Situating the bold & bodacious poetic voice of Mahogany L. Browne

The challenging questions right now are when and where to introduce students to the work of Mahogany L. Browne. Not if, but when and where. Got to get the timing and placement right in order to optimize the returns on the experience.  

In the upcoming fall semester in one of my African American literature courses as we listen to audio recordings of black women poets reading their works, we'll definitely study Browne's work. We're covering her poem "Black Girl Magic," for one, alongside poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Kelly Norman Ellis, Evie Shockley, Patricia Smith, and others.  

There's all kinds of wonderfulness about Browne's "Black Girl Magic" -- the affirmations for black girls, the lyricism and phrasings, the dynamic modulations in her voice, the Black Arts/Black Power-like resonances, the links to historical and contemporary conversations about black girls and women. The poem will no doubt move the students in the class.




So do we listen to the piece early on, toward the middle, or late in the semester? Her poem, when covered early, could usefully set the tone. Then again, the poem could be a necessary jolt if placed in the middle of the term. At the same time, Browne's poem is a spectacular grand finale piece. Decisions, decisions.

What other poets do we cover on the day we first study Browne? We could link her poem with Brooks's "Song in the Front Yard" and Kelly Norman Ellis's "Raised by Women" to discuss poems focusing on black girls and women. Or, we could position Browne's "Black Girl Magic" alongside Maya Angelou's "Phenomenal Woman" and Nikki Giovanni's "Ego-Tripping" as we examine poems of powerful affirmation. We might consider Browne in relation to jessica care moore and Patricia Smith as we talk about the expertise of dynamic poetry readers. More decisions, more decisions.   

Of course, I'm looking forward to thinking and rethinking my plans about the timing and placement of Browne's poem on my syllabus. I'm also excited about giving more thought to her bold, bodacious poetic voice. How might we describe what we hear from Browne along a continuum and as a kind of singular event?

Related:
• Can the sounds of black women's poetic voices get a witness? 
• Blog entries about black women poets

Henry Dumas, the Black Panther comic book, and Ta-Nehisi Coates

Excerpt from Henry Dumas poem "Rootsong" in Black Panther #3

Eugene B. Redmond has been advocating for and facilitating the posthumous publication of Henry Dumas's poems for nearly 50 years now. As my faculty mentor, Redmond prompted me to think about Dumas's poetry in multiple contexts. Still, I can't say I could've predicted today's Dumas sighting.  

Black Panther #3 -- written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, artwork by Brian Stelfreeze, and coloring by Laura Martin -- opens with an excerpt from Dumas's poem "Root Song,"  which reads in part:

Once when I was tree
flesh came and worshiped at my roots.
My ancestors slept in my outstretched
limbs and listened to flesh
praying and entreating on his knees.

How exciting to see the words of a somewhat underground poet whom you studied for so long show up in a comic book like Black Panther.

Today on his Atlantic blog, Coates published a short piece "Wakanda the Black Aesthetic" explaining his early readings of Dumas's poetry. He also references how Redmond and Toni Morrison helped ensure that readers might discover Dumas's work.  Coates writes that:

Dumas was killed at the age of 34 by New York city transit cop. But his legacy endures through the strivings of the poet Eugene Redmond and the great Toni Morrison. It was Redmond who posthumously edited Dumas’ poems into a book. It was Morrison, then an editor at Random House, who ultimately published them.

Dumas and Redmond were colleagues in 1968 at SIU's higher education program in East St. Louis. In May of that year, Dumas was killed in New York City by a transit police officer who alleged that Dumas had illegally jumped a turnstile. Murderous police brutality at its finest. Since his death, Redmond has work with a range of poets, scholars, editors, and Dumas's widow Loretta Dumas, to give readers access to Dumas's poems, short stories, and extended narratives (a novel). 

The appearance of Dumas's words in the opening of Black Panther #3 reveal that Coates was one of the many readers who encountered the poet's words and then found a way to re-present them in other modes. Perhaps, this appearance in a comic book is a first.


Related:
• A Notebook on Black Panther
• A Notebook on comic books
• Ta-Nehisi Coates

Can the sounds of black women's poetic voices get a witness?

This fall in one of my African American literature courses, we'll cover audio recordings by more than 20 black women poets and rappers. The recordings will give us opportunities to consider divergent voices of a range of artists.

Several years ago in my classes, I began incorporating audio recordings of Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, Jayne Cortez, Kelly Norman Ellis, Tracie Morris, and others reading their people. The recordings, however, were never the focus. Typically, the published poems were primary.

What happens when we privilege audio recordings and make printed poems secondary? How might that approach shift how we engage the work?

I'll get some answers in the fall.

In recent years, we've listened to MC Lyte, Lauryn Hill, Nicki Minaj, and other rappers. We were more inclined to privilege their sounds, even though we looked at the words on the page. Our experiences engaging their sounds provide a blueprint for how we might proceed with the poetry.

For nearly two decades now, I've heard literary scholars speak of the ways that women are "silenced." We somehow rarely comment on the ways that reading and not listening to artists prevents us from hearing them. Maybe the approaches my class takes in the fall will give a group of women artists new listening audiences. 

Related:
• Blog entries about black women poets

Differences between black poets and black poets

Back in the day, before say, the rise of African American literature courses and the formation of black literary studies, English teachers and their students were less likely to cover varieties of black poetry and poets. The "token" black poets in the anthologies and on the syllabi were used as stand-ins for all black poets.

Ah, but things change.


Today, in many contexts, we're often led to wonder: What are some differences between black poets and black poets?  What differences do those differences make?

In literature courses that concentrate exclusively on black writers, divergences among African American poets drive general and scholarly conversations about the poetry in ways that were less likely when folks studied one or two black poets at a time. In courses that highlight 10 or 20 or 30 black poets, the differences take on added significance.

Does any us -- folks into the work -- confuse the poetry of Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, and Rita Dove? Or, the poetry of Tracie Morris, Tracy K. Smith,and Patricia Smith? The poetry of Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Kevin Young, Terrance Hayes, and Tyehimba Jess? Nope.Hardly ever. Listen: many of us even make distinctions between the poetry of early LeRoi Jones and late Amiri Baraka.

The expansive production of poetry -- in print and on Youtube -- over the last decade alone places all kinds of demands on our abilities to discern between black poets and black poets. You hear folks discussing "academic" black poets as something quite different from spoken word poets. And of course, those so-called academic poets are constantly noting the differences among writers in their field, just as spoken word folks point out the varieties of spoken word. 

In some genres, the primacy of African American creators is the standard. There's no need to speak of "black rap music" or "black jazz," since so many black practitioners were instrumental to the formation of those fields. There might be some tokens in rap and jazz, but they ain't black.

Within fields of black poetry, we're still finding our way in talking about the differences without losing sight of the links. We try to talk about this seemingly unified thing called black poetry, even as we acknowledge all these debates, tensions, diversities, and divergences within the field. 

Related:
• Poetry vs. Poetry vs. Poetry vs. Poetry  
• LeRoi Jones vs. Amiri Baraka vs. Black poetry
• Writing poetry to be read/published vs. Writing poetry to be heard
• Black poetry vs. black poetry
• Contemporary Black Poets vs. Contemporary Black Poetry
• Black Poetry Debates: tracking histories of tension, vs., and questions  

Justice Sonia Sotomayor channels black studies

In her dissent in Utah vs.Strieff, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor draws on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Michelle Alexander, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others to strengthen her case about why she disagrees with the majority opinion concerning the legality of searches and seizures by police officers.  

Sotomayor writes that,

it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny. See M. Alexander, The New Jim Crow 95–136 (2010). For generations, black and brown parents have given their children “the talk”— instructing them never to run down the street; always keep your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking back to a stranger—all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them. See, e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903); J. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963); T. Coates, Between the World and Me (2015).

By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged.

We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are “isolated.” They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. See L. Guinier & G. Torres, The Miner’s Canary 274–283 (2002). They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.

In an article about the dissent, Victoria M. Massie writes that "Sotomayor’s dissent highlights the ways the ruling fails to listen to those who have long discussed the ways illegal stops undermine American democracy."

Yes. What also stood out to me was how important black studies texts were to Sotomayor's ability to produce such a strong dissent.

Related:
• Black Intellectual Histories 
• Ta-Nehisi Coates

"Seshat: A Digital Humanities Initiative" at Howard University

By Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II

This week, we're presenting entries related to the intersections of black artistic culture, technology, DH, and African American literary studies for the NEH-funded  project, "Seshat: A Digital Humanities Initiative in Literature, Language, and Criticism," directed by Dana Williams at Howard University. 

Below, we have provided links to brief entries that address text-mining findings, blogging, and other tech or DH projects that we have been producing.

Blogging
• Why blogging matters

Slave narratives
• Slave narratives and word count
• Chronological List of 33 Slave Narratives
• The word counts of 33 Slave narratives

Digital tools:
• Some Free Digital Software Programs and tools
• African American literary studies and three research methods using digital tools
• Voyant Tools Brief Overview
• Voyant Tools General Features
• Voyant Tools Ratios and Language Density
• Stop Words and AAVE
• Voyant Tools: Data Visualizations
• How short and long are African American short stories?

Jay Z 
• Jay Z, Metadata, and African American literary studies 

Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright
• Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Text-Mining Experiments
• Zora Neale Hurston & Richard Wright Similarities (In Graphs)
• Zora Neale Hurston & Richard Wright Differences (In Graphs) 

Related:
• African American Language and Culture Lab

Jay Z, Metadata, and African American literary studies

By Kenton Rambsy

On July 4, 2013, Jay Z released his 12th solo studio album Magna Carta …Holy Grail in partnership with Samsung. A multinational conglomerate company, Samsung paid $5 Million dollars so that the first million new owners of a Samsung device (Galaxy S II, Galaxy S4, Galaxy Note II) could, through the “Magna Carta” app, claim the album for free.

Well, not entirely free.  In exchange for downloading the album, the app collected a trove of information about the new customers. For instance, the app prevents a person’s phone from sleeping in order to collect information from other apps as well as learning the person’s precise GPS location, full network communication, and phone status among other things. Thus, the new customers were paying for the album, not with cash, but with the currency of data and metadata from their phones.   

So the methods by which Magna Carta was released that July were an important moment for Jay Z, Samsung, big data and rap music, and business.

That summer of 2013 also proved important for me as well. I decided to listen to all of Jay’s solo albums up until that point, which included 188 songs. While Samsung gathered information on its new customers, I began collecting data on Jay’s music. I paid attention to perfect rhymes, slant rhymes, metaphors, similes, and other stylistic features of his work. 

I began to ask more questions about Jay’s music and think about the significance of tracking characteristics from each song. Similar to Samsung, I was interested in metadata concerning Jay Z. Instead of paying particular attention to Jay’s fan base, I was quantifying his distinct modes of delivery as well as the production histories of each album.

I observed Jay’s style change over the course of 12 albums. I tracked the number of producers who participated in the production of each album and noted which producers collaborated on some of Jay’s biggest hits. Later, I tracked the average word usage of each of Jay’s album and compared those numbers based on album sales.

The summer of 2013 did not just entail listening to rap music. During those months, I was studying for my comprehensive exams, as I was in the process of pursuing a graduate education in literary studies. When I wasn't only studying, I was working to quantify features of African American short fiction. I tracked the usage of African American Vernacular English, references to geographic regions, the presence of cultural metaphors, and other attributes of short fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Edward P. Jones, and several others. 

I just completed my first year as a professor in the department of at the University of Texas at Arlington. This past semester, I taught two courses: "Geo-Coding Black Short Stories" and "The Life and Times of S. Carter." In retrospect, those courses are directly linked to my listening, studying, and data-gathering experiences during the summer of 2013.

At the time, I did not fully understand that collecting and comparing quantitative data about African American short stories with thematic content would equip me with a powerful lens for examining literary expression. I was also unaware that gathering and quantifying information about 188 songs by Jay Z would serve as such a sturdy foundation for my future work on data and metadata and a literature course on life and times of S. Carter.

Related:
• "Seshat: A Digital Humanities Initiative" at Howard University 
• African American Language and Culture Lab

Slave narratives and word count

By Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II

Our on-going research on Frederick Douglass led us to look at a larger body of slave narratives. We mined 33 narratives written between the early 1840s and late 1860s. Those 33 narratives comprised approximately 1,213,088 words.

[Related: Chronological List of 33 Slave Narratives]

We organized three sets of the narratives by decade. The 1840s corpus or group of texts contains 16 narratives totaling 388,093 words. The 1850s corpus contains 5 narratives totaling about 418,625 words. The 1860s corpus contains 12 narratives totaling about 406,370 words.

[Related: The word counts of 33 Slave narratives]

Why were slave narratives during the 1850s so long? The 5 works by Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, John Brown, John Thompson, and Jermain Wesley Loguen were longer than a combined total of 16 narratives published during the 1840s. Those 5 works were more than the toal of 12 narratives published from the 1860s.

Our project is at a preliminary stage with only 33 narratives among the more than 200 published North American slave narratives.  Still, utilizing text-mining software to quantify the word count made us aware of measurable differences between a large body of slave narratives when organized by decade. Based on the texts we selected, the 1850s marked a notable moment for extended individual narratives in comparison to narratives published in the previous and subsequent decade.

Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), published 10 years after Douglass’s Narrative of the Life (1845), contains over three times the words of his first publication. At 77,289 words, Twelve Years a Slave (1853) contains more words than the total number of words in The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina (1862), The Experience of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-three years (1862), Life of James Mars, a Slave Born and Sold in Connecticut (1864), Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green, a Runaway Slave from Kentucky (1864), and The Story of Mattie J. Jackson (1866).

To what extents do the brevity or lengthiness of slave narratives matter? For now, we're uncertain. 

For now, our tally of total words from a selection of slave narratives made us aware of the extended length of 5 of the 33 narratives published from 1842 – 1868. In further investigations, we’ll add to the total number of narratives we consider. We are also interested in thinking more about the relationships between word count of literary works and reception.

Related:
• "Seshat: A Digital Humanities Initiative" at Howard University 
• African American Language and Culture Lab

The word counts of 33 Slave narratives

By Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II

The following list contains the word counts of 33 select slave narratives published between 1842 and 1868. The list of narratives constitutes the preliminary stage for one of our text-mining projects. We stress preliminary as more than 200 slave narratives were published.

[Related: Chronological List of 33 Slave Narratives]

Word counts, slave narratives, and year of publication

3,460 words: The Life and Sufferings of John Joseph, a Native of Ashantee, in West Africa (1848)
9,392: Life of James Mars, a Slave Born and Sold in Connecticut (1864)
9,771: The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black (1847)
11,044: Narrative of Henry Watson, a Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself (1848)
11,815: The Story of Mattie J. Jackson (1866)
13,414: Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy (1843)
13,612: The Narrative of Lunsford Lane (1842)
15,050: Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green, a Runaway Slave from Kentucky (1864)
17,393: The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina (1862)
17,770: The Experience of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-three years (1862)

18,650: Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery (1848)
19,219: Narrative of William Wells Brown (1847)
20,599: The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave (1849)
24,499: The Light and Truth of Slavery (1845)
25,172: Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (1849)
25,218: Running a thousand Miles for Freedom (1860)
25,002: The Fugitive Blacksmith, or Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington (1849)
26,816: Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke (1846)
29,293: Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky (1863)

30,383: A Narrative of Events of the Life of J. H. Banks, an Escaped Slave (1861)
35,036: Struggles for Freedom: Or the Life of James Watkins, Formerly a Slave in Maryland (1860)
36,417: The Life of John Thompson, A Fugitive Slave (1855)
36,577: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
44,747: Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson, of Kentucky (1847)
47,240: Narrative of William Hayden (1846)
49,152: Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (1849)
49,888: Slave Life in Georgia (1855)
51,609: Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868)
77,289: Twelve Years a Slave (1853)

81,804: Bond and Free: or, Yearnings for Freedom (1861)
81,607: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
120,410: The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman (1855)
134,621: My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

Related:
• "Seshat: A Digital Humanities Initiative" at Howard University 
• African American Language and Culture Lab

Chronological List of 33 Slave Narratives

By Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II

The following list contains a chronological list of 33 slave narratives published between 1842 and 1868. The list of narratives constitutes the preliminary stage for one of our text-mining projects. We stress preliminary as more than 200 slave narratives were published.

[Related: The word counts of 33 Slave narratives]

Slave Narratives
Year of publication, title, author

1840s [16]
1842: The Narrative of Lunsford Lane by Lunsford Lane
1843: Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy by Moses Grandy
1845: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
1845: The Light and Truth of Slavery by Aaron
1846: Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke by Lewis and Milton Clarke
1846: Narrative of William Hayden by William Hayden
1847: The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black by Leonard Black
1847: Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson, of Kentucky by Andrew Jackson
1847: Narrative of William Wells Brown by William Wells Brown
1848: Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery by Moses Roper
1848: Narrative of Henry Watson, a Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself by Henry Watson
1848: The Life and Sufferings of John Joseph, a Native of Ashantee, in West Africa by John Joseph
1849: Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown by Henry Box Brown
1849: The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave by Josiah Henson
1849: Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb by Henry Bibb
1849: The Fugitive Blacksmith, or Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington by James W. C. Pennington

1850s [5]
1853: Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
1855: My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass
1855: Slave Life in Georgia by John Brown
1855: The Life of John Thompson, A Fugitive Slave by John Thompson
1855: The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman by Jermain Wesley Loguen

1860s [12]
1860: Running a thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft
1860: Struggles for Freedom: Or the Life of James Watkins, Formerly a Slave in Maryland by James Watkins
1861: A Narrative of Events of the Life of J. H. Banks, an Escaped Slave by J. H. Banks
1861: Bond and Free: or, Yearnings for Freedom by Israel Campbell
1861: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
1862: The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina by John Andrew Jackson by John Andrew Jackson
1862: The Experience of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-three years by Thomas H. Jones
1863: Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky by Francis Fedric
1864: Life of James Mars, a Slave Born and Sold in Connecticut by James Mars
1864: Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green, a Runaway Slave from Kentucky by J. D. Green
1866: The Story of Mattie J. Jackson by Mattie J. Jackson
1868: Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House by Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley

*******
Note: Some of the titles are abbreviated.

Related:
• "Seshat: A Digital Humanities Initiative" at Howard University 
• African American Language and Culture Lab

African American literary studies and three research methods using digital tools

By Kenton Rambsy

My ongoing work using text-mining software to analyze short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Edward P. Jones over the years has allowed me to offer detailed accounts of black artistic styles across historical periods and geographic boundaries. So far, I have used digital tools: 1) Extracting Quantitative Data, 2) Managing Quantitative Data, and 3) Visualizing Quantitative Data.

I utilize text-mining software to extract numerical values from digitized texts. The software reveals the density of language in a given text, the frequency of recurring phrases using a collocate function, and linguistic markers that link multiple texts among a host of other features.

The process of quantifying the contents of stories by Hurston, Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Jones allows for me to identify and chart a host of artistic trends based on geographic settings and historical periods. Below, I have expanded upon these three areas with specific examples.

1.) Extracting Quantitative Data: I use Voyant Tools, a text-mining software program, extracts quantitative data from digitized texts (i.e. short stories, autobiographies, and rap lyrics). The enumeration of texts can assist with identifying linguistic trends and pinpointing word and phrase usage.

2.) Managing Quantitative Data: After using text-mining software to extract raw quantitative data from digitized texts, I organize the content in spreadsheets, like Excel (similar to Google Spreadsheets). I use Excel in order to organize data alphabetically, by size, color, or some other filter that I designate. This enables me to effectively assess information and identify notable features based on the data I collect.

3.) Visualizing Quantitative Data: I export CSV (Excel) files to create data visualizations in various programs, including Tableau Public. Data visualizations make complex data accessible, understandable, and usable. Visualizations can take many forms ranging from geographic and map-based graphics to bar graphs, charts, word clouds, or visualized networks. Tables display measures of a variable, while charts and network visualizations patterns or relationships in the data for one or more variables.

Related:
• "Seshat: A Digital Humanities Initiative" at Howard University 
• African American Language and Culture Lab

Why blogging matters

I’m taking some of my time at a DH workshop at Howard University to talk about the value of blogging, especially its value for African American literary studies and African American Studies. For now, I focus on the following 4 reasons why blogging matters:

1.) Serialized, extended commentary over time represents one of the vital possibilities for blogging. For me, that has involved producing entries about:
• Poetry
• Writers & cultural figures 
• Assorted special topics

2.) The creation of extensive and manageable resources has been one of the most useful services that I have provided on the blog, assisting visitors filter or navigate large bodies of information. 
• Timelines (i.e. Black Poetry 1854-2015 – An Afrofuturism-based timeline, 1998 - 2016 – Awards)  
• Coverage of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Between the World and Me  ––  6 notable reviews
• A checklist of poems featuring ex-slaves

3.) Gathering and publishing news items creates opportunities to track developing stories in real-time. It's also possible to utilize blogging to reflect on events across the course of a year.   
• Coverage of Mike Brown
• The year in African American poetry, 2015

4.) Writing for an immediate audience has greatly strengthened my capabilities as a writer and thinker. My work as a blogger has also made me more mindful of the divergent interests of audiences.

Related:
• "Seshat: A Digital Humanities Initiative" at Howard University 
• African American Language and Culture Lab

African and African American tensions

In a recent review of Yaa Gyasi's novel Homegoing in The New York Times, Isabel Wilkerson gives voice to the sometimes whispered tensions between Africans and African Americans.

While Wilkerson offers many praises of the book, she also notes that Gyasi more impressively presents West Africans than she does African Americans. "In the first, magical half of the novel," writes Wilkerson, "Gyasi walks assuredly through the terrain of Alex Haley, Solomon ­Northup and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her intimate rendering of the human heart battered by the forces of conquest and history." However, "the spell breaks," explains Wilkerson, as Gyasi depicts present-day African Americans. 

According to Wilkerson, "More disappointingly, the lyricism and depth of the scenes in West Africa give way to the coarser language and surface descriptions of life in America." As one example, Wilkerson points out that Gyasi juxtaposes a studious first-generation, African girl with an African American girl who appears adverse to educational pursuits. "It is dispiriting to encounter such a worn-out cliché — that ­African-Americans are hostile to reading and education — in a work of such beauty," writes Wilkerson.

Months ago, I wrote about the deep investments that Knopf, Gyasi's publisher, was putting into the novel. So far, the reviews and extensive coverage of Homegoing suggest that those investments are paying off. The commentary on the novel has largely been positive.  

Yet, Wilkerson's review does raise some concerns about Gyasi's presentation of black folks on this side of the Atlantic: "On the whole, African-Americans are shown as passive, boats buffeted by the currents. Rarely do we see the richness of their lives."  

André M. Carrington, Mark Anthony Neal, and recovery work

André M. Carrington includes chapters in his book Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction on Lieutenant Uhura and Benjamin Sisko, notable black characters from Star Trek and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, respectively. In the process, Carrington performs a kind of "recovery work," reminding us of characters whose groundbreaking presence and activities could easily be overlooked or downplayed.

Uhura was portrayed by actress Nichelle Nichols in the television series of Star Trek in the 1960s. Nichols also played the character in film adaptations of the Star Trek movies in 1979, 1982, 1984, 1986, and 1989. I've always been aware of the Uhura character, but Carrington's chapter was the first chapter-length discussion I had ever encounter of Nichols. She's usually mentioned fondly, but almost always only in passing.  

Benjamin Sisko was portrayed by Avery Brooks in the series Deep Space Nine from 1993 through 1999. I somehow missed the show during its run, and so have had sketchy knowledge about Brooks's portrayal.

I immediately thought of Mark Anthony Neal's book Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013) as I read Carrington. Neal also performs a kind of recover work in his book. He provides chapters on the actor Gene Anthony Ray from Fame and on Avery Brooks's portrayals in Spencer for Hire, A Man Named Hawk, and Deep Space Nine.

Neal approaches Avery Brooks from the perspective of illegible black masculinity; Carrington approaches Brooks from the lens of a blackness and speculative fiction. Taken together, they broaden the possibilities for thinking about Benjamin Sisko and then subsequently, various other black characters. In some ways, their recovery work could usefully reconfigure how we envision these various figures.   

Related:
• A Notebook on André M. Carrington's Speculative Blackness 
• A Notebook on Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy

A Notebook on André M. Carrington's Speculative Blackness

This notebook comprises a series of short writings on André M. Carrington Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (2016).

Entries 
• André M. Carrington, Mark Anthony Neal, and recovery work 
• Speculative Blackness by André M. Carrington 
• From Afrofuturism to Speculative Blackness
• An Afrofuturism-based timeline, 1998 - 2016 

Related: 
• Afrofuturism
• A Notebook on Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy

An Afrofuturism-based timeline, 1998 - 2016

What follows is a partial timeline of activities, events, and publications related to afrofuturism, technology, and digital humanities that I've traced over the years.

1998: Alondra Nelson creates Afrofuturism listserv.
1998: Science fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson publishes Brown Girl in the Ring.
1998: Colson Whitehead publishes  The Intuitionist on Dec. 29. Most bibliographies cite 1999 as pub date.
1998: Octavia Butler publishes Parable of the Talents.
1998: Detective novelist Walter Mosley publishes Blue Light, a science fiction novel. 
1998: OutKast releases Aquemini.  
1999: Octavia Butler receives Nebula Award for Best Novel for Parable of the Talents.
2000: Nalo Hopkinson publishes Midnight Robber.
2000: Sheree R. Thomas edits Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora.
2001: Colson Whitehead publishes John Henry Days.
2001: BlackPlanet, an African American community web-site is launched, on September 1. 
2002: Alondra Nelson edits Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text/
2004: Anna Everett organizes AfroGeeks (race and technology conference) on May 7 - 8.
2004: Dark Matter: Reading the Bones ed. by  Sheree R. Thomas published.
2004: Scratch releases Embodiment of Instrumentation. 
2005: Anna Everett organizes AfroGeeks conference on May 19 - 21.

#NEHBlackSpace – Space & Place in Africana/Black Studies

By Kenton Rambsy

This week, I have the privilege to serve as institute faculty at the NEH funded “Space & Place in Africana/Black Studies” summer institute co-directed by Professors Kim Gallon (Purdue University) and Angel David Nieves (Hamilton College).

The institute brings together twenty early and mid-career Africana/Black Studies scholars, graduate students, librarians and archivists as a means of “bringing Africana/Black Studies scholars into the fold of digital humanities through the critical nexus of race and space. The Institute also prepares participants to view Black Digital Humanities as a way to challenge and transform discourse and activities across the humanities.”

My presentation addresses how geography can facilitate engagements with African American literature and digital humanities. Specifically, I focus on aspects of cultural geo-tagging (similar to my work on writer Edward P. Jones) as I explore 10 short stories by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and explain how quantitative data can assist in identifying a variety of stylistic features of the South and southern literature.

Below, I have provided links to brief posts that explain how utilizing text mining software helps to illuminate the significance of geography and the predictive function of core texts by Hurston, Wright, and other select black writers.

Useful Posts:
• Some Free Digital Software Programs and tools
• Voyant Tools Brief Overview
• Voyant Tools General Features
• Voyant Tools Ratios and Language Density
• Stop Words and AAVE
• Voyant Tools: Data Visualizations
• Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Text-Mining Experiments
• How short and long are African American short stories?
• Zora Neale Hurston & Richard Wright Similarities (In Graphs)
• Zora Neale Hurston & Richard Wright Differences (In Graphs) 

Related:
• African American Language and Culture Lab

Zora Neale Hurston & Richard Wright Differences (In Graphs)

By Kenton Rambsy

In addition to noting similarities between Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, I used text-mining software to chart some of their differences.

Hurston’s focus on folk culture in Florida and the interactions among working black characters  contrasts sharply with Wright’s emphasis on black-white interactions in rural Mississippi to show the urgency and threat of violence. Wright uses far more racial markers (black, white, nigger) in his fiction in comparison to Hurston.

Hurston was raised in a relatively insular all-black town in Florida, which could explain why her story reflected that environment. In fact, in nearly every instance when Hurston uses the word “white” in her works, she is not referencing white people. Unlike Hurston, Wright, on the other hand, grew up in an environment that was often violently hostile to black people.

During my text-mining analyses of Hurston's and Wright's works, I also honed in on the word “said” to document differences in narration styles. All of the stories by both writers are written in third person. However, on average, Wright uses the word “said” in far greater frequency than Hurston. Wright’s stories have far more characters in comparison than Wright. In Wright's stories, the word "said" is used to clarify what character is speaking. Hurston’s stories use far less characters and readers can better follow dialogues without having to differentiate between many characters.

Related:
• "Seshat: A Digital Humanities Initiative" at Howard University 
• African American Language and Culture Lab
• A notebook on short stories by black writers  

Geo-coding black short stories & Jay Z -- Spring 2016 courses at UTA

By Kenton Rambsy

In the spring semester of 2016, I taught two digital humanities classes at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) -- "Geo-Coding Black Short Stories" and "The Life and Times of S. Carter." In both courses, we used text-mining software to identify stylistic features of black short story writers.

Course Descriptions:
Geo-Coding Black Short Stories: This course focused on stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Toni Cade Bambara, Edward P. Jones and other writers, and we examined the racial-spatial dimensions of African American short fiction. Students used quantitative data and text-mining software to create data sets that illuminated the significance of ‘black’ geography and corresponding thematic trends.

The Life and Times of S. Carter S. Carter: This course placed Jay Z’s four classic albums in a broad African American literary continuum of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical works. Students compiled metadata on Jay Z in order to produce thematic data visualizations, literary timelines, and a list of key terms that demonstrated the literary merit of rap music and its close ties to the larger field of African American literature.

Related:
• Jay Z, African American literary studies & digital humanities
• Geo-Coding Black Short Stories
• African American Language and Culture Lab
• A notebook on short stories by black writers

Zora Neale Hurston & Richard Wright Similarities (In Graphs)

 
By Kenton Rambsy

Despite the perceived ideological differences between Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, both writers share a common regional setting: the South.

Text-mining software allowed me to extract quantitative data to construct visualizations that illustrate stylistic differences between the two southern writers. These findings become especially important when analyzing works by Hurston and Wright, whose competing interests helped to create these broad parameters for studying African American literature.

How short and long are African American short stories?

By Kenton Rambsy

Text-mining leads us to consider differences in what we mean by “short” in short stories. Charles Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” has 4, 641 words. Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” has 4,729 words. Richard Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” has 11,020 words, Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” has 13,657 words. The word counts of those canonical stories indicate that the lengths of short stories vary greatly. The quantifying feature of text-mining clarifies that a short story can be 5,000 words of 14,000 words.

Above, I provide a bar graph highlighting the word count of stories by Wright and Hurston. Below, I provide a graph showing the word count of 15 canonical stories.

Related:
• "Seshat: A Digital Humanities Initiative" at Howard University 
• African American Language and Culture Lab

Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Text-Mining Experiments

By Kenton Rambsy

My on-going work with Zora Neale Hurston’s and Richard Wright’s southern short fiction led me to think more critically about instances of AAVE in African American literature over an extended period of time. AAVE often times serves as a stylistic marker that connects characters and geographic locations to the American South. Words such as “Ah” (I), “Yuh” (You), “Wuz” (Was), and “Git” (Get) are used frequently in stories published before 1940 to create phonetic spellings that are meant to mimic the drawls of southern black people.

I decided to examine 10 short stories by Hurston and Wright. For Hurston, I selected 5 stories that have been frequently reprinted in anthologies over the past 50 years. I chose to analyze Wright’s first short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938). See above: I have provided a table that includes the story title, story word count, word types, and ratios.

Some Free Digital Software Programs and tools

By Kenton Rambsy

Here’s a checklist of free digital software programs and tools that I’ve found useful.

Google Ngram charts the numbers of times an n-gram (a character or characters that stands for a word or group of words) appears in Google’s collection of texts published between 1500 – 2012. Google Ngram is useful for tracking the prominence of specific people, subjects, and locations overtime in print publications from Google’s database.

NYT Chronicle identifies the number of times a particular word or phrase appears in the New York Times from 1851 to the present. The program creates a timeline where the frequency of the word is plotted on a graph in relation to how many times it appeared in the newspaper. NYT Chronicle is useful for tracking the coverage of various subjects from the newspaper over time.

Rap Stats scans a massive online database of rap music from 1988 to the present and identifies words or phrases from song lyrics. Rap Stats can assist scholars interested in tracking the rise and fall of terminology over the course of rap history.

Google Trends: This tool tracks the use of a specific word or phrase in relation to how many times people searched the word on Google’s search engine from 2004 to the present. The website produces a number of visualizations such as a line graph that charts topic frequency and a heat map that shows the regularity of the terms that have been searched worldwide. Scholars might find the tool helpful for tracking keywords and subjects pertaining to African American literary studies.

Readings for African American Literatures & Cultures Institute (2016)

This June at the University of Texas San Antonio, I'll work with Fellows in the African American Literatures and Cultures Institute, a program founded and directed by part-time literary scholar, full-time superhero Joycelyn Moody. I run the day-to-day seminar duties.

Here's a look at our reading list for the summer.

Week 1
• Keywords 
• Debates in Black Studies
• Poetry packet #1: Vivee Frances, Robert Hayden, Ishmael Reed, Opal Palmer Adisa
• “Message to the Grassroots” by Malcolm X
• Editorial selections by Felicia Nimue Ackerman
• "Diversifying the Graduate school Pipeline" by Joycelyn Moody and Howard Rambsy II
• Poetry packet #2: Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Jayne Cortez, Lucille Clifton, Jay Z and Jay Electronica
• Beyoncé, bell hooks, and Black Feminisms
• Poetry packet #3: Amiri Baraka, Nas, and Jay Z
• Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Nina Simone's Face" and "The Appropriation of Nina Simone"

[Related: 2016 course packet]

Week 2
• "The Breast Cancer Racial Gap" by Tara Parker-Pope 
• "A Grim Breast Cancer Milestone for Black Women" by Tara Parker-Pope 
• Poetry packet #4: Kelly Norman Ellis, Tracie Morris, jessica care moore, Evie Shockley, Lauryn
Hill, Kendrick Lamar, and Jay Z
• "1.5 Million Missing Black Men," "The Methodology: 1.5 Million Missing Black Men," "Chicago’s Murder Problem"
• “Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think” by Robert H. Frank
• Excerpts from The Boondocks by Aaron McGruder and (Th)ink by Keith Knight
• Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl"
• Toni Morrison's "Sweetness"
• Excerpt from The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
• Poetry packet#5: Poems by Tyehimba Jess, Adrian Matejka, Kevin Young, and Common

Week 3
• Presentations

Related:
• African American Literatures and Cultures Institute

Notebook on Voyant Tools

By Kenton Rambsy

This notebook provides information about Voyant Tools, a free, web-based, text analysis and visualization toolset.

• Stop Words and AAVE
• Voyant Tools Ratios and Language Density
• Voyant Tools: Data Visualizations
• Voyant Tools General Features
• Voyant Tools Brief Overview

Related:
• Some Free Digital Software Programs and tools
• The African American Literary Studies Lab

Stop Words and AAVE

By Kenton Rambsy

Black southern writers often times employ AAVE and rely on common words such as “dat” (that), “ah” (I), “yuh” (you), and “en” (in) to create southern environments. Since Voyant’s stop words list does not account for AAVE, I hone in on these particular words to make connections and identify distinctions between stylistics patters of black short fiction with southern characters.

In the case of African American literature, function words such as conjunctions, pronouns, and prepositions, are of great importance. These words serve as literary markers and stylistic features of the fictional South.

Below, I have provided a table featuring distinct AAVE words and the total number of times they appear across select short stories by Charles Chesnutt, Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright.

Related
• Notebook on Voyant Tools
• "Seshat: A Digital Humanities Initiative" at Howard University  

Voyant Tools Ratios and Language Density

By Kenton Rambsy

I use Voyant’s “ratio” feature to gauge the linguistic variety between various writers. Ratio is a word density measurement. The ratio is derived from the amount of content words in relation to the total number of words in a document (content words divided by total number of words).

Below is a table that contains the total number of words, word types, and ratios for 10 short stories by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright.

Voyant Tools: Data Visualizations

By Kenton Rambsy


Data visualizations help researchers turn complicated metadata into accessible, usable, and discernable graphics that communicate characteristics about the style of writing.

Below, I have provided images of visualizations that were made through Voyant Tools. The text-mining software automatically extracted data extracted from short stories I uploaded and created create visualizations based on numerical information related to word usage and diversity of language.

Below are five data visualizations features on Voyant Tools.

Data Visualizations:
Cirrus is a word cloud displaying the frequency of words appearing in a corpus.

Voyant Tools General Features

By Kenton Rambsy

Voyant has built in interfaces that automatically generate data visualizations from the content a user uploads. For literary study, visualizations can graphically illustrate a variety of numerical correlations such the ranking of words, deviations and categorical subdivisions of language trends, correlations between multiple documents.

Below are five general tools I used to analyze short fiction by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright


Tools

Corpus Summary is a tool that provides a simple, textual overview of the current corpus. This includes number of words, number of unique words, longest and shortest documents, highest and lowest vocabulary density, most frequent words, notable peaks in frequency, and distinctive words.

Collocates provides an ordered list of word collocation for a specified word and document. A collocate is the habitual juxtaposition of a particular word with another word or words with a frequency greater than chance. The tool provides a sortable table of word collocation for a specified keyword in a specified document.

2016 course packet for AALCI

I'm gearing up for the African American Literatures and Cultures Institute (AALCI). We begin on Sunday. In addition to meeting and working with this year's Fellows, and I'm excited about the course packet that we'll use.

Similar to two years ago when I first produced a formal course packet, I wanted to have collected body of materials, with samples of previous work, templates of professional statements, and other items that might be useful to the students. I also printed select timelines from this blog, images, and short entries related to African American literary studies and Black Studies.

The course packet also contains keywords and definitions, partial chronologies from professors and students, and descriptions of critical approaches. So much of what's gathered here emerges from the collected wisdom of working with AALCI for the past six summers.  The presentation of the materials in a single course packet makes it possible bring all the scattered information together in book form.

Printing costs usually prevent me from producing course packets like these during the academic school year. I simply have too many students to afford it. I might have to rethink that approach though. At AALCI, the small number of Fellows means that the costs of printing fit just within my budget.

I began producing course packets during my days as a instructor in graduate school at Pennsylvania State University. There was a system in place, established over the years by the many graduate students, that made the process of producing course packets accessible and exciting. Perhaps the course packets were also a version of book production for all of us.

There was no similar system when I began as a professor at SIUE, though I have worked on a variety of print-based productions over the years. Returning to the production of a course packet this year for AALCI allows me to think, again, about the value of using these kinds of documents in the process of working with students. 

Related:
• African American Literatures and Cultures Institute 

Blogging about Poetry in May 2016

[Related content: Blogging about Poetry]

• May 29: Black men writers and creativity, 1995 - 2016
• May 27: Gun violence, Black Lives Matter, and poetry 
• May 25: Tony Medina and bystander blues
• May 24: When will poets & literary scholars deal with gun violence?   
• May 15: African American Poets and Academic Appointments  
• May 14: Books noted (poetry #1)
• May 2: Margaret Walker almost won the Pulitzer in 1943 
• May 2: Margaret Walker and exclamation points in African American poetry
• May 1: Poetry awards and lucky breaks
• May 1: Blogging about Poetry in April 2016

Debates and tensions in Black Studies

As a complement to my "Black Poetry Debates: tracking histories of tension, vs., and questions," I decided to produce a list related to Black Studies. Although Black Studies programs began appearing on university campuses in the mid to late 1960s, a wide range of historical events, discussions, collaborations, and yes, arguments shaped the formation of the programs. The following list offers brief descriptions of some of the general recurring debates and tensions in the field.

• Black curriculum vs. conventional, Eurocentric curriculum – For many proponents of Black Studies programs, one main problem was prevalence of Eurocentric approaches and curriculums throughout the academy and the exclusion of African and African American perspectives. Black Studies programs were designed to offer alternatives.

• Names for the programs – Over the years, scholars and participants have struggled over the names and implications of the programs. Some of the names have included: “Black Studies,” “African American Studies,” “Afro-American Studies,” “African and African American Studies,” “African American and African Studies,” “Africana Studies,” and “Ethnic Studies.” Many universities shifted names for their programs; each name, of course, signals distinct orientations and interests of the programs.

• Dealing with anti-black racism – Many, if not most, Black Studies scholars agree that anti-black racism has been a destructive and debilitating force in the lives of African Americans. There’s far less agreement among Black Studies scholars, though, on how exactly people should deal with racism.

• Political vs. Cultural focus – During the 1960s, some black activist groups wanted to concentrate on what they viewed as ‘political’ issues, exemplified in some respects by the platform of Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (i.e. issues pertaining to housing, healthcare, employment, police brutality). Other black groups wanted to take a cultural or artistic approach, doing more to utilize the arts to highlight African American concerns and interests. The political groups and the cultural groups sometimes had serious conflicts about which focus to prioritize.

• Research vs. programming – Some of the programs concentrate on research ad scholarly production. Other programs concentrate on programming, primarily for undergraduates. The different points of focus create a variety of subtle and direct tensions for students and faculty involved in the programs, particularly with respect to funding. Within the frame research vs. programming, there is also strain on whether the priority should be graduate students or undergraduates.