Podcasts about Jean Toomer

Most people in North America have probably at least heard the name W. E. B. Dubois. In the early twentieth century, DuBois—the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard—published and spoke extensively about his vision of equality through education. In particular, he edited The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP, while also writing such classics as The Souls of Black Folk. But if Dubois is well known, the same cannot be said these days of Jessie Redmon Fauset, the central character of Victoria Christopher Murray's Harlem Rhapsody (Berkley, 2025). In her day, Fauset—who held a degree from Cornell as well as a master's from Penn and a certificate from the Sorbonne in Paris—worked as the literary editor of The Crisis and its associated children's magazine, The Brownies Book, while writing the first of what would become four acclaimed novels. She fostered such stars of the Harlem Renaissance as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. She was also romantically involved with W. E. B. Dubois, a reality that Murray uses to humanize a heroine who is in every other respect truly remarkable. Her story pulled me in and kept me reading to the very last page. Victoria Christopher Murray is the author of more than thirty novels, including The Personal Librarian and The First Ladies, both historical fiction co-written with Marie Benedict. Harlem Rhapsody is her most recent book. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Steadfast, is due in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Most people in North America have probably at least heard the name W. E. B. Dubois. In the early twentieth century, DuBois—the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard—published and spoke extensively about his vision of equality through education. In particular, he edited The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP, while also writing such classics as The Souls of Black Folk. But if Dubois is well known, the same cannot be said these days of Jessie Redmon Fauset, the central character of Victoria Christopher Murray's Harlem Rhapsody (Berkley, 2025). In her day, Fauset—who held a degree from Cornell as well as a master's from Penn and a certificate from the Sorbonne in Paris—worked as the literary editor of The Crisis and its associated children's magazine, The Brownies Book, while writing the first of what would become four acclaimed novels. She fostered such stars of the Harlem Renaissance as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. She was also romantically involved with W. E. B. Dubois, a reality that Murray uses to humanize a heroine who is in every other respect truly remarkable. Her story pulled me in and kept me reading to the very last page. Victoria Christopher Murray is the author of more than thirty novels, including The Personal Librarian and The First Ladies, both historical fiction co-written with Marie Benedict. Harlem Rhapsody is her most recent book. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Steadfast, is due in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Most people in North America have probably at least heard the name W. E. B. Dubois. In the early twentieth century, DuBois—the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard—published and spoke extensively about his vision of equality through education. In particular, he edited The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP, while also writing such classics as The Souls of Black Folk. But if Dubois is well known, the same cannot be said these days of Jessie Redmon Fauset, the central character of Victoria Christopher Murray's Harlem Rhapsody (Berkley, 2025). In her day, Fauset—who held a degree from Cornell as well as a master's from Penn and a certificate from the Sorbonne in Paris—worked as the literary editor of The Crisis and its associated children's magazine, The Brownies Book, while writing the first of what would become four acclaimed novels. She fostered such stars of the Harlem Renaissance as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. She was also romantically involved with W. E. B. Dubois, a reality that Murray uses to humanize a heroine who is in every other respect truly remarkable. Her story pulled me in and kept me reading to the very last page. Victoria Christopher Murray is the author of more than thirty novels, including The Personal Librarian and The First Ladies, both historical fiction co-written with Marie Benedict. Harlem Rhapsody is her most recent book. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Steadfast, is due in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Most people in North America have probably at least heard the name W. E. B. Dubois. In the early twentieth century, DuBois—the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard—published and spoke extensively about his vision of equality through education. In particular, he edited The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP, while also writing such classics as The Souls of Black Folk. But if Dubois is well known, the same cannot be said these days of Jessie Redmon Fauset, the central character of Victoria Christopher Murray's Harlem Rhapsody (Berkley, 2025). In her day, Fauset—who held a degree from Cornell as well as a master's from Penn and a certificate from the Sorbonne in Paris—worked as the literary editor of The Crisis and its associated children's magazine, The Brownies Book, while writing the first of what would become four acclaimed novels. She fostered such stars of the Harlem Renaissance as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. She was also romantically involved with W. E. B. Dubois, a reality that Murray uses to humanize a heroine who is in every other respect truly remarkable. Her story pulled me in and kept me reading to the very last page. Victoria Christopher Murray is the author of more than thirty novels, including The Personal Librarian and The First Ladies, both historical fiction co-written with Marie Benedict. Harlem Rhapsody is her most recent book. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Steadfast, is due in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

Founded in Chicago in 1914, the avant-garde journal the Little Review became a giant in the cause of modernism, publishing literature and art by luminaries such as T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Amy Lowell, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Stella, Hans Arp, Mina Loy, Emma Goldman, Wyndham Lewis, Hart Crane, Sherwood Anderson, and more. Perhaps most famously, the magazine published Joyce's Ulysses in serial form, causing a scandal and leading to a censorship trial that changed the course of literature. In this episode, Jacke talks to scholar Holly A. Baggett about her book Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the Little Review, which tells the story of the two Midwestern women behind the Little Review, who were themselves iconoclastic rebels, living openly as lesbians and advocating for causes like anarchy, feminism, free love, and of course, groundbreaking literature and art. PLUS Phil Jones (Reading Samuel Johnson: Reception and Representation, 1750-1970) stops by to discuss his choice for the last book he will ever read. Additional listening: 600 Doctor Johnson! (with Phil Jones) 564 H.D. (with Lara Vetter) 165 Ezra Pound The music in this episode is by Gabriel Ruiz-Bernal. Learn more at gabrielruizbernal.com. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the school year begins, today's poem goes out to all of those everyday saints performing the unseen and unsung acts of love that make life possible for rest of us!Born Asa Bundy Sheffey on August 4, 1913, Robert Hayden was raised in the Detroit neighborhood Paradise Valley. He had an emotionally tumultuous childhood and lived, at times, with his parents and with a foster family. In 1932, he graduated from high school and, with the help of a scholarship, attended Detroit City College (later, Wayne State University). In 1944, Hayden received his graduate degree from the University of Michigan.Hayden published his first book of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust (Falcon Press), in 1940, at the age of twenty-seven. He enrolled in a graduate English literature program at the University of Michigan, where he studied with W. H. Auden. Auden became an influential and critical guide in the development of Hayden's writing. Hayden admired the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wiley, Carl Sandburg, and Hart Crane, as well as the poets of the Harlem Renaissance—Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer. He had an interest in African American history and explored his concerns about race in his writing. Hayden ultimately authored nine collections of poetry during his lifetime, as well as a collection of essays, and some children's literature. Hayden's poetry gained international recognition in the 1960s, and he was awarded the grand prize for poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966 for his book Ballad of Remembrance (Paul Breman, 1962).Explaining the trajectory of Hayden's career, the poet William Meredith wrote:Hayden declared himself, at considerable cost in popularity, an American poet rather than a Black poet, when for a time there was posited an unreconcilable difference between the two roles. There is scarcely a line of his which is not identifiable as an experience of Black America, but he would not relinquish the title of American writer for any narrower identity.After receiving his graduate degree from the University of Michigan, Hayden remained there for two years as a teaching fellow. He was the first Black member of the English department. He then joined the faculty at Fisk University in Nashville, where he would remain for more than twenty years. In 1975, Hayden received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship and, in 1976, he became the first Black American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (later, U.S. poet laureate).Hayden died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on February 25, 1980.-bio via Academy of American Poets Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

In today's poem, written a century ago, cinema (and Charlie Chaplin) is already supplying metaphors for the work and experience of modern poets. Happy reading.Harold Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio, and began writing verse in his early teenage years. Though he never attended college, Crane read regularly on his own, digesting the works of the Elizabethan dramatists and poets William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne and the nineteenth-century French poets Charles Vildrac, Jules Laforgue, and Arthur Rimbaud. His father, a candy manufacturer, attempted to dissuade him from a career in poetry, but Crane was determined to follow his passion to write.Living in New York City, he associated with many important figures in literature of the time, including Allen Tate, the novelist and short story writer Katherine Anne Porter, E. E. Cummings, and Jean Toomer, but his heavy drinking and chronic instability frustrated any attempts at lasting friendship. An admirer of T. S. Eliot, Crane combined the influences of European literature and traditional versification with a particularly American sensibility derived from Walt Whitman.His major work, the book-length poem, The Bridge, expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical and spiritual significance of America. Like Eliot, Crane used the landscape of the modern, industrialized city to create a powerful new symbolic literature.Hart Crane died by suicide on April 27, 1932, at the age of thirty-two, while sailing back to New York from Mexico.-bio via Academy of American Poets Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. This Episode, Emily chats with Los Angeles based sculptor & printmaker, Alison Saar. She was visiting the Bay Area recently working with Arion Press on their recent production of Octavia Butler's Kindred. They dive Alison's artistic journey, influences, and her recent project illustrating Octavia Butler's 'Kindred' for Arian Press. Alison reflects on her upbringing in a creatively rich environment, heavily influenced by her artist parents, Betty and Richard Saar. She discusses her techniques, particularly her affinity for woodcuts and linoleum blocks, and the importance of texture in her work. The conversation also touches on Saar's interest in African and Indigenous art, her spiritual connections, and significant influences such as Elizabeth Catlett. The episode concludes with insights into Saar's favorite creatively inspiring places in Los Angeles and her experience of continuously making art from a young age.About Artist Alison Saar:Alison credits her mother, acclaimed collagist and assemblage artist Betye Saar, with exposing her to metaphysical and spiritual traditions. Assisting her father, Richard Saar, a painter and art conservator, in his restoration shop inspired her learning and curiosity about other cultures.Saar studied studio art and art history at Scripps College in Claremont, California, receiving a BA in art history in 1978. In 1981 she earned her MFA from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. In 1983, Saar became an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, incorporating found objects from the city environment. Saar completed another residency in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1985, which augmented her urban style with Southwest Native American and Mexican influences.Saar's style encompasses a multitude of personal, artistic, and cultural references that reflect the plurality of her own experiences. Her sculptures, installations, and prints incorporate found objects including rough-hewn wood, old tin ceiling panels, nails, shards of pottery, glass, and urban detritus. The resulting figures and objects become powerful totems exploring issues of gender, race, heritage, and history. Saar's art is included in museums and private collections across the U.S.Visit Alison on the web by CLICKING HERE.   Follow Alison  on Instagram:  @Alison_SaarLearn more about her Kindred project with Arion Press HERE. --About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women's Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWilFollow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast--CREDITS:Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson. Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 LicenseThe Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions. For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Welcome to the second special episode of black history month, where we will be discussing one of the South's wealthiest black women, Amanda America Dickson. Amanda, like many mixed people in the South before the Civil War, was a product of an assault, but unlike most mixed-race children, she was raised in white society. She would go on to inherit her father's vast estate and become one of Georgia's most famous socialites. Come and hear her story today on this episode! Bibliography New Georgia Encyclopedia. “Amanda America Dickson,” March 10, 2003. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/amanda-america-dickson-1849-1893/. History of American Women. “Amanda Dickson,” October 24, 2008. https://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2008/10/amanda-dickson.html. Contributors to Wikimedia projects. “Amanda America Dickson.” Wikipedia, November 20, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_America_Dickson. ———. “Jean Toomer.” Wikipedia, December 6, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Toomer. ebutler. “Amanda America Dickson Toomer.” Georgia Historical Society, May 25, 2021. https://georgiahistory.com/amanda-america-dickson-toomer/. Nielsen, Euell A. “Amanda America Dickson Toomer (1849-1893) •,” November 22, 2015. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/amanda-america-dickson-toomer-1849-1893/. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “David Dickson.” Encyclopedia Britannica, November 16, 2007. https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Dickson. Leslie, Kent Anderson. Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege : Amanda America Dickson, 1849-1893, University of Georgia Press, 1995. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unb/detail.action?docID=3038897.

In this episode, Adam and Budi kick of the first book club episode of the year with The Dutchman, by Amiri Baraka. We welcome Taylor Barfield to the discussion, as he joins Budi and Adam in dissecting this classic. Poet, writer, teacher, and political activist Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey. He attended Rutgers University and Howard University, spent three years in the U.S. Air Force, and returned to New York City to attend Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. Baraka was well known for his strident social criticism, often writing in an incendiary style that made it difficult for some audiences and critics to respond with objectivity to his works. Throughout most of his career his method in poetry, drama, fiction, and essays was confrontational, calculated to shock and awaken audiences to the political concerns of black Americans. For decades, Baraka was one of the most prominent voices in the world of American literature.Baraka's legacy as a major poet of the second half of the 20th century remains matched by his importance as a cultural and political leader. His influence on younger writers has been significant and widespread, and as a leader of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s Baraka did much to define and support black literature's mission into the next century. His experimental fiction of the 1960s is considered some of the most significant African-American fiction since that of Jean Toomer.________________________________________________________________________________________________Taylor Barfield is a dramaturg, writer, and theater artist from Baltimore, MD. He served as the Acting Literary Manager at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, CT and the Literary Manager at Two River Theater in Red Bank, NJ. Taylor currently works as a freelance dramaturg and consultant working with organizations such as the Guthrie, BMG, Portland Center Stage, the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, and Yale Repertory Theatre. Taylor received his B.A. in Molecular/Cellular Biology and English Literature from Johns Hopkins University and is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, where he earned his M.F.A. and D.F.A. in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism. His scholarly work explores how contemporary Black American playwrights re-imagine and re-stage Black theater history. His writing has been published in Vulture, TDF Stages, and the Marginalia Review of Books. He is currently an adjunct professor at NYU Tisch.Support the show2024 Audio Play Festival submissions "Sounds of Home"If you enjoyed this week´s podcast, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. To submit a question: Voice- http://www.speakpipe.com/theatreofothers Email- podcast@theatreofothers.com Show Credits Co-Hosts: Adam Marple & Budi MillerProducer: Jack BurmeisterMusic: https://www.purple-planet.comAdditional compositions by @jack_burmeister

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators' relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world. Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly―that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive―from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince―Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these figures depict folk culture―and Blackness itself―as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. Their works reveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthy of assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators' relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world. Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly―that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive―from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince―Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these figures depict folk culture―and Blackness itself―as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. Their works reveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthy of assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators' relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world. Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly―that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive―from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince―Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these figures depict folk culture―and Blackness itself―as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. Their works reveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthy of assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators' relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world. Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly―that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive―from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince―Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these figures depict folk culture―and Blackness itself―as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. Their works reveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthy of assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators' relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world. Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly―that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive―from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince―Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these figures depict folk culture―and Blackness itself―as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. Their works reveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthy of assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/caribbean-studies

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators' relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world. Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly―that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive―from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince―Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these figures depict folk culture―and Blackness itself―as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. Their works reveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthy of assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators' relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world. Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly―that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive―from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince―Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these figures depict folk culture―and Blackness itself―as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. Their works reveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthy of assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators' relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world. Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly―that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive―from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince―Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these figures depict folk culture―and Blackness itself―as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. Their works reveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthy of assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators' relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world. Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly―that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive―from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince―Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these figures depict folk culture―and Blackness itself―as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. Their works reveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthy of assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators' relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world. Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly―that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive―from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince―Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these figures depict folk culture―and Blackness itself―as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. Their works reveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthy of assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

John J. Miller is joined by Brent Cline of Hillsdale College to discuss Jean Toomer's book, 'Cane.'

Welcome to the CodeX Cantina where our mission is to get more people talking about books! Was there a theme or meaning you wanted us to talk about further? Let us know in the comments below! While we're broken down Cane peace-by-piece, let's talk about it as a whole today! Cane Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfo56aXDdo&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YCZgYJSvqRaZ0FSIUA-XzbT Jack @ramblingraconteur1616 ✨Do you have a Short Story or Novel you'd think we'd like or would want to see us cover? Join our Patreon to pick our reads.

Welcome to the CodeX Cantina where our mission is to get more people talking about books! Was there a theme or meaning you wanted us to talk about further? Let us know in the comments below! The final cycle with "Kabnis" from Cane by Jean Toomer up for discussion today! Cane Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfo56aXDdo&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YCZgYJSvqRaZ0FSIUA-XzbT ✨Do you have a Short Story or Novel you'd think we'd like or would want to see us cover? Join our Patreon to pick our reads.

Welcome to the CodeX Cantina where our mission is to get more people talking about books! Was there a theme or meaning you wanted us to talk about further? Let us know in the comments below! Let's talk about Prayer, Harvest Song, and Bona and Paul from Cane by Jean Toomer today! Cane by Jean Toomer Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfo56aXDdo&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YCZgYJSvqRaZ0FSIUA-XzbT ✨Do you have a Short Story or Novel you'd think we'd like or would want to see us cover? Join our Patreon to pick our reads.

Welcome to the CodeX Cantina where our mission is to get more people talking about books! Was there a theme or meaning you wanted us to talk about further? Let us know in the comments below! Today we cover "Her Lips are Copper Wire", "Calling Jesus", and "Box Seat" from Cane by Jean Toomer! Cane Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfo56aXDdo&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YCZgYJSvqRaZ0FSIUA-XzbT ✨Do you have a Short Story or Novel you'd think we'd like or would want to see us cover? Join our Patreon to pick our reads.

Welcome to the CodeX Cantina where our mission is to get more people talking about books! Was there a theme or meaning you wanted us to talk about further? Let us know in the comments below! Today we continue with "Beehive", "Storm Ending", and "Theater" from "Cane" by Jean Toomer. "Cane" by Jean Toomer Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfo56aXDdo&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YCZgYJSvqRaZ0FSIUA-XzbT ✨Do you have a Short Story or Novel you'd think we'd like or would want to see us cover? Join our Patreon to pick our reads.

Welcome to the CodeX Cantina where our mission is to get more people talking about books! Was there a theme or meaning you wanted us to talk about further? Let us know in the comments below! Today we talk Seventh Streeth, Rhobert, and Avey from Cane by Jean Toomer. Jean Toomer's Cane Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfo56aXDdo&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YCZgYJSvqRaZ0FSIUA-XzbT ✨Do you have a Short Story or Novel you'd think we'd like or would want to see us cover? Join our Patreon to pick our reads.

Welcome to the CodeX Cantina where our mission is to get more people talking about books! Was there a theme or meaning you wanted us to talk about further? Let us know in the comments below! Jean Toomer's "Cane" is often considered a masterpiece. Conversion and Portrait in Georgia segue well into "Blood-Burning Moon" which often finds its way into the discussion when discussing the collection. Cane In-Depth Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfo56aXDdo&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YCZgYJSvqRaZ0FSIUA-XzbT ✨Do you have a Short Story or Novel you'd think we'd like or would want to see us cover? Join our Patreon to pick our reads.

In this episode, the hosts of Book Spider discuss Jean Toomer's Cane, a collection of poems and stories that evoke rural Georgia of the early 1900s. The critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls attention to Cane's use of black, white, and especially mixed-race characters to represent the American experience, an astounding literary innovation never used before or since. 

Jean Toomer's nocturne, one with bees in it, is oddly beautiful. Thinking about it, it seems to be about alienation from the worth of one's labor, but one doesn't have to think all the time while hearing it either.  For more than 650 other combinations of various words, mostly poetry, with original music, visit our blog and archives at frankhudson.org

Welcome to the CodeX Cantina where our mission is to get more people talking about books! Was there a theme or meaning you wanted us to talk about further? Let us know in the comments below! Today we are covering Nullo, Evening Song, and Esther by Jean Toomer from "Cane". Cane Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfo56aXDdo&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YCZgYJSvqRaZ0FSIUA-XzbT ✨Do you have a Short Story or Novel you'd think we'd like or would want to see us cover? Join our Patreon to pick our reads.

Subscribe to Quotomania on Simplecast or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!James Mercer Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes's birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 uncovered that he had been born a year earlier. His parents divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry. After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University in New York City. During this time, he worked as an assistant cook, launderer, and busboy. He also travelled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes's first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, (Knopf, 1926) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926 with an introduction by Harlem Renaissance arts patron Carl Van Vechten. Criticism of the book from the time varied, with some praising the arrival of a significant new voice in poetry, while others dismissed Hughes's debut collection. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter(Knopf, 1930), won the Harmon gold medal for literature.Hughes, who claimed Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen, Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including their love of music, laughter, and language itself alongside their suffering.In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple Speaks His Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1950); Simple Stakes a Claim (Rinehart, 1957); Simple Takes a Wife (Simon & Schuster, 1953); and Simple's Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965). He edited the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro and The Book of Negro Folklore, wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940), and cowrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place.”From https://poets.org/poet/langston-hughes. For more information about Langston Hughes:Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o about Hughes, at 16:05: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-137-ngg-wa-thiongo“Song for Billie Holiday”: http://stephenfrug.blogspot.com/2013/08/poem-of-day-langston-hughes-song-for.htmlSelected Poems of Langston Hughes: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/84090/selected-poems-of-langston-hughes-by-langston-hughes/“Religion ‘around' Langston Hughes, Billie Holiday, and Ralph Ellison”: https://aas.princeton.edu/news/roundtable-conversation-religion-around-langston-hughes-billie-holiday-and-ralph-ellison“Langston Hughes: The People's Poet”: https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/langston-hughes-peoples-poet“Langston Hughes”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/langston-hughes“Langston Hughes Papers”: https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/langston-hughes-papers

Welcome to the CodeX Cantina where our mission is to get more people talking about books! Was there a theme or meaning you wanted us to talk about further? Let us know in the comments below! Cane Novel Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfo56aXDdo&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YCZgYJSvqRaZ0FSIUA-XzbT ✨Do you have a Short Story or Novel you'd think we'd like or would want to see us cover? Join our Patreon to pick our reads.

Welcome to the CodeX Cantina where our mission is to get more people talking about books! Was there a theme or meaning you wanted us to talk about further? Let us know in the comments below! Let's talk "Song of the Son" and "Georgia Dusk" as we move part-by-part through Jean Toomer's "Cane". Cane by Jean Toomer Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfo56aXDdo&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YCZgYJSvqRaZ0FSIUA-XzbT ✨Do you have a Short Story or Novel you'd think we'd like or would want to see us cover? Join our Patreon to pick our reads.

Lola Ridge was once considered one of America's preeminent poets, on par with E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer, and Robert Frost. We discuss the radical life and career of this early 20th century modernist poet, anarchist, and literary editor with guest Terese Svoboda, whose 2018 biography of Ridge was described as “magisterial” in The Washington Post. For episodes and show notes, visit: LostLadiesofLit.comFollow us on instagram @lostladiesoflit. Follow Kim on twitter @kaskew. Sign up for our newsletter: LostLadiesofLit.comEmail us: Contact — Lost Ladies of Lit PodcastDiscussed in this episode: Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet by Terese SvobodaFirehead by Lola Ridge Emma Goldman Ferrer CenterFrancisco FerrerThe Ghetto, and Other Poems by Lola RidgeSacco and Vanzetti Guggenheim FellowshipShelley Memorial AwardLost Ladies of Lit episode on Heterodoxy with Joanna ScuttsHilda Dolittle (H.D.) Lost Ladies of Lit episode on Nora May French with Catherine PrendergastOthers: A Magazine of New VerseBroom MagazineMatthew Josephson Gertrude SteinMargaret SangerEdna St. Vincent MillayKatherine Anne Porter“Street Poet” by Robert Pinsky (Slate)Sun Up and Other Poems by Lola Ridge

Welcome to the CodeX Cantina where our mission is to get more people talking about books! Was there a theme or meaning you wanted us to talk about further? Let us know in the comments below! Let's talk about Carma from "Cane" by Jean Toomer Cane by Jean Toomer Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfo56aXDdo&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YCZgYJSvqRaZ0FSIUA-XzbT ✨Do you have a Short Story or Novel you'd think we'd like or would want to see us cover? Join our Patreon to pick our reads.

Welcome to the CodeX Cantina where our mission is to get more people talking about books! Was there a theme or meaning you wanted us to talk about further? Let us know in the comments below! Today we talk about "Face" and "Cotton Song" from Cane by Jean Toomer! Cane by Jean Toomer Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfo56aXDdo&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YCZgYJSvqRaZ0FSIUA-XzbT ✨Do you have a Short Story or Novel you'd think we'd like or would want to see us cover? Join our Patreon to pick our reads.

Subscribe to Quotomania on Simplecast or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!Harold Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899 in Garrettsville, Ohio and began writing verse in his early teenage years. Though he never attended college, Crane read regularly on his own, digesting the works of the Elizabethan dramatists and poets William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne and the nineteenth-century French poets Charles Vildrac, Jules Laforgue, and Arthur Rimbaud. His father, a candy manufacturer, attempted to dissuade him from a career in poetry, but Crane was determined to follow his passion to write.Living in New York City, he associated with many important figures in literature of the time, including Allen Tate, the novelist and short story writer Katherine Anne Porter, E. E. Cummings, and Jean Toomer, but his heavy drinking and chronic instability frustrated any attempts at lasting friendship. An admirer of T. S. Eliot, Crane combined the influences of European literature and traditional versification with a particularly American sensibility derived from Walt Whitman. His major work, the book-length poem, The Bridge, expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical and spiritual significance of America. Like Eliot, Crane used the landscape of the modern, industrialized city to create a powerful new symbolic literature.Hart Crane died by suicide on April 27, 1932, at the age of thirty-two, while sailing back to New York from Mexico.From https://poets.org/poet/hart-crane. For more information about Hart Crane:“Hart Crane”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/hart-craneThe Complete Poems of Hart Crane: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780871401786“A Discussion with Hart Crane”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=29&issue=1&page=46

Welcome to the CodeX Cantina where our mission is to get more people talking about books! Was there a theme or meaning you wanted us to talk about further? Let us know in the comments below! Today we are looking at the couplet of poems "Reapers" and "November Cotton Flowers" in "Cane" by Jean Toomer. Cane playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZMkgeahkTc&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YCZgYJSvqRaZ0FSIUA-XzbT Jean Toomer Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZMkgeahkTc&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YDWC_ZJSu9KLz4AodaTWZdX ✨Do you have a Short Story or Novel you'd think we'd like or would want to see us cover? Join our Patreon to pick our reads.

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes's birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 uncovered that he had been born a year earlier. His parents divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry. After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University in New York City. During this time, he worked as an assistant cook, launderer, and busboy. He also travelled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes's first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, (Knopf, 1926) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926 with an introduction by Harlem Renaissance arts patron Carl Van Vechten. Criticism of the book from the time varied, with some praising the arrival of a significant new voice in poetry, while others dismissed Hughes's debut collection. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter(Knopf, 1930), won the Harmon gold medal for literature.Hughes, who claimed Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen, Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including their love of music, laughter, and language itself alongside their suffering.In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple Speaks His Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1950); Simple Stakes a Claim (Rinehart, 1957); Simple Takes a Wife (Simon & Schuster, 1953); and Simple's Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965). He edited the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro and The Book of Negro Folklore, wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940), and cowrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place.”From https://poets.org/poet/langston-hughes. For more information about Langston Hughes:Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o about Hughes, at 16:05: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-137-ngg-wa-thiongo“Langston Hughes”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/langston-hughesThe Collected Poems of Langston Hughes: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/84092/the-collected-poems-of-langston-hughes-by-langston-hughes/“The Elusive Langston Hughes”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/sojourner“Langston Hughes: The People's Poet”: https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/langston-hughes-peoples-poet

Welcome to the CodeX Cantina where our mission is to get more people talking about books! Was there a theme or meaning you wanted us to talk about further? Let us know in the comments below! "Cane" is heralded for its approach to literature and varied style in delivery. Today we discuss "Karintha". Cane Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZMkgeahkTc&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YCZgYJSvqRaZ0FSIUA-XzbT ✨Do you have a Short Story or Novel you'd think we'd like or would want to see us cover? Join our Patreon to pick our reads.

Tonight on Girl, Goodnight, we will be reading Cane written by Jean Toomer.*WARNING: This episode contains periodic language that may be offensive to the modern day listener*Cane is a body of work known as a composite novel or short story cycle. It gained this classification due to its series of vignettes ranging from narrative prose, poetry, and play-like passages of dialogue surrounding the experiences of Black Americans. It is divided into 3 sections. The first details the experiences of black American in the southern farmland. The second details urban life for black American in the north. The last is comprised of the prose, Kabnis. The novel has been quoted as a “mysterious brand of southern psychological realism that has been matched only in the best work of William Faulkner.”Stay ConnectedInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/girl_goodnight/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GirlGoodnightYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGjGu7IIV8TVjJcP8CM2IbQ?view_as=subscriberSubmit original work to be featured on the show and make suggestions for future episodes by emailing girlgoodnightpodcast@gmail.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/girl-goodnight/exclusive-content

I begin my program with a poem for Ukraine by Vasyl Stus. I then read poems about the moon by Sappho, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, e.e. cummings, Philip Larkin, and Larry D. Thomas. I end the program with one of my own poems.

Our performance of Jean Toomer's incandescent Afro-American love poem is re-released today as part of our celebration of National Poetry Month. Wand more Parlando? Our archives have over 600 other combinations of various words with original music available at our blog: frankhudson.org

Tonight on Girl, Goodnight, we will be reading Cane written by Jean Toomer.*WARNING: This episode contains periodic language that may be offensive to the modern day listener*Cane is a body of work known as a composite novel or short story cycle. It gained this classification due to its series of vignettes ranging from narrative prose, poetry, and play-like passages of dialogue surrounding the experiences of Black Americans. It is divided into 3 sections. The first details the experiences of black American in the southern farmland. The second details urban life for black American in the north. The last is comprised of the prose, Kabnis. The novel has been quoted as a “mysterious brand of southern psychological realism that has been matched only in the best work of William Faulkner.”Stay ConnectedInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/girl_goodnight/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GirlGoodnightYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGjGu7IIV8TVjJcP8CM2IbQ?view_as=subscriberSubmit original work to be featured on the show and make suggestions for future episodes by emailing girlgoodnightpodcast@gmail.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/girl-goodnight/exclusive-content

Tonight on Girl, Goodnight, we will be reading Cane written by Jean Toomer.*WARNING: This episode contains periodic language that may be offensive to the modern day listener*Cane is a body of work known as a composite novel or short story cycle. It gained this classification due to its series of vignettes ranging from narrative prose, poetry, and play-like passages of dialogue surrounding the experiences of Black Americans. It is divided into 3 sections. The first details the experiences of black American in the southern farmland. The second details urban life for black American in the north. The last is comprised of the prose, Kabnis. The novel has been quoted as a “mysterious brand of southern psychological realism that has been matched only in the best work of William Faulkner.”Stay ConnectedInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/girl_goodnight/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GirlGoodnightYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGjGu7IIV8TVjJcP8CM2IbQ?view_as=subscriberSubmit original work to be featured on the show and make suggestions for future episodes by emailing girlgoodnightpodcast@gmail.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/girl-goodnight/exclusive-content

Tonight on Girl, Goodnight, we will be reading Cane written by Jean Toomer.*WARNING: This episode contains periodic language that may be offensive to the modern day listener*Cane is a body of work known as a composite novel or short story cycle. It gained this classification due to its series of vignettes ranging from narrative prose, poetry, and play-like passages of dialogue surrounding the experiences of Black Americans. It is divided into 3 sections. The first details the experiences of black American in the southern farmland. The second details urban life for black American in the north. The last is comprised of the prose, Kabnis. The novel has been quoted as a “mysterious brand of southern psychological realism that has been matched only in the best work of William Faulkner.”Stay ConnectedInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/girl_goodnight/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GirlGoodnightYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGjGu7IIV8TVjJcP8CM2IbQ?view_as=subscriberSubmit original work to be featured on the show and make suggestions for future episodes by emailing girlgoodnightpodcast@gmail.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/girl-goodnight/exclusive-content

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jean-toomer

Alex Haley and Jean Toomer are introduced. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/edward-russell-jr/support

Code-Switching and VulnerabilityIn this episode, herdacious host Lorelei chats with Frances Jordan about code-switching in the workplace. Code-switching is the practice of altering behavior, speech, appearance, or expression of oneself to optimize the comfort of others in exchange for fair treatment. On its surface, code-switching might seem a harmless way of operating, however we learn that code-switching reaps consequences of identity erasure that are anything but benign. Frances reframes code-switching as a barrier that represses vulnerability and inhibits us from showing up in the workplace as our most authentic selves. From identifying specific triggers to understanding that no two people share identical experiences, Frances helps us realize that there's power in showing up honestly if we so choose, just as there's power in welcoming and respectfully empathizing with our co-workers' individual experiences. Regardless of race, religion, sexuality, or identity, we're all here to be the best professionals we can be — and we all deserve to do so as our most authentic selves!Host: Lorelei GonzalezCo-host: Frances Leigh Jordan, Esq.Frances Leigh Jordan currently works at Notley as the Policy and Social Equity Director. Since law school, she's worked in civil rights, child protection services, and transportation with government agencies. She is an active member of the Austin Stone and has been volunteering with the Austin Justice Coalition since 2016, and currently serves as the Board Chair. She received her bachelor's degree in political science at Tuskegee University in 2008 and received her Juris Doctor from the University of Kentucky in 2011.Things you will learn in this episode (chapter markers available):  What is code-switching? 1:06Through the generations 6:28Why do it? 7:35The consequences 13:45Vulnerability 15:40Perpetuate positivity 21:40Breaking the cycle 28:45Femme fact: Edith Garrud 33:05Resources mentioned in this episode:  The Cost of Code-Switching (article) Code Switch (podcast)Cane by Jean Toomer (book)Articulate While Black by H. Samy Alim and Geneva SmithermanThe Elephant Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin HansonEpisode sponsors:  HERdacity   Moonray  Looking for additional resources on this topic? Check out our podcast episode with Sam Barrow “Navigating Bias Like a Boss”Loved what you heard on herdacious and want to share with friends? Tag us and connect with HERdacity on social media:Twitter: @herdacityFacebook: @HERdacityInstagram: @herdacityLinkedIn: HERdacity Email: herdacious@herdacity.orgFor up to date information on HERdacity events, webinars, podcasts, and community activities, join our newsletter here.  Disclaimer: While we appreciate our sponsors' support in making this show possible, herdacious content is curated with integrity and honesty.Support the show (http://herdacity.org/donate/)

This week, the Spine Crackers read Jean Toomer's 1923 modernist classic of the Harlem Renaissance, Cane. Alternating between vignettes of African American life in the South and the North, as well as poems, Cane is a unique achievement.

Welcome to the CodeX Cantina where our mission is to get more people talking about books! Today we look at an excerpt from the novel "Cane" (or short story cycle) called "Becky" which was written by Jean Toomer. An early Harlem Renaissance piece, published in 1923, considered by many to be the first Modernist Novel by a Black Author. Jean Toomer Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZMkgeahkTc&list=PLHg_kbfrA7YDWC_ZJSu9KLz4AodaTWZdX Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzdqkkUKpfRIbCXmiFvqxIw?sub_confirmation=1 ================================= Books or Stories Mentioned in this Video: "Cane" by Jean Toomer Channels Mentioned in this Video: ================================= #JeanToomer #Cane #SouthernLiterature #Modernist TABLE OF CONTENTS: 0:00 Introductions 0:42 Publication, Author, + Themes 1:57 Plot Summary 2:35 Analysis 11:00 Wrap Up and Ratings Do you have a Short Story or Novel you'd think we'd like or would want to see us cover? Submit your entry here: https://forms.gle/41VvksZTKBsxUYQMA You can reach us on Social Media: ▶ The Literary Discourse Discord: https://discord.gg/2YyXPAdRUy ▶ http://instagram.com/thecodexcantina ▶ http://twitter.com/thecodexcantina ====Copyright Info==== Song: Infinite Artist: Valence Licensed to YouTube by: AEI (on behalf of NCS); Featherstone Music (publishing), and 1 Music Rights Societies Free Download/Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHoqD47gQG8 --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thecodexcantina/support

Jean Toomer's short, symbolic poem about work and responsibility performed in a modest folk song setting. As we continue our #NationalPoetryMonth celebration, you can find other combinations of various words and original music at frankhudson.org

We speak with Dr. John Young - Professor of 20th Century British and American Literature at Marshall University in Marshall, West Virginia.  We discuss the racial tensions and how that ties into John's scholarly pursuits (highlighted below) We discuss the mythic nature of this virus and how science fiction could not have predicted this incredible event.  We discuss the 'Defund the Police' movement and what police reform may look like.  We discuss the education system and how that needs systemic reform and how it applies to so many other problems in our society.  It's important to examine the structure of public education and the 'prison-like' environment coupled with the low amount of funding extends itself into systemic issues that also need addressed.  We talk about conceptually what a fall semester in college or public schools may look like and what we all learned about public education as our children were home schooled to finish their semester - putting the education system in a lot of our faces.  We also dig into some book recommendations to read during the pandemic. Dr. Young's current scholarly projects include The Souls of Black Texts, which will apply W.E.B. Du Bois's idea of double consciousness to the drafts and published versions of major 20th– and 21st-century African American works (by Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and Claudia Rankine) and a series of essays on Jean Toomer's periodical publications. Previous publications include How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O'Brien's Processes of Textual Production (University of Iowa Press, 2017), Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race since 1850, co-edited with George Hutchinson (University of Michigan Press, 2012), Black Writers, White Publishers (University Press of Mississippi, 2006), and various articles on the production histories of modernist and postmodernist literature. He is also currently serving as Executive Director of the Society for Textual Scholarship. 

In 1923, African American author Jean Toomer published the novel Cane. It wasn’t a best seller at the time but is now held as a modernist classic and a central work of The Harlem Renaissance. A new radio adaptation is to be broadcast on Radio 4. We speak to playwright Janice Okoh and score composer, soul singer Carleen Anderson. Today is Bloomsday, when Dubliners celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses, the novel about Irish newspaper advertising salesman Leopold Bloom wandering round the city. As Ireland is emerging from lockdown events are moving online and for Zoomsday actor Seán Doyle is MC-ing a Joycean Punk Cabaret with an alternative presentation of extracts, songs, poems as well as Joyce’s saucier love letters. Seán joins us from Dublin just before the event begins. Lockdown came quickly and affected arts organisations around the country with barely any warning. Venues closed their doors and hung up the “closed until further notice” signs. But what’s happening behind the closed doors? We speak to Joanna Meacock from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow and Anna Renton from Penlee House in Penzance. For one week only Alison Brackenbury is Front Row’s poet in residence. The colsure of museums during Coronavirus has inspired Alison to write new poems about some of those she has visited. Every day this week we will be hearing one of her Museums Unlocked poems. In today’s Alison takes us to Aghanistan via a painting in the Museum of Somerset in Taunton Castle. Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Julian May Studio Manager: John Boland

Today's poem is Jean Toomer's "Harvest Song." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

After she tragically died in childbirth in 1932, acclaimed novelist and activist Margery Latimer became lost to history. While her work had drawn comparisons to Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, Latimer’s reputation as a writer was overshadowed by her interracial marriage with the poet and novelist Jean Toomer. In this podcast Emily Lutenski, associate professor of American studies at Saint Louis University, discusses Latimer and Toomer’s romantic relationship and intellectual partnership, the scandal that ensued, and the ways their legacies have been shaped as a result.

This week we're discussing Jean Toomer's 1923 book CANE, a genre-bending mix of prose and poetry written after the author spent several months working as a substitute principal in Georgia. Many people hold the book up as a modernist classic, and an important influence on other writers during the Harlem Renaissance, but: does it stand the test of time? Also this week: more monkey news! People in the '20s seemed fascinated with monkeys and their antics, even as anti-Darwinists seemed deeply offended at the suggestion that they'd evolved from apes. If you like the show and would like more Book Fight in your life, consider subscribing to our Patreon. For $5/month, you'll get access to regular bonus episodes, including monthly episodes of Book Fight After Dark, where we read some of the world's weirdest--and steamiest!--novels. We've also recently begun a new series of Patreon-only mini-episodes called Reading the Room, in which we offer advice on how to navigate awkward, writing-related social situations.

On this episode of Read Between the Vines, Jacquie and Chrissy enjoy the poetry of Rebecca Wolff and Jean Toomer. Stay tuned for a very special song at the end!

Jean Toomer’s 1923 Cane is one of America’s literary masterpieces: a book that captures the dynamism and rhythm of American English through characters that could not exist anywhere else in the world. The short novel is comprised of stories, tales, poetry and even songs, and in breaking with conventional genre it also broke with assumptions of who and what a book of modernist writing can feature. As a person who identified himself as the first “true American,” Toomer was educated in both black and white schools the 1920s. For a while he lived in Georgia where Cane is set, peopled by African-Americans and whites who are living through the volatile, gorgeous and violent reality structured by but not entirely determined by our country’s troubled race relations. But Cane is not a sociological treatise on race relations but as Ismail Muhammad explains, a book that resists and upends such interpretations. Toomer was furious when Cane was first marketed as a book by and about the African-American experience. While Toomer considered Cane the "swan song" of African-American folk culture rapidly destroyed by the industrialization of the South and the north-bound migration of African Americans during the era of Jim Crow, he did not want the book to be read only as a book about African-Americans. As Ismail Muhammad explains in an essay for the Paris Review, "far from being a book that [...] is intended to transcend blackness, Cane is the site where Toomer most artfully theorizes a surprisingly contemporary notion of what blackness means." I spoke with writer and critic Ismail Muhammad to understand why Toomer’s single published book ranks among the great masterpieces of modernism, how to read a book celebrated as a major achievement of the Harlem renaissance without pigeonholing and limiting its ambition, scope and achievement, and what Toomer's notion of "what blackness means" is so relevant back then and still today. 

Jean Toomer (1894–1967) was a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His work addresses both sides of The Great Migration: the problematic longing for life in the South, the energy (and injustices) of life in the North. In 2019, Cane became available in the public domain. To commemorate the occasion, Mouse will publish this landmark work in three installments. Volume 1 addresses Toomer’s imagination of the South. It is a fragmentary, hallucinatory, and lyrical, making it a key example of American Modernism.

African-American poet, Jean Toomer, and his work "Reapers"

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Catherine Keyser about early twentieth century fiction and the role that modern food plays in literature as a language for talking about race and racial categories. In Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press, Keyser explores the ways that modern fiction writers responded to the theories and anxieties about race in the early twentieth century through related anxieties about modern industrial food. In each chapter, Keyser focuses on a few closely related authors and texts, linked by their common use of food for plot, imagery, and metaphor, each one shedding some light on how that food carried meanings of racial identity. Keyser uncovers the historical context around each food to help today’s readers see what it might have meant to the writers and their contemporary readers. Keyser examines the use of soda pop and syrup or images of effervescence in Jean Toomer’s Cane as a metaphor for inevitable racial intermixing; the promises of raw food for revitalizing African American resistance in George Schuyler’s speculative fiction; Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein’s search for a cosmopolitan identity through European terroir; the fragility of whiteness in F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s anxieties about coffee, wine, and the sticky Mediterranean; and the failure of capitalism to secure black masculinity through the figure of the grocer in Zora Neale Hurtson’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dorothy West’s The Living is Easy. Keyser’s careful pairing of familiar texts with their less canonical contemporaries brings an important new perspective to both. Catherine Keyser is Associate Professor and McCausland Fellow at the University of South Carolina. Cat’s research focuses on Modern American Literature, African American Literature, Periodicals, Gender, and Food. She is also the author of the 2010 book Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture from Rutgers University Press, 2010. You can follow Cat on Twitter @Cat_Keyser. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Catherine Keyser about early twentieth century fiction and the role that modern food plays in literature as a language for talking about race and racial categories. In Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press, Keyser explores the ways that modern fiction writers responded to the theories and anxieties about race in the early twentieth century through related anxieties about modern industrial food. In each chapter, Keyser focuses on a few closely related authors and texts, linked by their common use of food for plot, imagery, and metaphor, each one shedding some light on how that food carried meanings of racial identity. Keyser uncovers the historical context around each food to help today’s readers see what it might have meant to the writers and their contemporary readers. Keyser examines the use of soda pop and syrup or images of effervescence in Jean Toomer’s Cane as a metaphor for inevitable racial intermixing; the promises of raw food for revitalizing African American resistance in George Schuyler’s speculative fiction; Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein’s search for a cosmopolitan identity through European terroir; the fragility of whiteness in F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s anxieties about coffee, wine, and the sticky Mediterranean; and the failure of capitalism to secure black masculinity through the figure of the grocer in Zora Neale Hurtson’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dorothy West’s The Living is Easy. Keyser’s careful pairing of familiar texts with their less canonical contemporaries brings an important new perspective to both. Catherine Keyser is Associate Professor and McCausland Fellow at the University of South Carolina. Cat’s research focuses on Modern American Literature, African American Literature, Periodicals, Gender, and Food. She is also the author of the 2010 book Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture from Rutgers University Press, 2010. You can follow Cat on Twitter @Cat_Keyser. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Catherine Keyser about early twentieth century fiction and the role that modern food plays in literature as a language for talking about race and racial categories. In Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press, Keyser explores the ways that modern fiction writers responded to the theories and anxieties about race in the early twentieth century through related anxieties about modern industrial food. In each chapter, Keyser focuses on a few closely related authors and texts, linked by their common use of food for plot, imagery, and metaphor, each one shedding some light on how that food carried meanings of racial identity. Keyser uncovers the historical context around each food to help today’s readers see what it might have meant to the writers and their contemporary readers. Keyser examines the use of soda pop and syrup or images of effervescence in Jean Toomer’s Cane as a metaphor for inevitable racial intermixing; the promises of raw food for revitalizing African American resistance in George Schuyler’s speculative fiction; Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein’s search for a cosmopolitan identity through European terroir; the fragility of whiteness in F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s anxieties about coffee, wine, and the sticky Mediterranean; and the failure of capitalism to secure black masculinity through the figure of the grocer in Zora Neale Hurtson’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dorothy West’s The Living is Easy. Keyser’s careful pairing of familiar texts with their less canonical contemporaries brings an important new perspective to both. Catherine Keyser is Associate Professor and McCausland Fellow at the University of South Carolina. Cat’s research focuses on Modern American Literature, African American Literature, Periodicals, Gender, and Food. She is also the author of the 2010 book Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture from Rutgers University Press, 2010. You can follow Cat on Twitter @Cat_Keyser. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Catherine Keyser about early twentieth century fiction and the role that modern food plays in literature as a language for talking about race and racial categories. In Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press, Keyser explores the ways that modern fiction writers responded to the theories and anxieties about race in the early twentieth century through related anxieties about modern industrial food. In each chapter, Keyser focuses on a few closely related authors and texts, linked by their common use of food for plot, imagery, and metaphor, each one shedding some light on how that food carried meanings of racial identity. Keyser uncovers the historical context around each food to help today’s readers see what it might have meant to the writers and their contemporary readers. Keyser examines the use of soda pop and syrup or images of effervescence in Jean Toomer’s Cane as a metaphor for inevitable racial intermixing; the promises of raw food for revitalizing African American resistance in George Schuyler’s speculative fiction; Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein’s search for a cosmopolitan identity through European terroir; the fragility of whiteness in F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s anxieties about coffee, wine, and the sticky Mediterranean; and the failure of capitalism to secure black masculinity through the figure of the grocer in Zora Neale Hurtson’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dorothy West’s The Living is Easy. Keyser’s careful pairing of familiar texts with their less canonical contemporaries brings an important new perspective to both. Catherine Keyser is Associate Professor and McCausland Fellow at the University of South Carolina. Cat’s research focuses on Modern American Literature, African American Literature, Periodicals, Gender, and Food. She is also the author of the 2010 book Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture from Rutgers University Press, 2010. You can follow Cat on Twitter @Cat_Keyser. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Catherine Keyser about early twentieth century fiction and the role that modern food plays in literature as a language for talking about race and racial categories. In Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press, Keyser explores the ways that modern fiction writers responded to the theories and anxieties about race in the early twentieth century through related anxieties about modern industrial food. In each chapter, Keyser focuses on a few closely related authors and texts, linked by their common use of food for plot, imagery, and metaphor, each one shedding some light on how that food carried meanings of racial identity. Keyser uncovers the historical context around each food to help today's readers see what it might have meant to the writers and their contemporary readers. Keyser examines the use of soda pop and syrup or images of effervescence in Jean Toomer's Cane as a metaphor for inevitable racial intermixing; the promises of raw food for revitalizing African American resistance in George Schuyler's speculative fiction; Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein's search for a cosmopolitan identity through European terroir; the fragility of whiteness in F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's anxieties about coffee, wine, and the sticky Mediterranean; and the failure of capitalism to secure black masculinity through the figure of the grocer in Zora Neale Hurtson's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dorothy West's The Living is Easy. Keyser's careful pairing of familiar texts with their less canonical contemporaries brings an important new perspective to both. Catherine Keyser is Associate Professor and McCausland Fellow at the University of South Carolina. Cat's research focuses on Modern American Literature, African American Literature, Periodicals, Gender, and Food. She is also the author of the 2010 book Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture from Rutgers University Press, 2010. You can follow Cat on Twitter @Cat_Keyser. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Catherine Keyser about early twentieth century fiction and the role that modern food plays in literature as a language for talking about race and racial categories. In Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press, Keyser explores the ways that modern fiction writers responded to the theories and anxieties about race in the early twentieth century through related anxieties about modern industrial food. In each chapter, Keyser focuses on a few closely related authors and texts, linked by their common use of food for plot, imagery, and metaphor, each one shedding some light on how that food carried meanings of racial identity. Keyser uncovers the historical context around each food to help today's readers see what it might have meant to the writers and their contemporary readers. Keyser examines the use of soda pop and syrup or images of effervescence in Jean Toomer's Cane as a metaphor for inevitable racial intermixing; the promises of raw food for revitalizing African American resistance in George Schuyler's speculative fiction; Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein's search for a cosmopolitan identity through European terroir; the fragility of whiteness in F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's anxieties about coffee, wine, and the sticky Mediterranean; and the failure of capitalism to secure black masculinity through the figure of the grocer in Zora Neale Hurtson's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dorothy West's The Living is Easy. Keyser's careful pairing of familiar texts with their less canonical contemporaries brings an important new perspective to both. Catherine Keyser is Associate Professor and McCausland Fellow at the University of South Carolina. Cat's research focuses on Modern American Literature, African American Literature, Periodicals, Gender, and Food. She is also the author of the 2010 book Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture from Rutgers University Press, 2010. You can follow Cat on Twitter @Cat_Keyser. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Catherine Keyser about early twentieth century fiction and the role that modern food plays in literature as a language for talking about race and racial categories. In Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press, Keyser explores the ways that modern fiction writers responded to the theories and anxieties about race in the early twentieth century through related anxieties about modern industrial food. In each chapter, Keyser focuses on a few closely related authors and texts, linked by their common use of food for plot, imagery, and metaphor, each one shedding some light on how that food carried meanings of racial identity. Keyser uncovers the historical context around each food to help today’s readers see what it might have meant to the writers and their contemporary readers. Keyser examines the use of soda pop and syrup or images of effervescence in Jean Toomer’s Cane as a metaphor for inevitable racial intermixing; the promises of raw food for revitalizing African American resistance in George Schuyler’s speculative fiction; Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein’s search for a cosmopolitan identity through European terroir; the fragility of whiteness in F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s anxieties about coffee, wine, and the sticky Mediterranean; and the failure of capitalism to secure black masculinity through the figure of the grocer in Zora Neale Hurtson’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dorothy West’s The Living is Easy. Keyser’s careful pairing of familiar texts with their less canonical contemporaries brings an important new perspective to both. Catherine Keyser is Associate Professor and McCausland Fellow at the University of South Carolina. Cat’s research focuses on Modern American Literature, African American Literature, Periodicals, Gender, and Food. She is also the author of the 2010 book Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture from Rutgers University Press, 2010. You can follow Cat on Twitter @Cat_Keyser. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode was recorded before we recorded episode 12, but we recommend listening to that episode on METAPHOR before listening to this episode on the OUTER REACHES OF METAPHOR. In this episode that might be our most off-the-rails one yet, we talk about how sunflowers can look like almost anything in Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra"; how metaphors are era-specific and typewriter erasers live on past obsolescence because of Elizabeth Bishop's "12 O'Clock News"; and how the hyper-specific metaphorical way in which lips like copper wires is super sexy in Jean Toomer's "Her Lips are Copper Wire." LINKS TO POEMS: (Ginsberg: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49304/sunflower-sutra) (Bishop: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1973/03/24/12-oclock-news) (Toomer: https://poets.org/poem/her-lips-are-copper-wire)

Today's poem is Beehive by Jean Toomer.

This edition takes a look at Reapers by Jean Toomer.

Chief Marketing Officer at Open Road Integrated Media Interview starts at 9:51 and ends at 38:35 “I do think we're unusual in that we consistently continue to market these books day in and day out for many years. I think that's the benefit we bring to our partners in the Open Road Ignition program, that we are taking those eBooks that they don't have time or resources to market in an ongoing way and doing it on their behalf.” News “Amazon, to Win in Booming Rural India, Reinvents Itself” by Eric Bellman at The Wall Street Journal - December 31, 2018 Russ Grandinetti interviewed for Amazon's Day One Blog - November 14, 2017 “Hiring for Amazon's Alexa team massively outpaces that of Apple's Siri” by James Mattone at Thinknum - January 3, 2019 “Alexa, what's a screen pass? Amazon speaker can teach football to casual NFL fans” by Edward C. Baig at USA Today - January 3, 2019 Tech Tip Alexa voice commands for Hulu Interview with Mary McAveney Open Road Integrated Media “New Life for Old Classics, as Their Copyrights Run Out” by Alexandra Alter at The New York Times - December 29, 2018 Cane: A Library of America eBook Classic by Jean Toomer ($9.99 on Kindle) Content “The 50 Best TV Shows on Amazon Prime Right Now” at Paste - January 3, 2019 Comments 2019 Goodreads challenge The Autobiography of Mark Twain: Deluxe Modern Classic Echo Spot - $130 at Amazon.com Next Week's Guest Dave Addey, author of Typeset in the Future: Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies Music for my podcast is from an original Thelonius Monk composition named "Well, You Needn't." This version is "Ra-Monk" by Eval Manigat on the "Variations in Time: A Jazz Perspective" CD by Public Transit Recording" CD. Please Join the Kindle Chronicles group at Goodreads! Right-click here and then click "Save Link As..." to download the audio to your computer, phone, or MP3 player.

Harriett Gilbert discusses favourite books with the writers Nikesh Shukla and Leone Ross. Nikesh's choice is Amateur; a real-life account of testing one’s masculinity in the boxing ring by Thomas Page McBee. Leone's is Cane, the largely forgotten African-American classic by Jean Toomer and Harriett's is a divisive modern classic, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Producer: Eliza Lomas

Sound Design and Production by Kevin Seaman

Best-selling author Marita Golden talks about her novel “The Wide Circumference of Love,” in which the real-world impact of Alzheimer's disease on the African-American community is woven into a fictionalized story. Marita tells us how writing the novel turned her into an Alzheimer's activist. She ponders some big questions about how the disease is changing America and she shares some alarming facts, uncovered during her research for the book, about the impact of Alzheimer's on communities of color. Born and raised in Washington, DC, Marita also talks about the colorful, pre-gentrified neighborhood of her youth and growing up on the same block where famed Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer spent his childhood. Note: this episode originally aired on November 16, 2017. Marita's website: http://bit.ly/2igYwBk Connect with Marita on Facebook: http://bit.ly/2iVKLrp Find her book on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2jqBKdW Music: “Lakeside Path” and “Delicious” by Blue Dot Sessions | CC BY NC | Free Music Archive

Read aloud by Lexitron Series C Read the poem with your own fleshy orbs: https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/face-9 Contact: poetry4robos@gmail.com (01001110 01101111 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101001 01101110 01100101 01110110 01101001 01110100 01100001 01100010 01101100 01100101 00100000 01100101 01111000 01100011 01100101 01110000 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100111 01110011 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100011 01101000 01100001 01101110 01100111 01100101 00101110 00100000 01001101 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100111 01110011 00100000 01100011 01101000 01100001 01101110 01100111 01100101 00100000 01110111 01100101 01101100 01101100 00101110)

Panel: Nissa Cannon | University of California, Santa Barbara Nissa is an Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Pre-doctoral Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is completing her Ph.D. in English. Her dissertation, “Paper Identities and Identity Papers” argues that the documents of interwar itinerancy are responsible for creating a distinct mode of migratory identity: expatriation. She has published on Jean Toomer’s Cane, and has an article forthcoming in symploke on Claude McKay’s Banjo and the modern passport system Bret Johnson | University of Loughborough Bret is a fully-funded researcher at Loughborough University, with an interest in the role of literary prizes, small publishers, and the avant-garde. His work currently looks at literature throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a focus one Modernism and its legacy within contemporary fiction and combines archival research with oral history interviews. He gained a BA at Goldsmiths (2012) and an MA at the University of Birmingham (2014) before winning a studentship at Loughborough University in 2016 to work under the supervision of Dr Lise Jaillant and Professor Nigel Wood Emma West | University of Birmingham Emma is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Her postdoctoral project, Revolutionary Red Tape: How state bureaucracy shaped British modernism, examines how public servants and official committees helped to commission, disseminate and popularise British modernist art, design, architecture and literature. She has published essays on modernism, periodicals, fashion and theory and is the organiser of several conferences, including Alternative Modernisms (2013), A Century On (2015) and Twentieth-Century British Periodicals (2017). She is the Founder and Chair of Modernist Network Cymru (MONC).

American Weimar, novelist Steve Erickson’s 1995 essay on threats to American democracy, has always been among Alec Baldwin’s favorite pieces of writing.  But last year, when all of the chickens Erickson identified came home to roost, it became clear that the piece, and its author, deserved even closer study.  Erickson warned, “Democracy cannot long navigate a sea of national rage. Untempered by rationale and open-mindedness, fury eventually consumes democracy rather than nourishes it.”  Today, Americans look back on the 90s as a relatively happy time, but Erickson saw our increasing polarization and our unwillingness to make tough policy choices, and he saw where those failures could lead.  Erickson’s updated observations are just as fascinating, and troubling, as the original essay.  His latest novel, Shadowbahn, riffs on the same American themes.  In funny and moving prose, it captures a fractured people, unable to overcome our troubled past but stubbornly holding out for redemption... as one reviewer put it, “a country with hellhounds on its trail but better angels just over the horizon.”     Steve Erickson is a lot of novelists’ favorite novelist.  Pynchon says he has a “rare and luminous gift;” Rick Moody says he’s in a league with Pynchon.  Murakami’s a fan.  David Foster Wallace (in a presumably rare lapse into cliché) deemed Erickson “the cream of the crop.” Erickson’s own novels employ a wild range of genres and narrative devices -- from the Hollywood farce Zeroville, currently being turned into a movie featuring Will Farrell, to the meditative Shadowbahn, a family roadtrip through alternate American histories, featuring Elvis’s stillborn twin brother.  Erickson’s exuberant mashups feel natural and even spontaneous, but he is also a professor of Creative Writing, so in his other life he has the near-impossible task of teasing out and precisely naming the building blocks of great fiction.  And he has to decide which books best model each one for his students. During Alec Baldwin’s conversation with Erickson on the latest episode of Here’s the Thing, he asked Erickson for the reading list he provides to his Creative Writing students at UC Riverside, matched to which writing-tool each one can help budding novelists master.  Below (in the order in which it came), is that list.                Unreliable Narrative:  Wuthering Heights by Emily BrontëMixed Textual Media:  Cane by Jean ToomerThe Interior Vision:  To the Lighthouse by Virginia WoolfStructure: Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald & Light in August by William FaulknerVoice Driving the Narrative:  Tropic of Cancer by Henry MillerLandscape as Character:  The Sheltering Sky by Paul BowlesSocial Commentary Posing as Genre:  The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (crime) & Ubik by Philip K Dick (science fiction)Integrity of Worldview Posing as Anarchy:  V. by Thomas PynchonFiction of Ideas:  Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, & The Names by Don DeLillo  

Jean Toomer (1894-1967) was born into a prominent black family in Washington, D.C., but it wasn’t until he returned to the land of agrarian Georgia that he was inspired to write his masterpiece Cane (1923), a towering achievement that went on to influence the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation. While Toomer’s own life presents a portrait of a man searching for an identity in a world of too-rigid categorization, the confident and self-assured Cane stands for a universality that defies categorization and bridges American divisions. In this episode, host Jacke Wilson reflects upon his own search for identity in small-town Wisconsin, which coincidentally was one of the places where Jean Toomer landed as well.  FREE GIFT!  Write a review on iTunes (or another site), then send us an email at jackewilsonauthor@gmail.com to receive your free History of Literature postcard as a thank you gift. Act now while supplies last!  Show Notes:  Contact the host at jackewilsonauthor@gmail.com or by leaving a voicemail at 1-361-4WILSON (1-361-494-5766).  You can find more literary discussion at jackewilson.com and more episodes of the series at historyofliterature.com. Check out our Facebook page at facebook.com/historyofliterature. You can follow Jacke Wilson at his Twitter account @WriterJacke. You can also follow Mike and the Literature Supporters Club (and receive daily book recommendations) by looking for @literatureSC. Music Credits: “I Been ‘Buked” (trad. Negro Spiritual), performed by the Georgia Spiritual Ensemble. “Handel – Entrance to the Queen of Sheba” by Advent Chamber Orchestra (From the Free Music Archive / CC by SA).   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We begin a new series on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance with Jean Toomer's Cane. A great example of American modernism and in some ways a thematic summary of the issues writers explored in the Harlem Renaissance.

AMIRI BARAKACLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO SHOWPoet, writer, teacher, and political activist Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey. He attended Rutgers University and Howard University, spent three years in the U.S. Air Force, and returned to New York City to attend Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. Baraka was well known for his strident social criticism, often writing in an incendiary style that made it difficult for some audiences and critics to respond with objectivity to his works. Throughout most of his career his method in poetry, drama, fiction, and essays was confrontational, calculated to shock and awaken audiences to the political concerns of black Americans. For decades, Baraka was one of the most prominent voices in the world of American literature.Baraka’s own political stance changed several times, thus dividing his oeuvre into periods: as a member of the avant-garde during the 1950s, Baraka—writing as Leroi Jones—was associated with Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; in the ‘60s, he moved to Harlem and became a Black Nationalist; in the ‘70s, he was involved in third-world liberation movements and identified as a Marxist. More recently, Baraka was accused of anti-Semitism for his poem “Somebody Blew up America,” written in response to the September 11 attacks.Baraka incited controversy throughout his career. He was praised for speaking out against oppression as well as accused of fostering hate. Critical opinion has been sharply divided between those who agree, with Dissent contributor Stanley Kaufman, that Baraka’s race and political moment have created his celebrity, and those who feel that Baraka stands among the most important writers of the twentieth century. In the American Book Review, Arnold Rampersad counted Baraka with Phyllis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison “as one of the eight figures . . . who have significantly affected the course of African-American literary culture.”Baraka did not always identify with radical politics, nor did his writing always court controversy. During the 1950s Baraka lived in Greenwich Village, befriending Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and Gilbert Sorrentino. The white avant-garde—primarily Ginsberg, O’Hara, and leader of the Black Mountain poets Charles Olson—and Baraka believed in poetry as a process of discovery rather than an exercise in fulfilling traditional expectations. Baraka, like the projectivist poets, believed that a poem’s form should follow the shape determined by the poet’s own breath and intensity of feeling. In 1958 Baraka founded Yugen magazine and Totem Press, important forums for new verse. He was married to his co-editor, Hettie Cohen, from 1960 to 1965. His first play, A Good Girl Is Hard to Find, was produced at Sterington House in Montclair, New Jersey, that same year. Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Baraka’s first published collection of poems appeared in 1961. M.L. Rosenthal wrote in The New Poets: American and British Poetry since World War II that these poems show Baraka’s “natural gift for quick, vivid imagery and spontaneous humor.” Rosenthal also praised the “sardonic or sensuous or slangily knowledgeable passages” that fill the early poems. While the cadence of blues and many allusions to black culture are found in the poems, the subject of blackness does not predominate. Throughout, rather, the poet shows his integrated, Bohemian social roots. The book’s last line is “You are / as any other sad man here / american.”With the rise of the civil rights movement Baraka’s works took on a more militant tone. His trip to Cuba in 1959 marked an important turning point in his life. His view of his role as a writer, the purpose of art, and the degree to which ethnic awareness deserved to be his subject changed dramatically. In Cuba he met writers and artists from third world countries whose political concerns included the fight against poverty, famine, and oppressive governments. In Home: Social Essays (1966), Baraka explains how he tried to defend himself against their accusations of self-indulgence, and was further challenged by Jaime Shelley, a Mexican poet, who said, “‘In that ugliness you live in, you want to cultivate your soul? Well, we’ve got millions of starving people to feed, and that moves me enough to make poems out of.’” Soon Baraka began to identify with third world writers and to write poems and plays with strong political messages.Dutchman, a play of entrapment in which a white woman and a middle-class black man both express their murderous hatred on a subway, was first performed Off-Broadway in 1964. While other dramatists of the time were wedded to naturalism, Baraka used symbolism and other experimental techniques to enhance the play’s emotional impact. The play established Baraka’s reputation as a playwright and has been often anthologized and performed. It won the Village Voice Obie Award in 1964 and was later made into a film. The plays and poems following Dutchman expressed Baraka’s increasing disappointment with white America and his growing need to separate from it. Critics observed that as Baraka’s poems became more politically intense, they left behind some of the flawless technique of the earlier poems. Richard Howard wrote of The Dead Lecturer (1964) in the Nation: “These are the agonized poems of a man writing to save his skin, or at least to settle in it, and so urgent is their purpose that not one of them can trouble to be perfect.”To make a clean break with the Beat influence, Baraka turned to writing fiction in the mid-1960s, penning The System of Dante’s Hell (1965), a novel, and Tales (1967), a collection of short stories. The stories are “‘fugitive narratives’ that describe the harried flight of an intensely self-conscious Afro-American artist/intellectual from neo-slavery of blinding, neutralizing whiteness, where the area of struggle is basically within the mind,” Robert Elliot Fox wrote in Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany.The role of violent action in achieving political change is more prominent in these stories, as is the role of music in black life.In addition to his poems, novels and politically-charged essays, Baraka is a noted writer of music criticism. His classic history Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) traces black music from slavery to contemporary jazz. Finding indigenous black art forms was important to Baraka in the ‘60s, as he was searching for a more authentic voice for his own poetry. Baraka became known as an articulate jazz critic and a perceptive observer of social change. As Clyde Taylor stated in Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, “The connection he nailed down between the many faces of black music, the sociological sets that nurtured them, and their symbolic evolutions through socio-economic changes, in Blues People, is his most durable conception, as well as probably the one most indispensable thing said about black music.” Baraka also published the important studies Black Music (1968) and The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (1987). Lloyd W. Brown commented in Amiri Baraka that Baraka’s essays on music are flawless: “As historian, musicological analyst, or as a journalist covering a particular performance Baraka always commands attention because of his obvious knowledge of the subject and because of a style that is engaging and persuasive even when the sentiments are questionable and controversial.”After Black Muslim leader Malcolm X was killed in 1965, Baraka moved to Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. The Black Arts Movement helped develop a new aesthetic for black art and Baraka was its primary theorist. Black American artists should follow “black,” not “white” standards of beauty and value, he maintained, and should stop looking to white culture for validation. The black artist’s role, he wrote in Home: Social Essays (1966), is to “aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.” Foremost in this endeavor was the imperative to portray society and its ills faithfully so that the portrayal would move people to take necessary corrective action. He married his second wife, Amina, in 1967. In that same year, Baraka published the poetry collection Black Magic,which chronicles his separation from white culture and values while displaying his mastery of poetic technique. There was no doubt that Baraka’s political concerns superseded his just claims to literary excellence, and critics struggled to respond to the political content of the works. Some felt the best art must be apolitical and dismissed Baraka’s newer work as “a loss to literature.” Kenneth Rexroth wrote inWith Eye and Ear that Baraka “has succumbed to the temptation to become a professional Race Man of the most irresponsible sort. . . . His loss to literature is more serious than any literary casualty of the Second War.” In 1966 Bakara moved back to Newark, New Jersey, and a year later changed his name to the Bantuized Muslim appellation Imamu (“spiritual leader,” later dropped) Ameer (later Amiri, “prince”) Baraka (“blessing”).By the early 1970s Baraka was recognized as an influential African-American writer. Randall noted in Black World that younger black poets Nikki Giovanni and Don L. Lee (later Haki R. Madhubuti) were “learning from LeRoi Jones, a man versed in German philosophy, conscious of literary tradition . . . who uses the structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy in his System of Dante’s Hell and the punctuation, spelling and line divisions of sophisticated contemporary poets.” More importantly, Arnold Rampersad wrote in the American Book Review, “More than any other black poet . . . he taught younger black poets of the generation past how to respond poetically to their lived experience, rather than to depend as artists on embalmed reputations and outmoded rhetorical strategies derived from a culture often substantially different from their own.”After coming to see Black Nationalism as a destructive form of racism, Baraka denounced it in 1974 and became a third world socialist. He produced a number of Marxist poetry collections and plays in the 1970s that reflected his newly adopted political goals. Critics contended that works like the essays collected in Daggers and Javelins (1984) lack the emotional power of the works from his Black Nationalist period. However, Joe Weixlmann, in Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, argued against the tendency to categorize the radical Baraka instead of analyze him: “At the very least, dismissing someone with a label does not make for very satisfactory scholarship. Initially, Baraka’s reputation as a writer and thinker derived from a recognition of the talents with which he is so obviously endowed. The subsequent assaults on that reputation have, too frequently, derived from concerns which should be extrinsic to informed criticism.”In more recent years, recognition of Baraka’s impact on late 20th century American culture has resulted in the publication of several anthologies of his literary oeuvre.The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (1999) presents a thorough overview of the writer’s development, covering the period from 1957 to 1983. The volume presents Baraka’s work from four different periods and emphasizes lesser-known works rather than the author’s most famous writings. Transbluency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1995), published in 1995, was hailed by Daniel L. Guillory in Library Journal as “critically important.” And Donna Seaman, writing inBooklist, commended the “lyric boldness of this passionate collection.” Kamau Brathwaite described Baraka’s 2004 collection, Somebody Blew up America & Other Poems, as “one more mark in modern Black radical and revolutionary cultural reconstruction.” The book contains Baraka’s controversial poem of the same name, which he wrote as New Jersey’s poet laureate. After the poem’s publication, public outcry became so great that the governor of New Jersey took action to abolish the position. Baraka sued, though the United States Court of Appeals eventually ruled that state officials were immune from such charges.Baraka’s legacy as a major poet of the second half of the 20th century remains matched by his importance as a cultural and political leader. His influence on younger writers has been significant and widespread, and as a leader of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s Baraka did much to define and support black literature’s mission into the next century. His experimental fiction of the 1960s is considered some of the most significant African-American fiction since that of Jean Toomer. Writers from other ethnic groups have credited Baraka with opening “tightly guarded doors” in the white publishing establishment, noted Maurice Kenney in Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, who added: “We’d all still be waiting the invitation from the New Yorker without him. He taught us how to claim it and take it.”Baraka was recognized for his work through a PEN/Faulkner Award, a Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, and the Langston Hughes Award from City College of New York. He was awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Amiri Baraka crossed over on January 9,  2014To visit Amiri Baraka's website CLICK HERE

Recent political debates around language have often been controversial, sometimes poorly informed, and usually unedifying. It’s striking to consider that such debates have, at least in the USA, been current for more than 100 years; and perhaps surprising to learn that they can be seen to have a striking effect on the development of modernist literature. In Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2011), Joshua Miller begins by evoking a time when the existence and substance of a distinctly American national language is first being argued, and when Presidents, language mavens and the new breed of linguistics scholars are exchanging opinions in major public fora. Against this background, he reads the work of some of the major American writers of the interwar years as exploring and negotiating the relation between language and cultural identity. In this interview, we talk first about Mencken’s rehabilitation as a public figure through his work on language, and his role in the political debates on the status of American English. We then discuss how the cosmopolitan language backgrounds of Gertrude Stein and John dos Passos variously informed their work, how the relationship between language and African American identity plays out in the works of Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen, and how Spanish and indigenous languages shape the writing of Carlos Bulosan and Americo Paredes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recent political debates around language have often been controversial, sometimes poorly informed, and usually unedifying. It’s striking to consider that such debates have, at least in the USA, been current for more than 100 years; and perhaps surprising to learn that they can be seen to have a striking effect on the development of modernist literature. In Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2011), Joshua Miller begins by evoking a time when the existence and substance of a distinctly American national language is first being argued, and when Presidents, language mavens and the new breed of linguistics scholars are exchanging opinions in major public fora. Against this background, he reads the work of some of the major American writers of the interwar years as exploring and negotiating the relation between language and cultural identity. In this interview, we talk first about Mencken’s rehabilitation as a public figure through his work on language, and his role in the political debates on the status of American English. We then discuss how the cosmopolitan language backgrounds of Gertrude Stein and John dos Passos variously informed their work, how the relationship between language and African American identity plays out in the works of Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen, and how Spanish and indigenous languages shape the writing of Carlos Bulosan and Americo Paredes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recent political debates around language have often been controversial, sometimes poorly informed, and usually unedifying. It's striking to consider that such debates have, at least in the USA, been current for more than 100 years; and perhaps surprising to learn that they can be seen to have a striking effect on the development of modernist literature. In Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2011), Joshua Miller begins by evoking a time when the existence and substance of a distinctly American national language is first being argued, and when Presidents, language mavens and the new breed of linguistics scholars are exchanging opinions in major public fora. Against this background, he reads the work of some of the major American writers of the interwar years as exploring and negotiating the relation between language and cultural identity. In this interview, we talk first about Mencken's rehabilitation as a public figure through his work on language, and his role in the political debates on the status of American English. We then discuss how the cosmopolitan language backgrounds of Gertrude Stein and John dos Passos variously informed their work, how the relationship between language and African American identity plays out in the works of Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen, and how Spanish and indigenous languages shape the writing of Carlos Bulosan and Americo Paredes.

Recent political debates around language have often been controversial, sometimes poorly informed, and usually unedifying. It’s striking to consider that such debates have, at least in the USA, been current for more than 100 years; and perhaps surprising to learn that they can be seen to have a striking effect on the development of modernist literature. In Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2011), Joshua Miller begins by evoking a time when the existence and substance of a distinctly American national language is first being argued, and when Presidents, language mavens and the new breed of linguistics scholars are exchanging opinions in major public fora. Against this background, he reads the work of some of the major American writers of the interwar years as exploring and negotiating the relation between language and cultural identity. In this interview, we talk first about Mencken’s rehabilitation as a public figure through his work on language, and his role in the political debates on the status of American English. We then discuss how the cosmopolitan language backgrounds of Gertrude Stein and John dos Passos variously informed their work, how the relationship between language and African American identity plays out in the works of Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen, and how Spanish and indigenous languages shape the writing of Carlos Bulosan and Americo Paredes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices