Colson Whitehead Novel on Twitter

Back in February, I posted an entry about the early buzz concerning Colson Whitehead's upcoming novel Zone One, which will be released October 18, 2011. I took notice because when Whitehead announced the release date for the novel on twitter, there was immediate chatter among the many tweeps out there that follow his work.

[Related: The Early Buzz on Whitehead's Newest Novel]

Well, today, someone (perhaps Whitehead) started a twitter account with the handle @ZoneOneNovel (October 18, 2011). Apparently, the twitter feed will focus on the novel. Or, better, the twitter feed will assume the persona of the novel.

The opening tweet went: "...Father?"

And on his twitter site, Whitehead responded: "Yes, son?"

Later @ZoneOneNovel tweeted: "It's cold here. Why am I so cold?"

@ColsonWhitehead responded "You haven't been bound yet. You're just a lump of words & a cover concept."

As of 5:30 eastern time, @ZoneOneNovel has 70 followers and is following one person, Colson Whitehead.

It'll be interesting to see how this project develops. It's certainly one of the first and only novel twitter accounts that I am aware of by a work of African American literary fiction.

Beyond how much publicity the twitter project will gain for Whitehead, I'm interested to learn how this new approach will affect the promotional campaigns for others novels and books by black writers.

Stay tuned.

A Civil War Nerd Energizes Black Studies @ SIUE

TNC leading Q & A during presentation at SIUE

Last week's visit and presentation by Ta-Nehisi Coates (TNC), a senior editor and blogger for The Atlantic magazine, was an important moment in the ongoing history of Black Studies @ SIUE. Coates's visit gave us an opportunity to interact with an accomplished writer and a significant black public thinker.

During his talk, Coates described himself as a "Civil War nerd" and discussed his experiences visiting battle sites across the South. He explained that he became more and more interested in the Civil War when he discovered how little he knew about this monumental event (or series of events) in American history.

TNC told the story of Andrew Jackson Smith, who was born a slave. When Smith learned that he might be forced to  assist his master who joined the Confederacy, Smith fled and joined the Union forces. He participated in the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee and the Battle of Honey Hill in South Carolina. In 1916, Smith was nominated to receive the Medal of Honor, but the award was not granted during his lifetime.  In 2001, President Bill Clinton presented the Medal to Smith's descendants.

Learning more about figures like Smith, the Civil War, and why black people are absent from historical sites like Shiloh has motivated Coates to spend considerable energies reading, thinking, and writing about the War. Listening to him discuss his interest in the Civil War really captivated.

If it's rare for our university to invite an accomplished African American writer and public thinker under the age of 40 to give a "serious talk," then it's especially rare to have a black writer and public thinker who happens to be a Civil War nerd.  

Modesty probably prevented Coates from saying what those of us who follow his blog know. He's far more than a nerd of the Civil War; for more than two years now, he has produced a tremendous body of writings concerning soldiers, historical figures, battles, and modern-day issues related to the War.     

The Coates talk gave us an opportunity to bring a wide range of folks connected to our Black Studies Program together for a common event. Two months before the talk, members of our crew began reading and discussing TNC's memoir The Beautiful Struggle. I complemented those discussions by publishing several entries related to Coates's writings.  

[Related: Reflections from black studies crew on Coates's visit]

Next year, we will organize several black studies activities under the theme "building consciousness," as we encourage program participants to become more active in their pursuits learning about African American history and culture. In many respects, Coates's talk and our efforts to promote his visit constituted a building consciousness preview.  

[Related: TNC the blogger vs. TNC the memoirist]

Associate Dean Larry LaFond and Arts and Issues Director Grant Andree took the lead on bringing Coates to campus when they selected him as a keynote speaker as part of the university's spring colloquium "Thinking About America." It was notable and admirable that LaFond selected a keynote speaker, who among other things addresses black history and ideas in his work.

Reflections on the Ta-Nehisi Coates visit

Ta-Nehisi Coates's visit and discussion on our campus has been receiving positive feedback. Here are a few statements by members of our crew.

I found Coates' visit especially valuable to black males and underrepresented students in general. It is rare that we have a visit from an accomplished African-American author. Hearing him speak and his very presence on campus was both enlightening (as far as content) and symbolically encouraging and refreshing. --Dometi Pongo

During my undergraduate years, as well as my current graduate studies, it was rare that Black intellectuals were invited to speak on campus. I found Coates’s visit particularly helpful because it exposed our collegiate community to a Black voice that does more than entertain; he offered legitimate food for thought on an array of cultural topics. Being a minority on our campus and even more so as a graduate student, it was comforting to see the university acknowledge a cultural scholar and great thinker who looks like me. I find a sort of identity affirmation and solidarity in that. --Cindy Lyles

As a grad student in History and Museum Studies, I really enjoyed Coates's perspective and interest in Civil War history. Prior to grad school, my knowledge of the Civil War was rather limited. Coates mentioned visiting several CW battles sites and re-enactments. These cultural spaces are not made for black people: 1.) because we don't really visit these sites and 2.) we're not really written into the "script." So, black people are essentially nonexistent in the history of the War that was about black people or as DuBois would say "the Negro Problem in America." Coates's interest in black soldiers and the stories that aren't told and histories that get overlooked really stood out to me from the perspective of a historian. --Danielle Hall

Upon meeting Coates, I could tell that the man had a lot a knowledge. He spoke with authority and a sense to teach the audience a lesson about history that needed to be learned. What I really appreciated about Coates was his ability to connect with those of us of the younger generation. --Vince Manuel

Building Consciousness Preview

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates signing book for Cindy Lyles

Black Studies is in "spring training" mode right now. We decided to take a break from our regular, robust programming routine for the semester. The small things we're doing this semester are primarily prep for Fall 2011 when we move forward with our Building Consciousness campaign and activities.

This past Wednesday, March 23, we hosted a reception for Atlantic senior editor and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The good sisters Cindy Lyles and Danielle Hall really brought things together. They organized the room and also led the conversation with Coates about his memoir The Beautiful Struggle. Our regular contributor Dometi Pongo also took part in the conversation. Coates was clearly impressed with the questions and level of discussion from our crew. 

In the fall of 2011, we'll coordinate a reading project focusing on Coates's book for a group of incoming students. Cindy and Danielle have already been assisting me with setup for the project. I'm excited about the possibilities.

Coates signing book for Danielle Hall.

During the discussion with Coates about the book, Dometi, Cindy, and Danielle frequently mentioned how Coates's writing style connected to music, especially rap. Their interests led us on some wide-ranging considerations of hip hop, literary texts, history and reading or literacy practices.   

For our fall 2011 reading project focusing on Coates's book, I'm sure those and other topics will emerge.

Professor-Student Collaboration: The Case of Jessica DeSpain

My friend and English department colleague Jessica DeSpain has been providing me with ideas about literary scholarship and models for collaboration for some time. She continued demonstrating best practices yesterday at SIUE's College of Arts and Sciences "Thinking about America" colloquium. 

For the discussion "Representations of Americanness in Book Designs for Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World," Jessica was joined by two students, Kelly Walsh and Wendy Simpson. The students - participants in SIUE's URCA program - have been working with Jessica to expand and enhance her Wide, Wide World Hypermedia archive project--which features "illustrations, cover designs, and textual variants of Susan Warner’s novel, The Wide, Wide World."

Panel: Racism in American Higher Institutions of Learning

 Traice Webb 

One of our longtime black studies contributors, Dr. Traice Webb, from Counseling Services, demonstrated once again that she's one of our university's most thoughtful and important voices when it comes to conversations about race and efforts to expand opportunities for all students.

Webb was part of a panel "Racism in American Higher Institutions of Learning" at SIUE's College of Arts and Sciences "Thinking about America" colloquium. She was joined by sociology professor Erin Murphy and student Johnathan Long, both of whom helped expand the conversation as well.

Why Huey vs. Riley Matters

I've covered a fairly broad range of topics on my blog over the past two years related to black studies. But according to the traffic stats on my site, my Huey vs. Riley entry, which I posted this past summer, has gained more attention than any other writings here.

Aaron McGruder is one of a select group of writers I plan to produce more extensive pieces on over the next couple of years. When I wrote the piece on Huey vs. Riley, I did not expect it to become so popular.

Of course, I do view the brothers' conflict as a driving force of energy behind the show. Their conflict and differences are probably suggestive of some larger contrasts and tensions among black folks or any people for that matter. At the same time, the Riley vs. Huey saga is about conflict even with an individual person.

Why the Birth Years of Black Poets Matter

Recently, I was looking over the birth years of various black poets and noticed some important trends. It appears that a disproportionate number of today’s most popular black poets were born between the late 1920s and early 1940s.

Consider the following writers and their dates of birth:

Maya Angelou b. 1928
Sonia Sanchez b. 1934
Amiri Baraka b.1934
Jayne Cortez b. 1936
Eugene B. Redmond b. 1937
Ishmael Reed b. 1938
Quincy Troupe b. 1939
Haki Madhubuti b. 1942
Nikki Giovanni b. 1943

You’d be hard-pressed to identify another group of living black poets who are collectively more widely known and acclaimed than this related group of literary artists. In addition to being a formidable group of poets by today’s standards, these poets were quite popular and respected 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and even 30-plus years ago.

I wondered if it had to do with the years of their births.

10 Reasons to Check out Ta-Nehisi Coates Presentation

Ta-Nehisi Coates (TNC) will give a talk here at SIUE on Wednesday, March 23, at 7:00 PM, in the Hickory Room at the Morris University Center.

You need  10 reasons to attend? No sweat. I got you. Among other things, the Coates talk will give us a special opportunity to check out:

1. A talented journalist. Coates has produced an impressive body of writings on politics, music, popular black cultural figures, and a variety of other topics.

2. A leading, wide-ranging blogger. Football. Politics. Dungeons and Dragons. Comedy. Rap. the Civil War. What it means to be a writer, a father, a son of a former Black Panther. Anger. Fears. Coates covers it all. Frequently. And on a highly visible platform--The Atlantic magazine site.

3. A significant public thinker. A blogger like Coates, with his up-to-date commentary and his active engagements with commenters, represents a notable shift from what we have typically seen from well-known writers and intellectuals. Indeed, Coates's blog is about the practice of black public thinking, not merely the notion of the black public intellectual.

4. A new, notable contributor to the tradition of African American literature. Coates's memoir The Beautiful Struggle is a useful addition to the body of interrelated texts that we refer to as African American literature. As mentioned, TNC had already published several journalistic pieces, but producing an autobiographical work that details the experiences and thoughts of a black boy growing up in America situates Coates's writings in a tradition of works that includes Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Barack Obama.

5. A Malcolmite. Some years ago, Coates wrote that he is "a Black Panther-sired, Malcolm X-worshiping, People's History of America-toting idealist." In addition to those things, something that really connects him to Malcolm is the nature of his street knowledge and consciousness regularly displayed in his writings. 

6. Zora2.0. Like Zora Neale Hurston, Coates did some time at the Mecca, HU. More notably, Coates's background as a reporter leads him to interview all kinds of folks -- Bill Cosby, Michelle Obama, MF Doom, and most recently, residents in Palm Woods, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Detroit. His documentation and representation of the stories of black folks from all over is very Hurston-like. 

7. A focal figure for black studies. In the fall of 2011, Black Studies @ SIUE is coordinating a reading project focusing on TNC's The Beautiful Struggle. Coates's talk provides us with an important preview.

8. An alternative to the typical speaker. When and if our university, like too many universities, brings black speakers to campus, those speakers are usually comedians and entertainers. TNC's writings are regularly infused with humor, and the experience of reading his work is enjoyable. But he's far from a comedian and entertainer. He's something else.

9. An aspiring rapper turned writer. In his memoir, Coates noted that when he was 12 years old and heard Lyrics of Fury, he "put away childish things, went to the notebook, and caged myself between the blue lines." First and foremost, respect to the God for influencing the young Coates and so many more. TNC's career confirms that lyricists don't necessarily have to become rappers.

10. The conscious folks. A cool thing about the presence of a "conscious" speaker is that they tend to attract conscious audiences. The Coates event should provide us with what has become too rare: getting all the conscious folks around here together at one time.

Black Public Thinking: The Case of Ta-Nehisi Coates

The in-process and communal exchanges that take place on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blog lead me to view the site as an important example of black public thinking.

Coates and his expansive group of commenters regularly referred to as "the Golden Horde" hardly focus on just race. However, the sustained conversations about black people, ideas, and culture on the site as well as the critiques of anti-black racism are definitely distinguishing features of the blog.

[Related: Black Writing & Community--TNC and the Golden Horde]

To the extent that Coates shares his writings about black topics on The Atlantic, this highly visible and long-established platform, we could easily view him in the tradition of the black public intellectual. Perhaps?

Black Writing & Community: More on Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Golden Horde

The kind of writing and community that's developed on Ta-Nehisi Coates's site at The Atlantic provides us with one example of how blogs and blogging creates new possibilities in the histories and production of black writing. 

The presence of the Golden Horde (the general name for the community of regular commenters on Coates's blog) regularly affects what or how TNC discusses particular subjects.


Coates often responds to commenters' questions, and he often asks some of them to elaborate on points that they make. The nature and direction of discussion in the comments section in the posts sometimes leads Coates to return to and stay on a subject for a while and even expound on what was initially a minor or passing thought in a post.

TNC, The Beautiful Struggle, Chp. 8

So we learn in the closing chapter of Ta-Nehisi Coates's memoir The Beautiful Struggle that he's headed to Howard University or "the Mecca" as he refers to the college.

In the last chapter, Coates again devotes time to discussing his passion playing djembe. At one point during a class, he drifted off and thought of drumming:

I just placed my palms on my thighs in ready position, leaned back in my wooden chair until I was five hundred years away, until I stood in the court of Mansa Musa, in a kufi and a dark robe. My djembe hung from my shoulders, and when the Lion of Mali nodded, my hands fired and called across the Sahel (212).

Later, he describes arriving at a spring recital, where he "could hear the drums roaring, and young sisters singing in tongues that they did not understand. But that was always irrelevant. The whole point was to reach beyond the coherent and touch what we were, what we lost, when the jackboots of history pinned us down."

Before reading his memoir, I was already familiar with Coates's writings on hip hop, so I suspected that he would elaborate on his deep early interests in rap. But his passion for drumming was an unexpected, fascinating feature of the book. Playing djembe empowered the young Coates to connect to a distant past in Africa and participate in communal practices that nurtured his cultural well being.

Any other unexpected or notable features from the last chapter worth highlighting?

Nikky Finney, Nikki Giovanni, & the Black Poetry Best Seller List

I was pleased to see that Nikky Finney's newest volume, Head Off Split was no. 3 on the Best Sellers in Contemporary Poetry List for the Week of February 27. The previous week Finney's book had been no. 19.

Poetry best sellers are far  less than the general best seller list but still.

Finney is the subject of a feature profile in the March/April 2011 issue of Poets & Writers and appears on the cover. I was pleased to see her image there, as I know it'll bring her work some much deserved attention. The profile on Finney, by the way, makes you aware of all kinds of interesting facts about her.

[Related: 100 Volumes of African American Poetry]

Most notably, when she was young and reading poems at events in South Carolina, people referred   to her as "Nikky" in reference to the more widely known poet Nikki Giovanni at the time. So the reference stuck, and we now have the poet Nikky Finney, who's good friends by the way, with Nikki Giovanni. In fact, Giovanni helped Finney get her first book published.

Brief Summary of the Kenneth Warren and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Debate

University of Chicago English professor and literary scholar Kenneth Warren caused somewhat of a stir a few weeks ago when his essay “Does African American Literature Exist?” appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The essay was an excerpt from his book What Was African American Literature?
According to Warren

African-American literature was the literature of a distinct historical period, namely, the era of constitutionally sanctioned segregation known as Jim Crow. Punctuated by state constitutional amendments that disfranchised black Americans throughout much of the South, legitimated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 with the infamous "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, and stumbling into decline in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s, Jim Crow and the fight against it gave rise to—and shaped—African-American literary practice as we have come to know it. Like it or not, African-American literature was a Jim Crow phenomenon, which is to say, speaking from the standpoint of a post-Jim Crow world, African-American literature is history. While one can (and students of American literature certainly should) write about African-American literature as an object of study, one can no longer write African-American literature, any more than one can currently write Elizabethan literature.

Warren’s book, like most books of African American literary criticism, may have gone unnoticed. But, the essay’s appearance in such a visible space like The Chronicle and the provocative premise of the essay prompted folks to circulate it and discuss it on facebook and via email.

The Signed Mixology and For Show Mixology

Signed Mixology & For Show Mixology 

Adrian Matejka's Mixology is one of the books included in our program's collection of 100 volumes of poetry published since 2000.

Yesterday, when I placed all 100 books from our collection on a table and looked over them, I was pleased and surprised to see that my signed volume of Mixology , which Adrian had autographed after a reading in June 2009, had finally come back to me. You see, my Mixology had somehow been growing legs over the last year and continually walking away.

Actually, to be honest, I can't complain too much...not too much...about the way that the book kept leaving my office. Some of the young brothers around campus knew that Adrian had a fairly new book out, but, the typical college budget and interests don't prioritize purchasing contemporary volumes of poetry.

Allison Joseph's Presence Among our 100 books

Black Studies @ SIUE has a collection of about 100 volumes of poetry published between 2011, and among those books, Allison Joseph's work is well-represented. And why not? She's a really gifted and prolific writer.

Her books include What Keeps us Here (1992), Soul Train (1997), In Every Seam (1997), Imitation of Life (2003), Worldly Pleasures (2004), Voice: Poems (2009), and my father’s kites: poems (2010). For the purposes of our project, we got the books she published since 2000.

Allison is right down the street, so to speak, at SIU-Carbondale. Her closeness to us has given us an even greater sense of purpose in making sure we always represent with her works. Emily Phillips and I have written about Allison perhaps more than we have with any other writer represented in our collection.

She's the kind of poet who draws you in. Just the other day, I was re-reading Allison's expansive sequence of 34 sonnets in my father's kites. It's a really fascinating project, in part because she typically doesn't write sonnets. But the sonnets are also intriguing because of the subject - her father and his death.

Well, it's more than that. It's about her father, his death, the funeral preparations, music, memory, family secrets revealed, and so much more. Allison Joseph rightly takes up space in our collection.

Related:
100 Volumes of Poetry

100 Volumes of Poetry

Over the last couple of years, the Black Studies Program has collected about 100 volumes of poetry by African American poets published between 2000-2011. Nearly half of the books came from my personal collection. We purchased several more, and some others were donated.

We have newer books by writers such as Amiri Baraka, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, and Quincy Troupe, who all established their careers decades ago. We have books by a somewhat newer generation of writers, including Terrance Hayes, Camille T. Dungy, Jericho Brown, and Tara Betts.

Books by Frank X. Walker, Patricia Smith, Tyehimba Jess, Vievee Francis, and the late Lucille Clifton? Got'em. Allison Joseph and Kevin Young have produced quite a few volumes over the last ten years, and we have all their books.

[Related: Allison Joseph's Presence among our 100 Books]

We have the 2004 booklet Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes, which was released as part to coincide with Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign, which used the words from Hughes's poem as a campaign slogan. We have the booklet Praise Song for the Day by Elizabeth Alexander, the poem for Barack Obama's inauguration.

[Related: The Saga of Adrian Matejka's Signed Mixology & For Show Mixology]

But this collection, I hope, is about more than just books to put on the shelf and look at. I got the idea to start bringing my own books in to class when I discovered that my students had so little contact with contemporary volumes of poetry. I started having "browsing sessions," where they could look at, touch, flip through, and read volumes by a wide range of poets.

I then began blogging about some of the poets like Evie Shockley and Kevin Young. And our program was fortunate to recruit this talented graduate student Emily Phillips who wrote several posts about Allison Joseph, Marilyn Nelson, Nikki Giovanni and other poets represented in our collection.

TNC, The Beautiful Struggle, Chp. 7

In the opening of chapter 7 of The Beautiful Struggle, Coates mentions that "You may note that all my references to girls have been brief, and mostly touched by failure. My catalog was comic." He then details some of his awkward incidents with girls.

In one description, he pinpoints that young women in these tough environments were inclined to develop tough exteriors. With all the challenges facing the women, guys would still have "the never" to "sidle up and ask why you never smile."

Who knew what this dude was holding behind those cold hazel eyes? Girls of Knowledge would shoot a nigger down without so much as eye contact, because they knew every smile, every infatuated act compromised security and handed us a weapon that we would only deploy for selfish use. So they made themselves into fortresses, and demanded that you drop your arms before they even thought about the drawbridge. They had so much more to lose (186).

I was moved by the ideas here for a number of reasons.

For one, I started thinking about all the young sisters have to lose and how knowledge of those risks can end up shaping how they have to operate. I also worried that a kind of knowledge of their exteriors could end up making them still vulnerable nonetheless.

And finally, I thought it was notable that Coates was addressing these issues. Folks have sometimes critiqued autobiographers by Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, and Malcolm X because those works overlooked or mis-represented black women. I'm not saying Coates covers everything. But I think his work avoids some of the troubles of those other works.

What were some of your thoughts on Coates's discussions of women or any other important issues he raised in the chapter? What else might be focus on from the chapter?

4 Technological Implications of the Gates and Warren Debate for the field of Af-Am Literary Study

Folks in Af-Am lit circles, at least a number of my friends and friends of my friends on facebook, have been talking (often critiquing and complaining about) an essay “Does African American Literature Exist?” by Kenneth Warren from his book What Was African American Literature?

Recently, The Chronicle of Higher Education, which published the essay, followed up with an online chat session, The End of African American Literature?, with Warren and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. I read the transcript from the discussion/debate. For now, I wanted to jot down a few of the technological implications of the session for the field of African American literary study.

1.) High-profile, online chat session

It’s one of the few high-profile discussions/debates related to African American literature to take place using an online chat session. The visibility and value of the venue – The Chronicle of Higher Education – along with the reputation of the participants, especially Henry Louis Gates, Jr., contributed to the high-profile nature of the session.

2.) Signifying as Technical Skill 
 
Throughout the online chat session, Gates’s signifying, that is, the use of verbal indirection to make sly and humorous critiques, was an energizing and entertaining element of the discussion.

For example, at one point, Gates said to Warren, who’s a professor at the University of Chicago: "By the way, I don't know about Chicago, but up here, we haven't entered a 'post-race' or 'post-black' anything! There won't be post race until we are post racism." Among other things, Gates could have been alluding to being arrested at his house.

Later, Warren wrote that based on his ideas, "a course in Af-Am lit would be begin in roughly 1890 and end somewhere in the 1970s." Gates quickly responded “Not in my class! It begins in 1770 and ends yesterday."

In many respects, Gates’s signifying and verbal play can be viewed as useful *technical* skills. Indeed, signifying amounts to a complex system of producing links in short, tweet-like statements.  

3.) Hi-tech Venues for African American Literary Scholarship 

The appearance of Warren’s essay and the subsequent online chat session in The Chronicle of Higher Education might, in a positive sense, tell us that discussions of African American literature can and do take place beyond the realm of black literary journals.

On the other hand, the fact that the essay and online chat session did not and probably could not (at this point) appear in a leading African American literary journal dedicated to African American literary scholarship might tell us something—not to positive—about the state of such venues. That is, our “leading’ journals are not yet digitally equipped to host live, online chat sessions. And few of those journals have active blogs.

4.) The Transmission of Provocative Essays

At one point, Warren mentions that “African American literary study has a bright future,” and Gates followed up by noting that “I agree with my friend, Ken, about the bright future, as long as he keeps writing provocative essays such as this one!”

Signifying aside, the transmission of Warren’s article -- via email forwards, blogs, facebook, and twitter links -- represents an important model for how African American literary scholars might reach broader audiences.

********
Feel free to let me know of additional technological implications.

Kevin Young Representing Cinque

In an early review, Publishers Weekly noted that Kevin Young's Ardency is "a big and varied book." I'm going to say that the size and variety of Young's work has prevented me from writing more about it sooner. Well, that's the story I'm going to stick to for now.

I'm enjoying Ardency overall, but the section on Cinque - the most well-known figure involved with the Amistad - is really special. Young takes on the persona of the leader of the rebellion and really stretches out in multiple directions.

The Cinque section, entitled "Witness," is the longest portion of the book and includes seven sub-sections: I. Processional; II. Passages III. Captivity; IV. Conversions; V. Merica, a minstrel show; VI. Manumissions; and VII. Benedictions.

10 Articles by Ta-Nehisi Coates

On March 23, at 7:00 in the Hickory/Hackberry Rooms in the Morris University Center, Ta-Nehisi Coates will give a talk entitled "A Deeper Black: The Meaning of Race in the Age of Obama."

Over the years, before becoming a noted blogger for The Atlantic, Coates has produced an impressive body of works concerning African American culture, politics, music, and poetry. Follow the links to check out 10 of his articles.

1. "'This is How We Lost to the White Man'." May 2008. This Atlantic article is an extensive and really thoughtful piece about "the audacity of Bill Cosby's conservatism," as the subtitle notes. The title of the article is from a line in a Cosby speech. Coates covers quite a bit of ground as he discusses black culture and ideological differences. Really impressive.

2. Is Obama Black Enough? Feb. 2007. In this Time magazine piece, Coates discusses the debates about the nature (and degrees) of the then-presidential candidate Barack Obama's racial and cultural identity.

3. Rice, Rice, Baby! July 2003. This article from The Village Voice showcases Coates's ability to blend humor and black political consciousness.

4. Promises of an Unwed Father. Jan. 2006. Here's the sub-heading for this O magazine article: "His pregnant girlfriend came from a long line of vanishing dads. How could he—a young, unemployed college dropout—persuade her (and her mother) that he'd be any different? Ta-Nehisi Coates remembers the nine most thrilling, unnerving, tightrope-walking months of his life."

5. Critical Race Theory. April 2004. In this Washington Monthly review of Debra Dickerson's book The End of Blackness, Coates offers useful insights and critiques of how people think about black people and ideas.

6. Soul Mates. April 2001. In this Washington Monthly article, Coates discusses "Black America's Love Affair with Bill Clinton."

7. Gaston Neal, 1934-1999. Oct. 1999. A short and touching piece about the funeral services for poet Gaston Neal. A couple of years earlier, Coates had written an extensive piece on Neal who was battling cancer.

8. Comic Belief. July 1996. Here, for The Washington City Paper, Coates writes about Aaron McGruder, who was just beginning to gain a national reputation. July 1999.

9. Hard Corps. July 1996. A piece in The Washington City Paper where Coates reflects on his experiences co-teaching a poetry workshop for a group of students in a struggling environment.

10. Return of the Mecca? Feb. 1999. Another Washington City Paper article, this extensive piece concentrates on the possibility that Howard University students were not necessarily fulfilling the legacy of activism and political consciousness that had defined the institution in its heyday.

The Coverage of Mat Johnson's Pym

On March 1, Mat Johnson's novel Pym was published by Spiegel & Grau. The novel's been receiving positive reviews.

On March 2, The Takeaway ran an interview with Johnson about his novel, NPR also produced a piece about Pym.

Also on March 2, the ABC News site published a short review by Jennifer Kay. The Kay review also appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune on March 4.

On March 5, the Kay review appeared in the Detroit Free Press, and in the Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks' piece "Icy State of Affairs" discussed David Vann's Caribou Island and Johnson's Pym.


On March 6, The Boston Globe published a review of the novel by Ethan Gilsdorf, and The New York Times Book Review published a review of the book by Adam Mansbach. The Houston Chronicle also published a review by Maggie Galehouse. Laura Miller, who is really pleased by the humor of Pym, has a review of the novel in Salon. 

On March 7, The publication Graphic Novels & Manga ran an interview with Johnson about Pym.

On March 9, The Washington Post published a review of Johnson's book by Michael Dirda.

On March 10, the A.V. Club published a review of Pym by Rowan Kaiser.

On March 27, the American-Statesman published a review by Joe O'Connell.

Some earlier pieces

On January 5, Glennis Byron posted a short review and mentions some books that correspond to Johnson's Pym as well.

The Houston Chronicle's Creative Pride ran an interview with Johnson about the Pym on January 10.

Time Out Chicago ran a short review by Jonathan Messinger on February 23. 


Related:
The Coverage of Kevin Young's Ardency

Treasure Williams and the Arkansippi Effect

Treasure Williams reading Fannie Lou Hamer poems in St. Louis 
Feb. 12, 2011. 

Years ago, poet Eugene B. Redmond coined the term "Arkansippi" as a way of acknowledging the convergence of large numbers of black people from Arkansas and Mississippi to a common area: East St. Louis/St. Louis. Historical studies of migration typically concentrate on south to north or westward moves. Redmond's concept pays homage to moves from the South to the Midwest.

I was recently thinking about this Arkansippi idea when I reflected on Treasure Williams's reading last month in St. Louis. I realized that part of what distinguishes her performance style is her cultural identity and practices as a southern-born black poet.

Of course not all southern-born, black women poets read like Treasure. But Treasure's sound and approach have distinct connections to her upbringing in Mississippi.

Collegiate Black Men - Defining Problems

Over the course of about 5 years now, my friend and colleague Kim Poteet and I have been having a wide-ranging discussion about the distinct challenges facing collegiate black men. We talked about various other issues, of course, but the question of how to think about and address the struggles facing black men on our campus has come up frequently.

Kim and I recently decided to expand our conversation. So on the evening of March 1st, we organized a focus group discussion for black men at the university, where we tried to identify some of the problems. Why, for instance, does SIUE seem to lose a disproportionate number of black men before they graduate?

More than 20 collegiate black men showed up for the meeting, and we had a lively, extended conversation. The guys accomplished the goal of beginning to identify some of the problems that they and their black male peers are confronting in terms of academic performance. They listed things like lack of preparation in high school, culture shock, inadequate support systems, mismanaged priorities, and many other issues.

The meeting was productive and gave us a solid foundation to continue building.

TNC, The Beautiful Struggle, Chp. 6

Still on the move here on TNC's The Beautiful Struggle.

Among other issues, Coates discusses some crucial issues related to being a curious black boy up against a not-so-caring educational system.

He mentions absorbing books "about my own, and further, about foreign places and geographies." Still, "whenever someone threatened to put a grade on it, I fell asleep and lost interest."

Although his parents wanted him to understand that "school was a weapon" against the "war upon us," Coates found the whole process of school--"with its equally spaced desks, precisely time periods and lectures, with its standardized pencils and tests"--"unnatural."

As much as he disdained school, what he hated more was failing. That left him with

a great unconscious sadness, an emptiness which, even when I was alone, I was not fully aware. But it worked on me like an invisible weight, altered my laughter, posture, my approach to girls. Fuck what you have heard or what you have seen in your son. He may lie about homework and laugh when the teacher calls home. He may curse his teacher, propose arson for the whole public system. But inside is the same sense that was in me. None of us ever want to fail. None of us want to be unworthy, to not measure up (170).

Later, toward the end of the chapter Coates repeats "No matter what the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail."

I'm really fascinated and impressed by how Coates pushes us to consider with something we've always known but need to hear more about: that school systems can regularly fail curious, intelligent black boys.

I'm also drawn to how Coates feels passionate enough about the subject to interrupt his narrative to make the strong point about black boys not wanting to fail.

I've notated those points, and I'm reminding myself to really discuss those issues with the young brothers next year when we're reading the book. Any particular ideas we should communicate to the group about those points? Or, what else about chapter 6 stood out to you and was of particular interest?