Commentaries - August 2013

White mischief IV

The Imus Effect

A critic advises
not to write on controversial subjects
like freedom or murder
but to treat universal themes
and timeless symbols
like the white unicorn

A white unicorn?
—Dudley Randall

One wag once wagered that from the modernism we choose we get the postmodernism we deserve.  Kathy Lou Schultz has observed that the nature of Melvin B. Tolson’s relationship to Modernism remains a subject of real contention some forty years after the poet’s death, and implied in that observation is the correlative that the subjects of African Americans’ relationships to both modernism and postmodernism are themselves equally fraught.