Mercy, Mercy Me: African-American Culture and the American Sixties; Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box; South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature

2004 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-194
Author(s):  
S. P. Knadler
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
American Culture ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
African American Culture

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: AN INTRODUCTION

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Kocić Stanković
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
American Studies ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
African American Studies ◽  
Integrative Approach ◽  
Topic Area ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Academic Courses ◽  
The U.S

My purpose in compiling this book was to produce a “student-friendly” course book in African American Studies, the elective course I designed and introduced into the English Department curriculum at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš. The book is meant to provide a brief introduction into the history and culture of African Americans in the U.S., but could also be of interest to the general public, and, hopefully, may add to the practice of teaching African American literature and history already established at Serbian universities. The main purpose of the book is to get the readers/students acquainted with the key events in African American history, the most important political and cultural figures and the most prominent themes in African American culture. One of the goals would also be to spark further interest in this topic area and open possibilities for similar postgraduate academic courses. As most available books in African American studies deal either with history or literature, I have made an attempt to consider the subject from the perspective of cultural studies, integrating historical data with sociological, political and cultural commentary. I have deemed that such an integrative approach would provide the best insight into the study area and give the fullest picture of the African American contribution to the U.S. and world history and culture. The book is divided into eight chapters covering the period from the origins of the Atlantic slave trade to the contemporary period. The concept of individual chapters is as follows: an outline of the most important events, developments and historical figures of a particular period is followed by two or three brief excerpts from some of the most important works by major African American writers which illustrate the most important theme(s) covered in the chapter, accompanied by a brief commentary with topics and questions for further study.

"ENTIRELY BLACK VERSE FROM HIM WOULD SUCCEED

2005 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 494-525
Author(s):  
GENE JARRETT
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
American Culture ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
Racial Authenticity ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Literary Realism

In a letter to a literary editor about promising American writers, William Dean Howells asserted that "a book of entirely black verse" from the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar "would succeed." Howells's appreciation of the racial authenticity of Dunbar's dialect poetry belongs to a larger critical and commercial demand for "minstrel realism" in postbellum nineteenth-century American culture. The racialism of blackface minstrelsy created a cultural precondition in which postbellum audiences regarded Black minstrelsy (that is, minstrelsy performed by Blacks) as realistic. This reaction resulted from the commercialization of Black minstrelsy in American culture as an avant-garde cultural performance of racial authenticity. An analogous reaction, I suggest, occurred in 1896, when Dunbar published Majors and Minors and Howells reviewed it in Harper's Weekly. By situating the ideological politics of Howells's criticism of African American literature, I show that Howells ignored the characteristic eschewal of romance and sentiment in Anglo-American literary realism, while also de�ning African American literary realism in these very terms. This apparent inconsistency results from Howells's subscription to racialism, which then helped to perpetuate this de�nition in the dramatic and literary cultures of minstrelsy. Ultimately, the relationship between Howells and Dunbar and the implications for African American writers confronting a White-dominated literary marketplace might be an overwhelmingly familiar story. Less intuitive or obvious, however, are the precise ways in which the racialism of Howells and this marketplace arbitrated the realism of African American literature.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-32
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The chapter length introduction, “The Post Era,” historicizes both popular cultural (i.e. colorblindness and post-racialism) and scholarly attempts to periodize contemporary African American culture and literary aesthetics (i.e. post-soul, post-black, and postrace). It connects these conceptualizations with the revision of Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness. The introduction locates these shifts in the new millennium in the context of Black politics and the rise of Barack Obama. It also addresses the relationship of the current moment in African American literature with past movements, focusing especially on the post era’s repudiation of the Black Arts Movement.

Dark-Skinned Servants Through the Eyes of a White Author: a case study of K. Stockett’s Novel “The Help”

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 306-318
Author(s):  
Yulia L. Sapozhnikova
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
White People ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
Green Book ◽  
Film Texts

If white authors speak on behalf of dark-skinned characters in their texts, African-American critics and writers often accuse them of attempting cultural appropriation. In this case, according to African-Americans, white people describe them only stereotypically and thus deprive them of a voice. Despite this, such attempts continue. In 2009, K. Stockett released her novel “The Help”, which is narrated by three women, including two dark-skinned maids (Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson). These characters tell about their experiences working for white masters in the early 1960s, in the city of Jackson, Mississippi, during a time of severe racial segregation. Newly arising after every release of such literary or film texts (just remember the recent film “Green book”), the ongoing controversy over cultural appropriation determines the relevance of addressing this topic. K. Stockett presents these characters as anti-racism fighters, with the word as their main weapon. Minny bluntly tells her employers what she thinks of them, which is in line with how African-American authors describe in their texts a way of speaking boldly to those you obey, called “to sass”. On the other hand, Aibileen tries not to show her attitude to white people and, in conversations with them, encodes the true content of her statements as much as possible, in fact using the practice of “signifying”, also characteristic of African-American culture: persuading other maids to tell a white girl about the relationship between masters and servants in their city, in order for it to be published. She deems the written preservation of an ethnic group history as a way to fight against racism. The author comes to the conclusion that K. Stockett follows, consciously or not, the traditions of African-American literature, in which many dark-skinned characters appear as tricksters.

Post-Soul Satire

2014 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Internet Culture ◽  
African American Artists

This volume collects essays that explore the variety of satiric productions in contemporary African American culture. Often dubbed “Post-Soul,” the artists of this period mark a change in political and aesthetic concerns from those embraced by artists of the Civil Rights period. Building off of Bertram Ashe’s notion of “blaxploration” – or the troubling of African American identity – this volume investigates the variety of means that African American artists have used to trouble the understanding of what it means to be black in contemporary America. The chapters in this collection offers the first interdisciplinary approach to the study of satire in contemporary African American literature, film, television, theatre, music, visual arts, and internet culture. The essays in this collection work to discern the means by which “Post-Soul Satire” addresses both in-group and external satiric critique of many aspects of contemporary African American cultural production.

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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