Alexander Street: Literature, Drama, and Performing Arts

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: