The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War / Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature / Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in US Literature and Law / Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11

2014 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 633-636
Author(s):  
J. A. Gordon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Narrative Ethics ◽  
Literature And Law ◽  
The Revolution

Reconstructing Revenge: Race and Justice after the Civil War

2019 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 751-781
Author(s):  
Gregory Laski
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Colored People ◽  
True Meaning ◽  
Literary Period

Abstract This essay reconsiders the politics of African American literature after the Civil War by focusing on revenge as a response to the wrong of slavery. Though forgiveness dominates literary and historical scholarship, I assemble an archive of real and imagined instances of vengeance in black-authored texts from the period following formal emancipation to the dawn of the twentieth century: the petitions of the freedmen of Edisto Island, South Carolina; the minutes of the 1865 Virginia State Convention of Colored People; the narrative of the ex-slave Samuel Hall; and the Colored American Magazine’s coverage of the lynching of Louis Wright. Reading these works alongside Pauline E. Hopkins’s Winona (1902), I show how her novel develops a philosophy of righteous revenge that reclaims the true meaning of justice in a democracy. Ultimately, this archive can help us not only to examine anew a neglected literary period but also to reimagine racial justice, then and now.

The Genteel Tradition and the Emergence of the African American Sonnet

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-38
Author(s):  
Timo Müller
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter traces the emergence of the sonnet in African American literature to the pervasive influence of genteel conventions. These conventions have widely been regarded as conservative or even stultifying, but they provided black poets with various opportunities for self-assertion in the public sphere. The sonnet was a favourite genre among the genteel establishment, and poets pushed the boundaries of black expression by appropriating the form to subvert racial stereotypes, develop a black poetic subjectivity, and participate in the debate over the memory of the Civil War. In tracing these developments, the chapter repositions the outstanding poets of the period, Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson, alongside their less-known contemporaries, Samuel Beadle, William Stanley Braithwaite, Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr., T. Thomas Fortune, and Henrietta Cordelia Ray.

Irish Heritage in the Literary Remains of Frank Yerby and Henry James

MELUS ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 122-146
Author(s):  
Korey Garibaldi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Henry James ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
British Colonization ◽  
Racial Solidarity ◽  
The One ◽  
Historical Epoch

Abstract This essay investigates how Irish heritage—during the long historical epoch of British colonization—figured into the literary works of Frank Yerby and Henry James. Autobiographical connections and literary affinities between these authors are illuminated and contextualized by, among other published sources, the posthumous collection of essays by the latter novelist’s father, The Literary Remains of the late Henry James (1884). While scholars are newly investigating intersections between Henry James’s oeuvre and African American literature, Yerby’s enormously popular fiction has remained by and large estranged from this new direction in Jamesian studies. When read alongside Henry James, Sr.’s unfinished autobiography featured in the Literary Remains and related nonfictional texts, Yerby’s first novel and commercial best-seller, Foxes of Harrow (1946), seems to share an eerie amount in common with both the James family’s history and their humble Irish origins. Moreover, Yerby’s narrative curiously parallels the cross-racial solidarity the Jameses were regularly credited for in the one hundred years following the American Civil War.

The African Americanization of Victorian Literature

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Daniel Hack
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Political Strategy

This introductory chapter demonstrates how nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature and print culture used Victorian literature to conduct acts of “African Americanization.” Here, close engagement with Victorian literature represented no mere capitulation to existing constraints, but instead constituted a deliberate political strategy and means of artistic expression. The chapter shows that this practice did not impede or undercut the development of a distinctive African American literary culture and tradition, but on the contrary contributed directly to its development. It did so through the very repetition of African Americanizing engagements, repetition that grew increasingly self-conscious and self-referential, as writers and editors built on, responded to, and positioned themselves in relation to prior instances. Victorian literature's role as an important archive for the production of African American literature and print culture, the chapter also argues, makes African American literature and print culture an important archive for the study of Victorian literature.

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

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