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"South African literature Black authors History and criticism."
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Grounds of Engagement
Part literary history, part cultural study, Grounds of Engagement examines the relationships and exchanges between black South African and African American writers who sought to create common ground throughout the antiapartheid era. Stéphane Robolin argues that the authors' geographic imaginations crucially defined their individual interactions and, ultimately, the literary traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Subject to the tyranny of segregation, authors such as Richard Wright, Bessie Head, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Michelle Cliff, and Richard Rive charted their racialized landscapes and invented freer alternative geographies. They crafted rich representations of place to challenge the stark social and spatial arrangements that framed their lives. Those representations, Robolin contends, also articulated their desires for black transnational belonging and political solidarity. The first book to examine U.S. and South African literary exchanges in spatial terms, Grounds of Engagement identifies key moments in the understudied history of black cross-cultural exchange and exposes how geography serves as an indispensable means of shaping and reshaping modern racial meaning.
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The muzzled muse : literature and censorship in South Africa
\"The long history of censorship is a parallel and equally powerful history of literature. Censors bear witness to the power of the word even more forcefully than the writers and the readers they consider dangerous.\" (Index on Censorship 6/1996)A critical assessment of literature produced under censorship needs to take into account that the stategies of the censors are answered by strategies of the writers and the readers. To recognize self-censoring strategies in writing, it is necessary to know the specific restrictions of the censorship regime in question. In South Africa under apartheid all writers were confronted with the question of how to respond to the pressure of censorship. This confrontation took a different form however, depending on what group the writer belonged to and what language he/she used. By looking at white writers writing in Afrikaans and white and black writers writing in English, this book gives the impact of censorship on South African literature a comparative examination which it has not received before. The book considers works by J.M.Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, André Brink, and others less known to readers outside South Africa like Karel Schoeman, Louis Krüger, Christopher Hope, Miriam Tlali and Mtutuzeli Matshoba. It treats the censorship laws of the apartheid regime as well as, in the final chapter, the new law of the Mandela government which shows some surprising similarities to its predecessor.Margreet de Lange teaches Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and coordinates the University's interdisciplinary program of South African Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.\"De Lange expertly sketches in the historical and literary backgrounds as she goes, taking us right up to the recent (unsatisfactory) revision of the censorship laws, making The Muzzled Muse a
vitally important summary of literary censorship in South Africa, and a handbook of what to guard against in the future.\"Shaun de Waal, Mail & Guardian Sept. 26 to October 1, 1997.
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Emerging Traditions
The monograph explores the linguistic impact of the colonial and postcolonial situations in South Africa on language policy, on literary production and especially on the stylistics of fiction by indigenous South Africans writing in English. A secondary concern is to investigate the present place of English in the multilingual spectrum of South African languages and to see how this worldly English relates to Global English, in the South African context.
The introduction presents a socio-linguistic overview of South Africa from pre-historic times until the present, including language planning policies during and after the colonial era and a cursory review of how the difficulties encountered in implementing the Language Plan, provided for by the new South African constitution, impinge on the development of black South African English.
Six chapters track the course of English in South Africa since the arrival of the British in 1795, considered from the point of view of the indigenous African population. The study focuses on ways in which indigenous authors \"indigenize\" their writing, innovating and subverting stylistic conventions, including those of African orature, in order to bend language and genre towards their own culture and objectives.
Each chapter corresponds to a briefly outlined historical period that is largely reflected in linguistic and literary developments. A small number of significant works for each period are discussed, one of which is selected for a case-study at the end of each chapter, where it is subjected to detailed stylistic analysis and appraised for the degree of indigenization or other linguistic or socio-historic influences on style.
The methodology adopted is a linguistic approach to stylistics, focusing on indigenization of English, inspired by the work of Chantal Zabus in her book, The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel (2007, (1991)).
The conclusion reappraises the original hypothesis - that the specific characteristi
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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.
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American Lazarus : religion and the rise of African-American and native American literatures
The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust. This book explores the means bywhich the very first Black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African-American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as earlyBlack and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions.While shedding fresh light on the pioneering figures of African-American and Native American cultural history--including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant--this work also explores a powerful set of little-known Black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals,and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how eighteenth-century Black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion.American Lazarus offers a bold new vision of a foundational moment in American literature. It reveals the depth of early Black and Indian intellectual history and reassesses the political, literary, and cultural powers of religion in America.
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Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature
Geneva Cobb Moore deftly combines literature, history, criticism, and theory in Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women’s Literature by offering insight into the historical black experience from slavery to freedom as depicted in the literature of nine female writers across several centuries. Moore traces black women writers’ creation of feminine and maternal metaphors of power in literature from the colonial era work of Phillis Wheatley to the postmodern work of Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. Through their characters Moore shows how these writers re-create the identity of black women and challenge existing rules shaping their subordinate status and behavior. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and other social science theory, Moore examines the maternal iconography and counter-hegemonic narratives by which these writers responded to oppressive conventions of race, gender, and authority. Moore grounds her account in studies of Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. All these authors, she contends, wrote against invisibility and powerlessness by developing and cultivating a personal voice and an individual story of vulnerability, nurturing capacity, and agency that confounded prevailing notions of race and gender and called into question moral reform. In these nine writers’ construction of feminine images—real and symbolic—Moore finds a shared sense of the historically significant role of black women in the liberation struggle during slavery, the Jim Crow period, and beyond.
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Pan-African American Literature
The twenty-first century is witnessing a dynamic broadening of how blackness signifies both in the U.S. and abroad. Literary writers of the new African diaspora are at the forefront of exploring these exciting approaches to what black subjectivity means. Pan-African American Literature is dedicated to charting the contours of literature by African born or identified authors centered around life in the United States. The texts examined here deliberately signify on the African American literary canon to encompass new experiences of immigration, assimilation and identification that challenge how blackness has been previously conceived. Though race often alienates and frustrates immigrants who are accustomed to living in all-black environments, Stephanie Li holds that it can also be a powerful form of community and political mobilization.
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Abandoning the Black Hero
Abandoning the Black Herois the first book to examine the postwar African American white-life novel-novels with white protagonists written by African Americans. These fascinating works have been understudied despite having been written by such defining figures in the tradition as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ann Petry, and Chester Himes, as well as lesser known but formerly best-selling authors Willard Motley and Frank Yerby.
John C. Charles argues that these fictions have been overlooked because they deviate from two critical suppositions: that black literature is always about black life and that when it represents whiteness, it must attack white supremacy. The authors are, however, quite sympathetic in the treatment of their white protagonists, which Charles contends should be read not as a failure of racial pride but instead as a strategy for claiming creative freedom, expansive moral authority, and critical agency.In an era when \"Negro writers\" were expected to protest, their sympathetic treatment of white suffering grants these authors a degree of racial privacy previously unavailable to them. White writers, after all, have the privilege of racial privacy because they are never pressured to write only about white life. Charles reveals that the freedom to abandon the \"Negro problem\" encouraged these authors to explore a range of new genres and themes, generating a strikingly diverse body of novels that significantly revise our understanding of mid-twentieth-century black writing.
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