Download or read book Reading Africa into American Literature written by Keith Cartwright and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The literature often considered the most American is rooted not only in European and Western culture but also in African and American Creole cultures. Keith Cartwright places the literary texts of such noted authors as George Washington Cable, W.E.B. DuBois, Alex Haley, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Joel Chandler Harris, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, and many others in the context of the history, spiritual traditions, folklore, music, linguistics, and politics out of which they were written. Cartwright grounds his study of American writings in texts from the Senegambian/Old Mali region of Africa. Reading epics, fables, and gothic tales from the crossroads of this region and the American South, he reveals that America's foundational African presence, along with a complex set of reactions to it, is an integral but unacknowledged source of the national culture, identity, and literature.
Download or read book How to Read African American Literature written by Aida Levy-Hussen and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-12-13 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Read African American Literature offers a series of provocations to unsettle the predominant assumptions readers make when encountering post-Civil Rights black fiction. Foregrounding the large body of literature and criticism that grapples with legacies of the slave past, Aida Levy-Hussen’s argument develops on two levels: as a textual analysis of black historical fiction, and as a critical examination of the reading practices that characterize the scholarship of our time. Drawing on psychoanalysis, memory studies, and feminist and queer theory, Levy-Hussen examines how works by Toni Morrison, David Bradley, Octavia Butler, Charles Johnson, and others represent and mediate social injury and collective grief. In the criticism that surrounds these novels, she identifies two major interpretive approaches: “therapeutic reading” (premised on the assurance that literary confrontations with historical trauma will enable psychic healing in the present), and “prohibitive reading” (anchored in the belief that fictions of returning to the past are dangerous and to be avoided). Levy-Hussen argues that these norms have become overly restrictive, standing in the way of a more supple method of interpretation that recognizes and attends to the indirect, unexpected, inconsistent, and opaque workings of historical fantasy and desire. Moving beyond the question of whether literature must heal or abandon historical wounds, Levy-Hussen proposes new ways to read African American literature now.
Download or read book The Earliest African American Literatures written by Zachary McLeod Hutchins and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-12-16 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the publication of the 1619 Project by The New York Times in 2019, a growing number of Americans have become aware that Africans arrived in North America before the Pilgrims. Yet the stories of these Africans and their first descendants remain ephemeral and inaccessible for both the general public and educators. This groundbreaking collection of thirty-eight biographical and autobiographical texts chronicles the lives of literary black Africans in British colonial America from 1643 to 1760 and offers new strategies for identifying and interpreting the presence of black Africans in this early period. Brief introductions preceding each text provide historical context and genre-specific interpretive prompts to foreground their significance. Included here are transcriptions from manuscript sources and colonial newspapers as well as forgotten texts. The Earliest African American Literatures will change the way that students and scholars conceive of early American literature and the role of black Africans in the formation of that literature.
Download or read book African American Literature written by William L. Andrews and published by Henry Holt. This book was released on 1992 with total page 1032 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Images of Africa in Black American Literature written by Marion Berghahn and published by Totowa, N.J. : Rowman and Littlefield. This book was released on 1977 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hemingway and Africa written by Miriam B. Mandel and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2011 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New scholarly essays providing a multifaceted approach to the role of Africa in Hemingway's life and work.
Download or read book The Black Aesthetic Unbound written by PH D April C E Langley and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the era of the slave trade, more than 12 million Africans were brought as slaves to the Americas. Their memories, ideas, beliefs, and practices would forever reshape its history and cultures. April C. E. Langley's The Black Aesthetic Unbound exposes the dilemma of the literal, metaphorical, and rhetorical question, "What is African in African American literature?" Confronting the undeniable imprints of West African culture and consciousness in early black writing such as Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative or Phillis Wheatley's poetry, the author conceives eighteenth-century Black Experience to be literally and figuratively encompassing and inextricably linked to Africa, Europe, and America. Consequently, this book has three aims: to locate the eighteenth century as the genesis of the cultural and historical movements which mark twentieth-century black aestheticism--known as the Black Aesthetic; to analyze problematic associations of African identity as manifested in an essentialized Afro-America; and to study the relationship between specific West African modes of thought and expression and the emergence of a black aesthetic in eighteenth-century North America. By exploring how Senegalese, Igbo, and other West African traditions provide striking new lenses for reading poetry and prose by six significant writers, Langley offers a fresh perspective on this important era in our literary history. Ultimately, the author confronts the difficult dilemma of how to use diasporic, syncretic, and vernacular theories of Black culture to think through the massive cultural transformations wrought by the Middle Passage.
Download or read book Playing in the Dark written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-07-24 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
Download or read book Africans in America written by Charles Johnson and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1999 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the lives of Africans as slaves in America through the eve of the Civil War.
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 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 African American Literature written by Demetrice A. Worley and published by McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages. This book was released on 1998 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of eighty-five selections that exemplify the range and depth of the writing of Africian Americans. f.
Download or read book Voodoo Hoodoo and Conjure in African American Literature written by James S. Mellis and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-06-20 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the earliest slave narratives to modern fiction by the likes of Colson Whitehead and Jesmyn Ward, African American authors have drawn on African spiritual practices as literary inspiration, and as a way to maintain a connection to Africa. This volume has collected new essays about the multiple ways African American authors have incorporated Voodoo, Hoodoo and Conjure in their work. Among the authors covered are Frederick Douglass, Shirley Graham, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ntozake Shange, Rudolph Fisher, Jean Toomer, and Ishmael Reed.
Download or read book African American Writers Classical Tradition written by William W. Cook and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constraints on freedom, education, and individual dignity have always been fundamental in determining who is able to write, when, and where. Considering the singular experience of the African American writer, William W. Cook and James Tatum here argue that African American literature did not develop apart from canonical Western literary traditions but instead grew out of those literatures, even as it adapted and transformed the cultural traditions and religions of Africa and the African diaspora along the way.Tracing the interaction between African American writers and the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome, from the time of slavery and its aftermath to the civil rights era and on into the present, the authors offer a sustained and lively discussion of the life and work of Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Rita Dove, among other highly acclaimed poets, novelists, and scholars. Assembling this brilliant and diverse group of African American writers at a moment when our understanding of classical literature is ripe for change, the authors paint an unforgettable portrait of our own reception of “classic” writing, especially as it was inflected by American racial politics.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature written by Ezra Tawil and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together leading scholars to examine slavery in American literature from the eighteenth century to the present day.
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 A Home Elsewhere written by Robert B. Stepto and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University --
