DESCRIPTION

For the last three decades, Nathaniel Mackey, an African-American writer intent on exploring "both sides of the hyphen", has navigated a diversity of forms and subjects. He has published poetry, fiction, essays and lectured extensively. Mackey is also the founding editor of the literary journal Hambone. Yet despite the diversity of his output, Mackey's work almost always gathers around a single idea, what he terms the possibility of "discrepant engagement" between cultures. The phrase serves as both a title for his book of essays and as an apt description of Hambone.

The magazine's first issue was published in the spring of 1974 as a group effort by the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University. It was dormant until 1982, when Mackey revived it as a significantly different journal. With Mackey as sole editor and publisher Hambone became known as "the main meeting-place for Third World, American minority and white avant-gardists." According to MacKey the cultivation and pursuit of networks of association and communities of interest, inclination and affinity was his central reason for starting the magazine. "My idea was to simply put my sense of a community of writers and artists on a kind of map... Ok, here's my map... and we're going to call it Hambone."

Mackey's Hambone covers a large region. In it he enacts a rich cross-cultural trickster poetics, traversing the African American vernacular and Euro-American "open form" poetics, slipping across literary boundaries and wire-cutting his way through genre constraints. Since 1982 Hambone has published everything from interviews to poetry and fiction. It also publishes reviews, essays and debates on African American culture, including a controversial conversation on the function of black literature with Ismael Reed that Amiri Baraka later described as "straight-out agentry, and in certain circumstances could easily get these dudes iced."

en français

PEOPLE

Sun Ra, Robert Duncan, Beverly Dahlen, Jay Wright, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Carence Major, Wilson Harris, Jodi Braxton, Michael Harper, David Henderson, bell hooks, Ishmael Reed

FAMILY TREE

• Free Lance (1955)
• Negro Digest/ Black World (1961)
• Obsidian/Obsidian II (1975)
• Black American Literature Forum (1976)
• Callaloo (1976)
• First World (1977)
• Y'Bird (1977)
• Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women (1984)
• Catalyst (1986)
• Shooting Star Review (1986)
• Konch (1990)

RE/SOURCES

• Nathaniel Mackey. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-culturality, and Experimental Writing, Cambridge University Press, 1993
• "Nathaniel Mackey Interview by Christopher Funkhouser," Poetry Flash: A Poetry Review and Literary Calendar for the West, 224 (1991)
• Nathaniel Mackey, "Editing Hambone", Callaloo Volume 23, Number 2, Spring 2000, pp. 665-668
• Ronald Maberry Johnson, Abby Arthur Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century, University of Massachusetts Press, 1979
• Nathaniel Mackey, Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews, Univ of Wisconsin Press, 2005
• Mackey on EPC
• Mackey on Groovdigit
• Hambone on Wikipedia