CELEBRATING AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE - DAY 1

Penn State's conference on the African American Novel after 1988 kicked off the evening of October 22 (a date of some significance for this blog) with a reading and book launch by Alice Randall. Randall, perhaps best known for her controversial first novel, Wind Done Gone, presented her newly published volume, Rebel Yell.

Folks looking for continuity here may take note of the fact that Randall attended Georgetown Day School as a child with classmate Elizabeth Alexander, whose reading we featured earlier in the year.

Randall's reading was introduced by fiction writer Charlotte Holmes. It was only later that I learned, from Randall, that our colleague Lovalerie King had been among that select group of first readers who offered comments on the manuscript of the new book.

C.L.R. JAMES IN CANADA

There were a number of unusual aspects to the recent conference on C.L.R. James held at the University of Ottawa. It was probably the first James conference ever supported by a law firm, and was organized and hosted by the Faculty of Law. The occasion for the conference, titled "Re-imagining Western Civilization: On the 60th Anniversary of the Writing of C.L.R. James's American Civilization," was a book few people knew existed until it was posthumously published decades later.

The conference also honored the long-standing connections James and his political comrades had with activists in Canada. As David Austin outlined in his talk (and you can read more about this in the book he has just edited of James's Montreal lectures), Bobby Hill was a Jamaican college student in Canada when he first wrote to Detroit to make contact with James's group.

Soon there was a James study group in Canada involving many student activists who would go on to play a major role in the political evolution of the West Indies and in the intellectual development of black political philosophy.

This conference brought me back together with other James scholars I've met over the years, such as Selwyn Cudjoe, Kent Worcester, Christian Hogsbjerg, Lindsey Swindall, Frank Rosengarten and others. It also introduced me to many new people, including the wonderfuul conference organizers, Joanne St. Lewis and Ravi Malhotra.

My own contribution was a continuation of my work on the James group's engagements with Melville and the U.S. Government's detention of James in the early 1950s.

There is talk of a book project. Stay tuned . . .

DAWN LUNDY MARTIN AT PENN STATE

Poet Dawn Lundy Martin visited Penn State this past week to read from her wonderful book a gathering of matter / a matter of gathering and newer works. Martin, in addition to teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, is a member of The Black Took Collective and was just coming off a performance by the collective at the conference held the week before at the Poetics Program of SUNY Buffalo.

Go to Amazon for information on ordering Dawn's book.

Now available from AK Press, this new collection makes available for the first time transcriptions of speeches and talks James gave while visiting Canada in the 1960s, most at a time when he still wasn't allowed in the United States. A few of these offer variations on other talks James gave through the years (though most of those are currently not available in book form), but others are new even to long time readers of James. Additionally, the new collection, edited ably by David Austin (producer of that wonderful CBC Radio documentary on James a few years ago), makes public important correspondence between James, members of his political group, and Caribbean activists then working in Canada.

Find the book here at the AK Press web site.

with TOM RAWORTH

Poet Tom Raworth recently made one of his periodic swings through southern California and we spent an afternoon with him and other friends at the home of Marjorie and Joe Perloff. I hadn't seen Tom since the last American Poetry conference at the University of Maine in Orono, where the two of us had taken turns photographing Fred Wah as he posed in the clutch of the stuffed bear that stalked the lobby of the motel where we were staying. Just two weeks later I was in Ghana, sitting by the ocean and reading Tom's collected poems.

I had to book it back to Penn State before I could go to any of Tom's stateside readings, but I'm sure they were as quick and well-aimed as ever.

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER AT PENN STATE

I first heard Elizabeth Alexander read nearly a quarter of a century ago, and we've run into each other often in the years since. (Though somehow never in our mutual home town, D.C.) -- We were on a great panel together at the Paul Laurence Dunbar conference at Stanford.

This year Elizabeth was the honoree of Penn State's annual Emily Dickinson lecture/reading. My students paid her the highest compliment. They told me they would have gone to the reading even if I hadn't required them to.