By Adam Gussow, associate professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi
University of Tennessee Press, 2007

REVIEWS

Adam Gussow has lived the Blues life. By some miracle he has also lived to write about it. Whether his subject is a novel by Faulkner or the romance of buying an amp, his prose is as dynamic as a guitar solo by Stevie Ray Vaughan.
—Krin Gabbard, Author of Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture

Adam not only knows the blues…he feels it. Read this book and you will too.
—Shemekia Copeland

This book bridges the seemingly disparate worlds of the blues bar and the college seminar as few, if any, others do—eloquently arguing that blues music and blues communities can be significant galvanizing forces in the human experience.
—Roger Wood, author of Texas Zydeco and Down In Houston: Bayou City Blues

Journeyman’s Road offers a bold new vision of where the blues have been in the course of the twentieth century and what they have become at the dawn of the new millennium: a world music rippling with postmodern contradictions. Author Adam Gussow brings a unique perspective to this exploration. Not just an award-winning scholar and memoirist, he is an accomplished blues harmonica player, a Handy award nominee and veteran of the international club and festival circuit. With this unusual depth of experience, Gussow skillfully places blues literature in dialogue with the music that provokes it, vibrantly articulating a vital American tradition.

Journeyman’s Road tells unfamiliar stories about a popular American art form, takes contrarian positions, explodes familiar mythologies, and frames the contemporary blues scene in bold, new ways. Taking its title from Gussow’s self-described status as a “journeyman,”-a musician who has completed his apprenticeship and is well on his way to becoming a master-this new book brings together articles that Gussow wrote for publications such as Blues Access and Harper’s, as well as critical scholarly essays, including the first comprehensive examination of William Faulkner’s relationship with the blues.

At the heart of Gussow’s story is his own unlikely yet remarkable streetside partnership with Harlem bluesman Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee, a musical collaboration marked not just by a series of polarities-black and white, Mississippi and Princeton, hard-won mastery and youthful apprenticeship-but by creative energies that pushed beyond apparent differences to forge new dialogues and new sounds.

Undercutting familiar myths about the down-home sources of blues authenticity, Gussow celebrates New York’s mongrel blues scene: the artists, the jam sessions, the venues, the street performers, and the eccentrics. At once elegiac and forward-looking, Journeyman’s Road offers a collective portrait of the New York subculture struggling with the legacy of 9/11 and healing itself with the blues.

Filled with photographs and complete with a comprehensive bibliography, Journeyman’s Road is an expedition through the evolution and culture of the blues, a trip filled with the genre’s characteristic collisions and contradictions, paradoxes and multiplicities, innovative calls and often unexpected responses.

By Adetayo Alabi, associate professor of English

Telling Our Stories: Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobiographies by Adetayo Alabi, Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005.

Telling Our Stories (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2005) investigates the continuities and divergences in selected Black autobiographies from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. The stories of slaves, creative writers, and political activists are discussed both as texts produced by individuals who are products of specific societies and as interconnected books. The book identifies influences of environmental and cultural differences on the texts while it adopts cross-cultural and postcolonial reading approaches to examine the continuities and divergences in them.

REVIEWS

“Black is the color of the autobiographies that Adetayo Alabi rereads in Telling Our Stories. Slaves, creative writers, and political activists, the self-conscious narrators in writing and through readers create communities and establish continuities – across both centuries and continents, from the African slave trade to the United States civil rights movement and the Caribbean ‘lionhearted gal.’ Alabi’s radical reactivation of autobiography as a genre of resistance and mobilization is a compelling inquiry into a critical past and on behalf of an even more crucial promise.”
—Barbara Harlow, The University of Texas at Austin

“Alabi’s book is a long overdue and most welcome addition to the scholarly library on ‘the African diaspora.’ A major distinguishing mark of this field of study is the exploration of the links between regional segments of the Black world, in terms of continuities and divergences in their recognition of their common racial backgrounds and histories. Alabi makes two other valuable contributions to this field: one, an inclusion of oral African texts in his discussion of the genre; and two, an especially welcome interrogation of the concept of ‘autobiography’ employed in Western discourses of the genre. Now I am finally ready to teach the course I have been planning for!”
—Isidore Okpewho, State University of New York, Binghamton

“The book offers a dexterous analysis of three fundamental terms of modern black self definition: individuality, communality, and resistance. Alabi teaches readers of black autobiography how tropes of individualism dwells in narratives of the collective.”
—Adélékè Adéèkò, University of Colorado, Boulder

“This book theorizes on testimonial narratives from both sides of the Atlantic. Race, class, and gender go “marching on” in this significant cross-cultural analysis. Telling Our Stories convenes a trans-Atlantic exegetical festival with familiar voices of modern griots such as Nelson Mandela, Wole Soyinka, Frederick Douglass, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, and Derek Walcott. Shifting the focus of creative burden from self to community, and their interface, the p0testimonial narrative embodies the oral-written agency, signaling a celebration of both political resistance and innovation. With the publication of this substantial comparative work, Adetayo Alabi has dared to enter the often dreaded forest of a thousand critical dis-junctures—carefully synthesizing in order to illuminate our understanding of naming, place, and identity in African and African diasporan discourse and cultures.”
—Niyi Afolabi, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

“This is a solid contribution to Black autobiographical discourse. Its unique strength is in the bridge it builds between the African and the diasporan. It is a book that shows the autobiographical genre as central to understanding the life continuities, the survival, and the identity of the Black person in postimperial Africa and its diaspora. It is the work of a scholar whose knowledge of Black oral and written traditions and of contemporary western theories provides him formidable skills in handling the materials. It is a must read for teachers, students, and cultural theorists.”
—Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah, Western Illinois University

Adetayo Alabi teaches Postcolonial and International Literatures at the University of Mississippi. He published entries in the Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Literatures and in The Companion to African Literatures. He has also published several chapters in books, including Ogoni’s Agonies: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Crisis in Nigeria, The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, and Marvels of the African World: African Cultural Patrimony, New World Connections, and Identities; and in journals like Liwuram, African Literature Today, and In-Between.

Race and Sport
The Struggle for Equality on and off the Field, Edited by Charles K. Ross

Edited by Charles K. Ross, director of African American Studies and professor of history at the University of Mississippi, this anthology from the University Press of Mississippi (2006) is an examination of the connection between race and sport in America with essays by John M. Carroll, Gerald R. Gems, Rita Liberti, Michael E. Lomax, Patrick B. Miller, Kenneth Shrophsire and Scott Brooks.

Even before the desegregation of the military and public education and before blacks had full legal access to voting, racial barriers had begun to fall in American sports. This collection of essays shows that for many African Americans it was the world of athletics that first opened an avenue to equality and democratic involvement.

Race and Sport showcases African Americans as key figures making football, baseball, basketball, and boxing internationally popular, though inequalities still exist today.

Among the early notables discussed is Fritz Pollard, an African American who played professional football before the National Football League established a controversial color barrier. Another, the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, exemplifies the black American athlete as an international celebrity. African American women also played an important role in bringing down the barriers, especially in the early development of women’s basketball. In baseball, both African American and Hispanic players faced down obstacles and entered the sports mainstream after World War II. One essay discusses the international spread of American imperialism through sport. Another shows how mass media images of African American athletes continue to shape public perceptions.

Although each of these six essays explores a different facet of sports in America, together they comprise an analytical examination of African American society’s tumultuous struggle for full participation both on and off the athletic field.

Professor Ross is the author of Outside the Lines: African Americans and the Integration of the National Football League.

Derrick Harriell, assistant professor in English and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi, won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters 2014 Poetry Award for his collection of poems, Ropes, focused on the lives of black boxers in America. Cotton (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2010) was his first collection of poems.

REVIEWS

Ropes: Poems by Derrick Harriell, Aquarius Press/Willow Books

“Promised Jim Crow/don’t go in the ring,/that the language of/the fourteenth amendment lies/ within those ropes. Long before Jackie Robinson bravely entered major league hatred, African Americans tied cultural pride, anxiety and politick to angry fists buffered with cotton. Derrick Harriell has mined the human history of lives perpetually in fight and woven a gutbucket stench of ghetto wail and back alley holler survival. The work of these four rounds, the transparent employment of voice and source, working the head, body, groin and knees, is a flurry of converging dialogues, real and cleverly imagined, in conversation with self, God, Uncle Sam, other Black pugilists and the women who adorn these boxers as trinket and stain. Jack Johnson, from Leavenworth, writes to Joe Louis We take turns dying. Myth, truth, lies and the substance of Black testosterone in viscous, historically-textured sonics, Ropes confirms Derrick Harriell is among the finest young poets in the country.”
—Quraysh Ali Lansana, author of mystic turf and Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community

“In 4 rounds, Derrick Harriell tours us through the cultural history of boxing, from Mike Tyson and Joe Frazier to one of the first African American pugilists, writing from 1855. These richly detailed persona poems are spoken by boxers and also the journalists, cutmen, and girlfriends who surround the ring. Harriell’s nuanced ear conveys not just the intimacies of a sport but the intimacies of the human spirit. Ropes is a knock out.”
—Beth Ann Fennelly, professor of English and director of the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, and author of Tender Hooks and Open House

Cotton, Aquarius Press/Willow Books, by Derrick Harriell

The first collection of poems by Derrick A. Harriell, assistant professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi, Cotton, was published by Aquarius Press/Willow Books in 2010.

REVIEWS

“In his remarkable debut collection, Cotton, Derrick Harriell has created a mural in poems. The characters that inhabit this vivid tableau step into an active third dimension and allow us to witness the vicissitudes of their daily struggles, triumphs large and small, private desires. The community here is anchored by a specific Midwestern, African-American family which, in spite of both external and internal challenges, maintains its unity, however precarious at times. Death, passion, humor, mother wit, history, place, these are the colors that Harriell mixes and applies with such artistry that readers may not be so sure if they are watching a particular world or if that world is watching them. Harriell is among America’s most exciting new voices in poetry.”
—Maurice Kilwein Guevara

“All African Americans have a historic relationship with cotton. The southern United States was once the world s major supplier of cotton, King Cotton. It fueled the 19th Century s need for increasing the slave trade. The migrations of the freedmen could never put distance to that fact. Derrick Harriell s poems are the doors in the neighborhoods where they settled. The people of the streets, the houses, and the bars live in these poems. The personal family history of blues and redemptions are woven in the fabric, too. Both, noble and wicked traditions are revealed in a rich credible vernacular, a musical voice, like a storyteller sitting in your kitchen or on the barstool beside you testifying to the significant particulars, situations of poetic truths, the edgy full dimensions deep within the culture. Cotton is a stirring debut, and Derrick Harriell is a blues poet.”
—Gary Copeland Lilley, Author of The Subsequent Blues

Derrick Harriell was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He holds a Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a MFA in Creative Writing from Chicago State University. He is an assistant professor of Creative Writing for the Department of English and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. He formerly taught Creative Writing at UW-Milwaukee. He has presented in conferences such as the Idlewild Writers Conference and will present at Chicago State University in 2013. A former assistant poetry editor for Third World Press, Harriell served as poetry editor for The Cream City Review. A Pushcart Prize Nominee, Harriell’s poems have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including The Cream City Review, Reverie, the Lamplighter Review and Main Street Rag.

By Charles K. Ross, associate professor of history and director of African American Studies at the University of Mississippi

Outside the Lines, NYU Press (2001), traces how sports laid a foundation for social change long before the judicial system formally recognized the inequalities of racial separation. Integrating sports teams to include white and black athletes alike, the National Football League served as a microcosmic fishbowl of the highs and lows, the trials and triumphs, of racial integration.

Watching a football game on a Sunday evening, most sports fans do not realize the profound impact the National Football League had on the civil rights movement. Similarly, in a sport where seven out of ten players are black, few are fully aware of the history and contributions of their athletic forebears. Among the touchdowns and tackles lies a rich history of African American life and the struggle to achieve equal rights.

Although the Supreme Court did not reverse their 1896 decision of “separate but equal” in the Plessy v Ferguson case until more than fifty years later, sports laid a foundation for social change long before our judicial system formally recognized the inequalities of racial separation. Integrating sports teams to include white and black athletes alike, the National Football League served as a microcosmic fishbowl of the highs and lows, the trials and triumphs, of racial integration.

In this chronicle of black NFL athletes, Charles K. Ross has given us the story of the Jackie Robinsons of American football.

REVIEWS

“Ross provides a concise account of the pioneers who integrated pro football in the early part of the century and those who helped reintegrate the game in the era of World War II. It is a heroic yet tragic story ably told. One hopes the book might convince the pro football establishment to honor some of these stalwart athletes and coaches by enshrining them in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.”
—John M. Carroll, Lamar University, author of Fritz Pollard: Pioneer in Racial Advancement and Red Grange and the Rise of Modern Football

“Informative . . . Ross has opened some important doors.”
—American Historical Review

“Charles Ross’ stellar research clearly demonstrates that the African American struggle for merit and equality not only extends to the playing field but has, in fact, long defined the game of professional football. A must read for students of the game, from casual gridiron enthusiasts to scholars alike.”
—C. Keith Harrison

“…offers an interesting recitation of the on-again-off-again participation of blacks in the early years of pro football.”
—The Baltimore Sun

“An important analysis for all who care about the African American experience in professional sports. Significant not only for the history it tells, but for the questions it raises about race relations in football as an industry and as a United States institution.”
—Michael E. Lomax