A Conversation: Max Hunter's new book, Speech Is My Hammer

University Book Store is proud to present Max Hunter in conversation about Max’s his new book, Speech Is My Hammer.

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With Speech Is My Hammer, Max Hunter draws on memoir and his own biography to call his readers to reimagine the meaning and power in literacy. Defining literacy as a spectrum of skills, abilities, attainments, and performances, Hunter focuses on dispelling literacy myths and discussing how Black male artists, entertainers, professors, and writers have described their own literacy narratives in self-conscious, ambivalent terms.

Beginning with Frederick Douglass's My Bondage My Freedom, W. E. B. Dubois's Soul of Black Folks, and Langston Hughes's Harlem Renaissance-memoir The Big Sea, Hunter conducts a literary inquiry that unearths their double-consciousness and literacy ambivalence. He moves on to reveal that for many contemporary Black men the arc of ambivalence rises even higher and becomes more complex, following the civil rights and the Black Power movements, and then sweeping sharply upward once again during the War on Drugs.

Hunter provides rich illustrations and probing theses that complicate our commonsense reflections on their concealed angst regarding Black authenticity, respectability politics, and masculinity. Speech Is My Hammer moves the reader beyond considering literacy in normative terms to perceive its potential to facilitate transformative conversations among Black males.

Max “Diego” Hunter, Ph.D., perceives fate in entering the world during the culmination of civil rights activism and the Moynihan report. He spent his formative years bearing witness to urban decline in Southern California and Washington D.C. A quiet and precocious child, he dreamed of shedding his illiteracy to pursue a self-defined soulful erudition based on the black and brown consciousness permeating inner-city culture in Los Angeles and Southeast San Diego.

As an adolescent shoe-shine boy, Hunter experienced the streets and began to forge his identity as a bookish preppy hustler, presaging the character Stringer Bell on HBO’s The Wire. Although he embraced art, film, and culture, Hunter vacillated between neo-European artiste funkster and a stoic street player gender and race performances, causing him to struggle to reconcile his interest in the life of the mind and street life. Eventually, he earned numerous advanced degrees from the University of Washington and Harvard.

As a leader in the Community Innovation Hub at Odessa Brown Community Clinic, Max hopes to leverage his education, experiences, and social capital to serve the most marginalized communities in the Pacific Northwest.

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