Cultural Front

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

African American Silent Generation

A brief take on African American novelists born between born between 1928 and 1945.

Written by Howard Rambsy II

Voiceover by Kassandra Timm

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Related:

• Episodes of Remarkable Receptions

Trans-national African Women Writers

A brief take on how movement has contributed to the success of African women writers.

Script by Makayla Mallon

Voiceover by Kassandra Timm

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Related:

• Episodes of Remarkable Receptions

Sunday, November 17, 2024

Laura Vrana's Pitfalls of Prestige

It's rare to refer to book of poetry criticism and literary history as "highly anticipated," but that was my thought with Laura Vrana's Pitfalls of Prestige: Black Women and Literary Recognition (Ohio State University Press). I met Vrana a decade ago at an NEH summer institute focusing on Black poetry, and since that time, we've been talking on poets, books, and literary history.

She was still a graduate student when we first met, but already, I knew, everyone knew that here was an emergent scholar who would be contributing to and advancing the critical discourse on African American poetry. Her book Pitfalls of Prestige doesn't disappoint. All kinds of useful and fascinating ideas here.

Vrana's main argument is that "literary establishment institutions of prize-granting, academic, and publishing create particular obstacles for Black women, as they construct a version of the visible, metonymic Black female poet useful for their aims and circulate it through rehearing its terms time and again to conjure what has become the predominant discourse for analyzing contemporary African American women's poetics" (5).

Vrana points out that "This archetypal formation or constructed Black woman figure is primarily known as a poet, though she typically for income works in academia, wherein she was educated and attained (if she was not raised with) the privileges of the Black professional elite; she creates and innovates only within preapproved boundaries."

Vrana considers "this figure's successes and struggles" by examining the works and careers of several poets: Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey, Tracy K. Smith, Harryette Mullen, Evie Shockley, Elizabeth Alexander, Patricia Smith, Sharon Bridgforth, Mendi Obadike, Duriel Harris, Harmony Holiday, Claudia Rankine, M. NourbeSe Philip, Brenda Marie Osbey, Robin Coste Lewis, and Patricia Smith.

I spent many years studying and collecting information about African American poetry, including the increased award-winning that has taken place in the 21st century. So I'm immediately drawn to what Vrana is covering and uncovering here.

I'm looking forward to finishing up her book and then blogging about what I've learned.

Laura Vrana's Pitfalls of Prestige in Context

As I began reading Pitfalls of Prestige, I started thinking about how Laura Vrana's book connects to various other projects on poetry and African American artistic writing in general.

Oh, well, first, I want to make it clear that we simply do not have enough scholarly writing on Black poetry. That's especially clear when consider book publications in African American literary studies over the last two decades. Overall, there's been tremendous output in the field, but not necessarily on poetry.

So Vrana's book is a welcome addition to an area that needs even more contributors. Pitfalls of Prestige extends treatments of Black women's poetry that we saw in Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (2011) by Evie Shockley and The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (2011) by Meta DuEwa Jones. And more recently, there's Introduction to Claudia Rankine (2023) by Kathy Lou Schultz.

Over the last decade or so, we've had a few books on African American poetry, including The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka ((2013) by Schultz , Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (2014) and Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (2021) by Anthony Reed, A History of African American Poetry (2019) by Lauri Scheyer, The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka (2021) by Aldon Nielsen, Revolutionary Poetics: The Rhetoric of the Black Arts Movement (2023) by Sarah RudeWalker, and Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry and the Archive (2024) by Ryan Sharp.

It's a different kind of history, but the attention to the careers and works of Black women writers in Pitfalls of Prestige connects in important ways to The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (2023) by Courtney Thorsson.

Vrana's research and writing aligns with some of the work that people have been doing on awards. Most notably, I'm thinking of works on the subject by Juliana Spahr, Stephanie Young, and Claire Grossman. I've tried to contribute to this conversation as well. Collectively, our work build on James English's The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2008). You'll note the prestige in English's and Vrana's titles.

To varying degrees, Vrana's work is also in conversation with Richard Jean So's Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (2020), and Dan Sinykin's "How Capitalism Changed American Literature" and Sinykin and Edwin Roland's "Against Conglomeration: Nonprofit Publishing and American Literature After 1980." That is, Vrana, like those other folks, is addressing aspects of the publishing industry. Along these lines, there's also John B. Thompson's Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, which Vrana cites.

Related:

• Laura Vrana's Pitfalls of Prestige

Ryan Sharp's Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry and the Archive in Context

I've been thinking and writing about African American persona poems for quite some time, so of course I was excited to read Ryan Sharp's new book Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry and the Archive (University of North Carolina Press, 2024).

Sharp's book makes unique contributions and also connects to various projects on African American poetry.

Before moving forward, I feel obligated to note that we don't have scholarly works on African American poetry. Last year, I pulled together a list of more than 150 scholarly works. Few of those books concentrated on Black poetry.

The absence of scholarship on contemporary African American verse is one reason I'm excited about the contributions of Sharp's book. Another Throat joins another recent book, Laura Vrana's Pitfalls of Prestige: Black Women and Literary Recognition (Ohio State University Press, 2024). I treated some aspects of contemporary Black poetry in my book Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers (2020), but Sharp and Vrana really extend things.

Sharp builds on research offered in The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (2011) by Meta DuEwa Jones. His writing on poetry also had me thinking of Revolutionary Poetics: The Rhetoric of the Black Arts Movement (2023) by Sarah RudeWalker.

Sharp contributes to the broader discourse on African American poetry that we've seen over the last decade and a half. I'm thinking of books like The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka ((2013) by Kathy Lou Schultz, Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (2021) by Anthony Reed, and A History of African American Poetry (2019) by Lauri Scheyer, just to name a few.

Sharp focuses on persona poems, but I thought of The African American Sonnet: A Literary History (2018) by Timo Müller and Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s (2010) by Jon Woodson, because those scholars take a look at common modes of writing among Black poets.