Download or read book Afro American Literature in the Twentieth Century written by Michael G. Cooke and published by New Haven [Conn.] : Yale University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""For the serious student of black writers and black writing, this book is provocative and challenging, not to mention original. If one's appetite for black literature is large, this book will be a continuous source of nourishment.""-Charlayne Hunter-Gault
Download or read book Afro American Literature in the Twentieth Century written by Michael G. Cooke and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Black Writers White Publishers written by John Kevin Young and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2006 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jean Toomer's Cane was advertised as a book about Negroes by a Negro, despite his request not to promote the book along such racial lines. Nella Larsen switched the title of her second novel from Nig to Passing, because an editor felt the original title might be too inflammatory. In order to publish his first novel as a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection Richard Wright deleted a scene in Native Son depicting Bigger Thomas masturbating. Toni Morrison changed the last word of Beloved at her editor's request and switched the title of Paradise from War to allay her publisher's marketing concerns. Although many editors place demands on their authors, these examples invite special scholarly attention given the power imbalance between white editors and publishers and African American authors. Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature examines the complex negotiations behind the production of African American literature. In chapters on Larsen's Passing, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Gwendolyn Brooks's Children Coming Home, Morrison's Oprah's Book Club selections, and Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, John K. Young presents the first book-length application of editorial theory to African American literature. Focusing on the manuscripts, drafts, book covers, colophons, and advertisements that trace book production, Young expands upon the concept of socialized authorship and demonstrates how the study of publishing history and practice and African American literary criticism enrich each other. John K. Young is an associate professor of English at Marshall University. His work has appeared in journals such as College English, African American Review, and Critique.
Download or read book The Real Negro written by Shelly Eversley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03-29 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Shelly Eversley historicizes the demand for racial authenticity - what Zora Neale Hurston called 'the real Negro' - in twentieth-century American literature. Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in 'the real Negro' transforms the question of what race an author belongs into a question of what it takes to belong to
Download or read book Black on Black written by John Cullen Gruesser and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black on Black provides the first comprehensive analysis of the modern African American literary response to Africa, from W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk to Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Combining cutting-edge theory, extensive historical and archival research, and close readings of individual texts, Gruesser reveals the diversity of the African American response to Countee Cullen's question, "What is Africa to Me?" John Gruesser uses the concept of Ethiopianism--the biblically inspired belief that black Americans would someday lead Africans and people of the diaspora to a bright future--to provide a framework for his study. Originating in the eighteenth century and inspiring religious and political movements throughout the 1800s, Ethiopianism dominated African American depictions of Africa in the first two decades of the twentieth century, particularly in the writings of Du Bois, Sutton Griggs, and Pauline Hopkins. Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance and continuing through the Italian invasion and occupation of Ethiopia, however, its influence on the portrayal of the continent slowly diminished. Ethiopianism's decline can first be seen in the work of writers closely associated with the New Negro Movement, including Alain Locke and Langston Hughes, and continued in the dramatic work of Shirley Graham, the novels of George Schuyler, and the poetry and prose of Melvin Tolson. The final rejection of Ethiopianism came after the dawning of the Cold War and roughly coincided with the advent of postcolonial Africa in works by authors such as Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and Alice Walker.
Download or read book When Malindy Sings written by Paul Laurence Dunbar and published by . This book was released on 1903 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A God of Justice written by Qiana J. Whitted and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the representations of spiritual crisis in twentieth-century African American fiction and autobiography, Qiana J. Whitted asks how some of the most distinguished writers of this tradition wrestle with the inexplicable nature of God and the experience of unmerited natural and moral sufferings such as racial oppression. Although this spiritual and existential dilemma of "the problem of evil" is not unique to African Americans, writers such as Countée Cullen, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison offer paradigmatic examples of it in black life and culture after World War I. Whitted argues that these spiritual struggles so often articulated through the cry for divine justice are central to an understanding of modern black literary engagements with religion. Chapters explore the discourse of religious doubt and questioning through the crucified black Christ and the mourner's bench tropes, womanist spiritual infidelity, and the humanist improvisations of blues narratives. For too long, the author contends, literary critics have explained this suffering through platitudes of endurance and communal redemption, valorizing problematic notions of unquestioned faith and self-sacrifice. By questioning what is at stake for African Americans who call for divine justice, Whitted challenges the assumptions about African American religiosity by revealing an alternative tradition of narrative dissent and philosophical engagement. In doing so, she broadens the horizons of critical inquiry in black literary and cultural studies.
Download or read book What Was African American Literature written by Kenneth W. Warren and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-03 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American literature is over. With this provocative claim Kenneth Warren sets out to identify a distinctly African American literatureÑand to change the terms with which we discuss it. Rather than contest other definitions, Warren makes a clear and compelling case for understanding African American literature as creative and critical work written by black Americans within and against the strictures of Jim Crow America. Within these parameters, his book outlines protocols of reading that best make sense of the literary works produced by African American writers and critics over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. In WarrenÕs view, African American literature begged the question: what would happen to this literature if and when Jim Crow was finally overthrown? Thus, imagining a world without African American literature was essential to that literature. In support of this point, Warren focuses on three moments in the history of Phylon, an important journal of African American culture. In the dialogues Phylon documents, the question of whether race would disappear as an organizing literary category emerges as shared ground for critical and literary practice. Warren also points out that while scholarship by black Americans has always been the province of a petit bourgeois elite, the strictures of Jim Crow enlisted these writers in a politics that served the race as a whole. Finally, WarrenÕs work sheds light on the current moment in which advocates of African American solidarity insist on a past that is more productively put behind us.
Download or read book Afro American Literature in the Twentieth Century written by Michael G. Cooke and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines works by African American writers
Download or read book The Origins of African American Literature 1680 1865 written by Dickson D. Bruce and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the earliest texts of the colonial period to works contemporary with Emancipation, African American literature has been a dialogue across color lines, and a medium through which black writers have been able to exert considerable authority on both sides of that racial demarcation. Dickson D. Bruce argues that contrary to prevailing perceptions of African American voices as silenced and excluded from American history, those voices were loud and clear. Within the context of the wider culture, these writers offered powerful, widely read, and widely appreciated commentaries on American ideals and ambitions. The Origins of African American Literature provides strong evidence to demonstrate just how much writers engaged in a surprising number of dialogues with society as a whole. Along with an extensive discussion of major authors and texts, including Phillis Wheatley's poetry, Frederick Douglass's Narrative, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Martin Delany's Blake, Bruce explores less-prominent works and writers as well, thereby grounding African American writing in its changing historical settings. The Origins of African American Literature is an invaluable revelation of the emergence and sources of the specifically African American literary tradition and the forces that helped shape it.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of African American Literature written by Maryemma Graham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 861 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major new history of the literary traditions, oral and print, of African-descended peoples in the United States.
Download or read book Black Miami in the Twentieth Century written by Marvin Dunn and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 1997-11-19 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book devoted to the history of African Americans in south Florida and their pivotal role in the growth and development of Miami, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century traces their triumphs, drudgery, horrors, and courage during the first 100 years of the city's history. Firsthand accounts and over 130 photographs, many of them never published before, bring to life the proud heritage of Miami's black community. Beginning with the legendary presence of black pirates on Biscayne Bay, Marvin Dunn sketches the streams of migration by which blacks came to account for nearly half the city’s voters at the turn of the century. From the birth of a new neighborhood known as "Colored Town," Dunn traces the blossoming of black businesses, churches, civic groups, and fraternal societies that made up the black community. He recounts the heyday of "Little Broadway" along Second Avenue, with photos and individual recollections that capture the richness and vitality of black Miami's golden age between the wars. A substantial portion of the book is devoted to the Miami civil rights movement, and Dunn traces the evolution of Colored Town to Overtown and the subsequent growth of Liberty City. He profiles voting rights, housing and school desegregation, and civil disturbances like the McDuffie and Lozano incidents, and analyzes the issues and leadership that molded an increasingly diverse community through decades of strife and violence. In concluding chapters, he assesses the current position of the community--its socioeconomic status, education issues, residential patterns, and business development--and considers the effect of recent waves of immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean. Dunn combines exhaustive research in regional media and archives with personal interviews of pioneer citizens and longtime residents in a work that documents as never before the life of one of the most important black communities in the United States.
Download or read book African American Literature in Transition 1900 1910 Volume 7 written by Shirley Moody-Turner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-13 with total page 653 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910 offers a wide ranging, multi-disciplinary approach to early twentieth century African American literature and culture. It showcases the literary and cultural productions that took shape in the critical years after Reconstruction, but before the Harlem Renaissance, the period known as the nadir of African American history. It undercovers the dynamic work being done by Black authors, painters, photographers, poets, editors, boxers, and entertainers to shape 'New Negro' identities and to chart a new path for a new century. The book is structured into four key areas: Black publishing and print culture; innovations in genre and form; the race, class and gender politics of literary and cultural production; and new geographies of Black literary history. These overarching themes, along with the introduction of established figures and movement, alongside lesser known texts and original research, offer a radical re-conceptualization of this critical, but understudied period in African American literary history.
Download or read book Burnin Down the House written by Valerie Sweeney Prince and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: -- Cheryl A. Wall, Rutgers University
Download or read book African Literature in the Twentieth Century written by O. R. Dathorne and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1975 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores intellectual currents in African prose and verse from sung or chanted lines to modern writings
Download or read book Crossing the Line written by Gayle Wald and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-07-24 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial “order.” Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial “passing,” a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race’s authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fails to represent identity. She thus uses cultural narratives of passing to illuminate both the contradictions of race and the deployment of such contradictions for a variety of needs, interests, and desires. Wald begins her reading of twentieth-century passing narratives by analyzing works by African American writers James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen, showing how they use the “passing plot” to explore the negotiation of identity, agency, and freedom within the context of their protagonists' restricted choices. She then examines the 1946 autobiography Really the Blues, which details the transformation of Milton Mesirow, middle-class son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, into Mezz Mezzrow, jazz musician and self-described “voluntary Negro.” Turning to the 1949 films Pinky and Lost Boundaries, which imagine African American citizenship within class-specific protocols of race and gender, she interrogates the complicated representation of racial passing in a visual medium. Her investigation of “post-passing” testimonials in postwar African American magazines, which strove to foster black consumerism while constructing “positive” images of black achievement and affluence in the postwar years, focuses on neglected texts within the archives of black popular culture. Finally, after a look at liberal contradictions of John Howard Griffin’s 1961 auto-ethnography Black Like Me, Wald concludes with an epilogue that considers the idea of passing in the context of the recent discourse of “color blindness.” Wald’s analysis of the moral, political, and theoretical dimensions of racial passing makes Crossing the Line important reading as we approach the twenty-first century. Her engaging and dynamic book will be of particular interest to scholars of American studies, African American studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.
Download or read book Master Players in a Fixed Game written by Ralph D. Story and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2001-04 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The literary expression of Afro-Americans has been scrutinized and criticized in exhaustive detail, yet historically perceived by many American and English literary scholars are qualitatively and quantitatively underdeveloped. This was the view held by many literary scholars until the late 1960s when Afro-American literary scholars and black students argued forcefully and convincingly in favor of the plays, short stories, poetry and novels written by Afro-Americans. Despite such noteworthy efforts, however, few scholars have investigated the uneven and sporadic appearance of publications, or the absence of publications, by black writers in any comprehensive fashion. Thus, the dissertation examines the various extra-literary problems faced by Afro-American writers which have contributed to either many--or few--of their works emerging in print in any era.
