Books

• Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century. Athens, GA: U of Georgia Press, 1988. [Winner of the SAMLA Studies Prize of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Citation, and the Kayden Prize for best book in the humanities from a university press. Nominated for an American Book Award].

• Writing between the Lines: Race and Intertextuality. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1994.
• "Black Chant:" Languages of African-American Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• C. L. R. James: A Critical Introduction. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.
• Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation. University of Alabama Press, 2004. [Winner of the Josephine Miles Award]

 

Edited Volumes

• Reading Race in American Poetry: “An Area of Act.” Champaign , IL : U of Illinois P, 2000.
• Amiri Baraka special double issue of African American Review . Co-edited with William J. Harris and Kalamu ya Salaam. 37.2-3 (2003).
• Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African American Artists . Co- edited with Lauri Ramey. Tuscaloosa : U of Alabama P, 2006.

 

Poetry

• Heat Strings . Washington , D.C. : SOS Press, 1985.
• Evacuation Routes: A User's Guide . Oakland , CA : Score Press, 1992. (available on-line at the SUNY Buffalo Electronic Poetry Center)
• Stepping Razor. Washington , D.C. : Edge Books, 1996.
• Vext. San Francisco : Sink Press, 1998.
• Mixage: Tenerife, Canary Islands : Zasterle Press, 2005.

 

Articles

• "Imagining Space: Spatial Relationships in Modern and Post-Modern American Verse." The Literary Review: An International Quarterly . 24 (1981), 333-347.
• "Patterns of Subversion in the Poetry of Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley." Western Journal of Black Studies . 6 (1982), 212-219.
• "Theme and Variations: The Early Poetics of Amiri Baraka and Jay Wright." The Kaleidoscopic Torch: Amiri Baraka, A Tribute . Ed. James Gwynne. New York : Stepping Stones Press, 1985. 116- 127.
• "Mark Twain's Puddn'head Wilson and the Novel of the Tragic Mulatto." Greyfriar: Siena Studies in Literature . XXVI, 14-30.
• "This Means That: On the Poetry of David Bromige." The Difficulties . 3 (1987), 73-75.
• "Of a Further Instant's: On the Poetry of Douglas Messerli." Aerial . 4 (1988), 54-56.
• "On Against the American Grain: William Carlos Williams, Jay Wright and Nioclas Guillen ." (review essay) The William Carlos Williams Review . 14.1 (1988): 135-40.
• "Whose Blues: William Carlos Williams and Jazz." The William Carlos Williams Review . 15.2 (1989). 1-8.
• "The Sense of Unending: A Post-Script to C.L.R. James's Renegades, Mariners and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live in ." Emergences 1.1 (1990). 5-23.
• "Review of the American Social History Project Videos and Film." (review essay co-authored with Nancy Grey Osterud and Roy Christman) American Quarterly . 43.3 (1991): 457-63.
• "Melvin B. Tolson and the Deterritorialization of Modernism." Black American Literature Forum . 26.2 (1992): 241-255.
• "Reading James Reading: C.L.R. James on Heidegger and the Novels of Wilson Harris." Hambone 10 (1992): 205-211.
• "Gassire's Lute (On the Writings of Nathaniel Mackey)." Talisman 9 (1992): 66-68.
• "Poetics and Science." Textures 4 (1993): 31-32.
• "Breaking In: An Introduction to Race and Intertextuality." The Arkansas Quarterly 2.3 (1993): 177- 202.
• "Clark Coolidge and a Jazz Aesthetic." Pacific Coast Philology (1993): 94-112.
• "In the Last of the Small Hours: African-American Prose Poetry and the Politics of Inclusion." The CAAS Report: The UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies 15.1 & 2 (1994): 12-15.
• "Reading James Reading." (rpt of 1992 article) in The Intellectual Legacies of C.L.R. James . Selwyn Cudjoe and Bill Cain, Eds. Amherst , MA : University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. 348-355.
• "Hieroglyphics of Space: Wilson Harris in The Waiting Room ." Callaloo . 18.1 (1995): 125-31.
• "Nostalgia and the Racial Epiphany." C.L.A. Journal . XXXIX.2 (1996): 195-207.
• "C. L. R. James: The Black Critic as Prisoner and Artist." River City . 16.2 (1996): 62-73.
• "Black Deconstruction: Russell Atkins and the Reconstruction of African-American Criticism." Diacritics 26.3-4 (1996): 86-103.
• "No Saints in Three Acts: On Stephen Jonas." The Impercipient Lecture Series 1.6 (1997).
• "'The Calligrpahy of Black Chant': Resiting African-American Poetry." The Furious Flowering of African-American Poetry . ed. Joanne Gabbin. Charlottesville , VA : University of Virginian Press, 1999. 182-93. (Excerpted from Black Chant )
• “Will Alexander's ‘Transmundane Specific.'” Callaloo 22.2 (1999): 409-16.
• “Extremities Made to Seem Precedence.” A Wild Salience: The Writing of Rae Armantrout . Ed. Tom Beckett. Cleveland : Burning Press, 2000. 33-36.
• “N + 1: Before the Fact Reading in Nathaniel Mackey's Postcontemporary Music.” Callaloo 23.2 (2000): 796-806.
• “Ezra Pound and ‘The Best-Known Colored Man in the United States .'” Ezra Pound and African American Modernism . Ed. Michael Coyle. Orono , ME : The National Poetry Foundation, 2001. 143-56. Simultaneously published in Paideuma 29.1-2 (2001): 143-56.
• “Capillary Currents: Jayne Cortez.” We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women=s Writing and Performance Poetics . Eds. Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue. Tuscaloosa , AL : U of Alabama P, 2002. 227-36.
• “'A Hard Rain': Looking to Bob Kaufman.” Callaloo 25.1 (2002): 135-45.
• “William Carlos Williams and the New Black Poetries.” William Carlos Williams and the Language of Poetry . Eds. Burton Hatlen and Demetres Tryphonopoulos. Orono , ME : The National Poetry Foundation, 2002. 283-95. Simultaneously published in Sagetrieb 18.3 (2002): 283-95.
• “'This Ain't No Disco.'” The World in Space and Time: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry in Our Time . Eds. Edward Foster and Joseph Donahue. Jersey City , NJ : Talisman House Publishers, 2002. 536-46.
• “Kamau Brathwaite - Computing the Future Anterior.” Cross Cultural Poetics . 11 (2002): 203-10.
• “Fugitive Fictions.” African American Review 37.2-3 (2003): 321-31.
• “Somebody Blew off Baraka.” with William J. Harris. African American Review 37.2-3 (2003): 183- 87.
• “The Future of an Allusion: The Color of Modernity.” Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity . Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds. Bloomington , IN : Indiana U P, 2005: 17-30.
• “'Ain't Nobody Gonna Turn me Around.'” Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry . Keith Tuma, ed. Oxford , OH : Miami U P, 2005: 13-22.
• “Black Experiment: The Coltrane Exception.” Estudios Ingleses 52 (2006): 59-68.

 

Recent Selected Presentations

• March 2004: “ Patriot Acts.” Paper delivered at William and Mary College .
• April 2004: “ Lorenzo Thomas ' s ‘ Fit Music. '” Paper delivered at the College Language Association.
• April 2004: “ The Coltrane Exception. ” Paper delivered at Depaul University .
• May 2004: “ James, Melville, Ashcroft. ” Paper delivered at the American Literature Association.
• September 2004: “' This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman': Bob Kaufman ' s Capital Punishment. ” Paper delivered at the Furious Flower Conference, James Madison University .
• November 2004: “ C.L.R. James at the Institute of the Black World. ” Paper delivered at the American Studies Association.
• November 2004: “ Negritude Noir. ” Paper delivered at the Diasporic Avante Gardes conference, University of California , Irvine .
• December 2004: “ Deconstruction ' s Diaspora. ” Paper presented at the Modern Language Association.
• February 2005: “ African American Experimentalism and the Critical Reception. ” Paper delivered at the Twentieth Century Literature Conference, University of Louisville .
• April 2005: “ Palace Coup: The Black Took Collective. ” Paper delivered at the College Language Association.
• April 2005: “ Darkness at the Break of Dawn. ” Keynote address at the Black Archipelagoes Conference, Georgetown University .
• May 2005. “ Ed Roberson = s Blues. ” Paper delivered at the American Literature Association.
• Sept. 2005. “ How You Sound II. ” Paper delivered at the American Literature Association Symposium on Poetics.
• Oct. 2005. “ Poetry and Politics. ” Symposium conducted at Georgetown University with Rod Smith and Amiri Baraka.
• Oct. 2005. George and Barbara Kelly Inaugural Professorship Lecture. Pennsylvania State University .
• Dec. 2005. “ Bohemian Caverns. ” Paper delivered at the Modern Language Association.
• March 2006. “' Purple Haze ' : Dunbar ' s Lyric Legacy. ” Paper delivered at the Paul Laurence Dunbar Centennial Conference. Stanford University .
• March 2006. “ Baraka Performing Sound. ” Paper delivered at the Howard University conference “ The Black Arts Revisited. ”
• April 2006. “ White Fold: Black Spectatorship. ” Paper delivered at the College Language Association.
• Oct. 2006. “Bebop Ghost in the Machine.” Paper delivered at the conference on the life and works of Larry Neal, Brooklyn College .

 

Honors, Grants, and Awards

• 2005: The Josephine Miles Award from PEN, for Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation .
• 1998: Awarded Sigma Tau Delta Outstanding Professor Award, Loyola Marymount University .
• 1998 and 2000: Awarded Trustees Research Fellowships, Loyola Marymount university.
• 1996: Awarded an N.E.H. Fellowship.
• 1996: Awarded a third Summer research fellowship by the California State University Trustees.
• 1995: Selected for N.E.H. Summer Seminar "From the Work of Art to the Serializing of the Media," directed by Sam Weber.
• 1994 and 1995: Gertrude Stein Awards for Poetry received from Sun & Moon Press and the Contemporary Arts Educational Project.
• 1993-1994: Awarded a year-long research fellowship by the UCLA Institute of American Cultures for research at the Center for Afro-American Studies, UCLA.
• Summer, 1992: Awarded a second California State University Trustees Research Stipend.
• March, 1991: Awarded an NEH Summer Stipend for research on Race and Intertextuality in American Culture.
• Summer, 1990: Selected for NEH Summer Seminar, "The Problem of Race in American Literature," directed by Eric Sundquist.
• Spring, 1990: Awarded the Eugene Kayden prize for best book in the Humanities published by a university press.
• Spring, 1990: Awarded a second Meritorius Performance and Professional Promise Award by the California State University .
• January, 1990: Awarded Outstanding Book Citation from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Unites States for Reading Race .
• May, 1989: Meritorious Performance and Professional Promise Award received from California State University .
• December, 1988: Awarded a California State University Research Fund Summer Stipend.
• Summer, 1988: Selected for inclusion in Best American Poems of 1988 by volume editor John Ashbery.
• October, 1986: Awarded a second individual artist's grant by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
• September, 1986: Awarded the SAMLA Studies prize by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association for the manuscript of Reading Race .
• October, 1985: Awarded an individual artist's grant for work in poetry by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
• May, 1983: Received the first Larry Neal award for poetry, presented by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
• Spring, 1982: Awarded "Distinction" on all four qualifying examinations for the PhD at George Washington University .
• Spring, 1980: Awarded first place for poetry in the Washington Writers' Competition sponsored by The Rock Creek Monitor .
• Spring, 1976: Poetry prize received from the editors of Circus Maximus poetry journal.

 

Links to Selected Interviews and Articles

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn ""Hieroglyphics of Space": Wilson Harris in The Waiting Room"

Callaloo - Volume 18, Number 1, Winter 1995, pp. 125-131

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v018/18.1nielsen.html

Friday, May 19, 2006

Interview with Aldon Lynn Nielsen

http://willtoexchange.blogspot.com/2006/05/interview-with-aldon-lynn-nielsen.html

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn "Black Deconstruction: Russell Atkins and the Reconstruction of African-American Criticism" Diacritics - Volume 26, Number 3/4, Fall-Winter 1996, pp. 86-103

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/v026/26.3-4nielsen.html

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn "Will Alexander's "Transmundane Specific""

Callaloo - Volume 22, Number 2, Spring 1999, pp. 409-416

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v022/22.2nielsen.html

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn “Fugitive Fictions.” African American Review 37.2-3 (2003): 321-31.

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&se=gglsc&d=5002046226&er=deny

 

Course Descriptions

English 487W

Remaking it New: The Search for an American Idiom

American writing confronted early on the crises of modernity and the question of origins. This seminar will be an exploration of the history of American literary artists ' constantly revived search for a poetics rooted in American languages. From the time of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and her early experiments with African inflections of Spanish poetries, and the rffoerts of Roger Williams to study the indigenous languages of North America, the poetries of the Americas have been marked by a polyrhythmic, multilingual inventiveness. Beginning with the very first book of poems published by an English language colonial poet (The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America), we will examine how our poets have attempted to meet William Carlos Williams ' s insistence that our poetry be written in the American grain, to the rhythms of our own altering speech. We will read both prose and poetry. Authors may include Walt Whitman, Phillis Wheatley, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Gertrude Stein, Lorine Niedecker and others.

English 437 “ Poet in America ”

WRITING AGAINST THE GRAIN

“ I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me to leave all out would be another, and truer, way. ” – John Ashbery

Ezra Pound argued that poetry should be at least as well-written as good prose. This semester we will read a number of works in poetry and prose by artists who have refused to confine themselves within the formal guidelines of fiction and verse, poets who have experimented at the very boundaries of sense. The entire rubric for this course will be examined closely: “ poet, ” “ in ” and “ America . ” Why does an American poet write “ The Great American Novel? ” Why does an American poet call a book written in paragraphs Three Poems? How is an English writer in America an American poet?

English 300M

“The Jazz Cadence of American Culture ”

“ In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live. ” – Ralph Ellison

It is often remarked that America ' s musical traditions have consistently been our most successful export, gleefully adopted and adapted all over the world. It has also been frequently observed that what has made American music so distinctive has been its joining together of European and African musical traditions. Less often, critics and historians have noted the persistent and distinctive contributions of black music to America ' s artistic cultures, particularly its literature. One reason that literary critics have been slower than musicologists to discuss this fact is that, to quote again from Ellison: “ it is possible that any viable theory of Negro American culture obligates us to fashion a more adequate theory of American culture as a whole. ” No adequate theories of American language can overlook the African American heart of this culture; No proper poetics of American literature can safely ignore the jazz cadences of American idioms. In this course we will read fiction, poetry and drama, supplemented with critical and theoretical readings. We will also listen carefully to a number of recordings and view relevant film and video clips.

English 574: Studies in Twentieth Century American Literature

Critical Issues in Race and Ethnicity

"One evening an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly is a black? First of all, what's his color?" Jean Genet, The Blacks

"I want one ethnic thing here right from the start. Dis-orientation." Fred Wah, "Scree-Sure Dancing"

American discussions of race and ethnicity seem perpetually marked by rhetorical questions, questions much like those asked by Jean Genet in his explanation of how he came to write his play The Blacks , a New York production of which holds a crucial place in the development of American theater. Genet's questions would seem commonsensical, and in that sense, quintessentially American. Artists from Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) to Cicely Tyson seized upon the American production of this French play of race and violence as a means by which to point up essential questions of race and color in American culture. Among their questions, why is that after centuries of bloody history we remain haunted by these same questions? Despite a plethora of appeals to "diversity" and "multiculturalism," both diversity and multiculturalism remain highly fraught and contested domains within American politics, education and art. As recently as this year, the web site of the National Association of Scholars denounced "inappropriate use of sexual, racial, and other nonscholarly criteria in selecting works to be studied." Note the rhetoric at work in this formulation. The attack is not simply upon the inappropriate use of criteria; this statement assumes that race simply falls into the category of the nonscholarly criteria. In the best spirit of scholarly inquiry, then, this seminar will be a critical examination and discussion of the multitudinous ways in which race and ethnicity are constantly recreated, questioned and reappropriated in American writing. No common sense will be left intact. Our readings will include both literary texts and works in criticism and theory. Authors may include E. San Juan , Jr., William Melvin Kelley, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Bernard Boxill, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, Tommy Shelby, Amiri Baraka, Richard Powers, etc.

English 567.01

Black Philosophy and Theory: Readings in the Literature

“ As intellectuals – a category instituted in black Africa by colonialism – we are always at the risk of becoming Otherness-machines. ”

– Kwame Anthony Appiah

In his introduction to a collection of interviews with prominent African American philosophers, George Yancy notes that the first black man to receive a PhD in philosophy from Yale was Thomas Nelson Baker, in 1903, and that another sixty-two years passed before the first African American woman received a PhD in philosophy. He asks of Baker, what led him, “ born enslaved, to pursue the study of philosophy? ” Yancy ' s question cuts immediately to the heart of a problem that haunts western thought, for, as Lewis Gordon points out, “ race theorists theorize in a racist world. ” Among the first questions faced by black thinkers is, what does it mean to think critically about a tradition that denies the full capacity of reason to the non-white world? While western philosophy has often defined philosophy per se as western, it has done so by refusing to consider black traditions of thought. While Thomas Jefferson defined literature as being beyond the capacities of African peoples, there was Phillis Wheatley, writing beyond his capacity to comprehend.

This seminar will not attempt the impossible task of surveying the entire history of diasporic thought; still, it will be diasporic in its reach. We will read texts from Africa, the Caribbean and North America . All readings will be in English, though some of the source texts will be translated from French and other languages. At the center of our discussions will be a consideration of the intertwining of race, reason, rhetoric, reading and writing.

Authors we study in the seminar will include Frederick Douglass, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Alain Locke, Angela Davis, Cornel West, Tommy Lott, Lucius Outlaw, Charles Mills, Adrian Piper, Ivan Karp and D.A. Masolo.

English 567

"At the Rendezvous of Victory" -- C.L.R.James, Edward Said and the Politics of Dispossession

Speaking of radical intellectuals from what he terms “ colonial or peripheral regions of the world, ” Edward W. Said has remarked that “ These figures address the metropolis using the techniques, the discourses, the very weapons of scholarship and criticism once reserved for the European, now adapted either for insurgency or revisionism at the very heart of the Western center. ” Ishmael Reed, in his comic novel Mumbo Jumbo, has caricatured the West ' s response to such adaptations: “ Why . . . why 1 of them dared to interpret critically mind you, the great Herman Melville ' s Moby Dick!! ” As it happens, both Reed and Said have the same radical intellectual in mind, C.L.R. James, who used the occasion of his internment on Ellis Island awaiting deportation as an illegal alien to write a revisionist response to Melville. In his essay “ Third World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture, ” Said recalls his own meeting with James, describing him as one who “ retains his faith in the persuasive powers of a narrative whose main ingredients are the struggle for freedom, common to France and Haiti, and the wish to know and act . . . ” This, of course, could serve equally well as a description of Said himself, who, like James, has combined a life-long commitment to literature with an active political life directed toward liberation from the strictures of colonialism and tyranny. In the midst of deportation proceedings (James) and threats of murder (Said), each critic has

managed to make significant contributions to literary criticism, philosophy and cultural studies. The latter, witness James ' s work on cricket and Said ' s work on classical music, serves as demonstration of Said ' s understanding of insurgency at the heart of the Western center. This seminar will address major works by Said on orientalism, by James on African and diasporic liberation struggles, and the interventions of both critics in philosophy and cultural studies. Said has argued that “ to rejoin experience and culture is of course to read texts from the metropolitan center and from the peripheries contrapuntally, neither according the privilege of objectivity to our side nor the encumbrance of subjectivity to theirs. ” This, then, will be a seminar in critical counterpoint.

ENGL 597 African American Postmodernism

“ It ' s after the end of the world. Don ' t you know that yet? ”

– Sun Ra

When the artist who then called himself LeRoi Jones edited a collection of contemporary fiction in the early 1960s, he titled it The Moderns. In later years, the authors he collected in that volume, all white with the exception of Jones himself, came to be viewed as among the most prominent authors of “ postmodern ” literature. But by then, LeRoi Jones had become Imamu Amiri Baraka, and his next anthology was to contain only black authors. In more recent years, Baraka, who had written of the need for a “ post-Western ” art, posted a poem attacking postmodernism on his website. In this seminar we will examine the turning points, and breaking points, between the modern and the postmodern, paying closest attention to the relationships of African American artists to the questions of modernity and contemporaneity. As early as the Harlem Renaissance, writers such as Alain Locke were advancing arguments, also taken up by C.L.R. James and W.E.B. DuBois, that modernity had western blackness as its very condition of possibility. In later years, authors including Ishmael Reed, Baraka, Jayne Cortez, William Melvin Kelley, Harryette Mullen and Nathaniel Mackey wrote works in which the question of the modern was reopened even as the question of race was reconfigured. This seminar will consider a number of works of criticism, philosophy and theory alongside poetry and fiction. We will also view relevant films and contemplate some of the farther regions of the musical universe.

 

English 589.01

After the New American Poetries

“ In such are we obsessed with our own lives, which lives being now language, the emphasis has moved. ”

– Lyn Hejinian

Charles Olson's attack upon traditional humanism, and Amiri Baraka's call for a post-American form, place their works as clearly in the post-modern as anything can be placed. And yet, if we learned anything from structuralism (and perhaps it was precisely "anything" that we learned), it was that things must differ from themselves for meaning to occur at all. This seminar will examine the many ways in which post-modernism, around 1972, increasingly differed from itself. The violence of that differing is registered in the passion with which some post-modern poets (such as Ed Dorn, David Lehman and Tom Clark) have rejected the works of poets of the much-abused L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group. This seminar will begin with a quick study of the philosophies that marked the advent of the post-modern in American verse, and will then move through a series of prose statements and poetry collections by poets who came to distrust the commitments to presence, voice and subjectivity of the post-war generations as deeply as those earlier poets had come to distrust the Eliotic stance and the teleological politics of a late, New Critical humanism.