The Uncommons (Danez Smith)

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (93) ◽  
pp. 102-110
Author(s):  
Christian P. Haines
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Social Death ◽  
The Face ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Literature Culture

This article examines the poetry of Danez Smith as a practice of commoning. It introduces the concept of the uncommons as a way of thinking about how African American literature, culture, and political practice develop egalitarian forms of life in the face of white supremacism. It considers the ways in which the violences of white supremacism uncommon black life—that is, bar blackness from belonging—as well as the ways in which poetry and politics become avenues through which black life invents alternative socialities. From this perspective, the lyric qualities of Smith’s verse are social not because they prescribe a proper collective identity but because they invent modes of relation that transform social death into the possibility of another way of living. This is the uncommons: a reckoning with the racialized political economy of death that constructs commonality through dissonance, disruption, passion, and power.

An Afterword About Self/Communal Care

2019 ◽  
pp. 235-238
Author(s):  
Ayanna Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Graduate Student ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
The Other ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Literature Culture

It is interesting to note that the terms “Shakespeare” and “social justice” are neither assumed to be synonymous nor necessarily “relevant” to each other. I find this particularly ironic because as a black, female Shakespeare scholar, I have come to think of Shakespeare as my great secret weapon. I frequently wield him in the service of dialogues about equality, justice, and progress as a hidden dagger that slices to the heart of the matter. As a graduate student, I specifically chose not to specialize in African-American literature and culture because I thought (naively and mistakenly) that I would not get a large enough set of interlocutors; many who are resistant to pedagogies/scholarship of justice simply opt not to engage with (i.e. ignore all together) African-American literature, culture, and scholarship. Shakespeare, on the other hand, has been so thoroughly adopted as both the epitome of high culture and as quintessentially American (regardless of the pesky fact of his birth in Stratford-upon-Avon) that many come to his works on the page, the stage, and in the classroom with their defenses down. They are more open and available to complex social issues when they encounter them in Shakespeare’s works. My students regularly comment that they come to my classes to study Shakespeare but leave having learned so much more about our contemporary world. I know that many of you will have heard similar comments....

Langston Hughes: Fringe Modernism, Identity and Defying the Interrogator Witch-Hunter

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-179
Author(s):  
YOMNA SABER
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Black Life ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many ◽  
Children's Stories

Langston Hughes (1902–67), the wondering wandering poet, has left behind a rich legacy of books that never grow dusty on the shelves. There seems to be no path that Hughes left untrodden; he wrote drama, novels, short stories, two autobiographies, poetry, journalistic prose, an opera libretto, history, children's stories, and even lyrics for songs, in addition to his translations. Hughes was the first African American author to earn his living from writing and his career spans a long time, from the 1920s until the 1960s – he never stopped writing during this period. The Harlem Renaissance introduced prominent black writers who engraved their names in the American canon, such as Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, but Hughes markedly stands out for his artistic achievements and longer career. Hughes had been identified by many as the spokesperson for his race since his works dug deep into black life, and his innovative techniques embraced black dialect and the rhythms of black music. He captured the essence of black life with conspicuous sensitivity and polished his voice throughout four decades. His name also had long been tied to the politics of identity in America. Brooding over his position, Hughes chose to take pride in being black in a racist nation. In his case, the dialectics of identity are more complicated, as they encompass debates involving Africa, black nationalism and competing constructions surrounding a seeming authentic blackness, in addition to Du Bois's double consciousness. Critics still endeavour to decipher the many enigmas Hughes left unresolved, having been a private person and a controversial writer. His career continues to broach speculative questions concerning his closeted sexual orientation and his true political position. The beginning of the new millennium coincided with the centennial of his birth and heralded the advent of new well-researched scholarship on his life and works, including Emily Bernard's Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964 (2001), Kate A. Baldwin's Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (2002), Anthony Dawahare's Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box (2002), Bruce R. Schwartz's Langston Hughes: Working toward Salvation (2003), and John Edgar Tidwell and Cheryl R. Ragar's edited collection Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes (2007), among others.

scholarly journals CONTINUITY OF AFROCENTRIC TROPES ABOUT AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY FORMATION IN THE NOVELS BY PAULE MARSHALL AND GLORIA NAYLOR

2020 ◽  
Vol X (32) ◽  
pp. 27-42
Author(s):  
Sandra Novkinić
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Paule Marshall ◽  
Gloria Naylor ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Spiritual Leader

African American literature that is fundamentally a socially symbolic linguistic construct, seeks different ways to expand and continue the use of Afrocentric vernacular tropes of personal and collective identity formation. The five residual oral forms – oratory (including everyday speech acts), myth/ritual performance, legend, tale, and song – as well as satire, irony, and paradox are used by contemporary African American novelists. This paper points to how the legendary black ancestors and elder members of the community, the gifted and often rebellious orator, musician, artist, the spiritual leader, and the messianic figure are equally enduring symbols and tropes. The aim of this work is to show the way in which the contemporary African American novelists Paule Marshall and Gloria Naylor use these (above mentioned) characters and symbols to reconstruct their long struggle as individuals and as community against anti-black racism. Therefore, the focus of this paper is on continuity of Afrocentric tropes in African American personal/collective and female/male identity formation as represented in selected novels by Paule Marshall and Gloria Naylor.

Thinking Through Crisis

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Edward Ford
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Social Breakdown ◽  
Materialist Theory ◽  
Black Life

Thinking through Crisis turns to 1930s African American literature to offer a critical response to Trauma Theory. This theoretical discourse carries a nostalgia for “European Man” that limits its understanding of racial and class antagonisms. Consequently, its version of “bearing witness” yields a political passivity that cannot address the injustices of racism as they are linked to class conflict. Against the political passivity produced by this idealist approach, this book offers a materialist theory of trauma that develops concepts for identifying the agency that Black life produces amid social breakdown.

Another Black Magazine with a Lumumba Poem

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
The Face ◽  
Iconic Figure

This chapter charts the influence of independent Congo’s first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba on the poetry and culture of the Black Arts movement. Although Lumumba was assassinated less than seven months after independence, he lives on as an iconic figure in the poetry that emerged during and after the Black Arts movement. Poems like “lumumba LIVES!” by Ted Joans, “Festivals & Funerals” by Jayne Cortez, and “Lumumba Blues” by Raymond Patterson are part of a genre of elegiac meditation on the Congo in post-1960 African American literature that asks how to speak in the face of haunting silences and how to imagine new political possibilities through literary engagements. These writings employ decidedly African American musical conventions to construct an elegiac discourse that ultimately locates the Congo as a central figure in modern African American poetics. These formal dynamics allow for political crises in the Congo and martyred African leaders like Lumumba to be interpellated as American subjects.

Book Faces

2020 ◽  
pp. 150-165
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Goldsby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Black Literature ◽  
Ethics Of Reading ◽  
The Face

Across the first half of the twentieth century, author portraits migrated from the frontispiece inside of books to the exterior covers of dust jackets; at the same time, while Jim Crow segregation reached its repressive heights in the United States, African-American literature enjoyed unprecedented circulation in the mainstream literary marketplace. This chapter traces this convergence to explore the cultural work performed by the “face” of a book—frontispieces, dust jackets, and author portraits. Examining these lays bare the signal development that distinguishes mid-twentieth-century African-American authorship from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precedents: namely, the turn away from writing as corroboration of black humanity to writing as expressive of black pluralities or personae. By setting alterity, not authenticity, as the threshold where readers meet and interpret black literature as works of art, the migration of author portraits also functions as a trope for the ethics of reading.

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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