Download or read book Black Literature Criticism Ellison to Lorde written by Jelena O. Krstovic and published by Gale Cengage. This book was released on 2008 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on writers and works published since 1950. The majority of the authors surveyed are African American, but representative African and Caribbean authors are also included.
Download or read book Ralph Ellison written by Arnold Rampersad and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-01-08 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ralph Ellison is justly celebrated for his epochal novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953 and has become a classic of American literature. But Ellison’s strange inability to finish a second novel, despite his dogged efforts and soaring prestige, made him a supremely enigmatic figure. Arnold Rampersad skillfully tells the story of a writer whose thunderous novel and astute, courageous essays on race, literature, and culture assure him of a permanent place in our literary heritage. Starting with Ellison’s hardscrabble childhood in Oklahoma and his ordeal as a student in Alabama, Rampersad documents his improbable, painstaking rise in New York to a commanding place on the literary scene. With scorching honesty but also fair and compassionate, Rampersad lays bare his subject’s troubled psychology and its impact on his art and on the people about him.This book is both the definitive biography of Ellison and a stellar model of literary biography.
Download or read book Black Literature Criticism Ellison to Lorde written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the authors and writings covered in Gale's Black Literature Criticism: Excerpts of the Most Significant Works of Black Authors over the Past 200 Years (1992) and its one-volume supplement (1998) were published prior to 1950, hence this new set of three volumes focusing on African-American (and some African and Caribbean) writers and works published since 1950. It includes coverage of 80 writers whose works are considered canon and have therefore been subjected to major critiques, as well as writers who have appeared in major anthologies and encyclopedias of African American literature. Each author entry includes an introduction that covers biographical details, the major literary interests of the author, descriptions and summaries of the author's best known works, and critical commentary about the author's achievement, status, and importance; a chronological list of principal works; and multiple excerpts of criticism, including book reviews, academic studies of individual works, and comparative studies, arranged chronologically to give a sense of how critical reception evolved over time; and, finally, a further reading list. Also included are author, nationality, and title indexes, comprehensive for these volumes together with the predecessors mentioned above. Annotation.
Download or read book Palmares written by Gayl Jones and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2022 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Fiction A NPR BOOKS WE LOVE 2021 Selection A New York Times “Biggest New Books Coming Out in September” Selection · A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice Pick · A Guardian “50 Biggest Books of Autumn 2021” Selection · An Esquire “Best Books of Fall 2021” Selection · A Buzzfeed “Best Books Coming Out This Fall” Selection · A Bustle “Most Anticipated Books of September 2021” Selection · A LitHub “22 Novels You Need to Read This Fall” Selection · A Kirkus Reviews “16 Best Books to Read in September” Selection · A Root September “PageTurner” “This story shimmers. Shakes. Wails. Moves to rhythms long forgotten . . . in many ways: holy. [A] masterpiece.”—The New York Times Book Review The epic rendering of a Black woman’s journey through slavery and liberation, set in 17th-century colonial Brazil; the return of a major voice in American literature. First discovered and edited by Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century. Now, for the first time in over 20 years, Jones is ready to publish again. Palmares is the first of five new works by Gayl Jones to be published in the next two years, rewarding longtime fans and bringing her talent to a new generation of readers. Intricate and compelling, Palmares recounts the journey of Almeyda, a Black slave girl who comes of age on Portuguese plantations and escapes to a fugitive slave settlement called Palmares. Following its destruction, Almeyda embarks on a journey across colonial Brazil to find her husband, lost in battle. Her story brings to life a world impacted by greed, conquest, and colonial desire. She encounters a mad lexicographer, desperate to avoid military service; a village that praises a god living in a nearby cave; and a medicine woman who offers great magic, at a greater price. Combining the author’s mastery of language and voice with her unique brand of mythology and magical realism, Jones reimagines the historical novel. The result is a sweeping saga spanning a quarter century, with vibrant settings and unforgettable characters, steeped in the rich oral tradition of its world. Of Gayl Jones, the New Yorker noted, “[Her] great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them.” Like nothing else before it, Palmares embodies this gift.
Download or read book Black Literature Criticism Achebe Ellison written by and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Black and Blur written by Fred Moten and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination In Black and Blur—the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single being—Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms. Black and Blur is marked by unlikely juxtapositions: Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and José Esteban Muñoz and artists and musicians including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other. Moten holds that blackness encompasses a range of social, aesthetic, and theoretical insurgencies that respond to a shared modernity founded upon the sociological catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. In so doing, he unsettles normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing.
Download or read book Divine Days written by Leon Forrest and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-15 with total page 1652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A virtuosic epic applauded by Stanley Crouch as “an adventurous masterwork that provides our literature with a signal moment,” back in print in a definitive new edition “I have an awful memory for faces, but an excellent one for voices,” muses Joubert Jones, the aspiring playwright at the center of Divine Days. A kaleidoscopic whorl of characters, language, music, and Black experience, this saga follows Jones for one week in 1966 as he pursues the lore and legends of fictional Forest County, a place resembling Chicago’s South Side. Joubert is a veteran, recently returned to the city, who works for his aunt Eloise’s newspaper and pours drinks at her Night Light Lounge. He wants to write a play about Sugar-Groove, a drifter, “eternal wunderkind,” and local folk hero who seems to have passed away. Sugar-Groove’s disappearance recalls the subject of one of Joubert’s earlier writing attempts—W. A. D. Ford, a protean, diabolical preacher who led a religious sect known as “Divine Days.” Joubert takes notes as he learns about both tricksters, trying to understand their significance. Divine Days introduces readers to a score of indelible characters: Imani, Joubert’s girlfriend, an artist and social worker searching for her lost siblings and struggling to reconcile middle class life with her values and Black identity; Eloise, who raised Joubert and whose influence is at odds with his writerly ambitions; (Oscar) Williemain, a local barber, storyteller, and founder of the Royal Rites and Righteous Ramblings Club; and the Night Light’s many patrons. With a structure inspired by James Joyce and jazz, Leon Forrest folds references to African American literature and cinema, Shakespeare, the Bible, and classical mythology into a heady quest that embraces life in all its tumult and adventure. This edition brings Forrest’s masterpiece back into print, incorporating hundreds of editorial changes that the author had requested from W. W. Norton, but were not made for their editions in 1993 and 1994. Much of the inventory from the original printing of the book by Another Chicago Press in 1992 had been destroyed in a disastrous warehouse fire.
Download or read book Aberrations in Black written by Roderick A. Ferguson and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-11-30 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hard-hitting look at the regulation of sexual difference and its role in circumscribing African American culture The sociology of race relations in America typically describes an intersection of poverty, race, and economic discrimination. But what is missing from the picture—sexual difference—can be as instructive as what is present. In this ambitious work, Roderick A. Ferguson reveals how the discourses of sexuality are used to articulate theories of racial difference in the field of sociology. He shows how canonical sociology—Gunnar Myrdal, Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and William Julius Wilson—has measured African Americans’s unsuitability for a liberal capitalist order in terms of their adherence to the norms of a heterosexual and patriarchal nuclear family model. In short, to the extent that African Americans’s culture and behavior deviated from those norms, they would not achieve economic and racial equality. Aberrations in Black tells the story of canonical sociology’s regulation of sexual difference as part of its general regulation of African American culture. Ferguson places this story within other stories—the narrative of capital’s emergence and development, the histories of Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, and the novels that depict the gendered and sexual idiosyncrasies of African American culture—works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. In turn, this book tries to present another story—one in which people who presumably manifest the dysfunctions of capitalism are reconsidered as indictments of the norms of state, capital, and social science. Ferguson includes the first-ever discussion of a new archival discovery—a never-published chapter of Invisible Man that deals with a gay character in a way that complicates and illuminates Ellison’s project. Unique in the way it situates critiques of race, gender, and sexuality within analyses of cultural, economic, and epistemological formations, Ferguson’s work introduces a new mode of discourse—which Ferguson calls queer of color analysis—that helps to lay bare the mutual distortions of racial, economic, and sexual portrayals within sociology.
Download or read book Making Callaloo written by Charles Henry Rowell and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important book collects a wide range of fiction and poetry that first appeared in the pages of Callaloo, the premier literary journal devoted to African-diaspora literature and to Black literary and cultural studies. Founded in 1976-and still edited-by Charles Henry Rowell (Texas A&M University, College Station), Callaloo is both national and international in terms of scope and readership. It is also, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., observed, "without doubt, the most elegantly edited journal of African and African-American literature [of] today." Making Callaloo, an anthology ideally suited for all readers studying modern Black literature, includes the work of Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lucille Clifton, Terry McMillan, Ai, Nathaniel Mackey, John Edgar Wideman, Michael S. Harper, Charles Johnson, Thylias Moss, and many other distinguished authors.
Download or read book The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison written by Ralph Ellison and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 1073 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A radiant collection of letters from the renowned author of Invisible Man that traces the life and mind of a giant of American literature, with insights into the riddle of identity, the writer’s craft, and the story of a changing nation over six decades These extensive and revealing letters span the life of Ralph Ellison and provide a remarkable window into the great writer’s life and work, his friendships, rivalries, anxieties, and all the questions about identity, art, and the American soul that bedeviled and inspired him until his death. They include early notes to his mother, written as an impoverished college student; lively exchanges with the most distinguished American writers and thinkers of his time, from Romare Bearden to Saul Bellow; and letters to friends and family from his hometown of Oklahoma City, whose influence would always be paramount. These letters are beautifully rendered first-person accounts of Ellison’s life and work and his observations of a changing world, showing his metamorphosis from a wide-eyed student into a towering public intellectual who confronted and articulated America’s complexities.
Download or read book The Black Humanist Tradition in Anti Racist Literature written by Alexandra Hartmann and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-05-13 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an intellectual history and theoretical exploration of black humanism since the civil rights era. Humanism is a human-centered approach to life that considers human beings to be responsible for the world and its course of history. Both the heavily theistic climate in the United States as well as the dominance of the Black Church are responsible for black humanism’s existence in virtual oblivion. For those who believe the world to be one without supernatural interventions, human action matters greatly and is the only possible mode for change. Humanists are thus committed to promoting the public good through human effort rather than through faith. Black humanism originates from the lived experiences of African Americans in a white hegemonic society. Viewed from this perspective, black humanist cultural expressions are a continuous push to imagine and make room for alternative life options in a racist society. Alexandra Hartmann counters religion’s hegemonic grasp and uncovers black humanism as a small yet significant tradition in recent African American culture and cultural politics by studying its impact on African American literature and the ensuing anti-racist potentials. The book demonstrates that black humanism regards subjectivity as embodied and is thus a worldview that is characterized by a fragile hope regarding the possibility of progress – racial and otherwise – in the country.
Download or read book Wrestling with the Left written by Barbara Foley and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-03 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth analysis of the composition of Invisible Man and Ralph Ellisons move away from the radical left during his writing of the novel between 1945 and 1952.
Download or read book Juneteenth written by Ralph Ellison and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The radiant, posthumous second novel by the visionary author of Invisible Man, featuring an introduction and a new postscript by Ralph Ellison's literary executor, John F. Callahan, and a preface by National Book Award-winning author Charles Johnson “Ralph Ellison’s generosity, humor and nimble language are, of course, on display in Juneteenth, but it is his vigorous intellect that rules the novel. . . . A majestic narrative concept.”—Toni Morrison In Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting senator from New England, is mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet while making a speech on the Senate floor. To the shock of all who think they know him, Sunraider calls out from his deathbed for Alonzo Hickman, an old black minister, to be brought to his side. The reverend is summoned; the two are left alone. “Tell me what happened while there’s still time,” demands the dying Sunraider. Out of their conversation, and the inner rhythms of memories whose weight has been borne in silence for many long years, a story emerges. Senator Sunraider, once known as Bliss, was raised by Reverend Hickman in a black community steeped in religion and music (not unlike Ralph Ellison’s own childhood home) and was brought up to be a preaching prodigy in a joyful black Baptist ministry that traveled throughout the South and the Southwest. Together one last time, the two men retrace the course of their shared life in an “anguished attempt,” Ellison once put it, “to arrive at the true shape and substance of a sundered past and its meaning.” In the end, the two men confront their most painful memories, memories that hold the key to understanding the mysteries of kinship and race that bind them, and to the senator’s confronting how deeply estranged he had become from his true identity. In Juneteenth, Ralph Ellison evokes the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech to tell a powerful tale of a prodigal son in the twentieth century. At the time of his death in 1994, Ellison was still expanding his novel in other directions, envisioning a grand, perhaps multivolume, story cycle. Always, in his mind, the character Hickman and the story of Sunraider’s life from birth to death were the dramatic heart of the narrative. And so, with the aid of Ellison’s widow, Fanny, his literary executor, John Callahan, has edited this magnificent novel at the center of Ralph Ellison’s forty-year work in progress—its author’s abiding testament to the country he so loved and to its many unfinished tasks.
Download or read book Roots of Afrocentric Thought written by Clovis E. Semmes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1998-02-12 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The uniqueness, sweeping content, and timing of Negro Digest/Black World give it enormous historical and scholarly importance. The most influential and widely read Black literary magazine in the 1960s, Negro Digest played a critical role in the era's Black Arts and Black Consciousness movement and is the most complete voice of that movement. Renamed Black World in 1970, the magazine gave voice to scholars coining and developing the concept of Afrocentric and African-centered analysis. An analysis of Afrocentric methods and discourse would not be complete without an examination of this magazine. This reference guide provides easy access to this valuable publication. Part One includes chapters on Literature and Literary Criticism, History, Mass Media and the Arts, and Social and Political Analysis, which provide annotations on original articles and speeches. Part Two indexes original materials, including poetry, short stories and plays, reviews, and interviews.
Download or read book Black Literature and Literary Theory written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-19 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The imaginative literature of African and Afro-American authors writing in Western languages has long been seen as standing outside the Western literary canon. In fact, however, black literature not only has a complex formal relation to that canon, but tends to revise and reflect Western rhetorical strategies even more than it echoes black vernacular literary forms. This book, first published in 1984, is divided into two sections, thus clarifying the nature of black literary theory on the one hand, and the features of black literary practice on the other. Rather than merely applying contemporary Western theory to black literature, these critics instead challenge and redefine the theory in order to make fresh, stimulating comments not only on black criticism and literature but also on the general state of criticism today.
Download or read book Invisible Man written by Ralph Ellison and published by Penguin Books Limited. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The invisible man is the unnamed narrator of this impassioned novel of black lives in 1940s America. Embittered by a country which treats him as a non-being he retreats to an underground cell.
Download or read book Black Literature Criticism written by James P. Draper and published by Gale Cengage. This book was released on 1992 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V.1 Achebe - Ellison -- V.2 Emecheta - Malcolm X. -- V.3 Marshall - Young, Indexes.
