Students Visiting the EBR Learning Center, Feb. 16

On February 16, we followed up with another visit to the EBR Learning Center to look through about 50 books from the 20th century. We wanted to move beyond the conventional classroom and utilize this new educational space.

 Related:
• February Humanities Programming

Students Visiting the EBR Learning Center, Feb. 11

On February 11, I gave students an chance to look through about 50 books from the 20th century from my personal collection in the EBR Learning Center. The activity was part of our class, but also part of our broader range of Black History Month activities.

Related:
• February Humanities Programming  

Ages of African American poets when they published popular poems

Frances E. W. Harper, Langston Hughes, and Maya Angelou

At what point in their careers did African American poets publish their poems that became their most known? Years ago, I read interviews where Gwendolyn Brooks expressed disappointment that editors and even audiences seemed to fixate on poem "We Real Cool," while ignoring many of her other works. Since I was recently looking at 52 most anthologized African American poems, I was curious about the different ages of poets when they first published poems what became their most reprinted works.

Here's a rundown of some of the poets and their approximate ages at the times some of their most well-known poems were first published.

Langston Hughes was 19 years old when "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"  was first published in the June 1921 issue in Crisis magazine. Phillis Wheatley was roughly 20 years old when  her poem "On Being Brought from Africa to America" appeared in her volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Countee Cullen was 21 when "Yet Do I Marvel" was published in Century magazine in 1924, and Margaret Walker's most anthologized poem "For My People" was first published in 1937 in Poetry magazine when she was 22.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was 24 when "We Wear the Mask" was published in 1896. When "Nikki-Rosa" was published in 1968, Nikki Giovanni was 25. Jean Toomer was 28 when "Georgia Dusk" and "Song of the Son" were published in 1922, a year before the poems appeared in Toomer's collection Cane (1923). Frances E. W. Harper was 29 when her poem "The Slave Auction" was published.

What about poets in their 30s? Claude McKay turned 30 in 1919 when his poem "If We Must Die" was first published. George Moses Horton  was 31 when "On Liberty and Slavery" was published in 1828; Robert Hayden was 31 when he first published "Middle Passage" in Phylon in 1944; and Amiri Baraka was also about 31 when his popular poems "Black Art" and "A Poem for Black Hearts" were first published.

Etheridge Knight  was 37 when his poem “The Idea of Ancestry" was published in his volume Poems from Prison (1968). Dudley Randall was 39 when his poem "Booker T. and W. E. B."was published in 1953. James Weldon Johnson was 37 when his poem "O Black and Unknown Bards" was published in 1908, and he was 47 when his poem "The Creation" was published in 1918. 

Gwendolyn Brooks was 42 when her regularly reprinted poem "We Real Cool" was first published in Poetry in 1959. Maya Angelou was 50 when her poems "Still I Rise" and "Phenomenal Woman" were published in 1978.  


Related:
• Poets by Birth Year
• A Notebook on Birth Years & Age Matters 

Poet Marilyn Nelson and scholar Alondra Nelson on Venture Smith

From the opening, Alondra Nelson had me thinking about links between her work and African American literary studies. On the first page of her book The Social Life of DNA (2016), Nelson mentions Alex Haley's Roots (1976), which was broadcast as a television miniseries in 1977. And then, in the introduction, Nelson writes about Venture Smith, who was known for his book A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related by Himself (1798). 

Marilyn Nelson's volume of poems The Freedom Business (2008), illustrated by Deborah Dancy, also contains Venture Smith's narrative. I thought about Marilyn Nelson's book as I was reading Alondra Nelson's descriptions of an event in Connecticut in July 2006, when a British Broadcasting Corporation crew were filming a documentary on Smith.

For Marilyn Nelson, the ex-slave was an important poetic muse. For Alondra Nelson, Smith was a touchstone to consider the social life of DNA. Often, literary scholars and historians produce works about the narratives and experiences of enslaved people. So I took notice that the poet Nelson and the sociologist Nelson were making these distinct contributions to the conversation.

In The Freedom Business, Nelson presents a series of poems in the persona of Venture Smith. Over the last several years in particular, many African American poets have produced full-length volumes or series of poems focusing on enslaved people--tribute poems and persona poems. The Freedom Business stands out among various other works based on the ways that Smith's narrative appears on even-numbered pages and Nelson's poems (in Smith's voice) appear on odd-numbered pages. This hybrid production of late 18th-century slave narrative and poems by a contemporary poet is uncommon and powerful.

In The Social Life of DNA, Nelson summarizes Smith's narrative and reveals that the ex-slave's "present-day relatives have extensive knowledge of their ancestry," having worked with a historian "to document ten generations" of the offspring of Venture and his wife (3). Nelson further notes that "Smith's descendants have sketched out a tall and broad family tree that begins on the African continent and branches to the present. In fact, Smith progeny hold the enviable position of having more information about their ancestors than most of us could ever hope to know about our own" (3). Despite the known facts of Smith's life, the notion that scientists, social scientists, and documentary producers were on a "quest to corroborate [Smith's] personal narrative with scientific evidence" raises questions about the social power and social life of DNA (7).

Nelson's and Nelson's writings pushed me to think about Venture Smith and by extension various other ex-slaves beyond conventional historical frames. 

Related:
• A Notebook on Marilyn Nelson
• Afrofuturists, Black Panthers & Genealogists: Alondra Nelson's Multi-threaded Journeys
• Reading Alondra Nelson and Colson Whitehead in 2011

A Notebook on Marilyn Nelson

2016
• February 27: Poet Marilyn Nelson and scholar Alondra Nelson on Venture Smith  

2014
• December 31: Blogging about Ai, Nikky Finney, Allison Joseph, Marilyn Nelson & Gwendolyn Brooks in 2014 
• July 16: Reading Marilyn Nelson this summer   

2013
• September 13: Poet Marilyn Nelson's good idea: Adrian Matejka's "shadow boxing" poems

2011
• June 14: Marilyn Nelson's Carver as a Crucial Connector 


Related:
• An Extended Notebook on the works of writers & artists

Exploring books by African Americans from the 20the century

This semester in one of my African American literature courses, I've been organizing a series of activities to give students opportunities to consider Book History. For the past month, we've been exploring only 50 books by African Americans from the 20the century. Later, we'll take a look at 50 books from the 21st century.

Some scholars have noted the benefits of young people having exposure to large numbers of books. While American and African American literature courses typically concentrate on a select number of readings, I decided to take a different approach and give students the chance to peruse books and think about the significance of books as cultural artifacts.

The series of projects I designed have allowed students to engage with novels, nonfiction works, and volumes of poetry. The downside is that we do not get to cover as many short stories or a few novels, as we’ve done in previous semesters. The upside is that we get a chance to look at a larger field of works. We also get opportunities to consider what a personal library, showcasing black books, might look like.

Related:
• List of 50 African American books in alphabetical order from the 20th century
• Chronological list of 50 books by African American writers from the 20th century

Notebook on Gwendolyn Brooks

2016
• February 26: Poetry magazine published two of the most anthologized poems 

2014
• December 31: Blogging about Ai, Nikky Finney, Allison Joseph, Marilyn Nelson & Gwendolyn Brooks in 2014 
• September  25: Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool" & Poetry Magazine (1959)
• January 8: From Gwendolyn Brooks to Rita Dove to Natasha Trethewey to Tracy K. Smith

2013
• June 11: Interpretation through Illustration: "A Song in the Front Yard" by Gwendolyn Brooks 

2012
• October 17: Letter to the Editor about Gwendolyn Brooks
• October 9: From Gwendolyn Brooks to Chief Keef
• September 7: Black World featuring Gwendolyn Brooks on the cover (Sept. 1972)
• June 27: People Watching: Gwendolyn Brooks & Robert Hayden
• January 22: 10 Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks on the Poetry Foundation site

2011
• July 14: "We Real Cool" & "For My People" First Appeared in Poetry Mag.

Related:
• An Extended Notebook on the works of writers & artists

Poetry magazine published two of the most anthologized poems

The November 1937 issue of Poetry magazine included a poem entitled "For My People" by Margaret Walker. Almost 22 years later, in the September 1959 issue, Poetry published a a series of poems under the heading "The Bean Eaters" by Gwendolyn Brooks, who had won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950. One of the poems in the series was "We Real Cool."

From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s as publishers began producing large numbers of anthologies featuring African American poetry, editors routinely chose to reprint Walker's "For My People" and "We Real Cool." Between 1967 and 1974, "We Real Cool" appeared in more than 15 African American anthologies, and "For My People" was reprinted in more than 20 collections during the same time period.

[Related: Two of the most popular non-anthologized poems]

"For My People" and "We Real Cool" are among the most reprinted pieces of the 52 most anthologized African American poems. Poetry magazine was where the poems began, and since that time, anthologists kept the works in print.

Related:
• "We Real Cool" & "For My People" First Appeared in Poetry Mag. 
• The Journey of Margaret Walker's "For My People"
• Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool" & Poetry Magazine (1959)

A Notebook on Digital East St. Louis

“Digital East St. Louis” is a National Science Foundation-funded project that implements and studies place-based learning with the purpose of increasing interest in STEM among African American students by utilizing the humanities.

Entries
• Digital East St. Louis
• Digital East St. Louis closing showcase (December 9, 2017)
• Scenes from the Digital East St. Louis exhibit
• Coverage of Digital East St. Louis
• Purposes of Digital East St. Louis
• Digital East St. Louis: Project Team
• Digital East St. Louis and new possibilities for presentations 
• Re-discovering St. Paul's Episcopal Church in the Theising Collection

Digital East St. Louis

“Digital East St. Louis” – a three-year, National Science Foundation-funded project – is designed to implement and study place-based learning with the purpose of increasing interest in STEM among African American students. The project, which began in 2015, engages middle school students from East St. Louis in a series of out-of-school, technological learning activities. The students participating in the project will gain computer skills and contribute to documentation and digital productions concentrating on their home—East St. Louis.

Middle school students participating in the “Digital East St. Louis” project have been researching and photographing various locales in their city and neighborhoods. At the same time, they’ve been learning aspects of web-design and strengthening technological skills. Their activities constitute innovative approaches to studying and producing knowledge about African American neighborhoods.

The middle school students have been producing sightseeing explorations about notable areas in their neighborhoods. These explorations, referred to as “walking tours” provide the students with opportunities to photograph, write about, and produce online content about historic and contemporary aspects of their city.

[Related: Scenes from the Digital East St. Louis exhibit]

I’ve observed and participated in service projects in East St. Louis for over 10 years now. However, “Digital East St. Louis” is the first project that I contributed to that makes technological training so central, with the possibility of increasing interest in STEM among students, beginning in middle school. The project creates opportunities for re-imaging service work in East St. Louis to include web design, oral history interviews, and “walking tours.”

Related:
• A Notebook on Digital East St. Louis 

Digital East St. Louis: Project Team

“Digital East St. Louis” is led by Sharon Locke, the director of SIUE's Center for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Research, Education, and Outreach.

Jessica DeSpain, a literature professor and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Research and Informatics Scholarship (IRIS) Center, and Liza Cummings, professor of curriculum and instruction at SIUE, serve as co-principal investigators for the project.

Georgia Bracey, a research associate at SIUE’s STEM Center, coordinates program evaluation and implementation.

Matthew Johnson, Instructional Designer and Curriculum Specialist for SIUE’s STEM Center, serves as the Community Outreach Director for Digital East St. Louis.

Jeff Manuel, an associate professor in the Department of Historical Studies and specialist in oral history, assists with the project curriculum and development. 

Mallory Maves, a graduate assistant for the STEM center, assists with project management and student recruitment. Sudhamadhuri Arvapally and Anthony Wilcox are also graduate assistants who contribute to the project.  

Related:
• A Notebook on Digital East St. Louis 

Purposes of Digital East St. Louis

“Research shows that middle school is when children begin to lose interest in STEM fields. This study [Digital East St. Louis] is examining out-of-school learning and what role it can have in shaping students’ STEM interest, attitudes and educational choices.”
–Sharon Locke, project leader for Digital East St. Louis, quoted in SIUE News, July 17, 2015

“Our research goal is to gauge whether the use of humanities-based and place-based learning will increase student interest in technologically advanced fields. We also hope to encourage students to take ownership and develop pride in their community and motivate them to pursue a college education in a STEM field.”
—Jessica DeSpain, curriculum leader for Digital East St. Louis, quoted in SIUE News, July 17, 2015

“Digital East St. Louis” – a three-year, National Science Foundation-funded project – is designed to implement and study place-based learning with the purpose of increasing interest in STEM among African American students.

Related:
• A Notebook on Digital East St. Louis 

Coverage of Digital East St. Louis

Here's a round-up of news coverage on "Digital East St. Louis" -- a three-year, National Science Foundation-funded project that will implement and study place-based learning with the purpose of increasing interest in STEM among African American school children. 

2017
• July 25: SIUE's "Digital East St. Louis" inspires local students to explore city's history and culture - Edglen Today

2015:
• August 2: Byte by byte, East St. Louis students get to know their hometown - Teri Maddox - Belleville News-Democraat
• July 17: Students Feature Local Culture & History Through SIUE “Digital East St. Louis” Project - SIUE News


2014:
• September 21: SIUE program to immerse East St. Louis middle school students in technological learning projects - Joseph Lacdan - This Month in CAS
• September 15: SIUE gets $846,000 grant to boost STEM interest - Brian Feldt - St. Louis Business Journal
• September 11: SIUE Receives NSF Grant for Digital East St. Louis - SIUE News

Related:
• A Notebook on Digital East St. Louis

Scenes from Digital East St. Louis exhibit

Today, I coordinated an exhibit focused on my work with "Digital East St. Louis," a three-year, National Science Foundation-funded project that will implement and study place-based learning with the purpose of increasing interest in STEM among African American school children.

Two of the most popular non-anthologized poems

I recently identified 52 of the most anthologized African American poems. Two poems that do not appear on my list, yet are perhaps more widely known among black people, especially black women, are Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise" and "Phenomenal Woman." Those poems have appeared in relatively few anthologies over the decades, but an incredibly large number of black people still know those poems.

On a local level, I've done a poll in one of my African American literature courses, comprised of all first-year black women, each year since 2008. I ask about the poems by black poets they have encountered. The only two poems that every single student has identified each year has been "Still I Rise" and "Phenomenal Woman." They don't encounter the poem in school. Instead, they say they first heard the poems at church programs, during community performances, as the talent segments of pageants, or from friends. 

16 of the 19 poets who wrote those 52 most anthologized African American poems were born prior to 1920, and all of the 52 poems were first published prior to the mid-1970s. By contrast, Angelou, who was born in 1928, first published "Still I Rise" and "Phenomenal Woman" in the late 1970s.

Related:
• Maya Angelou, Kelly Norman Ellis, poetry & collegiate black women
• Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and the popularity of poets  
• Teenage Black Girls, "Ego Tripping," and African American Literary History

“Boxer Braids” or Cornrows?

By Briana Whiteside

It seems that MTV UK has credited Kim Kardashian for making cornrows popular. They call her hairstyle “boxer braids," which they assume were inspired by the Hilary Swank’s character in the boxer movie Million Dollar Baby. MTV UK writes, “Whether you’re off down the gym or need a casual but polished day to night style, meet your new favorite hair do: boxer braids.” Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that an ethnic hairstyle has been appropriated by mainstream media: Kylie Jenner was cited on Marie Clare’s twitter as taking “bold braids to a new epic level,” and now Kim K receives extra credit for a hairstyle that African American women have worn for centuries.

Fall 2016 Course descriptions

We will offer the following African American literature courses in Fall 2016.

Note: Each of the courses fulfills the general education requirements for:
Humanities-Breath; Fine Arts & Humanities; US Cultures-Exp; Intergroup relations

ENG 205: Introduction to African American Texts (MW 1:30 - 2:45 pm) - Professor Tisha Brooks

This survey course is designed to introduce you to a range of African American texts, including poetry, autobiography, short fiction, novels, essays, drama, as well as works from the oral tradition, such as songs, folktales, sermons and speeches. Our primary texts will span from the colonial through the contemporary period with the goal of exploring major historical and literary movements, trends, and key themes. In this course, we will also further develop our critical reading, speaking and writing skills in response to the literature that we encounter. In order to help ground our discussions and expand our exploration of African American literature beyond the text, we will use digital resources in the classroom to view videos, images of historical artifacts, photographs, art and listen to audio clips of interviews, sermons, speeches, readings of poetry and musical performances. Expect to be actively engaged in this class, which includes small and large group discussions, full class workshops, and oral presentations.

ENG 341: African American Women’s Writings (TR 2:00 - 3:15 pm) - Professor Elizabeth Cali

This course will explore a number of literary themes, traditions, and forms of expression in African American women’s writing from the 19th century through to contemporary Black women’s writings. As a class we will explore the ways that African American women writers used oral, textual, and visual productions to represent their specific raced and gendered experiences of the world. Texts covered will include Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and Toni Morrison’s Sula. Students can expect to engage with a variety of literary mediums independently and in small and large group activities in this class.

ENG 343: Hip Hop & Black Consciousness (3:30 - 4:45 pm) Professor Howard Rambsy II

"My emancipation don't fit your equation.” —Lauryn Hill

"I'm like Che Guevara with bling on, I'm complex." —Jay Z

Listen. You already know what this class is about: the ways hip hop folks infuse ideas associated with Malcolm X, struggles for liberation, and serious knowledge into the culture. You know the deal too: we’ll listen to, analyze, and discuss works by Nas, Lauryn, Jay Elect, Kendrick, B.I.G. K.R.I.T, Dre3000, and obviously the “God” (Rakim). In the process of thinking about black consciousness in hip hop, we’ll seek to enhance our own consciousness. You down? Get at us; we’ll be here.

ENG 446 Studies in Afr-Am Lit: Spiritual Perspectives in Af-Am Lit. (MW 12:00-1:15 pm) - Prof. Tisha Brooks

This course takes seriously the spiritual experience and legacy of black people in America, considering, through close analysis of a range of African American texts, the ways in which that spiritual experience has been shaped by and has offered a critical response to the realities of social difference, including race, class, gender and sexuality. Responding to the challenge of Black Feminist scholars that we consider the diversity of spiritual perspectives at work in African American literature, this class explores the ways in which these multiple spiritual trajectories shape African American texts in critical ways. While the study of African American literature will be our primary method of unearthing the spiritual practices of black people, this course is interdisciplinary in scope—including literary, historical, theological, and sociological readings. Though this course will include readings from the 19th-century, most of the required texts will span the late 20th to the early 21st centuries and will include a mix of genres: autobiography, novels, short stories, poetry, and film.

Related:
• African American Literature @ SIUE

Adding poems by Frances E. W. Harper & George Moses Horton

Yesterday, I ran a list of 50 of the most anthologized African American poems, which my brother Kenton and I will use in upcoming projects on poetry and text mining. After publishing the list, I heard from scholar Matt Sandler, who noted the absence of poets between Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar in accounts of African American poets.

I took another look at frequently anthologized poems by African Americans and realized that Frances E. W. Harper's "Slave Auction" and George Moses Horton's "On Liberty and Slavery" met my criteria of appearing in at least 10 anthologies over the last 50 years. 
 
The list and accompanying short narrative have now been updated to concentrate on 52 of the most anthologized African American poems.  

Toni Morrison: Beyond Fiction

On February 23, my colleagues Tisha Brooks, Elizabeth Cali, and I coordinated our annual Toni Morrison exhibit. Students in Brooks's Morrison course produced audio commentary and display boards focusing on Morrison's works, and we organized their commentary, added background music, and placed the materials on audio devices.

Here's how Brooks explained this year's exhibit:

Toni Morrison: Beyond Fiction reflects the collaborative efforts of many individuals, including students from the ENG 477 Toni Morrison seminar, students from the North Star Leadership Forum.

Many people know that Toni Morrison is a world-renowned author of fiction. She has written eleven novels, including The Bluest Eye, her first book and Beloved, her best-known work for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Morrison is also the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, an honor she received in 1993. However, Morrison is more than a writer of fiction. Over the past four decades, she has also produced a considerable number of essays, memoirs, reviews, eulogies, lectures and speeches in addition to publishing a well-respected book of literary criticism, titled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, and editing The Black Book: Three Hundred Years of African American Life.

Images from the event:

Related:
• February Humanities Programming  
• Toni Morrison exhibit (2015) 
• Images from the Toni Morrison exhibit (2015) 
• Images from the Toni Morrison exhibit (2014)

The Warmth of Other Suns: 205 - 221

[The Warmth of Other Suns]

By Ieisha Banks

“The road shot more curves at him one right after the other, so that he was going north and south as much as west, and he has to slow down to absorb the blind hooks and horseshoes coming at him. He knew he wasn’t the best driver in the world, hadn’t done that much of it really. And also he would have to brake to a crawl if he was going to make it. Before it hadn’t mattered much that this was a two-lane road with no reflector lights and no guardrails to catch him. Now it did” (212). —Isabel Wilkerson

In this week's reading, the migration focus on Robert Joseph Pershing Foster is especially presented in detail in comparison to the other narratives in the book. Foster’s migration trek seems to present elements of foreshadowing and heavy metaphors in relation to the subject of oppression and progression. The text states, “He had just come out of the desert in every sense of the word, and the details of his future were too much to think about right now. He drove north toward whatever awaited him” (216).

How, in brief, did Isabel Wilkerson’s references to deserts, forked roads, or never-ending darkness affect how you thought about Foster’s travels or migration in general?

Upcoming Digital East St. Louis Exhibit

This Thursday, from 11:10 am - 12:30 pm in Friends Corner of Lovejoy Library, I'll curate a small exhibit on "Digital East St. Louis," a three-year, National Science Foundation-funded project – is designed to implement and study place-based learning with the purpose of increasing interest in STEM among African American students.

I'm a contributor to "Digital East St. Louis," which is led by Sharon Locke, the director of SIUE's STEM Center; Jessica DeSpain, a literature professor and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Research and Informatics Scholarship (IRIS) Center; and Liza Cummings, professor of curriculum and instruction.

Thursday's exhibit will also include questionnaires as some of us continue thinking about ways to develop culturally-distinct technology projects.

Related:
• February Humanities Programming 

52 of the most anthologized African American poems

Top: Phillis Wheatley, Claude McKay, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sterling Brown;
Bottom: Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni

If you looked through African American literature anthologies, published between the 1960s and early years of the 21st century, and produced a tally of poems that appeared in 10 or more collections, you would come up with a list that includes the 52 poems identified here. The list includes 19 poets--13 men and 6 women. 16 of the poets were born prior to 1920.

Editors were most likely to reproduce select poems by Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, and next was Gwendolyn Brooks. A large number of poems by Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez, Larry Neal, Bob Kaufman, Carolyn Rodgers, and others appeared in anthologies. However, editors never seemed to come to a consensus and repeatedly reprint poems by those poets the way they did with, say, Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel," Robert Hayden's "Frederick Douglass," and Margaret Walker's "For My People." In others, just because certain writers appeared in several collections, did not mean editors regularly chose to anthologize the same select poems by the poets.  

[Related: Two of the most popular non-anthologized poems]

A large number of Baraka's poems appeared in anthologies; however, editors often settled on three of his poems "Black Art," "A Poem for Black Hearts," and "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note."There was something similar at work with poems by Phillis Wheatley; although several of her poems were reprinted beginning during the mid-1960s, editors often selected her poems "On Being Brought From Africa to America," "To His Excellency General Washington," and "On Imagination."

52 of the most anthologized African American poems

1. "Black Art" by Amiri Baraka
2. "A Poem for Black Hearts" by Amiri Baraka
3. "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note" by Amiri Baraka
4. "kitchenette building" by Gwendolyn Brooks
5. "The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock, Fall 1957" by Gwendolyn Brooks
6. "a song in the front yard" by Gwendolyn Brooks
7. "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks
8. "Malcolm X" by Gwendolyn Brooks
9. "Southern Road" by Sterling Brown
10. "Strong Men" by Sterling Brown

Covering Jay Z in Af-Am lit at SIUE & UTA, Pt. 3

By Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II

Last week, we blogged about observations we made about Jay Z’s Reasonable Doubt using text-mining software. What follows are a few notes we’ve taken about our exploration of Jay Z’s using Voyant Tools.

Benefits of Using Voyant

Listening to Jay Z’s music, I usually paid attention to how he uses various rhymes to tell stories. Using Voyant Tools, however, makes me pay attention to the actual word usage. I’m able to pay attention to what types of words he uses and how often he uses those words across his entire rap career. This allows me to have precise information to describe Jay Z’s lyrical maturation since the 1996 release of Reasonable Doubt. – K. Rambsy

Having more precise knowledge about Jay Z’s word usage has made it possible for me to become a different kind of listener. I’m more attentive to his use of similes and repeated words and phrase across multiple songs in ways that I wasn’t in the past.  –H. Rambsy

Surprises and new discoveries

The word “like” ranks among the top 3 used words (After applying a word stop list) on Jay Z’s four classic albums—Reasonable Doubt (1996), Vol. 2 (1998), The Blueprint (2001), The Black Album (2003). Before our various experiments, I never really considered how much Jay Z used similes in his work. Now, I have started to think more precisely about the significance of metaphorical language in relation to rap music, specifically Jay Z. –K. Rambsy

I’m surprised we hadn’t done more with text-mining sooner. I’ve also surprised that our research on Jay Z has led helped guide us on our considerations of Frederick Douglass’s word usage. –H. Rambsy

What’s next?

Jay Z’s use of similes has made me grow far more curious about how he uses metaphors in his rhymes. I am interested to think about how we can use text-mining software to describe how Jay Z uses figurative language. –K. Rambsy

In addition to working through more of Jay Z’s music, I’m hoping we can do comparative work with Nas and Big as well as various writers we’ve been thinking about over the years. –H. Rambsy

Related:
• The African American Literary Studies Lab

The African American Language and Culture Lab

By Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II

The African American Language and Culture Lab constitutes our collaborative projects on a range of subjects, including Frederick Douglass, Jay Z, technology and digital humanities, and so forth.  

• A Notebook on Jay Z
Three entries from the notebook:
      • Why Jay Z? 4 Reasons  
      • "Like" on Reasonable Doubt
      • Jay Z, African American literary studies & digital humanities 

• Mining Malcolm's "Message": A Notebook
Three entries from the notebook:
     • “Message to the Grassroots” by the numbers
     • The Humor of Malcolm X
     • Yes, Malcolm is talking directly to You

• A Notebook on Frederick Douglass
Three entries from the notebook:
      • More on Frederick Douglass's use of "Man" in the Narrative
      • “Man,” “Covey,” and top 10 words in Douglass Narratives
      • Quantifying Frederick Douglass’s Notorious Mr. Covey

• A Notebook on the College Language Association Journal
Three entries from the notebook:
      • The CLA Journal by the Numbers, 1957 - 2012
      • Charting CLA Journal’s publishing productivity by decade
      • Top 6 focal authors in the CLA Journal

• Tools & digital projects
      • Some Free Digital Software Programs and tools 
      • Notebook on Voyant Tools 
      • Geo-Coding Black Short Stories 

Related:
• An Extended Notebook on the works of writers & artists
• Assorted Notebooks 

Voyant Tools Brief Overview

Voyant Tools with texts from albums by Jay Z

By Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II

Voyant Tools is a free, web-based, text analysis and visualization toolset created by Stéfan Sinclair, Geoffrey Rockwell, and their research team. Voyant enumerates words in a text or series of texts, categorizes the words, and also pinpoints word densities. In addition to calculating word usage, Voyant has several interfaces that represent quantitative information in data visualization formats.

So far, we have utilized Voyant Tools to identify word frequency in works by Frederick Douglass, Jay Z, short storiy writers, and poets.

Related
• Notebook on Voyant Tools 

More on Frederick Douglass's use of "Man" in the Narrative

By Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II

Students often complain about Douglass’s archaic language use. His language in 1845 is much different than how we speak in the 21st century. However, what we’ve learned by looking at Douglass’s word usage that he frequently uses the word “man” (75 times) in the Narrative, a term that carries considerable weight today.

We used Voyant Tools’s “collocate” feature to identify if there were any recurring words that appeared alongside man in the Narrative. A collocation is a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. The following terms are the top 5 words associated with “man”:

Douglass most often uses the word “man” to characterize his experiences with white masters and overseers. At one point, he says, “I saw in every white man an enemy,” and at another point, he goes, “to strike a white man is death by Lynch law.” [emphasis added.]

Douglass uses words such as “poor,” and “cruel” to describe interactions with other overseers. He recalls, “Mr. Covey was a poor man, a farm renter.” He also describes a former overseer, Mr. Plummer by noting that, “He was a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding.”

Douglass’s descriptions of these men typically describe their cruel behavior towards him and other enslaved black people. In that regard, using the word “man” is a not a marker of respect, but cruelty.

Deborah McDowell and Mary Helen Washington among others scholars, have rightly critiqued the masculinist biases and erasure of black women in Douglass’s works. Text mining confirms those biases and erasure by calculating the frequency of “man” and the scarcity of references to “woman” or “women.” In addition however, Voyant’s “collocate” feature reminds us how often Douglass spoke disparagingly of the men he encountered.

Related:
• #FrederickDouglass: Technology & African American Literary Studies
• African American Language and Culture Lab

Chronological list of 50 books by African American writers from the 20th century

Here's a list of 50 books by African Americans in chronological order from the 20th century that a group of my students have been browsing and using as the basis for class projects.The list is not exhaustive.
 
[Related: List of 50 African American books in alphabetical order from the 20th century] 

Chronological list of 50 books by African American writers

1903: The Souls of Black Folks by W. E. B. Du Bois
1912: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
1925: The New Negro edited by Alain Locke
1926: The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes
1929: Passing by Nella Larsen
1933: The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson
1937: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
1940: Native Son by Richard Wright
1941: 12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright
1942: For My People by Margaret Walker
1945: Black Boy by Richard Wright
1946: The Street by Ann Petry
1952: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
1963: Blues People by Amiri Baraka
1965: The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
1966: Jubilee by Margaret Walker
1969: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
1970: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
1970: Black Feeling Black Talk/Black Judgement by Nikki Giovanni
1972: Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
1972: Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara
1973: Sula by Toni Morrison
1973: Ego-Tripping And Other Poems for Young People by Nkiki Giovanni
1976: Roots by Alex Haley
1976: Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed
1976: Drumvoices by Eugene B. Redmond
1976: Patternmaster by Octavia Butler
1977: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
1977: Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler
1979: Kindred by Octavia Butler
1980: Wild Seed by Octavia Butler
1981: Ain't I a Woman?: Black women and feminism by bell hooks
1982: The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor
1982: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1984: Clay’s Ark by Octavia Butler
1984: Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
1987: Beloved by Toni Morrison
1987: The Truly Disadvantaged by William Julius Wilson
1988: Signifying Monkey by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
1990: Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
1990: Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
1992: Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones
1993: A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines
1994: Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
1994: Black Noise by Tricia Rose
1994: Race Matters by Cornel West
1995: Bloodchild and other stories by Octavia Butler
1996: Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat
1999: The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
1999: The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah

 Related:
• A Notebook on bookstores and book collections

List of 50 African American books from the 20th century

Here's a list of 50 books by African Americans from the 20th century that a group of my students have been browsing and using as the basis for class projects. The list I initially presented to the students was not in alphabetical order, as the list is below. Oh, and the list is definitely not comprehensive. 

[Related: Chronological list of 50 books by African American writers from the 20th century]

50 books by African American writers

1. Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
2. Baraka, Amiri. Blues People
3. Bambara, Toni Cade. Gorilla, My Love
4. Butler, Octavia. Bloodchild and other stories
5. Butler, Octavia. Clay’s Ark
6. Butler, Octavia. Kindred
7. Butler, Octavia. Mind of My Mind
8. Butler, Octavia. Patternmaster
9. Butler, Octavia. Wild Seed
10. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory
11. Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak!
12. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folks
13. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man
14. Gaines, Ernest. A Lesson Before Dying
15. Gates, Henry Louis. Signifying Monkey
16. Giovanni, Nikki. Ego-Tripping And Other Poems for Young People
17. Giovanni, Nikki. Black Feeling Black Talk/Black Judgement
18. Haley, Alex. Roots
19. hooks, bell. Ain't I a Woman?: Black women and feminism
20. Hughes, Langston. The Weary Blues
21. Johnson, Charles. Middle Passage

The Oprah, Beyoncé and Adichie Effects on Black books

In June, Knopf will publish Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, and in August, Random House will publish Imbolo Mbue Behold the Dreamers. Gyasi and Mbue were born in Ghana and Cameroon, respectively. Each of their novels, which are debut novels by the way, were reportedly acquired for seven figures. The significant investment that publishers are making in Gyasi and Mbue reflect a current interest in a "New Wave of African Writers," many of whom now live in the U.S. and Britain.

Some of those writers include Helen Oyeyemi, NoViolet Bulawayo, Teju Cole, Taiye Selasi, and of course most notably Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  The tremendous response to Adichie in fact may have inspired various other publishers to invest more in black women novelists, especially African-born black women.  

The early 1990s saw a moment that was viewed as particularly notable for black American women novelists. As the Times reported:

A turning point for the way black writing is perceived by the publishing industry came in June 1992, when "Waiting to Exhale" [by Terry McMillan] was one of three books by black writers among the top 10 titles on the New York Times fiction best-seller list. The others were Toni Morrison's "Jazz" and Alice Walker's "Possessing the Secret of Joy." 

In 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1996, Oprah Winfrey started "Oprah's Book Club," which among promoting various other authors, gave renewed or unprecedented attention to black women writers such as Morrison, Maya Angelou, Edwidge Danticat, and Pearl Cleage. 

If those writers were beneficiaries of "the Oprah Effect," then Adichie achieved an extensive boost from the New York Times and Beyoncé Effects. On December 4, the Times designated Adichie's Americanah one of the best 10 books of 2013. On December 13, Beyoncé released an album with one of the songs including an extended audio clip of Adichie. The appearance on Beyoncé's album positively affected books sale Adichie books and assisted in making her more known among an even larger audience.    

Today, we might wonder: did a kind of Adichie Effect prompt Knopf and Random House to make such substantial investments in Gyasi's and Mbue's debut novels? To what extent, if any, do the "new waves" of African writers, primarily African women writers by the way, displace the possibility of African American women writers? The discussion of whether publishers prefer black women novelists from Africa over black women novelists from the US has not yet gained much attention.

And then there's another take. In her essay "I’m Done With African Immigrant Literature," Siyanda Mohutsiwa draws attention to the fact that many of the most lauded "African" writers no longer live in Africa. Mohoutsiwa advocates for African literature that is based on the continent. 

I'm not saying the African immigrant experience isn't African, I'm just saying it's BORING. Give me Nairobi! Give me Mali! Give me Kinsasha!

— Siyanda-Panda (@SiyandaWrites) February 8, 2016

Related:
• The Lead-up to Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing 

A Poetic Trilogy: Jericho Brown, Phillip B. Williams & Rickey Laurentiis

I first met Jericho Brown, Phillip B. Williams, and Rickey Laurentiis in the fall of 2012 here in St. Louis. Treasure Shields Redmond was hosting a group of poets and visual artists at her house and asked me to stop by. Among other things, Treasure is a connector, and so here she was connecting writers.

I had been reading Jericho for years, but this was the first time I met him in person. I immediately understood why he's loved by everyone who knows him. He has a big personality, and at the same time, he's really attentive to you--the person he's talking with at a given moment or the person among the people who's reading for.

Oh, and put Treasure and Jericho in a room together, you might as well hold on, because they about to take you there. They'll telling stories and talking smack and laughing and moving around the room, and telling more stories and laughing more.    

In addition to various other artists, Treasure also introduced me to two graduate student poets from Washington University--Phillip and Rickey. I had already heard of them from poet Adrian Matejka. He always has his ear to the ground on new and emergent poets, and in one of our many conversations, he'd mentioned  two poets from Washington University to look for--Phillip and Rickey. Here they were.

Later all the poets read some of their poems. They almost all read from pieces that they had stored on their phones. After each poet read, Jericho served as everyone's hype man, offering shouting affirmations for what the writers had shared.

Rickey earned a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship in 2012, and Phillip earned the fellowship in 2013. In 2014, Rickey earned the Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

I thought back on that gathering at Treasure's place, as I recently began considering the ways Jericho Brown's The New Testament (2014), Rickey Laurentiis's Boy with Thorn (2015), and Phillip B. Williams's Thief in the Interior (2016). I was also wondering if I had unknowingly heard bits and pieces of these books as the poets read that evening back in 2012. Maybe. Maybe not.

Either way, I'm excited to think about their works individually and then in conversation. I'm also thankful, in retrospect, that I got a chance to hear them, which now allows their voices to accompany me as I read their books.   

Related:
• Jericho Brown takes you there in #BlackPoetsSpeakOut

Notations from the Natural Hair Movement exhibit

[ Related: Scenes from the Natural Hair Movement exhibit]

Nikkimae2003 (top), MsVaughnTV (bottom left), askProy (bottom right)

On February 17, we curated an exhibit that highlighted one of the most powerful social and economic developments of the contemporary era: the natural hair movement. Over the last 10 years in particular, large numbers of black women began to marshal their creative, technological, stylistic, and political capabilities into the production of a dynamic cultural enterprise. Collectively, they recovered and introduced new hair styles; they created new hair-care products; they raised awareness about black beauty and aesthetics; and they took advantage of new media and digital technologies to communicate with each other about #BlackHairStyles.

Afros, braids, cornrows, and the like have long histories in African American and African culture. Black people, especially black girls and women, have always worn braids, and afros, in particular, saw a resurgence during the 1960s. During the contemporary era, however, new modes of communication and interest in display cutting-edge fashionable hairstyles that also signal black consciousness resulted in black women innovating their hair game in all kinds of exciting ways.

Octavia Butler Exhibit

Earlier this week, I ran an exhibit concentrating on novelists Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler. The Butler portion of the exhibit focused on a series of novels that she wrote early in her career.

The Patternist Series

Science fiction writer Octavia Butler (1947 – 2006) published a series of novels known as the Patternist series, which included Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay’s Ark (1984). The stories of the linked novels stretch across hundreds of years, and the main characters – a group of supernatural beings, who could pass for human – are interested in developing a telepathic, interconnected network known as “the pattern.”

Many contemporary readers interested in the Patternist series read Butler’s book Seed to Harvest, which presents the books in narrative order: Wild Seed (2007), Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster. The narrative order, of course, is different than the order that the books were initially published. In addition, Seed to Harvest excludes one novel from the original Patternist series, mainly because Butler disliked that book and declined to have reprinted over the years.

According to Octavia Butler, her novel Survivor (1978) unfortunately resembled too many sci-fi representations where people went to other worlds and found “little green men or little brown men, and they were always less in some way.” As a result, she came to view Survivor negatively as her “Star Trek novel” and declined to have the novel reprinted.

 

Over the decades, publishers have reprinted various covers of Octavia Butler's Patternist series novels. Some of the vastly different covers reflect the efforts of publishers to market the books to core fans of science fiction (i.e. white males) and core fans of African American fiction (i.e. black women).
  
Related:
• A Notebook on Octavia Butler
• Covers of Octavia Butler Patternist Series Novels
• February Humanities Programming

Scenes from the Natural Hair Movement exhibit

Today, we ran an exhibit "The Natural Hair Movement" focusing on the increased activity and cultural efforts of black women stylizing their hair. Scenes from the exhibit: