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Transcription: {SPEAKER name="Eugene Ethelbert Miller"}
[00:20:31]
Actually, there's about six. [[Audience laughs]] six things that you can really talk about. I'm just going to talk about two.
[00:20:37]
But the thing that we can look at now in terms of trends is one for us which I think is very important. The arrival of the Black male homosexual writer.
[00:20:44]
I think that's definitely. if someone had to take the theme that's the one I would put out first.
[00:20:53]
I sort of tell this joke with Kojo near me. I went on his show about a year ago.
[00:20:59]
We were talking about literature and stuff and I said Kojo, next year, you know you're going to be dealing with this whole thing, Black male homosexuality,
[00:21:07]
and you know with tongues and tide and PBS, and things of that sort, that issue has really popped up this year.
[00:21:12]
And we have to thank Essex Hemphill and I want to talk about Essex Hemphill's work because I think it's very important
[00:21:18]
in terms of the content and also how it affects other parts of the community.
[00:21:23]
So the arrival of Black male homosexual writer is a theme that has to be examined.
[00:21:27]
The second theme that has to be looked at is what I call male bonding.
[00:21:33]
And some of this male bonding in literature seems like it comes after what we might identify as the feminist movement.
[00:21:40]
And it's interesting to see exactly what writers are doing in terms of as they present men in the text
[00:21:50]
and I'm going to use John Wideman's work to show you what I consider this male bonding.
[00:21:54]
Then, third, I think we have to look at the work of August Wilson.
[00:21:59]
If we had to pick, I think one of the major African American writers, I would say August Wilson
[00:22:06]
is pretty much the person that has definitely reshaped the literature.
[00:22:11]
Now, we may not be aware of that because sometimes, you know, we go to those matinees, go out, we go to theater,
[00:22:18]
and we pretty much have a nice evening, and not realize that as a writer,
[00:22:24]
he is just as important as Tony Morrison, or even more so.
[00:22:28]
And I think some of the things that August Wilson is doing in his plays are very, very important, and also ties into male bonding.
[00:22:38]
I'm going to talk a little bit about that. But there's other things in Wilson's work. I may not talk that much about Wilson because of time.
[00:22:44]
Then the other thing which needs to be looked at is the African American woman writer, what I call this new generation of African American women writers.
[00:22:50]
These are people who are coming after, like Alice (Walker) and Toni Morris, and they're just another generation of women writers.
[00:22:58]
There are some interesting things happening there in terms of what they are writing about.
[00:23:06]
Then, another issue that we could look at is the impact of Spike Lee as a writer.
[00:23:11]
One thing that Spike Lee has done with every film is give us a text, a book usually with Lisa Jones whose the co-author.
[00:23:21]
These books are very valuable. In turn, you get a sense of how Spike Lee conceptualizes film.
[00:23:28]
I think also we have to look at filmmakers as writers also, and, when you look at it that way,
[00:23:35]
then you understand why there's a struggle with Spike Lee over the Malcolm X film. Because one of the things that I have always felt is that Spike Lee has problems writing scripts, character development, and things of that sort.
[00:23:47]
In some of the things that made Spike Lee's films entertaining and enjoyable were things were actors and actresses were just ad-libbing and playing a role and it was not really written down. So when you take his books, She's Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing, read them as texts, and then look at the film. You can see what has been written and also what has been changed. If you go back and look at the book, Five for Five, the last book that Spike Lee gave us, which is interesting because then you really see the connection between Spike Lee and writers because he has all those writers like Johnson and Jerry Eten writing his films that he has to be placed right alongside it. But you see the tremendous change in the end of Jungle Fever.

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