Alexander Street: Literature, Drama, and Performing Arts

Important Blog Updates

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World Literature Online is now Alexander Street Literature

The online collection formerly known as World Literature Online has been renamed Alexander Street Literature.  The URL and any bookmarks you have made will not be affected, but libraries should update their catalogs and Web sites to reflect the new title.

The Literatue blog has expanded

The Alexander Street Literature blog has expanded to include news, updates, and information on our drama, film, and performing arts collections. Our award-winning collections in drama focus on the works and writings of individuals previously overlooked, as well as mainstream authors and playwrights. 

Rare, previously unpublished, and in-copyright materials are available in full-text, and our streaming video collections enable scholarly research of the performing arts in ways never before possible.  A complete list of drama collections can be found here.

Stay tuned for more news and updates, including information on our new Critical Video Editions series.

Pork-Knockers

"Black Midas" (1958, Secker and Warburg) by Guyana-born author Jan Carew is, as the author's preface states, "the story of Shark, a black boy from a small village in British Guiana, who runs away with his friend Santos to join the "pork knockers", the men who work in the diamond mines deep in the up-country jungles.  There he grows to manhood, makes a fortune, comes near to losing it when Santos steals his hoard of diamonds, then return to Georgetown to live alife of wild extravagance."

This is a very valuable early account/depiction of the post-colonial trend of resource plundering and not-so-freed nation impoverishment.  Guyana is one of the hemisphere's poorest nations and one of the more desperate economic prisoners of IMF debt.  This novel personalizes this atrocity and presages the deepening trends to come.

Singapore Slang

Singapore was a British colony until 1963 and became an independent nation in 1965.  They are the world's 17th wealthiest nation by GDP.  It would be interesting to compare the writings of India to Singapore.  While the Indian economy is growing, there is still a massive amount of deeply entrenched poverty.  (Not to mention myriad class intracacies/issues.)  What similarities might arise when comparing the post-colonial literature of both nations?  Do regional post-colonial economies demonstrate similar characteristics in terms of device, subtext, and theme in their literature?  It is a tempting question that must be approached by avoiding  generalizations about either tradition.  Heck, even attempting to say what constitutes a 'tradition' is dangerous. (Saving the canon debate for another day.)  Still, details can be extracted and context deepened simply by asking a question, responding in good faith, reading, and thinking.  Here are some books in our database from Singaporean authors.

The City of Forgetting: The Collected Stories of Gopal Baratham, by Gopal Baratham. (Times Books International, Singapore, 2001). 384pp.
Abraham's Promise, by Philip Jeyaretnam. (Times Books International, Singapore, 1995). 178pp.
They Do Return...But Gently Lead Them Back, by Catherine Lim. (Times Books International, Singapore, 1983). 119pp.

The Unknowns

Our database is loaded with heavyweights from the world of literature.  But the greatest satisfaction comes from finding absolute gems in any one of our products.  The old saw "there is something for everyone" should be improved to "remain curious."  The sheer multitude of works and authors in the database absolutely rewards digging for gold.  The student/scholar who comes to the table looking for information on X or corroboration of Y is more than welcome, but why not thumb around a little and look outside your area of focus.  Volume broadens context.  Sure, there is going to be a lot of wading but what better exercise for the intellectually adventuresome.  It is very rare, to me, to look at just about any work of art without even the smallest sense of sympathy for the artist's effort, goodwill, or even propagandistic/ideological goal.  Moved to act, they created.  They shared.  Bringing good faith to interfacing works of art is vital in the learning process.  Jadedness, narrowness can make you overlook what does not readily slide into your world-view.  Take some time to look around.  At the database.  At the world around you.

Leave Your Expectations at the Door

The Colored American Magazine: Selected Short Stories, 1900-1909 is a sprawling compilation of story-preaching, sociology, morality tales, bible transmutations, and evolving folklore.  A valuable glimpse at early strategies for approaching the Black American experience, its cumulative effect is to feel the tricky double responsibility of art-as-uplift.  How to balance the need for entertainment and advancement?  'Literariness and catharsis?  Presentation and representation?  Or is there even a "responsibility?"  To work to hard to find evidence of either pole bars full and open access to the text.  This is why, taken as a whole, this anthology operates more as a comprehensive Survey of Thought and Experience. Less snapshots than organic, multi-cellular organisms that defy the historical expectation of scholars who would annex each unit into an ideology.   Most of the writing is very informal, sometimes anecdotal, even at-the-bar or in-the-confessional confidential.  It is a very worthwhile source for a not very thoroughly chronicled or understood period of American Literary History.

Bill "Bojangles" Robinson

The historical tug-war between those who would call the great dancer, entertainer, and raconteur a victim of a co-opting and those who consider him a sly manipulator of media cannot be resolved.  Where one sees nothing but "yes, mams" another sees a semiotics of radical dance. But in Alexander Street's vast collection of black-written and black-owned literary journals and newspapers we have a glance at Robinson as an anecdotalist/urban-fable maker in full redress and catharsis mode.  As in "He Did His Best," brief stories or "jokes" build nicely and promise reward and comeuppance:

A few years ago a white man was being tried for murder in an Atlanta, Georgia, court, before a jury on which there was one colored man. The lawyers for the defendant contrived to get in touch with the colored juror and gave him $500, promising him two thousand more if he could get the jury to give a verdict of manslaughter.
The case went to the jury, which argued over the facts for two days, finally finding the defendant guilty of manslaughter. Elated, the defendant's lawyer hastened to keep their promise to the colored juror. They gave him the additional two thousand and congratulated him upon his success, although it had taken a long time, to bring the jury around.
The juror smilingly accepted the money and congratulations with the following comment on the obstacles he had been forced to overcome:
"Yes, sir, thank you, Mr. Jones. D' you know, that sure was a hard job. I had to argue there for two whole days 'cause 'leven of them men wanted to 'quit that guy."

Knee-jerks would call this Tom-ism. But these stories, for their time, were small victories for the beleaguered.  As one editorial post-script puts it, "They are a tonic."

Women Writing Africa Volumes I and II

With the release of Women Writing Africa Volume II a vital survey of evolving oral tradition,
historico- linguistics, and political emergence continues. While Volume I focused on the Southern
region, Volume II focuses on the Western Region and Sahel.

The deep research that accompanies the works of some of the regions most important activistic
and political writings is this volume’s strength:

"So I am a Peruvian Novelist"

A fragment-anecdote from author John J. Figueroa (a Jamaican Caribbeanist who once taught Derek Walcott) neatly undermines the notion of ideology-literature. The Peruvian Powerhouse Mario Vargas Llosa comes to speak at a university. He is attacked for living in London while writing "Peruvian" novels.  The will to rope art into confining borders and encapsulating theories is the new esthetic colonialism.  Fractious carvers of ideological space would have us lump all works under their one true umbrella.  Vargas Llosa lets the audience listen to their own cage-work.

"Why shouldn't I live in London if I wish to?"
"Because you are a Peruvian novelist."
"So I am a Peruvian novelist."
"Yes, and you are an excellent novelist."
"Oh, thank you.  I am glad you think I am an excellent novelist."
"Yes, the best we have had in Peru."
"If you think I am a great Peruvian novelist and you want me to write more Peruvian novels then I have to live away."
"Why?"
"Because I could never write my novels in Peru."

Later in the discussion he is taken to task for breaking with Castro over the censorship of books.  The audience supports the move because corrupting trash would tempt the masses.  Vargas Llosa asks the audience to write lists of what they think are the three most read books in Cuba.  Marx, Lenin, and Lorca they largely respond.  Vargas Llosa says "the book which is most read in Cuba today is Don Quixote and I rather think that if you were a censorship board you would have barred that Hispanic classic from entering Castro's Cuba."

Categories can ensnare.