African American Literature

10 Key excerpts on "African American Literature"

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  Afrocentric Visions

  Studies in Culture and Communication

  • Janice D. Hamlet, Janice Hamlet(Authors)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  The Af r i can-Am e r i can Legacy in American Literature Abu Abarry Since their enforced and brutal emigration to North America about 400 years ago, African Americans have forged rich and dynamic literary forms that today have become an important and unique aspect of American literature and culture. The sound literary qualities, interesting thematic range, and social significance of this variety of American literature notwith- standing, it has remained largely unknown to the general African American reading public, including even students of literature. We are, of course, aware of the presence of books by and on African Americans in our libraries and African American Literature courses in the curricula of African colleges and universities. But such books are generally limited to those of well-known authors, such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, and the courses are offered by only a few privileged institutions and even then on an irregular basis.' The aim of this chapter, then, is to help acquaint more African-American readers, particularly students of literature, with the ways in which the meanings, beauty, and power of African-American literary creations have This chapter originally appeared as an article in Journal ofSluck Studies (Vol. 20, No. 4, June 1990, pp. 379-398). Copyright 0 1990 Sage Publications, Inc. 121 122 AFROCENTRICIN AND THE BLACK AESTHETIC evolved to enrich American literature and culture. However, due to its time span, generic variations, stylistic complexity, and content range, it would be presumptuous and preposterous to attempt to treat the whole literature here. What follows, then, is a modest effort to review mainly African- American poetic contributions, as seen in the works of a few significant writers, from the earliest times until the death of Langston Hughes in 1967.

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  The African American Experience

  An Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide

  • Arvarh E. Strickland, Robert E. Weems Jr.(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Other male writers of the era include the following: Albert Murray, Henry Dumas, William Melvin Kelley, Michael Harper, Al Young, Quincy Troupe, James McPherson, Askia Muhammad Toure, John Edgar Wideman, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Reginald McKnight. Indeed, the explosion of African American writing since the 1970s has made it increasingly difficult to generalize about major themes and styles characteristic of the contemporary period. However, some of the most significant trajectories include the rise of African American women writing, the reclamation of history, the resurgence of autobiography, the rise of black gay literature and lesbian literature, incursions into popular literary forms, and postmodernist experimentations. As we move into a next millennium, African American writers such as J. California Cooper, Angela Jackson, Tina McElroy Ansa, Walter Mosely, Bebe Moore Campbell, and Paula Childress White have established themselves in the black literary tradition. As the works of these and other black writers show, African American Literature continues to build on the foundation established in the eighteenth century: the structures of oral tradition and the quest for freedom and equality. This foundation has supported African Americans as they moved from the chains of slavery through war and peace, to poverty and prosperity. African American Literature has recorded the defeats and the triumphs, the fears and the dreams. Its strength lies in its ability to present the truth—the good, the bad, and the ugly. To be sure, African American Literature gives voice to the eternal spirit of African Americans and the legacy of black life. Page 137 BIBLIOGRAPHY Anthologies Barksdale, Richard K., and Kenneth Kinnamon. Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology. New York: Macmillan Company, 1972. Bontemps, Arna, ed. American Negro Poetry. New York: Hill and Wang, 1963. Bullins, Ed, ed. New Plays from the Black Theatre. New York: Bantam Books, 1969.

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  Multicultural Literature and Response

  Affirming Diverse Voices

  • Lynn Atkinson Smolen, Ruth A. Oswald Ph.D., Lynn Atkinson Smolen, Ruth A. Oswald Ph.D.(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Libraries Unlimited

    (Publisher)

  5 Exploring African American Children’s Literature Claudette Shackelford McLinn, Yolanda A. Reed, John A. Casper, and Sarah King Since the advent of written language, history has been recorded with the ink and paper of the educated few. Ever since this development, the human experience of our past has echoed through the sanctuaries of our churches, the shelves of our libraries, and the halls of our schools. Literature is the tool that we use to understand who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. It is only through this tool that our children can learn about the events of the past and relate them to the world that they experience first- hand. Over the course of history, the various nations, peoples, and cultures of our world have each contributed to our collective experience in the forms of novels, poems, plays, and works of nonfiction. Each culture’s unique perspective and voice is presented in these writings and it is through these works that we can begin to understand and relate to one another in a peaceful and pluralistic global society. The body of children’s literature that chronicles the African-American experience is broad and deep, and it dates back to the earliest days of our nation’s history. In this chap- ter, we will uncover the extensive history and breadth of children’s literature written by African-American authors. We will survey the prevalent themes found in this literature by compiling a listing to assist in book selection and curricular-related lessons. Our focus is mostly on African-American authors who may be well known to some readers and less known to others. We believe that it is imperative that children the world over are able to hear the voice of the African-American community in the writings presented here. This is why we have chosen to focus primarily on books written by Black authors.

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  What Was African American Literature?

  • Kenneth W. Warren(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 1 Historicizing African American Liter ature H istorically speaking, the collective enterprise we now know as African American or black literature is of rather recent vintage. In fact, the wine may be newer than gen-erally acknowledged, which is to say that it was neither pressed on the African continent nor bottled during the slave era. Rather, African American Literature was a postemancipation phenomenon that gained its coherence as an undertaking in the social world defined by the system of Jim Crow segregation, which ensued after the nation’s retreat from Reconstruction. This social order, created by local and statewide laws, statutes, and policies, received constitutional sanction in 1896 with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson and was main-tained for decades by violence and intimidation, buttressed not only by the work of scholars, scientists, artists, and writers but also by the quotidian social practices of ordinary citizens. Yet it was through many of these same means that this order was challenged and sometimes acquiesced in by its victims un-til it was finally dismantled, at least judicially and legally, in h i s t o r i c i z i n g a f r i c a n a m e r i c a n l i t e r a t u r e 2 the 1950s and 1960s. African American Literature took shape in the context of this challenge to the enforcement and justifi-cation of racial subordination and exploitation represented by Jim Crow. Accordingly, it will be my argument here that with the legal demise of Jim Crow, the coherence of African American Literature has been correspondingly, if sometimes imperceptibly, eroded as well. Admittedly, my insistence on this rather constricted histori-cal frame for something called African American Literature may seem at the very least counterintuitive and at the most simply wrongheaded. Indeed, much recent literary criticism and scholarship has sought to justify taking a longer historical view of African American literary practice.

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  A History of African American Poetry

  • Lauri Ramey(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Since many of these writings were well known in the past, we gain important insight into which texts became alternately validated and excluded in varying iterations, which provokes speculation about the reasons. The foundations of the African American literary tradition are in its poetry. Although this body of poetry is as diverse and varied as its individual creators, some common themes and threads appear which justify its consideration as a literary tradition: attention to both oral- ity and print culture; themes and impacts of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism; the location and meaning of home and family; African survivals and the role of Africa; imagery of enslavement and freedom; the purpose of art as social and political action; art as defining a relation- ship between the individual and the community; music and musicality; art as a bridge between the present and the past; the deep and spiritual significance of land and place; play with multiple audiences and levels of address; creative and hybrid senses of diction; concerns with assimila- tion and authenticity; a clear pattern from the time of its origins of self- referencing, citationality, and allusion, even as it is in dialogue with the Anglo-American canon; and concern with the best critical tools to evalu- ate and appreciate African American poetry, including the question of whether a special theoretical lens should be developed and applied to this Introduction to a Genre 3 writing, which reflects its features, goals, and identity. This book is organ- ized chronologically to discuss a range of poetic styles and critical per- spectives, representing both oral and literary traditions, from the arrival of the first Africans in America to the current moment.

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  African American Almanac

  400 Years of Black Excellence

  • Lean'tin Bracks(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Visible Ink Press

    (Publisher)

  African American authors have influenced contemporary audiences and earned numerous national and international awards. Pulitzer Prize winners include Rita Dove for poetry (1987), August Wilson for playwriting (1987 and 1990), and Alex Haley for his contribution to the literature of slavery (1976). The National Book Award winners since 1975 include (in fiction) Alice Walker (1983) and Charles Johnson (1990), and, in poetry, Lucille Clifton (2000).

  At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, African American writing has continued to explore identity, but the oppressive legacy of the past has become only one factor, with other issues such as gender, sexual orientation, and individual challenges also being paramount. Writers such as E. Lynn Harris, Omar Tyree, Connie Briso, and Zane have developed a wide following and were major booksellers in their area of contemporary Black popular fiction. These works are considered largely outside the realm of serious literature and more a function of popular culture and entertainment. With the success of many programs in African American studies, more writers are coming from academic settings.

  Works that have been adapted to films are generally more known by the general public than the literary works themselves, but they continue to create and increase audiences for both popular books and film. The influence of contemporary fiction in expanding reading audiences, both Black and white, has continued the interest of mainstream publishers in Black writers.

  Literature of the 21st century has taken the words of Toni Morrison to the page. Blackness is a default (a preselected option) — unapologetic, boundless, and topically and artistically free. Black Literature has evolved from a contrived absence to become symbols of artistic mastery. It is sophisticated and highly individualized. It offers a variety of voices, aesthetics, genres, literary troupes, and dynamic conversations full of romanticism and idealism. History and specifically slave narratives have served to intensify the meaning of freedom while retrieving or creating stories of heroes and healing. While functionality is still an important point of discussion for the Black writers from any generation, writers in the 21st

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  The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature

  • D. Quentin Miller(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The prominence of the vernacular isn’t the only complicating factor in defining African American Literature. “Literature,” in addition to referring to written texts, generally connotes writing of some enduring social or cultural value. Literature is often associated with complexity, and its texts embody multiple meanings. The poet Ezra Pound defined it as “news that stays news;” in other words, its relevance endures over time. As a subject of study in academic settings, literature is often presented as a form of cultural production that is challenging to understand due to complex layering and obscure allusions. This line of thinking suggests that literature is something not everyone can appreciate: it requires of its readers a level of sophistication that comes with experience, education, and training.

  Yet within every tradition there are works of literature deemed “popular,” or works that might fit into certain genre categories (such as “crime,” “romance,” or “science fiction” within the broader category of fiction). Our discussion of “the vernacular” brings with it the question of what makes a work worthy of the name literature. Must literature be high art in the sense of being sophisticated, intellectual, and informed by a long tradition of other literary works? These questions pertain to all bodies of literature, but they are especially poignant in terms of nineteenth-century African American Literature because of the context of its production and the nature of its audience. Many early works of African American Literature had a specific rhetorical intent: to persuade the (white, educated) reader of the moral repugnancy of slavery and to expose readers to the physical, mental, and spiritual degradation suffered by slaves. These works are relatively straightforward, and their central intent can be gleaned by readers without much experience or training, as well as by more sophisticated readers. Yet one of the earliest works of African American Literature is Phillis Wheatley’s poetry collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

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  Books and Beyond

  The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading [4 volumes]

  • Kenneth Womack(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  In spite of and because of marginal status, a powerful, indigenous vernacular tradition has survived, not unbroken, but unbowed, a African American Literature 33 magnet, a focused energy, something with its own logic, rules, and integrity connecting current developments to the past. An articulate, syncretizing force our best artists have drawn upon, a force sustaining both individual talent and tradition. If what a writer wants is freedom of expression, then somehow that larger goal must be addressed implicitly/explicitly in our fictions. A story should somehow contain clues that align it with tradition and critique tradition, establish the new space it requires, demands, appropriates, hint at how it may bring forth other things like itself, where these others have, will, and are coming from. This does not mean defining criteria for admitting stories into some ideologically sound, privileged category, but seeking conditions, mining terri- tory that maximizes the possibility of free, original expression. (1990, vi–vii) For the contemporary writer, free and original expressions have translated into an exhaustive list of memoirs, short and long fiction, and independent films that are, to pull from Susanne B. Dietzel’s “The African American Novel and Popular Culture,” relatively unexplored terrain[s] in African American literary history and criticism (2003, 100). Reasons for this exclusion or oversight range from academic practices and aesthetic standards that qualify a text for inclusion in the African American lit- erary canon—practices and standards that are traceable over the centuries to ances- tral African American writers who strived to keep in place a division between literary and commercial forms of literature that rendered expressions of African American life and culture.

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  The Emergence of African American Literacy Traditions

  Family and Community Efforts in the Nineteenth Century

  • Phyllis M. Belt-Beyan(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  For instance, can anyone deny the influence on American popular culture of African American music, song, and dance, or deny the impact of African American political thought, literature, and liberation theol- ogy on American intellectual, political, and cultural and thus the dialogue on American freedoms? Huggins (1971) believed that individual achievements are strong, recurrent, themes because we all, perhaps, have a perceived need to embrace socially gratifying interpretations of the past. We es- pecially hold on to those that focus on individual struggles and avoid mention of or smooth over past and present tensions among groups. He also wrote that stories of individual achievements and heroism are easier to digest than stories of multiple lives fraught with disap- pointments, setbacks, frustrations, interminable strife, and conflict. In brief, we all write and internalize what we want to hear or believe about our past selves, regardless of who we are or believe we are as people. Given this, historical accounts that spotlight individual liter- acy attainment among African Americans, enslaved persons, and free persons, may possibly be seen as more interesting and reward- ing to think about than others. This may be especially true of those that are written to appeal to the American sense of story grammar 10 The Emergence of African American Literacy Traditions and literary champions, clothed in literary themes that portray deep- rooted American values of individualism. This may well have been the case in the past as seen in the read- ing interests of nineteenth century American and European readers. They purchased thousands of copies of slave narratives, regarding them as among the most original, exciting American adventure tales (Davis & Gates, 1985). The narratives characteristically told of cap- ture, enslavement, bold escape from bondage, chase, subversive un- derground tactics, and finally freedom and the triumph of the human spirit (Davis & Gates, 1985).

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  African American Religious Cultures

  [2 volumes]

  • Anthony B. Pinn(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Religion has provided African American authors with multifaceted opportunities to hone their literary skills as well. This literary interest in religion has drawn women as well as men, elites as well as working class, northern as well as southern, authors. It cuts across class, region, and gender differences even as it consolidates a distinctly African American literary tradi- tion. Once we understand the prevalence, importance, and complexity of religious thought to African American writing, we get a clearer understanding of the dynamism and vitality of the African American literary legacy. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Chesnutt, Charles. The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (Durham, NC: Duke Univer- sity Press, 1993). Delany, Martin. Blake; or, The Huts of America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life. The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Du Bois, W. E. B. Dark Princess: A Romance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Du Bois, W. E. B. Souls of Black Folk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man (New York: Modern Library, 1992). Griggs, Sutton. Imperium In Imperio (North Stratford, NH: Ayer Co., 1992). Hopkins, Pauline. Of One Blood; Or, The Hidden Self. The Magazine Novels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Perennial Classics, 1998). Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Moses, Jeremiah. The Golden Age of Black Nationalism: 1850–1925 (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1978). Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Norton, 2007). Wheatley, Phyllis. The Collected Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 462 | African American Literature and Religion

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