Download or read book Black Feminism and Traumatic Legacies in Contemporary African American Literature written by Apryl Lewis and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-01-09 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Feminism and Traumatic Legacies in Contemporary African American Literature expands on a literary tradition where Black writers articulate the impact of slavery's legacy over time. Along with Black Feminist studies, this book demonstrates how trauma studies can transcend Eurocentric roots by encompassing traumatic experiences of other cultures through intersectionality.

Download or read book Reading Contemporary African American Literature written by Beauty Bragg and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-11-12 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Contemporary African American Literature focuses on the subject of contemporary African American popular fiction by women. Bragg’s study addresses why such work should be the subject of scholarly examination, describes the events and attitudes which account for the critical neglect of this body of work, and models a critical approach to such narratives that demonstrates the distinctive ways in which this literature captures the complexities of post-civil rights era black experiences. In making her arguments regarding the value of popular writing, Bragg argues that black women’s popular fiction foregrounds gender in ways that are frequently missing from other modes of narrative production. They exhibit a responsiveness and timeliness to the shifting social terrain which is reflected in the rapidly shifting styles and themes which characterize popular fiction. In doing so, they extend the historical function of African American literature by continuing to engage the black body as a symbol of political meaning in the social context of the United States. In popular literature Beauty Bragg locates a space from which black women engage a variety of public discourses.

Download or read book Ancestral Voices Healing Narratives written by Kristina S. Gibby and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-12-06 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction examines four novels by Erna Brodber, Zoé Valdés, Sandra Cisneros, and Maryse Condé. In this unique comparative analysis, Kristina S. Gibby explores the significance of female ghosts—specifically maternal figures, who haunt female narrators, inspiring them to transcribe the dead’s obfuscated (hi)stories and recover their family memory. The author argues that these female ghosts subvert historiographic power structures through a matrilineal succession of knowledge via oral traditions of storytelling, inevitably broadening historical consciousness and asserting the value of fiction in the face of historical rupture. Gibby contends that in form and content, these novels disrupt patriarchal and Western expectations of time and epistemology. They favor cyclical temporality (highlighted by the spirits’ uncanny return), which underscores relational understanding and challenges the exclusive and limiting constraints of linear time. This book makes important contributions to inter-American literary criticism with its narrow focus on female authors who confront the horrors of history through maternal spirits.

Download or read book Reconstructing Womanhood written by Hazel V. Carby and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1987 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist, published in 1987, is a book by Hazel Carby which centers on slave narratives by women. Carby received her Ph.D. in 1984 from Birmingham University. Her doctoral dissertation later became the foundation for the book."--Wikipedia viewed Jan. 7, 2022.

Download or read book THERE WAS TROUBLE LONG BEFORE I WAS AWARE OF IT CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS DISCURSIVE REDEFINITION AND THE SPECULATIVE written by Regina Danielle Hamilton and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do contemporary African American women writers engage the speculative, and what kind of work does this engagement lend itself to? What is the relationship between the realized experiences of African American women in the 1970s and 1980s and the speculative work by African American women authors of the same time period? What historical, political, and aesthetic labor does this relationship do? Using Kindred by Octavia Butler and Beloved by Toni Morrison, I will investigate how these particular authors use the speculative to engage memory and the legacy of African American enslavement, while creating a contemporary African American female aesthetic. In this second renaissance of black women's letters, also cotemporaneous with second wave feminism, African American women writers were responding to civil rights and "mainstream" feminist movements in both their critical and creative work. It became important to many African American women writers to undo the elision of black female perspectives from the histories, trajectories, and traditions of both African American (male) and (white) feminist centered canons. Often this critical literary re-fashioning of the African American woman subject mirrored the revolutionary actions of black feminists working for the enfranchisement of black women and communities. Many African American women writers, in borrowing from certain Black Arts Movement modalities, argued for the existence of and the necessity to define a black female aesthetic. The use of the speculative is one very important component of the aesthetic that these writers were in the process of defining in this time period.

Download or read book Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights written by Robert J Patterson and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The post-civil rights era of the 1970s offered African Americans an all-too-familiar paradox. Material and symbolic gains contended with setbacks fueled by resentment and reaction. African American artists responded with black approaches to expression that made history in their own time and continue to exercise an enormous influence on contemporary culture and politics. This collection's fascinating spectrum of topics begins with the literary and cinematic representations of slavery from the 1970s to the present. Other authors delve into visual culture from Blaxploitation to the art of Betye Saar to stage works like A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White as well as groundbreaking literary works like Corregidora and Captain Blackman. A pair of concluding essays concentrate on institutional change by looking at the Seventies surge of black publishing and by analyzing Ntozake Shange's for colored girls. . . in the context of current controversies surrounding sexual violence. Throughout, the writers reveal how Seventies black cultural production anchors important contemporary debates in black feminism and other issues while spurring the black imagination to thrive amidst abject social and political conditions. Contributors: Courtney R. Baker, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Madhu Dubey, Nadine Knight, Monica White Ndounou, Kinohi Nishikawa, Samantha Pinto, Jermaine Singleton, Terrion L. Williamson, and Lisa Woolfork

Download or read book Traumatic Possessions written by Jennifer L. Griffiths and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-12 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of traumatic stress have explored the challenges to memory as a result of extreme experience, particularly in relation to the ways in which trauma resonates within the survivor’s body and the difficulties survivors face when trying to incorporate their experience into meaningful narratives. Jennifer Griffiths examines the attempts of several African American writers and playwrights to explore ruptures in memory after a traumatic experience and to develop creative strategies for understanding the inscription of trauma on the body in a racialized cultural context. In the literary and performance texts examined here, Griffiths shows how the self is reconstituted through testimony—through the attempt to put into language and public statement the struggle of survivors to negotiate the limits placed on their bodies and to speak controversial truths. Dessa in her jail cell, Venus in the courtroom, Sally on the auction block, Ursa in her own family history, and Rodney King in the video frame—each character in these texts by Sherley Anne Williams, Suzan-Lori Parks, Robbie McCauley, Gayl Jones, and Anna Deavere Smith gives voice not only to the limits of language in representing traumatic experience but also to the necessity of testimony as the public enactment of memory and bodily witness. In focusing specifically and exclusively on the relation of trauma to race and on the influence of racism on the creation and reception of narrative testimony, this book distinguishes itself from previous studies of the literatures of trauma.

Download or read book Rhetorical Healing written by Tamika L. Carey and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2016-09-30 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Black women's literary renaissance ended nearly three decades ago, a profitable and expansive market of self-help books, inspirational literature, family-friendly plays, and films marketed to Black women has emerged. Through messages of hope and responsibility, the writers of these texts develop templates that tap into legacies of literacy as activism, preaching techniques, and narrative formulas to teach strategies for overcoming personal traumas or dilemmas and resuming one's quality of life Drawing upon Black vernacular culture as well as scholarship in rhetorical theory, literacy studies, Black feminism, literary theory, and cultural studies, Tamika L. Carey deftly traces discourses on healing within the writings and teachings of such figures as Oprah Winfrey, Iyanla Vanzant, T. D. Jakes, and Tyler Perry, revealing the arguments and curricula they rely on to engage Black women and guide them to an idealized conception of wellness. As Carey demonstrates, Black women's wellness campaigns indicate how African Americans use rhetorical education to solve social problems within their communities and the complex gender politics that are mass-produced when these efforts are commercialized.

Download or read book New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers written by LaToya Jefferson-James and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2022 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers spans the contemporary era into the AfroFuture. It begins with Ann Petry, who has been forcibly mashed into masculinized critical paradigms, and ends by introducing audiences to Black speculative and Science Fiction writers.

Download or read book Masculinity Under Construction written by LaToya Jefferson-James and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masculinity Under Construction: Literary Re-Presentations of Black Masculinity in the African Diaspora analyzes Black male identity as constructed by Black male authors. In each chapter, Dr. Jefferson-James discusses a different "construction" or definition of masculine identity produced by men of African descent on the continent of Africa, in the Caribbean, and in North America. Combing through the works of James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, Ralph Ellison, George Lamming, and other pan-African authors, Masculinity Under Construction argues for the importance of analyzing the historical context that contributed to the formation of Black male identity. Additionally, Dr. Jefferson-James draws a relationship between Black feminists and writers, such as Anna Julia Cooper and her contemporaries, and these works of literature viewed as primarily about Black masculinity.

Download or read book Existentialist Thought in African American Literature before 1940 written by Melvin G. Hill and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-07 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Existentialist Thought in African American Literature Before 1940 is the first collection of its kind to break new ground in arguing that long before its classification by Jean-Paul Sartre, African American literature embodied existentialist thought. To make its case, this daring book dissects eight notable texts: Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I A Woman (1861), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861), Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). It explores and addresses a wide range of complex philosophical concepts such as: authenticity, potentiality-for-authentic living, bad faith, and existentialism from the Christian point of view. The use of interdisciplinary studies such as gender studies, queer studies, Christian ethics, mixed-race studies, and existentialism, allows the authors within this book to lend unique perspectives in examining selected African American literary works.

Download or read book The Jazz Trope written by Alfonso Wilson Hawkins and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jazz Trope takes a look at the African American lifestyle through the lens of jazz, blues, and spirituals. Through the pioneering efforts of Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, and other notable scholars who have related jazz, spirituals, and blues to African American life and culture, The Jazz Trope offers an opportunity to add scholarship to the perception of African American identity as a creative attempt to survive a unique history and struggle. Transcending structure and the perimeters that it limits, African American musical statements were produced out of a human need to be free. Using jazz as a metaphor for escaping slavery, jazz can be seen as a creative attempt to exceed restriction through the act of improvisation; jazz takes a known melody and changes it to create a personal identity. The literary genre of African American life reflects this melding of musical milieu. It tells through tropes of the folktale, novel, self-script, slave narrative, myth, and legend a unique American experience and history. This book also explores motives and schemes that were hidden behind musical codes, illustrating that jazz (interrelated with its foundation in blues and spirituals) existed as a pre-musical statement and, then, manifested as it is more popularly known: as a musical statement. The Jazz Trope allows students to grasp the jazz song structure within this work and liken it to the tropes that it emits: a true American identity.

Download or read book The Twenty first Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life written by E. Lâle Demirtürk and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-05-25 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the post-9/11 African American novels, developing a new critical discourse on everyday discursive practices of whiteness. The critique of everyday life in the racial context of post-9/11 American society is important in considering diverse forms of the lived experiences and subjectivities of black people in the novels. They help us see that African American representations of the city have political significance in that the “neo-urban novel” explores the possibility of a black dialogic communication to build a transformative social change. Since the real power of Whiteness lies in its discursive power, the book reveals the urgency to understand not only how whiteness works in everyday life in American society. But it also explores how to cultivate new possibilities of configuring and performing Blackness differently, as a response to the post-9/11 configurations of the culture of fear, to produce new ways of interactional social relations that can eventually open up the space of critical awareness for white people to work against rather than reinforce discursive practices of White supremacy in everyday life. This book explores how the multiple subjectivities and transformative acts of blackness can offer ways of subverting the discursive power of the white embodied practices. What defines post-9/11 America as a nation that is consumed by the fear of racialized terrorists is its roots in the fear of (‘uncontrollable’) Blackness as excess and ominous threat in the domestic terrain through which the ideology of White supremacy has constructed for governing through Whiteness. African-American urban novels published in the twenty-first century respond to the discursive power of normative Whiteness that regulates black bodies, selves and lives. This book demonstrates how black people contest white dominant social spaces as sites of black criminality and exclusion in an attempt to re-signify them as the sites of black transformative change through personal and grassroots activism through their performativity of Blackness as an agential identity formation in their interpersonal urban social encounters with white people. Hence, the vulnerable spaces of Whiteness in interracial urban encounters, as it pervasively addresses those moments of transformative change, enacted by Black characters, in the face of the discursive practices of whiteness in the everyday life. These novels celebrate multifarious representations of black individuals, who are capable of using their agency to subvert White discursive power, in finding ways in their personal and grassroots activism to transform the culture of fear that locates Blackness as such in an attempt to make a difference in the American society at large.

Download or read book Bridges to Memory written by Maria Rice Bellamy and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2015-12-04 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the development of a new genre in contemporary American literature that was engendered in the civil rights, feminist, and ethnic empowerment struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Bridges to Memory shows how these movements authorized African American and ethnic American women writers to reimagine the traumatic histories that form their ancestral inheritance and define their contemporary identities. Drawing on the concept of postmemory—a paradigm developed to describe the relationship that children of Holocaust survivors have to their parents' traumatic experiences—Maria Bellamy examines narrative representations of this inherited form of trauma in the work of contemporary African American and ethnic American women writers. Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, and Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Bellamy shows how cultural context determines the ways in which traumatic history is remembered and transmitted to future generations. Taken together, these narratives of postmemory manifest the haunting presence of the past in the present and constitute an archive of textual witness and global relevance that builds cross-cultural understanding and ethical engagement with the suffering of others.

Download or read book Reading Black Reading Feminist written by Henry Louis Gates and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1990-10-30 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique and comprehensive collection of 26 literary essays that explore the rich cultural history of black women in America. Black women’s writing has finally emerged as one of the most dynamic fields of American literature. Here, leading literary critics—both male and female, black and white—look at fiction, nonfiction, poetry, slave narratives, and autobiographies in a totally new way. In essence, they reconstruct a literary history that documents black women as artists, intellectuals, symbol makers, teachers, and survivors. Important writers whose work and lives are explored include Toni Morrison, Gloria Gaynor, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker, and the fascinating list of essays range from Nellie Y. McKay’s “The Souls of Black Women Folk in the Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois” to Jewelle L Gomez’s very personal tribute to Lorraine Hansberry as a dramatist and crusader for social justice. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the editor of this anthology and a noted authority on African-American literature, has provided a thought-provoking introduction that celebrates the experience of “reading black, reading feminist.” A penetrating look at women’s writing from a unique perspective, this superb collection brings to light the rich heritage of literary creativity among African-American women. “Why is the fugitive slave, the fiery orator, the political activist, the abolitionist always represented as a black man? How does the heroic voice and heroic image of the black woman get suppressed in a culture that depended on her heroism for survival?”—Mary Helen Washington, from her essay in Reading Black, Reading Feminist

Download or read book Women Violence Testimony in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston written by Diana Miles and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2003 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zora Neale Hurston produced some of the most provocative literature of the twentieth century. This book examines the numerous scenes of violence against women in her fictional works and the development of her feminist ideals. This groundbreaking book is the first full-length discussion of Hurston's repetitive rendering of violently controlled women. It gives significant insight into why Hurston's themes often questioned the power dynamics of heterosexual relationships. It also explores the effect of death and loss on Hurston's life and reveals intertwined relationships between writing and healing.

Download or read book African American Literature of the Twenty First Century and the Black Arts written by Stephen Casmier and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2023-03-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The six novels that John Edgar Wideman wrote from 1987 to 2017 enable reassessment of the quarantining of the Black Arts movement by African American literary history. These works transform the novel into a charm or functional tool of the black arts, taking writing beyond the act of written representation.