itself a bricolage of raw street knowledge and confected “street dreams,”

Whether a prophecy of doom or emancipation, the clash seems the cultural moment writ large

We, who were once symbolically remanded to the racial Salon des Refusés and exhibited as animals at the colonial fairs, have stormed the palace of the Occident and crowned ourselves victorious in that gilded place.

Houston Baker Jr. came up with a pithy chiastic phrase to describe how black artworks and writings negotiated this tension: “the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery.”

The calling of Matthew is also known as his “vocation,” a word that reminds us here of the original etymological significance of a sacred interpellation, literally a calling from the divine.

Toni Morrison’s apothegm that “the function of freedom is to free someone else”?

Yet the quiddity of Morrison’s writing ultimately is just that.

Walker figured out how to make the cutout congeal into chirography, a signature effect that seizes us, and to which we cannot be indifferent.

George Herriman was a New Orleans Creole, and the comedy has a laconic Southern charm to its arrangement

Even within poems packed with dross, he’ll find his way to something, to a moment you won’t forget.