The Blackademic Life: Academic Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual
Northwestern University Press
October 15, 2019
http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/blackademic-life
Stay tuned for a fall event schedule, coming soon.
#TheBlackademicLife
My October post on Black Perspectives is “The Complex Life of Writer Chester B. Himes” a review of Lawrence P. Jackson’s recent biography of Chester Himes.
(I previously wrote about Himes’s autobiographical novel The Third Generation.)
In my latest post for Black Perspectives I wrote about teaching Paule Marshall’s short story “Brooklyn” and how the story anticipates current conversations on sexual harassment and abuse. Special thanks go out to my City Tech students for reading, thinking through, and writing about this story in our classes last semester. “Paule Marshall’s “Brooklyn” and the #MeToo Movement.”
Du Bois in 1946, photo by Carl Van Vechten
My latest post on Black Perspectives, “W. E. B. Du Bois, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual,” takes a look at Du Bois’s first novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911).
Back in 2007 I reviewed Samuel R. Delany’s Dark Reflections for the GC Advocate. Dark Reflections went out of print later that year when it’s publisher, Carroll & Graf, was acquired by another company and then dissolved, which turns out to be an oddly relevant development for a novel about the precarious nature of publishing and the writing life. Thankfully, Dover Books has released an updated and revised edition of Dark Reflections in 2016. I decided to write about this new version of the novel from the perspective of race and literary awards for The New Inquiry.
if you haven’t seen it, I also recommend Matthew Cheney’s extensive review essay on Dark Reflections in LA Review of Books.
THE BLACKADEMIC LIFE: THE BLOG 