The Convergence: When Collegiate Black Men Meet African American Literary Studies

The Convergence: When Collegiate Black Men Meet African American Literary Studies tells the inside story of a first-semester literature course for Black men at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, taught every fall since 2004. Drawing on twenty years of classroom practice, student voices, and campus data linking the course to higher persistence and graduation rates, the book shows how early, culturally grounded engagement with poetry, speeches, rap, fiction, and visual culture fosters deep reading and intellectual confidence.

Related:

• Black Men Readers 

• Book Notes

C. Liegh McInnis's Secret Histories of Prince's Contributions

For 20 or so years, C. Liegh McInnis has been providing me and others with what I’d call the secret histories of Prince’s contributions.

McInnis will absolutely not like that title, because he’ll point out that the histories aren’t secret. It’s out there for anyone looking and interested. But he sometimes forgets he’s a Prince expert. So what’s common Prince knowledge to him isn’t so with a lot, no, most, of us.

But another reason I call it “secret” is because McInnis often passes along casual tidbits about Prince in personal correspondence or just in conversation. You’ll mention a point, “Oh, I liked that movie last week.” McInnis will go, “Me too. And I’m glad that Prince provided Jane Doe with private lessons on playing guitar, which she then used to develop a band, which included John Doe piano, whose first cousin produced that movie based on inspiration from that band.” Seriously, it’ll be like that.

Aspects of the secret histories emerged recently when I shared my reflections on the New Edition Tour. I mentioned Tevin Campbell in passing, and McInnis sent me an email noting the songs that Prince had written for Campbell. I had no idea. He then went on to mention Prince’s role in shaping shifting directions in the tone and content of R&B.

I’ll have to remember to tell my students and junior colleagues about how someone like McInnis demonstrates the power of specializing in a major figure and then following that person’s career for years, decades, and, in this case, following the band members, influences, and disciples of that person. All of that is important in African American literary studies, where we’re constantly trying to figure out whether it’s better to focus on a major figure or devote time to various less well-known writers.

McInnis has me going back and forth on that. On the one hand, it seems more democratic to focus on several less prominent figures, right? But then, how would so much knowledge about Prince and others have flowed forth if McInnis hadn’t been as laser-focused as he’s been? Would I have been the beneficiary of so many secret histories?

Related:

• A Notebook on the Work of C. Liegh McInnis

A Brief Review of the New Edition Tour

Alright folks, a quick review

I traveled to Nashville to attend the New Edition, Boys II Men, Toni Braxton concert on Friday. I enjoyed it, mostly the idea of listening to music from years, no, decades ago, and seeing the folks perform it live. For some reason, with this show, Toni Braxton felt more like a sidenote. She performed only a few songs, and the other two groups performed more. Maybe it'll be different later this week when they perform here in St. Louis. But New Edition and Boys II Men were the real highlights. They were still hitting all their notes and moves. Well, that is, except my dude Bobby Brown, who can't move like the rest of them. But he was hanging in there.

Nashville is just like St. Louis in the sense that at an R & B concert, the audience is mostly Black women. "Look at us twinning," R & B audiences say to Black church congregations. But having said that, I was reminded that it had done something deeply positive to my young mind and the youngsters in my environment back in the day as we grew up witnessing those Black boys and young Black men groups doing coordinated dance moves together as they sang. (Y’all already know, so I won’t even point out that New Edition is criminally under-credited for creating the blueprint for the white boy bands that followed.)

Back to Black girl, now senior woman audiences: The early 1980s up through the 1990s were a unique moment for the amount of wholesome, affirming songs focusing on Black girls. From the 1983 “Candy Girl” up through maybe Tevin Campbell's 1993 “Can We Talk,” it was a brief, yet golden moment for songs that placed Black girls in the spotlight in a loving, not overly sexualized kind of way. This pattern of Black girl songs was less visible or plentiful in earlier decades and, lord Jesus, far less common in subsequent decades that followed.

This show didn't invest a lot in staging, not on the levels of Mariah Carey or Usher. This was more on the lower-level production, like Fantasia or Fred Hammond & Co. As a reunion tour, I enjoyed this better than Brandy and Monica. Still, they could've added more here and there to really contextualize the time and work they've covered. We're talking about a group that formed in 1978 and debuted in 1983.

I'm sometimes reluctant to give the South too much credit, but there's this fact: Nashville has a much more robust music scene than St. Louis. Beyond the concert venue, Bridgestone Arena, their downtown scene has various live music spots and bars. The most prevalent forms are country and southern rock, and a persistent indie vibe. Y'all know I've gone to a lot of music events in St. Louis, but the city itself doesn't have a really robust infrastructure for music. Of course, Nashville is majority white, and St. Louis is majority Black. I assume that all kinds of racial barriers prevented folks in St. Louis from building structures for a thriving music scene. I get that, but still............

Farah Jasmine Griffin and African American Literary Studies

At some point, in our continuing efforts to chart the development and scope of African American literary studies, we will need to reckon with the many contributions of one of the field’s most influential figures, Farah Jasmine Griffin. For me, she has certainly been a model of possibility, offering multiple blueprints and routes.

I was inclined to briefly comment on her contributions after listening to her talk yesterday.

Back in 1995, Grifin she hit the scene with "Who Set You Flowin'?" The African-American Migration Narrative and has been producing groundbreaking work ever since. Her books include the If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (2001),  Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (with Salim Washington, 2008), Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II (2013), and more recently, In Search of a Beautiful Freedom: New and Selected Essays (2023).

In 2021, I did a series of blog posts on her book Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, which touched on her work but likely did not go far enough in noting how Griffin has been one of our discipline's most critical cultural witnesses. She began her career at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1990s and moved to Columbia University around 2000, where she has since built a distinguished career. 

Consider that Griffin entered the profession in the mid-1990s, during a defining moment when African American literary studies was developing in new and consequential ways. There is understandably a tendency to focus on more prominent figures from that period—Henry Louis Gates Jr., bell hooks, Houston A. Baker Jr., Barbara Christian, Hazel Carby, and Trudier Harris among others. But Griffin, a junior to those figures, was there as well, just at an earlier stage of her career. Her soft-spoken and measured style also placed her somewhat outside the more visible Black public intellectual circuit that gained prominence during that period.

At Columbia University, Griffin became a member of the influential Jazz Study Group, which helps explain her sustained engagement with jazz. Founded by Robert G. O'Meally, the group brings together scholars, musicians, critics, and students for wide-ranging discussions of the music. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Griffin later co-edited Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004), a volume that reflects the intellectual energy of the group's exchanges. 

Based on various articles and presentations over the last two decades, Griffin is viewed as one of our leading Toni Morrison scholars. If you were hosting a gathering on Morrison at Princeton or Cornell or wherever, and you wanted expert thoughts on Morrison, then you likely thought of Farah Jasmine Griffin.

So it's possible that a large group of people know Griffin as a jazz scholar, and then a whole other group know her as a literary scholar. And there's more. She's been an important chronicler of Black Studies based on this notable document, Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States: A 25th Anniversary Retrospective of Ford Foundation Grant Making, 1982-2007. She also provided key leadership as the inaugural chair of its African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia.

When I spoke Griffin her after talk, somehow the subject of William J. Harris came up. "Did you know he was one of my professors?" she asked.  

"Did I know?" I responded, "You're one of the main reasons I can never become his top student of all time. Of course I know you're one of his former students."

We laughed. 

Griffin, Dana A. Williams, Brent Hayes Edwards, Saidiya Hartman, Mark Anthony Neal represent a generational cohort of literary and cultural scholars who made notable contributions to African American literary studies over the decades. We also have to add Alondra Nelson to that mix. While she's not a literary scholar, her work on Afrofuturism affected so many of us. And obviously, there are dozens more than the ones I've just named. 

It is worth thinking about a figure like Griffin for multiple reasons. She has produced outstanding work, for one. She also offers a clear sense of what a long, noteworthy career can look like. More than that, she stands as a testament to the possibilities of working across multiple disciplines, distinguishing herself through scholarship on jazz as well as Black literary and cultural history.

You trying to get a sense of what's possible as a literary scholar or an intellectual in general? Then, you likely want to think of Farah Jasmine Griffin. 

Farah Jasmine Griffin on Black Women Friendships

On March 17, Farah Jasmine Griffin delivered a talk at Washington University in St. Louis as part of the African Diaspora Literature and Culture guest lecture series, hosted by Julius Fleming. Titled “Safe Harbor: Black Women and the Art of Friendship,” the talk offered reflections from a project still in its early stages.

[Related: Farah Jasmine Griffin and African American Literary Studies]

Griffin began by discussing friendships among enslaved women before turning to the relationship between Obour Tanner and Phillis Wheatley. She then moved to the friendship between Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara. Across these examples, Griffin shared insights drawn from her study of letters exchanged among these women. Particularly striking was the discussion of Wheatley’s letters to Tanner—letters that Tanner preserved, passed down, and that are now housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society.  

Griffin also reflected on the close bond between Morrison and Bambara, noting that such friendships often emerged within larger gatherings of Black women, with deeper connections forming among smaller groups. At the same time, she emphasized that studying written correspondence can require a degree of speculation, especially when only one side of an exchange survives.

Fittingly, the conversation extended into the Q&A. Griffin’s friend and colleague Dwight McBride, who was in attendance, offered comments that helped advance the discussion. He observed that conversations about relationships often move too quickly to extremes—friends or enemies—whereas he prefers to think in terms of a continuum, from associates to more intimate friendships. His remarks prompted Griffin to elaborate further on her evolving ideas.

During his comments, McBride pointed out that Griffin should talk to Beverly Guy-Sheftall, noting her long-standing friendship with Alice Walker. Griffin’s response, that she would follow up with “Beverly,” offered a small telling glimpse of who's in her network of friends and colleagues. That Griffin-McBride-Guy-Shetftall-Walker moment is suggestive of the many interconnected relationships that quietly shape African American literary studies.

Toward the end of the Q&A, responding to audience comments, Farah Jasmine Griffin reiterated that she is less concerned with the broader politics or public implications of these friendships, what they might signify to others, than with what they meant in the lives of those women themselves.

She also noted that she does not always have precise language to describe the interactions among these women. In reflecting on this challenge, Griffin referenced a collection of letters she previously edited, where the women addressed one another as “beloved sisters and loving friends.”

Masking in The Boondocks

A brief take on layered metaphorical masking in The Boondocks, showing how Aaron McGruder’s satire stacks voices and cultural references, linking Samuel L. Jackson’s role in Pulp Fiction, Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous “unknown unknowns,” and a cartoon performance of political critique, to reveal how masking can function as comedy and cultural remix.

Script by Howard Rambsy II 

Narration by Kassandra Timm

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• Episodes of Remarkable Receptions

From Nine Citations to Thousands: Toni Morrison in Dissertation Research

Over the past five decades, dissertation data reveals the remarkable rise of Toni Morrison as the most central Black woman writer in African American literary studies.

Using ProQuest One Literature’s database of dissertations, I took a look at six Black women writers – Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Zora Neale Hurston, Harriet Jacobs, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker – decade by decade from 1970 – 2026. I was curious about their appearances in dissertations and MA theses during that time and how they evolved. I was intrigued by the rise of Morrison as the now most central figure in African American literary studies.

During the 1970s, Morrison was cited in just 9 dissertations and theses, making her next to the lowest, only above Jacobs. During the 1980s, Morrison steadily became a more cited author rising to 144. She was now behind only Hurston at 159 citations and Walker at 255 citations.

During the 1990s was when Morrison became the most cited of the group at 1,514. During the 2000s, she rose to 2,434 citations, and she dipped, by her standards, to 1,749 during the 2010s. So far, from 2020 – 2026, she’s at 1,056 citations.

The big shift for Morrison occurs after 1987, with the publication of Beloved. That work stands as Morrison’s most critically acclaimed. The tabulation of the citations on the ProQuest dissertation database makes it possible to see how dramatically Morrison’s position within African American literary studies expanded during the decades following that novel’s publication. 

From just 9 citations in the 1970s to more than 2,400 in the 2000s, Morrison experienced an increase of well over 26,000 percent, illustrating how rapidly she moved from a relatively minor presence in dissertations to the most studied writer among this group. No other writer in the dataset experienced a shift as dramatic, moving from near the margins of dissertation research in the 1970s to the most studied Black woman writer by the 1990s.

Related:

• Dissertation Citations for Six Black Women Writers, 1970–2026

Dissertation Citations for Six Black Women Writers, 1970–2026

Using the ProQuest One Literature dissertation database, I compiled tallies of how often selected Black women writers appear in dissertations and MA theses from 1970 through 2026. The figures below track those counts and provide a glimpse into how scholarly attention to these writers has evolved across decades. 

Dissertation and Thesis Citations by Decade 

1970 – 1979
Gwendolyn Brooks — 75
Nikki Giovanni — 39
Zora Neale Hurston — 54
Harriet Jacobs — 3
Toni Morrison — 9
Alice Walker — 127

1980 – 1989
Gwendolyn Brooks — 73
Nikki Giovanni — 45
Zora Neale Hurston — 159
Harriet Jacobs — 14
Toni Morrison — 144
Alice Walker — 255

1990 – 1999
Gwendolyn Brooks — 230
Nikki Giovanni — 140
Zora Neale Hurston — 874
Harriet Jacobs — 454
Toni Morrison — 1,514
Alice Walker — 1,206

2000 – 2009
Gwendolyn Brooks — 356
Nikki Giovanni — 200
Zora Neale Hurston — 1,258
Harriet Jacobs — 670
Toni Morrison — 2,434
Alice Walker — 1,292

2010 – 2019
Gwendolyn Brooks — 274
Nikki Giovanni — 169
Zora Neale Hurston — 834
Harriet Jacobs — 454
Toni Morrison — 1,749
Alice Walker — 769

2020 – 2026
Gwendolyn Brooks — 136
Nikki Giovanni — 90
Zora Neale Hurston — 437
Harriet Jacobs — 204
Toni Morrison — 1,056
Alice Walker — 428

The figures are listed alphabetically by author to make cross-decade comparisons easier.

Related:

• From Nine Citations to Thousands: Toni Morrison in Dissertation Research