Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Edouard Glissant ◽  
Edwidge Danticat ◽  
Verbal Art ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Randall Kenan ◽  
American Poets ◽  
Black Writing ◽  
Literatures Of The Americas

At the turn of the millennium, the Martinican novelist and critic Édouard Glissant offered the bold prediction that “Faulkner’s oeuvre will be made complete when it is revisited and made vital by African Americans,” a goal that “will be achieved by a radically ‘other’ reading.” In the spirit of Glissant’s prediction, Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas places William Faulkner’s literary oeuvre in dialogue with a hemispheric canon of black writing from the U.S. and the Caribbean. The volume’s seventeen essays and poetry selections chart lines of engagement, dialogue, and reciprocal resonance between Faulkner and his black precursors, contemporaries, and successors in the Americas. Contributors place Faulkner’s work in reciprocally illuminating conversation with writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Randall Kenan, Edward P. Jones, and Natasha Trethewey, and with the musical artistry of Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton. In addition, a quintet of emerging African American poets offer their own creative responses to Faulkner’s writings, characters, verbal art, and historical example. In these ways, Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas develops a comparative approach to the Faulkner oeuvre that goes beyond the compelling but also limiting question of influence—who read whom, whose works draw from whose—to explore the confluences between Faulkner and black writing in the hemisphere: the common questions framed in their bodies of work, the responses to common problems, precursors, and events.

F.B. Eyes

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Literature ◽  
Federal Bureau Of Investigation ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Black Protest ◽  
State Surveillance ◽  
Black Writing ◽  
National Emergency

Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). But behind the scenes, the FBI's hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, this book exposes the Bureau's intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem's renaissance and Hoover's career at the Bureau, secretive FBI “ghostreaders” monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover's death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau 's close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as this book reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century. This book details how the FBI threatened the international travels of African American writers and prepared to jail dozens of them in times of national emergency. All the same, it shows that the Bureau's paranoid style could prompt insightful criticism from Hoover's ghostreaders and creative replies from their literary targets. For authors such as Claude McKay, James Baldwin, and Sonia Sanchez, the suspicion that government spy-critics tracked their every word inspired rewarding stylistic experiments as well as disabling self-censorship. Illuminating both the serious harms of state surveillance and the ways in which imaginative writing can withstand and exploit it, this book is a groundbreaking account of a long-hidden dimension of African American literature.

Gutter and Skyline

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Timberman Newcomb
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Urban Modernity ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
And Gender ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Ethnicity And Gender

This chapter examines the little magazines' shift to a poetry of modern life between 1910 and 1925 by discarding long-standing generic strictures of style and subject matter in favor of themes dealing with the industrialized metropolis. Soon after 1910, many poets such as T. S. Eliot, Claude McKay, and Carl Sandburg began to write verses about life in the modern city. This turn toward urban subject matter marked a decisive change in American poetry's relationship to modernity and an epochal departure from national traditions. This chapter considers the integral connection between verse and the visual arts as many American poets focused on investigating urban modernity as a subject. It also discusses the different ways that these poets learned to represent the machine-age metropolis after 1910 and challenged the aesthetic and ideological verities of class, ethnicity, and gender underlying their romantic-genteel inheritance; acts of observation in American cityscape verse that operate at both microscopic and panoramic levels; and poems of gutters, street pavements, and skylines that are complementary within an emerging poetics of urban materiality.

Contemporary Black Writing and Southern Social Belonging: Beyond the Faulknerian Shadow of Loss

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Hinrichsen ◽  
Jay Watson
Keyword(s):  
Black Writers ◽  
The South ◽  
Randall Kenan ◽  
Wound Culture ◽  
Social Belonging ◽  
Black Writing

This chapter examines how Randall Kenan responds to both the force and inadequacy of Faulkner’s gothic representations of white southern loss which have arguably functioned to export—and perhaps exploit—a sense of the South as a “wound culture.” The chapter argues that in confronting how representations of white loss might have been used to legitimize or excuse pervasive forms of exclusion, racism, and homogeneity, contemporary black writers such as Kenan address the function of the gothic, as a genre of loss, in fostering a culture held in the grip of slavery. Specifically, Kenan’s queer appropriation of the gothic in A Visitation of Spirits signifies on the regulatory implications of the genre, calling into question the orthodoxies of white Renascence fiction.

Black Land

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Nurhussein
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
African Nation ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Black Transnationalism ◽  
American Media ◽  
Star Order

This is the first book to explore how African American writing and art engaged with visions of Ethiopia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the only African nation, with the exception of Liberia, to remain independent during the colonization of the continent, Ethiopia has long held significance for and captivated the imaginations of African Americans. The book delves into nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American artistic and journalistic depictions of Ethiopia, illuminating the increasing tensions and ironies behind cultural celebrations of an African country asserting itself as an imperial power. It navigates texts by Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, Harry Dean, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, and others, alongside images and performances that show the intersection of African America with Ethiopia during historic political shifts. From a description of a notorious 1920 Star Order of Ethiopia flag-burning demonstration in Chicago to a discussion of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as Time magazine's Man of the Year for 1935, the book illuminates the growing complications that modern Ethiopia posed for American writers and activists. American media coverage of the African nation exposed a clear contrast between the Pan-African ideal and the modern reality of Ethiopia as an antidemocratic imperialist state: Did Ethiopia represent the black nation of the future, or one of an inert and static past? Revising current understandings of black transnationalism, the book presents a well-rounded exploration of an era when Ethiopia's presence in African American culture was at its height.

scholarly journals The African-American Poets' Struggle for the Rights of People: A Study in Claude McKay's Selected Poems

Twejer ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 821-866
Author(s):  
Hameed Abdullah Mustafa ◽  
◽  
Sherzad Shafi'h Barzani
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This study scrutinizes selected protest poems written by the prominent black poet of the Harlem Renaissance Claude McKay (1889-1948). McKay is considered as a key literary figure of the Negro movement who played a significant role in struggling for and awakening his own people to demand their rights. His major aspiration was to end all forms of prejudice and oppression against blacks portrayed in his poems during the most effective movement in African American literary history comprising the times between 1920 to almost the mid-1930s. McKay established himself as a powerful literary voice for social justice during the Harlem Renaissance constantly struggling for people's identity and rights against the widespread prejudice, segregation, and racism against blacks in America and worldwide along with his pride in his black race and culture. These central issues had different impacts on the Harlem Renaissance and on the lives and works of those who participated in that movement; depicting how both race and racism could define the African American experience in the early twentieth century, as well. McKay, skillfully combined traditional forms and political protest in many of his sonnets. He took the old poetic genre and made it new and relevant to his own project by examining within its bounds unconventional and contemporary subjects. Along with his poetic diction and imagery, he juxtaposes contrasting images to show the hypocritic nature of America, showing his inevitable faith in the country. McKay's enthusiasm for and belief in the authority of intellectuals was strengthened by his understanding of America's deep-rooted racism. He closes many of his sonnets with gloomy observations of blacks' sufferings. The clear conclusion of his struggle was the fact that negro writers succeeded in showcasing the sufferings of people, incited blacks to demand their legal rights, and proved they are capable of everything and as genius as whites. Keywords: McKay, Struggles, Racism, identity, prejudice, rights.

Negro and Negro

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gayle Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Nicolas Guillen ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
The Us ◽  
Emilio Ballagas ◽  
Black Writing ◽  
Guillermo De Torre

Examines the reception of black US writing in Spain in order to contextualize and defamiliarize it as literatura negra norte-americana. By studying the translations, anthologies, and bilingual Spanish-English texts in which works by Hughes and Claude McKay appeared alongside works by leading figures of the Afro-Caribbean negrismo movement (Nicolás Guillén and Emilio Ballagas), this chapter reveals the ways in which black diasporic writing was given a unique new genealogy. Moving away from the Francophone négritude movement and reducing Africa to a source of a remote cultural past, figures like Ballagas collaborated with Spanish critics like Guillermo de Torre to reinterpret contemporary black writing as produced distinctly by the crossings of the US and Spanish empires. US black writing thus illuminated and complicated Spain’s racial past. Hughes, in turn, became for Spaniards and Spanish Americans alike the poet of an uncertain vision of blackness and leftist revolution. This vision was adopted by the Spanish Republicans during the civil war, just as they were paradoxically purging any notion of Moorish “blackness” or Africanism from their own political identity—something that Hughes himself engaged when he translated their poems on “Moorish traitors.”

Lectin-Induced RBC Agglutination: Chemical vs. Cryofixation

1980 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 664-665
Author(s):  
Dean A. Handley ◽  
Lanping A. Sung ◽  
Shu Chien
Keyword(s):  
Lectin Binding ◽  
Freeze Substitution ◽  
Electrostatic Charge ◽  
Geometric Parameters ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Chemical Fixation ◽  
Cell Surfaces ◽  
Minimal Cell ◽  
Membrane Stiffness ◽  
Cell Contour

RBC agglutination by lectins represents an interactive balance between the attractive (bridging) force due to lectin binding on cell surfaces and disaggregating forces, such as membrane stiffness and electrostatic charge repulsion (1). During agglutination, critical geometric parameters of cell contour and intercellular distance reflect the magnitude of these interactive forces and the size of the bridging macromolecule (2). Valid ultrastructural measurements of these geometric parameters from agglutinated RBC's require preservation with minimal cell distortion. As chemical fixation may adversely influence RBC geometric properties (3), we used chemical fixation and cryofixation (rapid freezing followed by freeze-substitution) as a comparative approach to examine these parameters from RBC agglutinated with Ulex I lectin.

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