The Fantastic Findings Forum
By Howard Rambsy II
For far too long, legitimacy in scholarly publishing has been implicitly tied to articles of 6,000 to 8,000 words or more. What that meant, in practice, is that an abundance of short insights went unpublished. Yet some of our most generative and illuminating ideas appear in relatively brief observations.
I began to envision an idea, what I called the “Fantastic Findings Forum,” where a group of scholars in African American literature would respond in 250 to 400 words to a common prompt highlighting a useful, interesting, surprising, or overlooked discovery that they had made. The forum makes room for a convergence of brief illuminating reflections, rather than the single-authored essays that pervade our discipline. It is designed to foreground discovery and the value of attentive rereading.
Like many of my projects, I enlisted the collaboration of Elizabeth Cali, who has worked with me on several initiatives and provided the basis for my first prompt in the series, which invited contributors to reflect on a notable moment they had previously overlooked in a Toni Morrison novel and why that discovery now matters to them.
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- How Morrison Treats Sex and Intimacy -- Elizabeth Cali
- Sula: Preventing a Fight Scene -- Donavan Ramon
- Morrison’s One Liners as Witness -- Cindy N. Reed
- Remembering Manlove -- Angel Dye
- Same Holiday, New Shadrack -- Jeremiah Carter
- Covenant-Making and Breaking in Beloved -- Tisha Brooks
- Milkman Against the Flow -- Howard Rambsy II
