Bronx Biannual
..The Bronx Biannual blog is now in effect, booyyeeee!!
Bronx Biannual is the most important literary journal in hiphop America. Consider Bronx Biannual an urban Paris Review, or McSweeney's Quarterly Concern from a hiphop standpoint. The journal will publish new writing--fiction, essays, reportage, interviews, poems--twice a year. The intention is to publish both celebrated and unsung writers on a variety of subjects germane to the black aesthetic. Urbane urban literature: bourgeois yet boulevard. Bronx Biannual will be fluid like water. No guiding manifesto per se, no set format. Issues might be published as graphic novels, or with two sheets of metal bound like a spiral notebook and shrink-wrapped in a Mylar sleeve, or with a concept in mind of what the Factory might've come up with had Andy Warhol put out a literary journal. Like XXL magazine edited by Rhodes Scholars at Oxford or Vanity Fair edited in the South Bronx at the Point.
The premiere edition includes new short stories by Greg Tate, Donnell Alexander, and Michael A. Gonzales; an essay on the nature of Christ by KRS-One; a comparison/contrast essay on television's Girlfriends and Sex and the City by Ferentz Lafargue; Caille Millner assaying the Korean black hair-care market; and poetic short fiction from muMs.
The journal's unifying aesthetic is summed up in its tagline: Bronx Biannual--the Journal of Urbane Urban Literature. Once upon a time, hiphop culture was a gritty, inner-city, youth-only movement. But the hiphop generation has come of age and is now the driving force in today's worldwide pop culture. The fervor sweeping hiphop encompasses more than just rap music. So Bronx broadens the charter to include everything the music touches, embraces, or informs: politics, movies, television, journalism, sports, crime, groupies, pimps, drugs, and all the other forms of hiphop America's social behavior, pathological and otherwise. Bronx is a new urban literary journalism including strong fiction, some humor, and a combination of literary, artistic, theatrical, political, and cultural matters. The Bronx spawned the hiphop zeitgeist; Bronx Biannual will birth the modern urbane urban lit.
Miles Marshall Lewis is author of Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don't Have Bruises, a memoir of growing up in the Bronx amidst the emergence of hip-hop culture. Lewis's writing has appeared in The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Blender, Spin, The Believer, and many other publications. He is the founder and editor of Bronx Biannual and lives in Paris, France, with his wife and baby boys.
Introduction
What does Bronx Biannual have to do with the Bronx? Well, what does The Paris Review have to do with Paris? The New Yorker wasn't exclusively concerned with the five boroughs of its namesake the last time I looked either. The hiphop aesthetic birthed in the early 1970s created a whole new vantage point for blacks (or urban folk, for our melanin-challenged brethren) at this particular time in history. This zeitgeist, embraced the world over, comes from my hometown of the Bronx. Hence Bronx Biannual. Even if you're anti-hiphop your stance is reactionary; it's the elephant in the room. Whether we consider the hiphop outlook to consist of emceeing, deejaying, bombing, B-boying, and knowledge of self, or street entrepreneurialism, bling, promotion, and marketing, hiphop informs the cultural expression of everyone from my generation and quite possibly always will. One of those cultural expressions is literature.
Hiphop hasn't seen a literary journal; Callaloo seems like antiquated Ebony to a readership raised on XXL. Zadie Smith is one of the writers playing an indirect role in the inception of our biannual. When her debut White Teeth won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and many other accolades with references to Lauryn Hill and the Beastie Boys in her prose, we took it as one for the home team. The new canonical lit (and White Teeth does indeed grace many an Ivy League syllabus) freely references hiphop culture. When Tom Wolfe pored over rap magazines researching Freaknik for A Man in Full--later even writing lyrics for a fictional MC in his followup novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons--it became even plainer that the space was clearing for an urbane urban outlet for fiction and essays.
What will this lit look like? Well, were about to find out. Expect hyperrealism, magic realism, pulp fiction, and graphic novelization; postmodernism, street lit, investigative reporting, and humor. I was employed by a few urban music magazines during the nineties whose highbrow pretensions were always slowly weeded out by publishers believing intelligent discourse among people of color either doesn't exist or isnt profitable. Our compulsion behind Bronx Biannual is to refute this idea, to serve readers turned off by the dumbing down of mags they once looked forward to as vanguards of urban publishing. This shout goes out to the lovers of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, Amiri Baraka, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Octavia Butler, Jean Toomer, Khalil Gibran, Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, Patrick Chamoiseau, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Chinua Achebe, Samuel R. Delaney, Ishmael Reed, Ntozake Shange, Gordon Parks, Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Richard Pryor, August Wilson, Haki Madhubuti, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Sonia Sanchez, Kalamu ya Salaam, Aesop, Clark Kent, and Lois Lane.
The year I left Harlem for France I became an author, and living in Paris naturally brought to mind for me other authors who had similar experiences before I was even born. Paris is a legendary life school of sorts for writers and pretty much always has been: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce lived here post-World War I even before Wright, Baldwin, or Himes; not to mention Beats like Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs. Adventure stories for boys, our own version of girls Cinderella story, frequently involve a pretender becoming the hero he impersonates. My generation is typically obsessed with this, understandably, as weve inherited a postmodern era. This is why Lenny Kravitz is the quintessential black rock star of our age. Or take neo-soul music as another example. Record companies have been known to label singers like Alicia Keys and D'Angelo as neo-soul in a nod to the seventies soul singers like Roberta Flack and Marvin Gaye whom they resemble. Erykah Badu has been called the hiphop Billie Holiday, Sean Combs the hiphop Sinatra. Beyonce is the new Janet, The Boondocks evolved into the hiphop Doonesbury after a stint as the hiphop Calvin & Hobbes, and so on. As if originality in the postmodern age is impossible, the greatest statements and artists are in the past, and doing a modern-age spin on the classics is the only real option these days. The implicit fear is that the heroes of old arent ever coming back, which means were going to have to be the heroes. And those are some big fucking shoes to fill.
This seems in its way a spot-on explanation for the creation of Bronx Biannual. The hiphop aesthetic is largely about the recycling, the sampling. Fire!!--the self-described quarterly devoted to younger Negro artists--published one issue in 1926, featuring Harlem Renaissance luminaries like Countee Cullen. At twenty-two, Aime Cesaire cofounded L'Etudiant Noir, a literary review that first coined the phrase negritude to name the French literary and political movement of the 1930s, and later launched another lit journal called Tropiques from Martinique at twenty-eight. For five years in the seventies Ishmael Reed spearheaded Yardbird Reader, editing multicultural poetry, drama, and interviews. Why should hiphop do any less? We are not eager to put brackets around modern black literature through our biannual or claim any singular raison d'etre from it all. We just want to publish some dope stories.
Miles Marshall Lewis
Paris, France
April 2006