Alexander Street: Literature, Drama, and Performing Arts

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.

Vital Survey of Black Caribbean Thought

With the release of "Gendered Realities: Essays in Caribbean Feminist Thought" editor Patricia Mohammed has gathered extraordinarily varied source material written by some of the most creative thinkers on gender and race today.  Highly accessible essays explore the placement and function of gender and race within classic texts, modern milieus, and un-mined territories.   Essay categories include "Speaking Their Piece: Women, Gender and the Media," "The Double Take: Gender and the Literary Imagination," and "Made in the Caribbean: Constructing Gender."

Mohammed has compiled an anthology vital for scholars and students, while also training an eye on a new direction for the broader discourse on Caribbeanism.

World Literature Series Launch

We are very pleased to announce the debut of the Alexander Street Press World Literature Series. This is a fully interactive collection of definitive, full-text databases covering literatures of place, race, and gender. In addition to celebrating the creative achievements of women from across the globe, the World Literature Series allows users to explore the rich literary heritage of Africa and its Diaspora, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and other regions. Today it comprises more than 5,500 plays and more than 250,000 pages of poetry, fiction, and essays. Every two weeks Alexander Street adds thousands of pages of new content--giving users immediate access to a steadily growing treasury of classic, rare, and contemporary literature.  Please come share this fascinating and expansive collection.

The Irish are Coming! The Irish are Coming! Irish Women that is

Alexander Street is very excited for our initial summer release of Irish Women Romantic Poets. A fascinating counterpoint to the early English and continental romantics, this collection brings together disparate voices of Nationalism and Unionism, Catholicism and Protestantism, Traditionalism and Emancipation, Worship and Revolt.

Gestating at a remove from literary currents of the time, many of the works in this collection not only stop quite shy of literary tribute but are often quite more political. Sample  A Poem on the African Slave Trade, Addressed to Her Own Sex, Part 1 by M. Birket

OPPRESSION! thou, whose hard and cruel chain,
Entails on all thy victims woe and pain;
Who gives with tyrant force and scorpion whip,
The cup of mis'ry to a Negro's lip;
Marks with stern frown thy wide, unhallow'd reign,
And broods with gloomy wing o'er Afric's injur'd plain!

Published in 1792 this was by no means a popular sentiment of the time. It is an example of how a literary sub-movement is uniquely positioned to critique the mainstream or even, as evidenced below in Verses on the Present State of Ireland (1778) by Lady Lucan, Margaret Bingham, attack a controlling force;

Ah! wretched parents, little you foresee
Of gavel laws, the fad calamity;
Laws still accursed by the good and wife,
That teach the son, his father to despise:
Most cruel laws, that can such acts approve,
Ah! fad return of our paternal love,
That from all ties of brotherhood, deters,
And him, that's first a hypocrite, prefers,
China thy laws that bright with wisdom teem,
The pious sons, the best of subject's deem;
But English councils otherwise have thought,
Their laws a fort of parricide have taught.

The works in this collection will not disappoint those with a revolutionary spirit or a fascination with the Irish land.

 

A Caribbean Odyssey: Welcome Aboard Derek Walcott

A-toss the seas of post-colonialism, the Nobel Prize Winner’s epic Omeros (1990) island-hops in quest of a foothold in the slippery present as the meaning and relevance of the past become more slippery. Walcott’s alternately lush then bare-boned language is well-suited to evoking both the epic and basic human qualities of locals, islanders, yokels, modern-day Achilles and Hector, and a Helen most resembling the shifting, surrounding seas. All the while, old battles never seem far away;

 

Now, whenever his mind drifted in detachment

like catatonic noon on the Caribbean Sea,

Plunkett recited every billet, regiment,

 

of the battle’s numerological poetry;

he learnt eighty ships of the line, he knew the drift

of the channel that day, and when the trade wind caught

 

the British topsails, and a deep-draught sigh would lift

his memory clear….

 

nor easily evaded. Come and join the quest.

 

Society vs. Woman: Two Fearless Females

            Alexander Street Press is very excited to have acquired two daring and distinctive works from two very important black women writers. Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1984), the autobiographical work by the Trinidadian born, Bronx-raised poet-radical, traces the early life experiences that shaped the voice of a plain speaker of often uncomfortable truths who would transform the challenges of being a black lesbian into some of the earliest resistance-and-illumination literature of its kind.
            Without a Name and Under the Tongue (1994) is a double-novella by Yvonne Vera who was raised in early post-independence Zimbabwe.  Her poetic approach to dauntingly harsh content garnered the 2004 Swedish PEN Tucholsky Prize "for a corpus of works dealing with taboo subjects.” In these works she speaks of the tenuous position of women in a traditional culture undergoing rapid transformation.