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"American literature -- African American authors"
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African American literature : an encyclopedia for students
\"This essential volume provides an overview of and introduction to African American writers and literary periods, from the beginning of the 20th century into the 21st century\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Ulysses in Black
In this groundbreaking work, Patrice D. Rankine asserts that the classics need not be a mark of Eurocentrism, as they have long been considered. Instead, the classical tradition can be part of a self-conscious, prideful approach to African American culture, esthetics, and identity.
Ulysses in Black demonstrates that, similar to their white counterparts, African American authors have been students of classical languages, literature, and mythologies by such writers as Homer, Euripides, and Seneca.
Ulysses in Black closely analyzes classical themes (the nature of love and its relationship to the social, Dionysus in myth as a parallel to the black protagonist in the American scene, misplaced Ulyssean manhood) as seen in the works of such African American writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen. Rankine finds that the merging of a black esthetic with the classics—contrary to expectations throughout American culture—has often been a radical addressing of concerns including violence against blacks, racism, and oppression. Ultimately, this unique study of black classicism becomes an exploration of America’s broader cultural integrity, one that is inclusive and historic.
Outstanding Academic Title,
Choice Magazine
eBook
The Sovereignty of Quiet
African American culture is often considered expressive, dramatic, and even defiant. InThe Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie explores quiet as a different kind of expressiveness, one which characterizes a person's desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, and fears. Quiet is a metaphor for the inner life, and as such, enables a more nuanced understanding of black culture.The book revisits such iconic moments as Tommie Smith and John Carlos's protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and Elizabeth Alexander's reading at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. Quashie also examines such landmark texts as Gwendolyn Brooks'sMaud Martha, James Baldwin'sThe Fire Next Time, and Toni Morrison'sSulato move beyond the emphasis on resistance, and to suggest that concepts like surrender, dreaming, and waiting can remind us of the wealth of black humanity.
eBook
The Strangers Book
The Strangers Book explores how various nineteenth-century African American writers radically reframed the terms of humanism by redefining what it meant to be a stranger. Rejecting the idea that humans have easy access to a common reserve of experiences and emotions, they countered the notion that a person can use a supposed knowledge of human nature to claim full understanding of any other person's life. Instead they posited that being a stranger, unknown and unknowable, was an essential part of the human condition. Affirming the unknown and unknowable differences between people, as individuals and in groups, laid the groundwork for an ethical and democratic society in which all persons could find a place. If everyone is a stranger, then no individual or class can lay claim to the characteristics that define who gets to be a human in political and public arenas.Lloyd Pratt focuses on nineteenth-century African American writing and publishing venues and practices such as the Colored National Convention movement and literary societies in Nantucket and New Orleans. Examining the writing of Frederick Douglass in tandem with that of the francophone free men of color who published the first anthology of African American poetry in 1845, he contends these authors were never interested in petitioning whites for sympathy or for recognition of their humanity. Instead, they presented a moral imperative to develop practices of stranger humanism in order to forge personal and political connections based on mutually acknowledged and always evolving differences.
eBook
A darker wilderness : Black nature writing from soil to stars
\"A vibrant collection of personal and lyric essays in conversation with archival objects of Black history and memory\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Early African American Print Culture
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw both the consolidation of American print culture and the establishment of an African American literary tradition, yet the two are too rarely considered in tandem. In this landmark volume, a stellar group of established and emerging scholars ranges over periods, locations, and media to explore African Americans' diverse contributions to early American print culture, both on the page and off. The book's seventeen chapters consider domestic novels and gallows narratives, Francophone poetry and engravings of Liberia, transatlantic lyrics and San Francisco newspapers. Together, they consider how close attention to the archive can expand the study of African American literature well beyond matters of authorship to include issues of editing, illustration, circulation, and reading-and how this expansion can enrich and transform the study of print culture more generally. Published in cooperation with the Library Company of Philadelphia.
eBook
Transscalar critique : climate, blackness, crisis
\"The history of the contemporary is a history of crisis - most centrally, the twinned crises of environmental destruction and anti-Black violence. Transscalar Critique argues that contemporary Black literature navigates this crisis by taking a transscalar approach, understanding crisis as working on multiple scales simultaneously, from the molecular to the geological, from the economic to the aesthetic. As a consequence, this book proposes transscalar critique as a mode of literary criticism. Organized around specific crises and authors, Transscalar Critique argues that crisis offers a window into how competing analytical, artistic, and planetary frameworks collide. In a moment of crisis, questions of race, geology, politics, epistemology, and ontology are brought into focus in surprising and unexpected ways and Transscalar Critique uses the literary, critical, and public policy responses to these events to reveal connections between the human and nonhuman worlds.\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Freedom time : the poetics and politics of black experimental writing
Experimental poetry and prose by black writers rejects traditional interpretations of social protest and identity formation to reveal radical new ways of perceiving the world.
Winner, 2016 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association
Standard literary criticism tends to either ignore or downplay the unorthodox tradition of black experimental writing that emerged in the wake of protests against colonization and Jim Crow–era segregation. Histories of African American literature likewise have a hard time accounting for the distinctiveness of experimental writing, which is part of a general shift in emphasis among black writers away from appeals for social recognition or raising consciousness. In Freedom Time, Anthony Reed offers a theoretical reading of \"black experimental writing\" that presents the term both as a profound literary development and as a concept for analyzing how writing challenges us to rethink the relationships between race and literary techniques.
Through extended analyses of works by African American and Afro-Caribbean writers—including N. H. Pritchard, Suzan-Lori Parks, NourbeSe Philip, Kamau Brathwaite, Claudia Rankine, Douglas Kearney, Harryette Mullen, and Nathaniel Mackey—Reed develops a new sense of the literary politics of formally innovative writing and the connections between literature and politics since the 1960s.
Freedom Time reclaims the power of experimental black voices by arguing that readers and critics must see them as more than a mere reflection of the politics of social protest and identity formation. With an approach informed by literary, cultural, African American, and feminist studies, Reed shows how reworking literary materials and conventions liberates writers to push the limits of representation and expression.
eBook