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Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition African American History & Literature

African-American History

     The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, Nikole Hannah-Jones

     How We Fight White Supremacy, Akiba Solomon & Kenrya Rankin (Editors)

     Stamped from the Beginning, How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X Kendi

     Creating Black America: African-American History and Its Meanings 1619 to the Present, Nell Irvin Painter

     How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, Clint Smith

     On Juneteenth, Annette Gordon-Reed

     Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D.G. Kelley

     Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, David Zucchino

     Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, Bloom & Martin

     The Dead Are Arising, Les Payne and Tamara Payne

     Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008, The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country (Gates & Cornel West), Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Africana (Gates & Kwame Anthony Appiah), Harlem Renaissance Lives: From the African American National Biography (Gates & Higgenbotham eds), The Annotated African American Folktales (Gates & Tatar eds), Henry Louis Gates Jr.

     The African Diaspora, Toyin Falola

     Parting the Waters: Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement 1954-63, Pillar of Fire: 1963-65, At Canaan’s Edge: 1965-68, Taylor Branch

     His Truth Is Marching on: John Lewis and the Power of Hope, Jon Meacham, John Lewis (Afterword)

     Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy, Robert Farris Thompson

     This was Harlem, Charles Anderson

     The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Richard Williams

     The History of Jazz, Ted Gioia

     Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, Andrea Elliott

                        African-American Literature

      Dreams Of My Father, Barak Obama

     Between the World and Me, We Were Eight Years In Power, The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates

     When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandele, Angela Y. Davis (Foreword)

     A Testament of Hope: the essential writings and speeches of Martin Luther King, James Washington editor

 The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr, Clayborne Carson ed

     Black Feminist Thought, Black Sexual Politics, Patricia Hill Collins

     Malcolm X: a life of reinvention, Speaking Truth to Power: essays on race, resistance, & radicalism, Manning Marable

     The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, Les Payne, Tamara Payne

     Roots, The Autobiography of Malcom X, Alex Haley

     The Black Panthers Speak, Foner ed

     Black Power: the Politics of Liberation, Stokely Carmichael

     Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, Richard Bruce Nugent, Thomas H. Wirth, Henry Louis Gates Jr

     The Angela Davis Reader

     The Cornel West Reader, Black Prophetic Fire, Hope on a Tightrope: words and wisdom, Cornel West

     I Am Not Your Negro (Peck ed), Go Tell It On The Mountain, Just Above My Head, Jimmy’s Blues and other poems, The Price of the Ticket: collected nonfiction 1948-1985, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and other conversations, James Baldwin

     The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois

W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, David Levering Lewis

     Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington

     I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, and Then Again: a Zora Neal Hurston Reader, Alice Walker ed, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Dust Tracks On A Road, Collected Plays, Zora Neal Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past And Present (Amistad Literary Series) Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kwame Anthony Appiah

     Native Son, The Long Dream, Black Boy, American Hunger, Pagan Spain, The Richard Wright Reader, Richard Wright

Richard Wright: Critical Prespectives Past And Present, Gates & Appiah eds

     Cane, Jean Toomer

     The Free-Lance Pallbearers, The Plays, New & Collected Poems 1964-2006, Going Too Far: essays, Mixing It Up: essays, Neo-Hoodoo Manifesto, Ishmael Reed

      The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor

     All Night Visitors, Clarence Major

     Kindred, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Bloodchild and Other Stories, Octavia E. Butler

     Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, Harold Bloom ed

    The Color Purple, Living by the Word, The Temple of My Familiar, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems, The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers , The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, Alice Walker

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom ed

    A Langston Hughes Reader

Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past And Present, Gates & Appiah eds

    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, Complete Stories, Maya Angelou

    The LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka Reader, The Fiction of LeRoi Jones, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, S.O.S. : Poems 1961-2013, Amiri Baraka

     Beloved , Song of Soloman, The Bluest Eye, A Mercy, Jazz, Desdemona, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (the Harvard Lectures), Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, Henry Louis Gates Jr. &  Kwame Anthony Appiah eds

      Bedouin Hornbook, Djibot Baghostus’s Run, Atet A. D., Bass Cathedral, School of Udhra, Whatsaid Serif,  Splay Anthem, Nod House, Blue Fasa, Nathaniel Mackey

     Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, The Collected Poems, The Collected Plays, ZAMI: a new spelling of my name, Audre Lorde

    John Henry Days, The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead

     Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi

     The Devil in Silver, Lucretia and the Kroons, Big Machine, The Ballad of Black Tom, The Changeling, Victor Lavalle

     Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: an American Lyric, Citizen: an American Lyric, Just Us, Claudia Rankine

     The World Doesn’t Require You, Rion Amilcar Scott

     Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Black Looks: Race and Representation, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, bell hooks

     Jean-Michel Basquiat: Words Are All We Have, Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks, Jean-Michel Basquiat

     The Shadow King, Maaza Mengiste 

    The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, Amanda Gorman

     The Prophets, Robert Jones, Jr. 

     Palmares, Gayl Jones 

     Sho, Douglas Kearney  

      Living Weapon: Poems, Rowan Ricardo Phillip       Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement, Tarana Burke

                    

                   

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jayofdollhousepark

I am a former counselor, teacher, and debate coach who loves to read and write, and a student of literature, psychology, history, philosophy, and languages who loves to travel. Help me celebrate the lives and works of our great authors as a common human heritage. I can also be reached at jayofdollhousepark@gmail.com. Regarding my literary criticism on Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium: My initial project was to celebrate the authors whose work I love on their birthdays, by reading something of theirs and writing an appreciation. I've now come full circle and completed the calendar year. These are the authors whose works have been my companions through life, and some new discoveries. Many of their books are ones I also taught in high school English classes; works thoroughly lived with. I also include reading lists by national literature, a Modern American Literature group of lists, and Best Books of the Year lists and reviews. There will occasionally be my own poetry as well; you are warned. I hope that you may also find books which will help you through life and bring depth and joy to your days. As to my aesthetics, I envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year. Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values. We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience. A beautiful political structure may be judged by the same criterion as a beautiful poem; so also with humans and the values their actions embody. Thank you so much for your company on this journey. Regarding my daily political journal on Torch of Freedom, a voice of progressive democracy and the antifascist Resistance: I stand for liberty, equality, truth, and justice; a free society of equals. My America is a torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world. I stand for the absolute structural and systemic equality of all human beings, and for the Rights of Man everywhere on earth. I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. Herein I write as an agent of Chaos and Transformation whose goal in life is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world. For thirty-nine years now I have been engaged in antifascist action, democracy activism, and revolutionary struggle against tyranny and state terror for the liberation of humankind, wherever men hunger to be free. And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut 1982 by the great Jean Genet as he formulated it in Paris 1940, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Resist and fear not, O my brothers and sisters, for in resistance we seize our freedom and become Unconquered.

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  1. Pingback: March 21 2023 On Poetic Vision as Reimagination and Transformation of Our Possibilities of Becoming Human – Torch of Liberty
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