William Maxwell Pulls a Kinnamon with His "James Baldwinism Now" Article/Survey

I've long viewed the late Kenneth Kinnamon as our greatest individual bibliographer. After all, the two Richard Wright bibliographies he published collectively include more than 20,000 bibliographic entries. Beyond the sheer volume of material he assembled, I've always been intrigued by the effort to document and trace critical and popular responses to a writer's work over time.

I thought of Kinnamon's work when I encountered William Maxwell's essay/survey, "James Baldwinism Now: A Short History of the Baldwin Revival, 1998–2024." The range and scope of Maxwell's coverage are truly impressive, as he brings together an extraordinary array of publications, cultural productions, and critical responses to Baldwin. For bibliographers like me, the piece is inspiring. It demonstrates what's possible when someone takes on the ambitious task of tracing a writer's reception across multiple decades and platforms.

In the article, Maxwell "charts and theorizes the course of US-based Baldwinism, my term for the inventive retrospection that made James Baldwin the twentieth-century African American writer most treasured in the twenty-first." His survey offers a compelling account of how Baldwin became such a prominent literary and cultural figure long after his death.

Although our names are misspelled (happens all the time, no worries), Kenton and I make an appearance in the footnotes for our Public Books article, “How The New York Times Covers Black Writers.” That article, as you know, forms the basis of our book. It's encouraging to see our work included in a project that takes such a wide-ranging approach to documenting Baldwin's remarkable reception.

Where the Talking Happens in Hurston's “Spunk”

By Jade Harrison

In “Spunk,” nearly 80 percent of the dialogue takes place in Joe Clarke’s store, and Elijah Moseley speaks 44 percent of all the dialogue. The story’s key events, including Lena Kanty’s six words and Spunk Banks’s dying words, reach readers only through Elijah’s retelling in the store and on the street.

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

Whose Story Gets Told at Joe Clarke’s Store in “Spunk”

By Jade Harrison

In fiction, the places where people gather often decide whose version of events the reader gets to hear.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s “Spunk” (1925), that place is Joe Clarke’s General Store. Four fifths of the story’s dialogue is spoken there, all of it by men. The store is public, so what happens between Spunk Banks, Joe Kanty, and Lena Kanty becomes the town’s story to tell.

Elijah Moseley re-tells most of it. He speaks 53 percent of the story’s dialogue, and the key events reach readers only through him. When Lena answers Spunk with “Thass mah house” and “Papa gimme that,” Elijah repeats her words to the men in the store. After Spunk dies at the sawmill, Elijah repeats his dying words to Walter Thomas as the two walk down the street.

Joe changes across Elijah’s story. At first, the men in the store talk about Joe as timid. By the end, Elijah believes Joe’s ghost pushed Spunk into the saw, “Joe’s ready for Spunk an’ ain’t skeered anymore.” In death, Joe has the nerve Spunk is known for among the men at the store.

Hurston reminds us that in fiction, where people gather shapes the stories they tell and the stories readers hear.

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

Rhonda Ferguson’s Washington, Then and Now

 By Kenton Rambsy 

In Edward P. Jones’s “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed,” every stop on the girls’ route around 1960 sat in a majority Black census area, while Georgetown, the place Melanie imagines for Rhonda, was 1 percent Black. By 2020, only Anacostia, which one character associated with rural life, remained majority Black. was still majority Black.

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

Black DC, Then and Now, in Edward P. Jones’s “Rhonda Ferguson”

By Kenton Rambsy

Fictional stories often preserve glimpses of real places and communities that have changed dramatically over time.

In Edward P. Jones’s “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed,” four Black teenage girls drive from Columbia Heights to Anacostia around 1960 to take a classmate’s father the last of his belongings, then return home to learn that their friend Rhonda, a singer about to sign a record contract, has been killed at home.

Geotagging the places Jones names against census records shows that every stop on the girls’ route sat in a census area at least 70 percent Black, when all of DC was 54 percent. During the ride, Melanie predicts that a famous Rhonda will move to Georgetown to “be with all them white people,” and in 1960 Georgetown was about 1 percent Black.

Cassandra, Rhonda’s best friend, insists that “Rhonda’s gonna stay the same,” and Rhonda never leaves, but the city changes around her. The Black share around Rhonda’s block on 13th Street fell from 86 percent in 1960 to 29 percent by 2020. Only Anacostia, which Anita’s grandfather dismissed as a place where people “still lived with chickens and cows,” held its Black majority, rising from 84 to 90 percent.

Jones’s characters debate whether one girl will leave Black Washington, and the census shows Black Washington shrinking around the blocks they drove.

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

Toni Morrison and the Singular Spotlight: What ProQuest Data Reveals

This slide is from a larger visualization that Kenton and I produced for a presentation on our book One Black Writer at a Time. 

The data here draws on ProQuest dissertations and theses search results from 1990 to 2025, revealing the extraordinary scholarly attention devoted to Toni Morrison’s Beloved compared to other major African American novels. With 4,568 search results, Beloved far surpasses Invisible Man, Native Son, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Color Purple. Part of an ongoing series on Toni Morrison and ProQuest findings, this post examines the striking concentration of scholarly attention surrounding Morrison and the implications for understanding the visibility of Black writers.

Related:

• Black Literary Data Findings

The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry by Emily Rutter

About the Book 

Publication: 2018 

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

A critical analysis of the poetic representations and legacies of five landmark blues artists: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Leadbelly, and Robert Johnson.

This post is part of the Books in Brief series, which features concise conversations with scholars about their books in African American literary studies.

1. What inspired you to pursue the lines of research and writing that resulted in this book?
Twenty years ago, Sterling Brown’s “Ma Rainey” inspired me to consider what it meant for a poet to reimagine a live blues performance—a transformative but ultimately ephemeral experience—on the printed page and to fashion one’s poetics to resemble aspects of the blues form. That interest in invocations of blues figures and forms became the subject of my master’s thesis and then my dissertation, both of which focused on poetic representations of blues icons from the Harlem Renaissance through the contemporary era.

2. What surprised you most during your research or writing process?
I initially underestimated just how many blues and jazz poems have been published over the past century. I am very grateful to Sascha Feinstein for cataloging many of those poems in A Bibliographic Guide to Jazz and, with Yusuf Komunyakaa, The Second Set, Vol 2: The Jazz Poetry Anthology. I had far more material, particularly Billie Holiday poems, than I could examine in The Blues Muse.

3. What was the hardest decision you had to make while writing this book?
I worked on The Blues Muse for many years in many different iterations (e.g., master’s thesis, dissertation, chapters that became articles and conference presentations, etc.), and that made it difficult to see the project anew when it came time to structure the book. I had many competing voices of mentors and reviewers in my head pulling me in this or that direction. I finally arrived at a book outline that was reflective of my aims, and that was an important milestone in trusting my own judgment as a researcher and writer.

4. What's one lesson you learned while producing this book that you'll carry into future projects?
There are going to be lots of setbacks (even failures) in the process of writing a book—it’s no small feat to complete a project that has the argumentative heft and breadth of a peer-reviewed monograph. Along the way, a mentor said, if you finish the book, it will get published, and I often still think of that reassuring guidance. One needs perseverance and resilience to complete a book and usher it into the world.

5. If any come to mind, are there books in African American literary studies that you see your work in conversation with?
Angela Y. Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
Sascha Feinstein’s Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present
Emily J. Lordi’s Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature Jennifer D. Ryan’s Post-Jazz Poetics: A Social History
Cheryl A. Wall’s Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition

Meta DuEwa Jones's Muse Is Music : Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word

Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists by Emily Rutter

About the Book

Publication: 2021
Publisher: University of Delaware Press

A revealing exploration of how contemporary Black writers reimagine historic Black celebrities by illuminating the complex inner lives behind their public personas.

This post is part of the Books in Brief series, which features concise conversations with scholars about their books in African American literary studies.

1. What inspired you to pursue the lines of research and writing that resulted in this book?
Black Celebrity was in many respects an extension of my first two books, which examine representations of blues icons (The Blues Muse) and Black baseball (Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line), demonstrating the unique capacity of imaginative literature to capture the emotional texture and terrain of the past. We have also been living through an era that appeared on the verge of a third reconstruction and now appears to be in another sociopolitical nadir (with echoes of the late nineteenth century), so Black Celebrity grew out of these longstanding research interests as well as the contemporary structure of feeling, which invites us to consider the throughlines between the postbellum era and our own time.

2. What surprised you most during your research or writing process?
I don’t know if these are surprises or just teachable moments, but I always learn a great deal in the process of writing a book about a subject I think I am already well-versed in. For example, I knew about some of the figures in the cast of characters invoked in Tyehimba Jess’s tour-de-force collection Olio but certainly not all, and it was a pleasure to be introduced to Sissieretta Jones and Christine and Millie McKoy, among others. Learning about them as virtuoso artists with tremendous life stories was an education in and of itself, and again this is the transformative power of literature to raise epistemological questions about how we know what we know and why some figures continue to be heralded (or remain notorious) and others are cast into the dustbin of history (lying in wait for a brilliant poet to invoke them anew!).

3. What was the hardest decision you had to make while writing this book?
With every book, the question is where to stop—where, in other words, to say this is the final chapter. One could always keep going, finding new material and continuing to write and examine. The choice comes down to what I am trying to achieve. Am I trying to produce a comprehensive survey of all the contemporary African American poetry collections or novels that, in this case, have taken up postbellum, pre-Harlem Renaissance artists and athletes, or am I examining these particular works as case studies to make a broader set of claims about what literature contributes to our understanding of history and its residue in the present? These are the questions I ruminated on as I made hard decisions about which chapters to include and which material to leave for another article or monograph.

4. What's one lesson you learned while producing this book that you'll carry into future projects?
If I had to write this book anew, I would deploy a more nuanced structure in the chapters and would worry less about adhering to more traditional literary analysis and theoretical structures. The scholarship I gravitate toward these days (and am producing more of as well) integrates literary analysis, auto-theoretical reflections, and theoretical frameworks into a more fluid reading experience that does not announce itself as scholarship (capital “S”) but is making important claims with significant stakes. Perhaps this is a style swerve more than anything, but with every new research project I think more about the how as it connects to the what and why.

5. If any come to mind, are there books in African American literary studies that you see your work in conversation with?

Annette Debo’s The Necessary Past: Revising History in Contemporary African American Poetry
Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture
Ryan Sharp’s Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black U.S. Persona Poetry and the Archive

As an aside, I’m always in conversation with The Honeyfish Collective scholars and poets: Sequoia Maner, darlene anita scott, Sharon Lynette Jones, Leah Milne, and Katy Didden. They are the ever astute and encouraging voices in my head as I am writing and thinking (friends of my mind, as Morrison might say).