view themselves as kinds of producers or audio designers. As students in a conventional classroom, the boys might receive assignments to produce written responses to poems, but in this after-school program, they respond to or really contribute to and rework lines of poetry through audio compositions.

Moving forward, it'll be interesting to see how the identities of "producer" and "audio designer" complements how these black boys view themselves and their technological capabilities. Further, given the small number of women as producers in the recording industry, I hope we can support our black girl participant and encourage others to become involved.

Related:
• The East St. Louis Digital Humanities Club Spring 2018

Digital Humanities Club: Week 2

On January 24, for the East St. Louis Digital Humanities Club, we continued working with audio mixes of poems by Robert Hayden and Elizabeth Alexander. We spent time editing and really trying to improve the overall quality of the productions.

I've been pushing the team leaders to become more active in making suggestions, as it's easy for the high school students to tune everything out as they work. They're using headphones and sometimes get caught up in the details of the sounds and plans they have in their own heads. I realize, though, that beyond the technology of the program, really what's crucial are the conversations we have overall and in the small teams. So more conversation, more conversation, more conversation.

Week #2 reflection from Rae'Jean Spears:

This week proved to be another good week for the Digital Humanities Club. Students in the room worked on two different projects, but all had the same goal of combining audio and poetry. This week, we had students listen to other samples before beginning their own which seemed to pull out a competitive spirit in them. They worked really hard to try and “beat” what they heard and kept asking if their sound was better. We can definitely conclude that they push themselves a bit harder when it seems as if there is a competition at hand.

Related:
• The East St. Louis Digital Humanities Club Spring 2018

Haley Reading Group: Sheri Fink's Life, Death, and Grim Routine Fill the Day at a Liberian Ebola Clinic

[The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2015)]

Rae'Jean Spears

Sheri Fink’s article “Life, Death, and Grim Routine Fill the Day at a Liberian Ebola Clinic” focuses on the usual daily routine at a Liberian hospital that treats Ebola infected patients. Fink gives an in-depth account of how daily operations run, giving the reader a full understanding of how Ebola affects individuals, even those actually serving in the medical field.

Fink’s description of the patients in the hospital was especially enlightening. Fink notes one patient’s feelings towards dying of Ebola when the patient expressed that “he would rather die from a knife than from Ebola. Two days later, the disease killed him” (64). This point indicates how Ebola could cause an especially painful death and the extremes that patients were willing to avoid it.

After reading Fink’s article, what was one point concerning any patient’s reaction to having or possibly having Ebola that caught your attention? Why did that scene stand out to you? Please provide a page number citation.

Haley Reading Group: The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic

[The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2016)]

Rae'Jean Spears

Amanda Gefter’s article, "The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic," gives a biographical sketch of scientist Walter Pitts. Pitts, a self-educated, extremely intelligent man, devoted much of his life to logic and how logic influenced mechanisms of the brain. Unfortunately, a failed friendship and new advances in science challenged his core ideas and sent him into a downward depression, ultimately causing his work to never be finished or published.

Gefter’s discussion of the ending of Wiener and Pitts' relationship was especially interesting. Gefter writes “for Pitts, it wasn’t merely a loss. It was something far worse than that: it defied logic” (61). This is interesting as it highlights that Pitts’ entire life was truly devoted to logic, as something that went against logic essentially ruined his life.

After reading Gefter’s article, at what point of Pitts career did you recognize that he was solely dependent on logic? How did it contribute to his career as a whole? Please provide a page number citation.

Spring 2018--Haley Reading Groups

This semester, one of our Haley Reading Groups will continue covering The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2015) edited by Rebecca Skloot and The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2016) edited by Amy Stewart.

• January 24 Amanda Gefter's "The man who tried to redeem the world with logic” (53 – 65) -- 2016
• January 24 Sheri Fink’s “Life, death, and grim routine fill the day at a Liberian Ebola Clinic” (58 – 64) -- 2015
• January 31 Apoorva Mandavilli’s “The Lost Girls” (165 – 181) -- 2016
• February 7 Eli Kintisch's “Into the Maelstrom” (154 – 162) -- 2015
• February 14 Charles C. Mann’s “Solar, Eclipsed” (182 – 194) -- 2016
• February 21 Sam Kean’s “Phineas Gage, Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient” (134 – 148) -- 2015
• February 28 Rinku Patel’s “Bugged” (231 – 239) -- 2016
• March 14 Jourdan Imani Keith’s “At Risk" & “Desegregating Wilderness” (149 - 150) & (151 –153) -- 2015
• March 21 Gaurav Raj Telhan's “Begin Cutting" (259 – 269) -- 2016
• March 28 Dennis Overbye’s “A Pioneer as Elusive as His Particle” (207 – 211) -- 2015
• April 4 Katie Worth’s “Telescope Wars” (270 – 282) -- 2016
• April 11 Michael Specter’s “Partial Recall” (244 – 260) -- 2015
• April 18 Reflections (2015) and Reflections (2016)

Related:
• Haley Reading Groups

Amiri Baraka's rap style and rejection of poet voice

People often make the point that the Black Arts Movement, a politically charged artistic and cultural enterprise of the 1960s and 1970s, served as a precursor to hip hop. I mostly agree. What's less discussed is how particular poets developed styles that corresponded directly to what we witness with rappers.

Three poems by Amiri Baraka -- "Dope," "Digging Max," and "Jungle Jim Flunks His Screen Test" -- often put me in the mindset of some of my favorite freestyles in rap music. Notably, Baraka, a leading force in 1960s and 1970s black creative culture, produced those three poems after the Black Arts era.

Baraka's extended, somewhat uninterrupted flow in performances of "Dope," "Digging Max," and "Jungle Jim Flunks His Screen Test" is a powerful display of a lyricist demonstrating his ability to run down a string of words at fairly rapid paces.

"Dope" is approximately 900 words, "Digging Max" is  about 444 words, and "Jungle Jim Flunks His Screen Test" is about 683 words. Baraka doesn't slowly and carefully read through each word, which is by far the norm for many contemporary print-based poets. They perform what is known as "poet voice," an approach to reading characterized by a monotonous incantation. Poet voice is linked to European church practices, which makes the irony of Baraka rejecting that approach in his poem "Dope" all the more ironic and fantastic.

In performances of "Dope," Baraka shouts, makes wordless phrasings, moves dramatically. He even includes the performance note to himself in the poem that reads "(Goes on babbling, and wailing, jerking in pathocrazy grin stupor)." Baraka mocks and draws on the performance styles of black preachers. Doing so allows him to emphatically reject poet voice and embrace a style that is more in line with what we view in rap freestyles.

Show up to a rap set and try poet voice, and you'll likely be booed off the stage. By contrast, if you get up showing the kind of breath control and powerful, varied cadence that Baraka does in "Dope," Digging Max," and "Jungle Jim Flunks His Screen Test," and you'll receive widespread praise. Rap discourse respects and values the expertise of talented verbal artists.

If you listen to the online version of "Jungle Jim Flunks His Screen Test," you won't catch the full range of his delivery capabilities. Here, he's reading somewhat slow and deliberate to match his accompanying saxophone player. I saw Baraka read the poem live. Let me tell you, while it took him 8-plus minutes to read the same poem with the saxophonist, he read it in just over 4 minutes when he set his own pace. In other words, he ran through those same 680 words in half the time.

Baraka's rapid pace, varied cadence, intentional shifts in tonalities, and dramatized presentation style align him with rappers in ways that is far less common in the world of formal poetry.

Related:
• A Notebook on Amiri Baraka

Poet Voice

Poet Voice is a phrase used to describe a somewhat pervasive style of reading out loud that is characterized by a kind of soft, calm and slow prayerful approach. The style is employed by a large number of poets.

As noted by scholar Marit MacArthur, the phrase refers to:

monotonous incantation, popularly known as “poet voice,” which is characterized by: (1) the repetition of a falling cadence within a narrow range of pitch; (2) a flattened affect that suppresses idiosyncratic expression of subject matter in favor of a restrained, earnest tone; and (3) the subordination of conventional intonation patterns dictated by syntax, and of the poetic effects of line length and line breaks, to the prevailing cadence.

Digital Humanities Club: Week 1

We're back with our East St. Louis Digital Humanities Club. We had our first session of the year on January 17.

Students began working on audio mixes of a poem on Frederick Douglass by Robert Hayden and an excerpt from Elizabeth Alexander's "The Venus Hottentot." For the first month or so, we're taking a look at audio recordings related to enslavement and struggles for freedom. We'll work to include use music and other sound recordings to enhance the recorded words.

Later in the semester, we'll share what we produce with various audiences. In the meantime, we'll work to sharpen our skills.

Week #1 reflection from Rae'Jean Spears:

Week 1 back with the students in the Digital Humanities club went well. At first glance, it seemed as if they were quite excited about returning back for the program and it's fulfilling to know that we have created an enjoyable space for them. Also, when it came to creating mixed audio files, they all seemed to be a bit more outspoken than last semester by offering suggestions for the future. After this week's session, I'm excited to continue this semester and watch how their creative geniuses continue to grow.

Related:
• The East St. Louis Digital Humanities Club Spring 2018

The East St. Louis Digital Humanities Club Spring 2018

This semester, I'm continuing my coordinating work with the East St. Louis Digital Humanities Club--an extracurricular program. The participants in the club -- a graduate student, undergraduates, and high school students -- have been working on audio mixes as part of a larger process of building interest and expertise in technology.

[Related: The East St. Louis Digital Humanities Club]

Spring 2018: Summaries of activities:
• Week 1: January 17
• Week 2: January 24
• Week 3: January 31
• Week 4: February 7
• Week 5: February 14
• Week 6: February 21
• Week 7: February 28
• Week 8: March 14
• Week 9: March 21
• Week 10: April 4
• Week 11: April 11
• Week 12: April 18
• Week 13: April 25

• Reflections by Rae'Jean Spears

Samples of work
• Jay's and Louis's Black Panther Interpretations

Exhibit 
• Silent listening session in East St. Louis

Observations
• Black boys and audio production
• Scenes from the East St. Louis Digital Humanities Club: Weeks 1 - 7
• Digital Humanities, side-by-side learning environments for black boys

-------------------------
This after-school DH club is an outgrowth of our larger Digital East St. Louis, a collaborative project between SIUE's STEM Center and the IRIS Center. The project is supported by a National Science Foundation ITEST grant. The project is directed by STEM Center director Sharon Locke, and involves Jessica DeSpain, Liza Cummings, Georgia Bracey, and Matthew Johnson.

Related:
• Notebook on Digital East St. Louis

#TheJayZMixtape

#TheJayZMixtape

Domestic and International Publication Date: January 4, 2018
Digital | ISBN 13: 978-1-946011-02-2 | ISBN 10: 1-946011-02-9

Thejayzmixtape.com

Jay-Z is not only one of the most popular and prolific rap artists of all time, but he reigns among the canon of artists in hip hop and contemporary American music whose work is now engaged by scholars as much as general audiences to shed light on American culture and society. In #TheJayZMixtape, Kenton Rambsy takes us on a journey through Jay-Z’s career and sheds light on his storytelling style, extensive musical collaborations, and connection to black music history.

Drawing on a rich dataset that includes lyrics from 189 songs across 12 solo albums by Jay-Z, Rambsy uses computational approaches to explore the Brooklyn-born rapper’s musical influences and allusions to other black artists and historical figures. Rambsy’s investigation interweaves innovative digital humanities techniques with the tradition of African American literary analysis of major black authors to reveal intriguing new dimensions to Jay-Z’s body of work. Visually engaging, and full of interactive ways to explore Jay-Z’s oeuvre, #TheJayZMixtape not only delivers an analysis of Jay-Z’s music, but also makes a compelling case for Jay-Z’s place in the greater African American literary tradition.

#TheJayZMixtape is the inaugural publication of the AFRO Publishing Without Walls Series and is published by Publishing Without Walls (PWW). PWW is a collaborative project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is part of the Illinois Open Publishing Network.

About the author: Kenton Rambsy is currently an assistant professor of African American literature and digital humanities at the University of Texas at Arlington. His teaching includes a course titled “#theJayZclass,” a digital humanities course positions the prolific rapper in a broader literary continuum of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical works.

Related:
• A Notebook on Jay-Z

A Eastern Illinois University visit prompts reflections on Richard Wright

On Thursday, during my time at Eastern Illinois University, I sat in on Tim Engles's "Multicultural American Literatures" class. Engles was covering Richard Wright's Savage Holiday (1954) -- a work that is less well-known among the writer's more famous books like Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945). Listening as Engles facilitated a discussion of Savage Holiday with his students took me back more than 20 years ago when I enrolled in a Richard Wright course.

In that undergrad class, we read Lawd Today!, Black Power, The Color Curtain, Pagan Spain, Eight Men, The Outsider. and Savage Holiday. (We were expected to have already read Native Son, Black Boy, and Uncle Tom's Children prior to taking the course). I went to an HBCU, so the classroom where I covered Savage Holiday contained only black students, while Engles's class contained mostly white students.

The main character of Savage Holiday is a white man, which might also explain why the novel has gained far less attention. The class at Eastern on Thursday had me thinking about the different and overlapping responses black students and white students might have to a book with a white protagonist by African American author.

I've also been thinking about keywords and concepts in my classes, and Engles's approach caught my attention. He would raise and define different terms as he discussed the novel with the students. At times, he would ask for volunteers to define concepts that emerged.

When students mentioned uncommon terms during their own comments, he prompted them to define the term. One student, for instance, mentioned "meta-cognition " as she spoke, and Engles encouraged her to define the term for the class. I'm looking forward to incorporating some of what I learned from the experience of sitting in on Engles's class into my own sessions.

Speaking of looking forward, Engles has an article on Wright's Savage Holiday, which will appear in his forthcoming book, White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature. 

Related:
• A Notebook on Richard Wright

Black fathers, African American literary studies, and special collections

A few years back, in the African American literature classes for first-year students I teach, I would pretend to become momentarily forgetful about something. In the middle of making comments on various subjects, I'd interrupt myself and go, "ohh, what's the name of that book, really important book, that deals with black folks and jail? I can't remember the name and author. Everybody has read it. Uhh...it's....uhhh?"

Without fail, a young black man in the class would raise his hand and go, "You mean The New Jim Crow, right?"

And another young brother would add, "by Michelle Alexander."

"That's it," I respond. "That's it."

I conducted this mini-experiment several times for a few years. I was intrigued that subsequent classes of young black men -- a population whom colleagues and university officials continually express sincere concerns about related to graduation and retention rates -- would always know Alexander's book. I'd follow up and ask them how they became familiar with Alexander's The New Jim Crow, and those young black men always gave the same answer: "my dad."

Look, when and if we took a more active approach to considering black students in African American literary studies, my guess is that we would hear more about the positive role of black fathers in the intellectual development of their children. (For the devil's advocates out there, yes, I realize there are some bad black fathers out there. I'm also fully aware of good black mothers as well as good white and Asian parents and so forth. This blog entry isn't about them).

"Oh, your dad told you about The New Jim Crow," I'd say to the guys pointing out that common source. They'd respond with a narrative that included a line about how "my father reads books like that, and would talk to me about'em." Over the years, I've heard and thought about many of these black fathers--relatively few of whom hold college degrees. I've thought about them reading books like that, and I began to imagine a section or special collection of a library. "You've read The New Jim Crow," librarians would say when you entered this imagined space, "well, you should go check out our special collection over there. It has other books like that."

It's not just the guys who inform me about how their fathers and their special collections influenced them. In the rap classes I teach, I often encounter young black women who are especially well-versed on rap music. When I ask them questions about how they first began learning so much about music, they usually identify their fathers.

Those young women and black men in the classes with expanded knowledge of rap will cite their dads, and in the narratives they share, they feel obligated to add something along the lines of, "and it's not just rap. He listens to all kinds of other music too."

Who are these rap-listening, The New Jim Crow-reading black men who've bestowed their children with a special consciousness on a variety of musics and books? Are they aware of how important their special collections are to the intellectual development of their sons and daughters? And who would those black fathers cite as sources of their knowledge?

Related:
• A Notebook on Collegiate Students

A notebook on the receptions of Ta-Nehisi Coates & Colson Whitehead: a presentation at Eastern Illinois University

On Thursday, January 18, I'll give a presentation at Eastern Illinois University on the remarkable receptions of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Colson Whitehead. I've followed their careers for over a decade now, and tracing their increased popularity in recent years has been especially intriguing.

The presentation will concentrate on:

• the extraordinary responses to Coates's and Whitehead's recent works
• the implications of outlier black writers receiving remarkable receptions
• the reality of widespread indifference to publications
• histories of receptions to black writers

Below, I provide links to various aspects of my presentation.

General
• Highlights in the history of remarkable reception of black writers
• Publishing and indifference (coming soon)

Noations on Whitehead's work
• The Coverage of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad
• Colson Whitehead and the New York Times
• A print-only excerpt from Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad in the New York Times

Notations on Coates
• Ta-Nehisi Coates and Toni Morrison's mutally beneficial endorsements
• Common Read Projects and Between the World and Me
• Coverage of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Between the World and Me

Related:
• A Notebook on Ta-Nehisi Coates
• A Notebook on Colson Whitehead

Highlights in the history of remarkable reception of black writers

My presentation at Eastern Illinois University on remarkable receptions concentrates on Ta-Nehisi Coates and Colson Whitehead. However, I've taken note of unusually expansive feedback to a few other select authors over the years. Here's a brief, though hardly exhaustive checklist.

1940: The publication of his Richard Wright's Native Son was crucial in making him one of the most critically acclaimed black writers of all time. Keneth Kinnamon's A Richard Wright Bibliography: Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary, 1933-1982 (1988) and Richard Wright: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism and Commentary, 1983-2003 (2005) together contain more than 21,000 annotated items on Wright.

1952: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man also made him and his work prominent subjects in American literature.

1960: Although Frederick Douglass's book The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was first published in 1845, the book's frequent reprinting beginning in 1960 and on to the present has been vital to the popular reception that the book has enjoyed for nearly 60 years now.

1965: The development of concerted efforts among poets, editors, illustrators, musicians, and others during the 1960s led to what is known as the Black Arts Movement, one of the most widely discussed moments and enterprises in African American literary history.

1970s: Although Zora Neale Hurston first published her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937, beginning in the mid-1970s, the book and author gained renewed interest and has remained exceptionally popular among audiences.

1985: The film adaption of Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982) greatly expanded interest in her and her work, and assisted in advancing interest in the transformation of African American novels into films.

1987: Toni Morrison published Beloved, and in January 1988, a group of black writers produced a strong public statement supporting her work. In 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and shortly thereafter, she became and has remained our most critically acclaimed black writer.

Late 1990s - present: Over the last 20 years, an increasing number of African American poets have won prestigious honors for their works. While there have always been exceptionally talented black poets, there has never been a moment with so many securing such a large number of awards, fellowships, and important academic appointments.

2012: Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow was first published in 2010, and the book became widely popular in 2012, after the paperback version was published was frequently read and discussed in various communities.    

2014-present: The publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Case for Reparations" (2014), Between the World and Me (2015), the Black Panther comic book series (2016-present), and We Were Eight Years in Power (2017), along with the extensive related commentary, made him one of the most prominent writers in the country.

2016: Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, which was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey and earned the author a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize and many glowing reviews, greatly increased the author's national and international visibility.

Related:
• A notebook on the receptions of Ta-Nehisi Coates & Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead and the New York Times

The big story when Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016) was published was that the work was an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection. That story was, no doubt, important, and it may have overshadowed some other fascinating story lines associated with the promotion of Whitehead's novel. In particular, less than a week after Winfrey's announcement of The Underground Railroad as a selection, the New York Times published a print-only, stand-alone, 16,000-world excerpt from the novel.

The production was an extraordinary production, especially during our current age of digital productions. Devoting so much attention to an individual author and his work was remarkable.

From a page of the New York Times print-only, stand-alone excerpt of The Underground Railroad

The Times has provided longstanding coverage of Whitehead and his books. All of his novels and his two nonfiction works were reviewed in the newspaper. In addition, the Times has provided additional coverage on Whitehead and published his reviews and essays.

The special stand-alone excerpt from The Underground Railroad was, in some respects, an extension of the previous support that the paper had offered the novelist for more over a decade and a half.

Related:
• A notebook on the receptions of Ta-Nehisi Coates & Colson Whitehead

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Toni Morrison's mutally beneficial endorsements

Shortly before the release of Between the World and Me in 2015, the book's publisher released a book blurb by Toni Morrison about Coates and his book. She praised Coates's work and linked him to James Baldwin. Morrison's assessment of Coates would stick,, particularly her suggestion that Coates was filling "the intellectual void" left for her after Baldwin's 1987 death.

As arguably the most critically acclaimed living novelist, Morrison hardly needs endorsements from younger writers. However, her support for Coates, whose fame quickly rose, also ensured that Morrison would benefit in some ways from the association. A large body of commentary was being produced on Coates, and Morrison was regularly mentioned. The blurb placed Morrison in the conversation about one of the most widely discussed books in 2015.

When Morrison published The Origin of Others (2017), who was selected to write the foreword? Well, naturally one of the foremost African American writers in the world -- Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Related:
• A notebook on the receptions of Ta-Nehisi Coates & Colson Whitehead

What about black students in African American literary studies?

Black students working on tablets for activity in an African American literature course

It's possible to spend more than a decade reading scholarly articles on African American literature and see relatively little mention of black students. Scholars will offer in-depth analyses of works by Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and others. We will write about the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement. We'll discuss feminism, intersectionality, anti-black racism, and other key concepts. Yet, concentrated attention to black students is harder to come by. If you're ever interested in looking.

There are many reasons why we have little discussion of black students in the scholarly discourse. For one, scholars think of themselves as being in conversation with other scholars, which thus diminishes the impulse to write about the interests of, say, African American undergraduates, whose interests might not be thought of as advanced by comparison. Second, with so few models writing about experiences working with African American undergraduates, scholars are less inclined to do so.

And there's more. Many professors who are positioned to attend literature conferences and publish scholarship have relatively few black students, even in their African American literature courses. Professors at elite or well-resourced institutions often have lighter teaching loads and fewer African American students than professors at teaching-intensive institutions. By contrast, professors who have heavy teaching loads and work with large numbers of black students tend to have less time and resources to attend conferences and produce scholarly works. (Of course, the template established in the scholarly discourse would not prompt them or anyone to write much about working with black students).

Those are just a few reasons. I suspect there are many more reasons why we haven't seen much writing about what professors are learning and thinking with respect to black students in African American literature classrooms. Yet, we should also consider benefits.

Off the top, we could better serve the students we have and will have in the future if we had more information on what folks (professors and students) have experienced over the last approximately 40 years as courses on African American literature began to appear. We could gain a more complex sense of the field if we had more ideas about how black student interests on canonical texts diverge from the focal subjects of scholars. Over the last 25 years, for instance, we now know that scholars have been especially interested in Toni Morrison's Beloved, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Richard Wright's Native Son, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Are those works the consensus choice of our students?

African American literature courses first began being offered with regularly after the push for Black Studies courses and programs on college campuses beginning in the late 1960s. That is to say, black students were central to the rise African American literature courses. It seems ironic, if not unfortunate, that those of us teaching African American literature are devoting so little research and writing to the experiences of black students in our classrooms.

Related:
• A Notebook on Collegiate Students

Rise of the Black Panther #1: a creative approach imagining history

There was a time when discussions of "Africa" permeated African American literary studies perhaps a lot more than today. Sure, people seem to have always discussed Countee Cullen's poem "Heritage," which contained the famous refrain, "What is Africa to me?," and in "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," Langston Hughes ruminated on those essential rivers: the Congo and the Nile. Where Africa began to really appear, though, with regularly and prominence was in the creative imaginings of black American writers during the 1960s and 1970s.

There was a resurgence of black consciousness during the late 1980s and early 1990s, facilitated largely by hip hop culture, when folks sported African medallions and channeled other aspects of the continent through lyrics, fashion, and a variety of symbols.

I was thinking about the shifts in representations of Africa in African American creative and intellectual history as I read The Rise of the Black Panther #1, written by Evan Narcisse, drawn by Paul Renaud, and colored by Stephane Paitreau. Narcisse is presenting a kind of origin story to Black Panther title written by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Narcisse's and Coates's works are both set in Wakanda, the fictional African nation that is home to Black Panther. Whereas Coates's writing constitutes a kind of present-day Black Panther, Narcisse's origin story comes off as more of a history. He's imagining a past for Wakanda, while also working within the context of the Marvel universe.  

The Rise of the Black Panther does really important work extending views of the people of this most famous fictional African nation. For one, unlike the many wonderful poems and novels on Africa, the comic book form presents visual representations that complement  words. And unlike the many arresting stand-alone images of the continent, the comic book facilitates extended written narratives with a variety of characters.

Narcisse, Renaud, and Paitreau are making the most of the mixed elements of the comic book form by presenting us with so many looks and musings of a Wakandan past. In addition to seeing T'Chaka, the father of current Black Panther, T'Challa, Narcisse presents the chief scientist of Wakanda, Queen N'Yami, who was the first wife of King T'Chaka. N'Yami is T'Challa's mother, but she dies shortly after giving birth. Still, we get a chance to consider her expertise as a scientist and one of Wakanda's key dreamers.

Narcisse does something fascinating with the setup of his narrative as well. The story is narrated from the perspectives, journal entries in fact, of Queen N'Yami and then Queen Ramonda, second wife of King T'Chaka. Their entries are addressed to T'Challa. Narcisse takes us in a unique direction by centering the perspectives of those African women, who in turn inform Black Panther about his familial and national histories. In other words, Narcisse empowers us to gain knowledge about Wakanda the way T'Challa does--through the writings of his mothers.

I'm excited to witness this creative approach to imagining a fictional and powerful African history.

Related:
• Coverage on another, different run of the Black Panther
• A Notebook on Comic Books

From Amiri Baraka and Greg Tate to a generation of black men writers

People often talk about the connection between Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Baldwin. That makes sense given the epistolary setup of Coates's Between the World and Me, which was designed to echo the frame of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. Nonetheless, one of the shortcomings in discussions of Coates's work, even in positive discussions, concerns the limited amount of attention that we give to other writers whose contributions may have led us to a figure like Coates.

In this case, we could definitely do more to acknowledge the writings about music by Amiri Baraka and Greg Tate. Their works contribute to a whole network of works by black men, including Mark Anthony Neal, Kevin Young, Colson Whitehead, Brent Hayes Edwards, Coates, and many others. (There are, no doubt, a large number of non-black men who write about music as well).

When Baraka died in 2014, Tate wrote an obituary where he mentioned Baraka's book Black Music. According to Tate,

Black Music introduced superheroic otherworldly entities calling themselves Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Pharaoh Sanders. And did so deploying a style that was as incandescent, indelible and whiplash smarting as the music itself. Laid down like grammatical law in Black Music is the mandate that music journalism seem as possessed by furies as The Music. Count this reporter among those writers who owe their adult vocation to being swept up by Baraka’s elegant prose juju at a tender, volatile age.

Consider this black music journalism genealogy. Tate, who's influenced untold readers and emergent writers, was in turn greatly influenced by Baraka. Beyond his journalism, Baraka's verse placed him at the forefront of what's known as jazz poetry. Moreover, it's not uncommon to hear his work discussed in the realm of blues poetry.

Baraka's writings about jazz in verse and prose provided a blueprint for a blueprint for what Tate did in hip hop journalism for The Village Voice. Like Baraka, Tate was perpetually blending the rules of so-called proper English, utilizing unconventional spellings, deploying vernacular terminology, and referencing aspects of vibrant black expressive traditions.

Before publishing his memoir The Beautiful Struggle, Coates was making pitches to publish a history of hip hop. He was among many black men interested in writing the histories of hip hop. The editor Chris Jackson rejected Coates's idea, but eventually suggested that Coates write about a book about his life and father. The Beautiful Struggle is still in some respects a book about a black boy's relationship with black music.

Coates was one of many black men writers who turned to black music as a point of reference and as an art form that inspired a sense of consciousness and awareness about African American conditions. Those writings stretch to Baraka's Blues People (1963) and Blues Music (1968), up through Tate's writing for The Village Voice.

Writing about the music has been a way of reflecting on and demonstrating African American creativity and consciousness for a large number of black men. Baraka and Tate remain crucial gateways for the expansive body of work that black men have produced about black music.    

Related:
• A Notebook on Black Boys, Black Men & Creativity
• Amiri Baraka

Blogging about poetry in December 2017

[Related content: Blogging about Poetry]

• December 26: A visual recap of poetry blog entries in 2017
• December 21: The year in African American poetry, 2017
• December 18: Courses on the Black Arts Movement
• December 13: William J. Harris discusses Amiri Baraka for the St. Louis Book Club
• December 5: Eugene B. Redmond meets with first-year collegiate black men
• December 2: William J. Harris and Eugene B. Redmond celebrate milestones in 2017
• December 1: Blogging about poetry in November 2017