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"Schultz, Kathy Lou"
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To Save and Destroy: Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Theories of the Archive
Schultz discusses the significance of the archive as law for African American poets. In their work of the 1950s, African American poets Langston Hughes and Melvin B. Tolson intervene into the construction of the archive of US history, using their poems to comment upon the making of national identity. As African Americans situated under the historical weight of the state using the entire force of its various apparatuses--religious, economic, and legal--to destroy the history and culture of people of African descent in order to preserve the institution of slavery, Hughes, in \"Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History Poem\" (1951), and Tolson, in Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), \"write back\" by using the poem form to archive African American accomplishment. Hughes and Tolson write into the voids in official records, making their own histories, highlighting the fact that the construction of the archive--of memory--must constantly be tended.
Journal Article
Amiri Baraka's Wise Why's Y's: Lineages of the Afro-Modernist Epic
This essay analyzes Amiri Baraka's Afro-Modernist epic, Wise Why's Y's: The Griot's Song (Djeli Ya) throughout its composition process, within the contexts of Classical epic traditions, early twentieth-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa. Wise is an Afro-Modernist epic that is unique in several respects: the epic shifts from the individual hero traditionally seen in the epic form to the collective, and displays a transnational, diasporic worldview opposed to a unitary national consciousness. Baraka uses the genre of the epic that at foundation coalesces national identity to question those very foundations. Wise does not follow the traditional narrative of the epic journey; the African American collective is unable to return to a physical location called \"“home.\"” Instead, Wise improvises a home for the African American collective through the act of performance, creating a jazz text combining poetry, music and visual art.
Journal Article
Amiri Baraka'sWise Why's Y's: Lineages of the Afro-Modernist Epic
This essay analyzes Amiri Baraka's Afro-Modernist epic,Wise Why's Y's: The Griot's Song (Djeli Ya)throughout its composition process, within the contexts of Classical epic traditions, early twentieth-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa.Wiseis an Afro-Modernist epic that is unique in several respects: the epic shifts from the individual hero traditionally seen in the epic form to the collective, and displays a transnational, diasporic worldview opposed to a unitary national consciousness. Baraka uses the genre of the epic that at foundation coalesces national identity to question those very foundations.Wisedoes not follow the traditional narrative of the epic journey; the African American collective is unable to return to a physical location called “home.” Instead,Wiseimprovises a home for the African American collective through the act of performance, creating a jazz text combining poetry, music and visual art.
Journal Article
Melvin Tolson
African American modernist poet Melvin B. Tolson was prolific in several genres from the 1930s through the 1960s. Tolson received several awards for his poetry during his lifetime. Tolson's engagement with free verse in his first collection ignites his exuberance concerning vernacular forms, including the blues. In the poem Harlem, which opens A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, half of the sixteen stanzas are blues lyrics. In contrast to T. S. Eliot's modernism, Tolson offers a more optimistic assessment of modern life. The faith in an optimistic unfolding of the future seen in Rendezvous continues into Tolson's work in the 1950s with Libretto for the Republic of Liberia. The result of Tolson's long engagement with modernism, Harlem Gallery presents a complex dialectical understanding of common dichotomies of race, culture, and speech that ultimately revises the narratives of modernism and of African American poetry, and exemplifies Afro‐modernist poetics.
Book Chapter
“In the modern vein”: Afro-Modernist poetry and literary history
\"Modernist Studies\" often denotes an Anglo-American lineage proceeding from the Eliot/Pound tradition (with correctives made by feminists) that does not include African American writers. In contrast, my dissertation defines the category of Afro-Modernism, an aesthetic practice that extends throughout the twentieth century. Afro-Modernists use modernist technique in conjunction with African American and African historical content. Afro-Modernism highlights uses of form along with issues of content, seeing form as a political issue. It confronts the singular, unified lyric \"I,\" re-seeing black identities. I begin by tracing the shifting that occurs in black poets' relationships to dialect throughout the twentieth century, from Paul Laurence Dunbar's apparently stark standard/non-standard split through the more fluid range of vernacular forms utilized by contemporary poets such as Harryette Mullen. I analyze the vexed relationship between dialect and standard English in the work of James Weldon Johnson, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and W. E. B. Du Bois. I then focus in-depth on the career Melvin B. Tolson. Tolson's work from the 1930s--1960s brings into focus a difficulty with many current literary chronologies, highlighting the consequences of viewing the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism as concurrent, yet separate, phenomena. Along with Tolson, I formulate the category of Afro-Modernism through the work of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Erica Hunt. Hunt's prose poems demonstrate the continuation of Afro-Modernism in the contemporary context, displaying the connection of writers labeled \"experimental\" or \"innovative\" to their Afro-Modernist predecessors from earlier in the century. In contrast to Hunt and Tolson, whose work has received little critical attention, Baraka is well known. Critics often focus on his Black Arts period, though I also turn to the work he produced in Greenwich Village (commonly called his Beat period), as well as to work from what is termed his current Third World Marxist period. Divisions of Baraka's career based on ideology, however, do not address his contributions to modernist innovation. By revising this literary chronology, along with those of African American poetry and modernism, my dissertation reveals that Afro-Modernism, as Baraka writes in \"Return of the Native,\" is both \"violent and transforming.\"
Dissertation
