Where did these Black Women Writers courses come from?

At hundreds of colleges across the country, English departments offer "Black Women Writers" courses. It's been this way for a few decades now. Those courses are integral to African American literature curriculums. The classes deserve more attention in considerations of African American literary studies and general interest in the work of Black women writers. 

A few years back, I was researching information on African American literature course offerings at multiple universities. I was not surprised to find that the most frequently offered African American literature classes were survey courses. I was intrigued, though, to learn how pervasive Black Women Writers courses were. 

Here at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE), the department has been offering a Black Women Writers course since at least 1990 (perhaps even earlier). We are hardly unique, and our department was not one of the pioneers.  

Alice Walker is often credited with teaching the first Black Women Writers courses. Prior to teaching the classes, she had experiences that primed her for leading the way. She began her undergraduate career at Spelman College in 1961, and she later transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she graduated in 1965. 

After publishing her debut volume of poetry Once (1968), Alice Walker worked at Jackson State and Tougaloo

Among others, she was reading Black women writers and pursuing a career as one. Her experiences in Black spaces were key, especially her presence at HBCUs. In 1968-1969, she was a writer-in-residence at Jackson State University (then known as Jackson State College), and in 1970-1971, she was writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College. At those two Black schools in Jackson, Mississippi, she was formulating or solidifying ideas for classes featuring African American women writers.     

In 1972, Walker moved to Boston, and taught at Wellesley and the University of Massachusetts at Boston. She taught courses on Black Women Writers at both institutions. In How We Get Free (2017), in an interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Barbara Smith recalls that she audited one of those courses with Walker at the UMass Boston campus. Walker was offering the class for adult learners. 

Take a moment to think on that: Walker, who was 28 years old at the time, offered a course on Black Women Writers at one college for undergraduates and soon after that, she offered the course in the same city, this time for adult learners. 

Walker's class was an important gateway. "That’s where I first got really exposed to Black women’s literature," said Smith, who is two years younger than Walker. And it didn't stop there. The very next year, Smith got a teaching job at Emerson College, also in Boston, and what did she promptly start teaching? Yes, a Black Women Writers course.

In her first semester as a college professor, Smith taught three classes: English composition, African American literature, and Black Women Writers.  

So Smith takes a Black Women Writers course in 1972; she teaches one in 1973, and in 1974, she co-founded the Combahee River Collective. In 1977, along with Beverly Smith and Demita Frazier, Smith co-wrote the well-known "Combahee River Collective Statement," and she also published "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism." 

The 1970s witnessed the publication and circulation of works by many outstanding Black women creative artists -- Toni Morrison. Maya Angelou. Gayl Jones. Jayne Cortez. Toni Cade Bambara. Octavia Butler. Sonia Sanchez. Look: the list goes on and on. Folks who were thinking of teaching a Black Women Writers course at that time had so many wonderful options. 

Margaret Walker (pointing) with Mari Evans, Sonia Sanchez at Phillis Wheatley Festival, 1973. photograph © Roy Lewis

It was also during this moment that people began returning to the works of Zora Neale Hurston, who has since become a mainstay in Black Women Writers courses. And consider this, if we're telling the history of recovery projects related to Black women writers, then we should return to Mississippi and mention another Walker -- Margaret Walker. In 1973, Walker organized and hosted the Phillis Wheatley Festival at Jackson State University.

The conference was on Wheatley, but goodness, the participants represented an extraordinary gathering of more than twenty Black women writers, including Margaret Walker, Alice Walker, June Jordan, Mari Evans, Nikki Giovanni, Lucille Clifton, Paula Giddings, Audre Lorde, and Carolyn Rodgers.  

From the 1970s up through the 1980s, a range of scholars contributed to the development of African American literary studies and the critical discourse on Black Women Writers. Some of those scholars included Barbara Smith, Deborah McDowell, Mary Helen Washington, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Barbara Christian, bell hooks, Cheryl Wall, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. Hey, that's just a few of the folks. 

So they're reading and teaching works by Margaret Walker and Alice Walker, Sanchez and Morrison, Gayl Jones and Octavia Butler, and publishing scholarly articles and books. They're also delivering papers on Black women writers at conferences across the country. Like Barbara Smith after taking that class with Walker, folks are becoming exposed to Black women's literature. 

So the classes on Black Women Writers offered at SIUE from 1990 - 2020 are routed to those specific histories of courses, scholarship, and gatherings from the 1970s. The courses on Black Women Writers offered at Rutgers, University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University, Princeton, Georgia Southern, and hundreds of other institutions are routed to those histories. It's where these Black Women Writers courses come from. 

Related: 

• Black Women Writers courses (YouTube)

• Black Women Writers courses (podcast)

• Black men writers and intellectual, comedic traditions

• A Notebook on Black Intellectual Histories

Black men writers and intellectual, comedic traditions

If you check out works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, Paul Beatty, Colson Whitehead, Aaron McGruder, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, you'll encounter several bookish characters, who are into reading or whose identities as thinkers are central to the narratives. In other words, these black men writers are interested, to varying degrees, in intellectualism. 

At the outset, I should say that I'm aware that not all black men writers share those interests, and I know that some black women writers do. Still, those eight aforementioned writers stand out in my own experiences as a reader and literature teacher, and their collective writings speak to us about how some black men writers have represented and explored intellectual traditions. 

I began thinking about these ideas back in 1996, when I took a course on Richard Wright as an undergraduate. There, I encountered Wright's novel The Outsider (1953), and I noticed the protagonist, Cross Damon, was into reading and philosophical ideas. At one point, his group of male friends tease him about his devoted reading interests. One of the guys joked that he once visited Cross, “and I could hardly get into the door! Big books, little books, books piled everywhere! He even had books in bed with ‘im.” The conversation continues:    

“Cross, you ain’t never said how come you was reading all them books,” Joe pointed out. 

“I was looking for something,” Cross said quietly. 

“What?” Pink asked. 

“I don’t know,” Cross confessed gloomily. 

“Did you find it?” Joe asked. 

“No.”

The narrator notes in passing that Cross had taken philosophy courses at the University of Chicago, and he had previously decided against marriage because "ideas had been his only sustained passion."  Of course, The Outsider was not the first time that Wright had presented a character who was engaged in books and ideas. In his autobiography Black Boy (1945), Wright presented himself as a curious and searching thinker from a young age.  

Wright and Ellison were good friends, and you see the emergence of a bookish young black man character in Ellison's most famous novel Invisible Man (1952), a work that has had a tremendous influence on many authors, including many black men writers. 

These days, when it comes to historically significant black essayists, you're far more likely to hear about James Baldwin than Ellison. Baldwin was offering critiques of American society in ways that make his work relevant to some of our modern-day conditions. Interest in Baldwin makes sense. 

Still, Ellison's essays about art and culture, collected in Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), shaped or affected the thinking and approaches of so many emergent thinkers at a particular point. The figure who wrote those essays is a literature, jazz, and visual art nerd, and a most studious notetaker concerning what he called "the plastic possibilities of Negro American experience."

Like Wright and Ellison, Ishmael Reed offered some memorable, thoughtful characters. Reed is more outrageously humorous in his novels than many of his predecessors. Raven Quickskill, the protagonist of Reed's Flight to Canada (1976) remains a defining protagonist in the history of bad men in American fiction.  

Quickskill is an incredibly smart fugitive slave, and his poem "Flight to Canada," mocking his master, is one of the funniest pieces you'll read about slavery. The intellectualism of Quickskill echoes presentations by Wright and Ellison, and really, Reed's representation goes all the way back to Frederick Douglass. At the same time, the combination of intellect and humor presented in Flight to Canada anticipates Charles Johnson's most known character Rutherford Calhoun from Middle Passage (1990). 

As the winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, Middle Passage is Johnson's most well-known work, but he had been self-consciously exploring and interspersing big ideas and humor in his compositions before and after that novel. Johnson began his career as a cartoonist, not a novelist. The comedy central to his drawings foreshadowed the humor that would later appear in his novels and short fiction. 

Johnson published a collection of cartoons Black Humor (1970), long before he became an award-winning and critically novelist. His drawings often play with representations of race in American culture. Scholars have primarily concentrated on his novels.      

"I began writing novels in earnest in 1970 with one specific goal in mind," explained Johnson, "that of expanding the category we might call black philosophical fiction;  i.e., opening up black literature to the  same ethical, ontological, and epistemological questions--Western and  Eastern--that I wrestled with as a student of philosophy." 

Johnson identified Wright, Ellison, and Reed, among others, as leading contributors to black or African American philosophical fiction. When Johnson was awarded the National Book Award in November 1990, he gave special acknowledgement to Ellison, who was in the audience. "In the 1990s," predicted Johnson during his acceptance speech, "we will see a black American fiction that will be Ellisonesque as we as a people move from narrow complaint to broad celebration."

In retrospect, he seemed to be forecasting works by Paul Beatty and Colson Whitehead whose works would appear during the late 1990s. Beatty began his career as a poet, and he made his debut as a novelist with The White Boy Shuffle (1996). That book follows a path traveled by Wright, Ellison, Reed, and Johnson by presenting an exceptionally intelligent black male lead. And like works by Reed and Johnson, Beatty's novel is full of humor. 

Whitehead arrived on the scene with his debut The Intuitionist (1999). The intellectualism is there. And there's also humor. Where Whitehead moved in a slightly different direction, though, was by presenting a black woman protagonist. The gender of his character linked his novel to books by several black women writers, but the specific bookishness of his lead character and how he engages some ideas seemed to echo ideas covered by those black men writers.   

Ellison died in 1994, and there was some chatter in some circles that publishers were on the lookout for a talented black male writer who would fill the void left by Ellison. Why wasn't that conversation had related to black women? Well, many people viewed Toni Morrison as the one, so to speak. From 1993, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature up until today, she has been by far the most critically-acclaimed black writer, and one of the most acclaimed American authors overall. 

Although in the last several years of her life, Morrison wanted to be viewed beyond only a sisterhood of writers that included Maya Angelou and Alice Walker, she is continually situated within the realm of "black women writers." For that reason, while emergent women writers were linked to or placed in the shadow of Morrison, guys like Beatty and Whitehead were often discussed as part of a tradition of black men writers.    

In 1999, the year that Whitehead made his debut as a novelist, Aaron McGruder's comic strip The Boondocks became nationally syndicated. In addition to presenting a black boy protagonist with an extraordinary intellect, McGruder ended up covering an expansive body of ideas in his work over the next couple of decades. As a writer and visual artist, you could, in some respects, think of McGruder as a cross between Paul Beatty and Charles Johnson. He was a intellectually adept comic writer who could also draw. 

At the same time that McGruder and Whitehead were receiving national accolades for their works, Ta-Nehisi Coates was quietly plying his trade as a journalist. He wouldn't become widely known until the late 2000s, but he was absorbing the culture, raising questions, gaining experience, and writing and publishing, all of which prepared him for major contributions he would make with "The Case for Reparations" (2014), Between the World and Me (2015), and the comic book Black Panther (2016-present), to name just a few.     

When you read Wright, Ellison, Reed, Ellison, Beatty, Whitehead, McGruder, and Coates,, you'll come across representations of smart black male characters. And, you'll notice that those figures are rarely referred to as "acting white." I guess that accusation began to pop up in more recent times. The guys in The Outsider are amused by protagonist Cross Damon's reading interests, but they don't question whether he's black. The same can be said of Huey Freeman in The Boondocks. Huey's intelligence, in fact, relies on black knowledge. 

I haven't really discussed poetry by black men here, and I could. Amiri Baraka. Cornelius Eady. Adrian Matejka. Many, many more. But I think that for better and worse, novelists and series writers like McGruder caught people's attention because of the clearcut representation of distinct characters. There are, of course, characters as the speakers in poems, but popular and critical discourses developed differently around characters in novels and a comic strip like The Boondocks.       

Hey, there's so much more to say on this subject of black men writers and intellectual and comedic traditions. And I'm hoping to get to some other issues on the topic soon. 

Related: 

• Black men writers and creativity, 1995 - 2016

• A Notebook on Black Intellectual Histories

Bringing the works of African American poets together

One of the many reasons that C. Liegh McInnis's article, "Thoughts after Reading Twenty-Five Collections of Black Poetry in Twenty-Five Days," caught my attention is related to one of my own articles, "Catching Holy Ghosts: The Diverse Manifestations of Black Persona Poetry" which I wrote and published years ago in African American Review. 

I was so excited to have pinpointed this deep, recurring interest among black poets. So many of them were taking up persona poems, and I felt good about the fact that I was getting a chance to mention so many contemporary poets in a single article. 

McInnis's article took me back to that excitement about bringing the work of a variety of African American poets together in one space, even if it was an article. It's common for folks to host readings with multiple poets. But it's not everyday that we assemble poems by several poets for the purposes of critical conversations. 

Related:

• Returning to C. Liegh McInnis's critical work on poetry 

• C. Liegh McInnis on obscure/vague language, references in poetry 

• C. Liegh McInnis on imagery in black poetry

• C. Liegh McInnis's concentrated cultural catalog on black poetry

Susan Harris discusses her Mark Twain book

A few months back, I read and blogged about Susan Harris's book Mark Twain, the World, and Me: Following the Equator, Then and Now (2020). The work merges literary criticism, travel narrative, cultural history, and memoir. Last week, August 6, Harris gave a talk about her book online for the Trouble at Home series sponsored by the Mark Twain House & Museum. (Here's a link to her presentation.)

It was cool hearing Harris discuss the book, her motivations, her ongoing concerns, and her travels. I often get to hear poets and novelists discuss their works. However, I somehow get fewer opportunities to check out literature scholars talking about aspects of their books.

It was special listening in on this conversation in the context of a group of Twain scholars who were represented in audience because so many of them were quite familiar with Twain's work. During the Q & A, Harris was deftly fielding a variety of specialized questions, demonstrating her expertise well beyond what she covered in the book. 

At one point, someone asked her about the inclusion of "Billy" (her husband William J. Harris) in the book. He traveled with her on some of the global excursions. Unlike conventional scholarly writing where authors avoid first-person narrative, Harris included herself in the narrative, and it was natural to acknowledge William Harris traveling alongside her as she processed what she experienced. 

It was through William Harris, who was and remains one of my professors, that I first learned that Susan Harris was writing a book on Twain and her travels. On social media, he would provide photos from the various travels and when I asked what he was doing in all these far-flung places, he mentioned that Susan Harris was writing a book. His travel posts prepared me for Mark Twain, the World, and Me.    

Listening to Harris discuss her book gave me even more ways into her book and approaches. I'm also now on the lookout for more literature scholars reflecting on their work and the processes of producing it. 

Related:
• Mark Twain and the generative power of difficult men

• An Inspiring Book on Mark Twain

• Susan Harris's recruitment letter: How I got to Penn State

Notes on the Enduring Legacy of Toni Morrison event

 

Among its many attributes, the Toni Morrison Society (TMS) is well known for getting a range of talented people together in a common space to discuss the life and writings of the organization's namesake. That was the case on August 5, 2020, when the TMS coordinated "The Enduring Legacy of Toni Morrison," a discussion featuring Edwidge Danticat, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Deborah McDowell, Maryemma Graham, Imani Perry, and Yolanda Pierce. The conversation was hosted by Dana Williams, and TMS founder, Carolyn Denard participated as well. 

So many wonderful Morrison minds in one place. Of course, our current moment of social distancing means that getting together often occurs virtually. Accordingly, this TMS event took place on Zoom.   

The speakers gave personal reflections on time that they spent with Morrison, and they also interspersed responses to the novelist's work. They covered the general topics: "Toni Morrison and the Academy," "Toni Morrison's Publics," and "Toni Morrison and the Humanities." 

Graham, Williams, Angelyn Mitchell, and I served as the planning committee for the event. We devised the topics as points of departure for the various speakers. We set the date for gathering on the one-year anniversary of Morrison's passing.  

Dana Williams, Imani Perry, Edwidge Danticat

Denard opened with brief remarks. McDowell and Graham began by speaking on the subject of Morrison and the Academy, followed by Danticat and Perry on Morrison's Publics, and then Griffin and Pierce talked about Morrison and the Humanities. The event closed with all of the speakers providing reflections. They have all collectively been producing work on Morrison's writings for decades, so it was inspiring and informative to hear them talk informally about her and her novels. 

At one point, McDowell told an amusing story about traveling on a train with Morrison in France. Morrison had insisted on their group eating fried chicken, so in route to an event that's what they had. It was funny and at the same time touching to hear McDowell laughing as she fondly recalled that moment. She gave us a view of the esteemed novelist to which we rarely have access.   

Beyond her status as one of our greatest authors, Morrison was, Denard noted in her opening remarks, a daughter and mother, a sister and a friend. A grandmother. A neighbor. I'm not sure about everyone else, but I do need occasional reminders that the author of the masterpiece Song of Solomon (1977) was an actual human being. Without such reminders, I've been inclined to forget. 

In all seriousness, "The Enduring Legacy of Toni Morrison" was an important moment to pause and get our bearings. So much and so little, it seems, have happened since we lost Morrison a year ago. As always, she's wonderfully unsettling our sense of time.   

We do have some idea of what the last fifty years of scholarship on her writings looks like. So what will the subsequent decades covering Morrison's work entail?  Listening to McDowell and Graham, Danticat and Perry, and Pierce and Giffin gave us a glimpse at the possibilities. 

During the conversation, someone in the chat section mentioned how amazing it was to have all these prominent writers and scholars together *right here* -- in this one Zoom session. This global pandemic had created the impetus for us to think creativity about what a TMS event could look like in this moment and perhaps in the future.

C. Liegh McInnis's concentrated cultural catalog on black poetry

Some of the volumes included in C. Liegh McInnis's catalog

By and large, you read reviews of African American volumes of poetry one-at-a-time. Scholarly articles might deal with a few poetry books. But coverage of more than two dozen contemporary volumes by black poets published in one year? Nah, rarely happens.

For that reason, I was drawn to the amount and range of C. Liegh McInnis's coverage in his article, "Thoughts after Reading Twenty-Five Collections of Black Poetry in Twenty-Five Days." His attention to so many poets and poems in a single article represents what I refer to as as "concentrated cultural cataloging," which refers to writers presenting and referencing a large number of historical figures, concepts, and sites in a single composition. As a result, they produce an extended record or catalog. 

It's perhaps true that scholars are inevitably always creating cultural catalogs of some sort when they go about citing various works and scholarship. I'm particularly fascinated, though, when folks who don't primarily define themselves as scholars present us with abundant artistic references. This is what McInnis does in his poetry article. 

Over the years, I've noticed McInnis producing cultural catalogs in his poetry. Or put another way, he'll have a poem with multiple black cultural references. In his poem, "The Bridge (for Medgar at the Crossroads)," for example, he references a variety of subjects related to Mississippi, Civil Rights, and his subject Medgar Evers. 

In a way, such references and allusions are typical for poetry, right? Yes, but it's been useful for me to think of black creators composing cultural catalogs as I consider their common practices across genres and modes of presentation. I enjoy thinking about the realms that are familiar to various composters.  

McInnis demonstrates his interests as a reader in the catalog that emerges in his article on those twenty-five books of poetry. The article extends to works well beyond those focal texts. Margaret Walker, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frantz Fanon, Larry Neal, and many others make appearances here. As noted, it's not surprising to see so many citations in a scholarly text. It is, however, somewhat rare to see scholarly writing that foregrounds so many volumes by African American poets published in the late 2010s.

Moreover, McInnis does not privilege his identity as a scholar. Instead, he often opens his byline with the note that he is "a poet, short story writer, instructor of English at Jackson State University." Unlike many conventional scholars, he has been committed to self-publishing, though over a long career of writing, he has published in traditional journals as well. 

Still, his interest in self-publishing was important for what he produced with this article. He read and wrote about two dozen volumes released in 2018 and published his thoughts on the writing in the same year. The comparatively slow processes of scholarly journals mean that you are unlikely to encounter articles that appear in the same year as the books they examine. Of course, it's not unusual for magazines and newspapers to publish timely reviews of poetry volumes, but again, they typically focus on one book at a time, and sometimes two or three, but never twenty-five.  

What I'm trying to say is that McInnis's work is unique in important ways. I wonder what the critical discourse on black writing would look like if more poets and scholars were inclined to share their extended thoughts, as McInnis does, on a large body of contemporary compositions that they covered. To do so would require an engaged interest in a creative domain and an ability to produce the work outside of conventional scholarly venues.    

 
This article, "Thoughts after Reading Twenty-Five Collections of Black Poetry in Twenty-Five Days," represents an expanded record of a couple dozen poetry books that McInnis read during a concentrated stretch of time in 2018. Reading what he wrote had me thinking about all kinds of possibilities for producing similar kinds of compositions. Among other things, I guess concentrated cultural catalogs are also inspirational.  

Related: 

• C. Liegh McInnis on obscure/vague language, references in poetry

• Returning to C. Liegh McInnis's critical work on poetry

• C. Liegh McInnis on imagery in black poetry

• A Notebook on the Work of C. Liegh McInnis

Blogging about poetry in July 2020

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• July 27: Returning to C. Liegh McInnis's critical work on poetry

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