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"LITERARY CRITICISM American African American."
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Before Harlem : an anthology of African American literature from the long nineteenth century
\"Despite important recovery and authentication efforts during the last twenty-five years, the vast majority of nineteenth-century African American writers and their work remain unknown to today's readers. Moreover, the most widely used anthologies of black writing have established a canon based largely on current interests and priorities. Seeking to establish a broader perspective, this collection brings together a wealth of autobiographical writings, fiction, poetry, speeches, sermons, essays, and journalism that better portrays the intellectual and cultural debates, social and political struggles, and community publications and institutions that nurtured black writers from the early 1800s to the eve of the Harlem Renaissance. As editor Ajuan Mance notes, previous collections have focused mainly on writing that found a significant audience among white readers. Consequently, authors whose work appeared in African American-owned publications for a primarily black audience--such as Solomon G. Brown, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, and T. Thomas Fortune--have faded from memory. Even figures as celebrated as Frederick Douglass and Paul Laurence Dunbar are today much better known for their \"cross-racial\" writings than for the larger bodies of work they produced for a mostly African American readership. There has also been a tendency in modern canon making, especially in the genre of autobiography, to stress antebellum writing rather than writings produced after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Similarly, religious writings--despite the centrality of the church in the everyday lives of black readers and the interconnectedness of black spiritual and intellectual life--have not received the emphasis they deserve. Filling those critical gaps with a selection of 143 works by 65 writers, Before Harlem presents as never before an in-depth picture of the literary, aesthetic, and intellectual landscape of nineteenth-century African America and will be a valuable resource for a new generation of readers. \"-- Provided by publisher.
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The Earliest African American Literatures
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.
eBook
A Joyous Revolt : Toni Cade Bambara, Writer and Activist
\"At long last--a book-length biography celebrates Toni Cade Bambara, a seminal literary, cultural, and political figure who was among the most widely read and frequently reviewed of the well-regarded black women writers to emerge in the l970s. \"-- Provided by publisher.
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Neither Fugitive nor Free
Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series Neither
Fugitive nor Free draws on the freedom suit as recorded in the
press and court documents to offer a critically and historically
engaged understanding of the freedom celebrated in the literary and
cultural histories of transatlantic abolitionism. Freedom suits
involved those enslaved valets, nurses, and maids who accompanied
slaveholders onto free soil. Once brought into a free jurisdiction,
these attendants became informally free, even if they were taken
back to a slave jurisdiction-at least according to abolitionists
and the enslaved themselves. In order to secure their freedom
formally, slave attendants or others on their behalf had to bring
suit in a court of law. Edlie Wong critically recuperates these
cases in an effort to reexamine and redefine the legal construction
of freedom, will, and consent. This study places such historically
central anti-slavery figures as Frederick Douglass, Olaudah
Equiano, and William Lloyd Garrison alongside such lesser-known
slave plaintiffs as Lucy Ann Delaney, Grace, Catharine Linda, Med,
and Harriet Robinson Scott. Situated at the confluence of literary
criticism, feminism, and legal history, Neither Fugitive nor Free
presents the freedom suit as a \"new\" genre to African American and
American literary studies.
eBook
African American gothic : screams from shadowed places
\"African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places is a new study of African American literary interventions into the gothic genre. The book investigates how African American authors have utilized the genre since its very beginnings in America to represent the real horrors of Black life in country haunted by racism. Re-reading major African American literary texts--such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Of One Blood, Cane, Invisible Man, and Corregidora--African American Gothic investigates texts from each major era in African American Culture to show how the gothic has consistently circulated throughout the African American literary canon\"-- Provided by publisher.
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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
New media in Black women's autobiography : intrepid embodiment and narrative innovation
\" Using 1980 as a starting point, Curtis explores how black women's insistence on writing embodiment into their narratives addresses and supplants images deployed against them. She argues that although many stereotypes rely on the notion that black female identity comes only from and through the body, emphasis on corporeality serves these women well. Joining somatic experience with complicated inner lives compels at least understanding and perhaps empathy. Privileging their experiences as the only road to truths about their lives succeeds across formats. Deployed by black women, new media facilitate well-executed, defiant, creative autobiographical gestures that should be considered among the most effective and innovative in their respective milieus\"-- Provided by publisher.
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In the Shadow of the Gallows
From Puritan Execution Day rituals to gangsta rap, the black criminal has been an enduring presence in American culture. To understand why, Jeannine Marie DeLombard insists, we must set aside the lenses of pathology and persecution and instead view the African American felon from the far more revealing perspectives of publicity and personhood. When the Supreme Court declared inDred Scottthat African Americans have \"no rights which the white man was bound to respect,\" it overlooked the right to due process, which ensured that black offenders-even slaves-appeared as persons in the eyes of the law. In the familiar account of African Americans' historical shift \"from plantation to prison,\" we have forgotten how, for a century before the Civil War, state punishment affirmed black political membership in the breach, while a thriving popular crime literature provided early America's best-known models of individual black selfhood. Before there was the slave narrative, there was the criminal confession. Placing the black condemned at the forefront of the African American canon allows us to see how a later generation of enslaved activists-most notably, Frederick Douglass-could marshal the public presence and civic authority necessary to fashion themselves as eligible citizens. At the same time, in an era when abolitionists were charging Americans with the national crime of \"manstealing,\" a racialized sense of culpability became equally central to white civic identity. What, for African Americans, is the legacy of a citizenship grounded in culpable personhood? For white Americans, must membership in a nation built on race slavery always betoken guilt?In the Shadow of the Gallowsreads classics by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, George Lippard, and Edward Everett Hale alongside execution sermons, criminal confessions, trial transcripts, philosophical treatises, and political polemics to address fundamental questions about race, responsibility, and American civic belonging.
eBook
Aphrodite's Daughters
The Harlem Renaissance was a watershed moment for racial uplift, poetic innovation, sexual liberation, and female empowerment.Aphrodite's Daughtersintroduces us to three amazing women who were at the forefront of all these developments, poetic iconoclasts who pioneered new and candidly erotic forms of female self-expression.
Maureen Honey paints a vivid portrait of three African American women-Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery-who came from very different backgrounds but converged in late 1920s Harlem to leave a major mark on the literary landscape. She examines the varied ways these poets articulated female sexual desire, ranging from Grimké's invocation of a Sapphic goddess figure to Cowdery's frank depiction of bisexual erotics to Bennett's risky exploration of the borders between sexual pleasure and pain. Yet Honey also considers how they were united in their commitment to the female body as a primary source of meaning, strength, and transcendence.
The product of extensive archival research,Aphrodite's Daughtersdraws from Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery's published and unpublished poetry, along with rare periodicals and biographical materials, to immerse us in the lives of these remarkable women and the world in which they lived. It thus not only shows us how their artistic contributions and cultural interventions were vital to their own era, but also demonstrates how the poetic heart of their work keeps on beating.
eBook