Dr. Kathy Lou Schultz. MFA, PhD
PDA Report
I wish to thank the College of Arts and Sciences for a tremendously productive PDA.
During the time of my PDA, my article “To Save and Destroy: Melvin B. Tolson,
Langston Hughes, and Theories of the Archive,” was published in Contemporary
Literature Vol. 52 No. 1 (Spring 2011): 108-45. “To Save and Destroy” builds on
research I did in the Tolson Papers at the Library of Congress, a project supported by a
Faculty Research Grant. Contemporary Literature is a top-tier, peer-reviewed scholarly
journal published by the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
According to the MLA Directory of Periodicals, Contemporary Literature accepts only 911% of the articles submitted each year.
Moreover, during my PDA I finished the article, “Amiri Baraka’s Wise Why’s Wise:
Lineages of the Afro-Modernist Epic,” which has been accepted by the Journal of
Modern Literature. The Journal of Modern Literature (JML) accepts 23% of
submissions. Indiana University Press publishes JML. My piece on Baraka is the only
article-length study of his important Afro-Modernist epic Wise Why’s Wise: The Griot’s
Song (Djeli Ya). I also published poems in two national journals during this time: “Allen
to Ezra” appeared in New American Writing No. 29 (2011) and “All I Ever Had” was
published by OnandOnScreen in issue No. 3, Winter 2011.
Finally, and most importantly, my monograph, The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary
History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka was brought under contract during my PDA and is
forthcoming in 2012 in the Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Series edited
by Rachel Blau DuPlessis for Palgrave. In this book I am arguing for the recognition of a
new genre category, the Afro-Modernist epic, which is related to other epic traditions
including the early twentieth-century modernist long poem and the Homeric epic, but
also rooted both formally and thematically within African American vernacular and
musical traditions. Using this genre as a frame, I trace a lineage from Melvin B. Tolson’s
Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) and Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator
(1965), through Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) and Ask Your
Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), to Amiri Baraka’s Why’s Wise Y’s (1995). These booklength epics combine modernist formal experimentation with critiques of the social and
legal orders that excluded African Americans from the status of full citizenship.
Importantly, Tolson, Hughes, and Baraka rewrite accepted narratives of American
nationhood, while also displaying diasporic consciousness through their range of
allusions, as well as formal strategies drawn from such sources as the West African griot
tradition and the compositional process of jazz.
In recognition of my expertise, Professor David Chinitz of Loyola-Chicago has asked me
to write the chapter on Melvin B. Tolson for a forthcoming volume: A Companion to
Modernist Poetry (Wiley-Blackwell). In addition, I was invited to be a columnist for
Jacket2, a literary journal published by the Kelly Writers House at the University of
Pennsylvania. I was also asked to evaluate essays for the scholarly journal Twentieth
Century Literature and began doing so in 2010. I would like to thank the College of Arts
and Sciences once again for supporting scholarly writing and research.