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.

Printed Religion, the Public Sphere, and the Disordering of the Union

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas P. Volkman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Chapter 4 reveals that the evangelical schisms in Missouri spurred a radical escalation of theological and political disputation between pro- and antislavery evangelicals in religious newspapers and other printed publications. This verbal sparring played a heretofore unexamined central role in spawning a vicious conflict between northern and southern evangelicals and partisans on the border with Kansas after 1854. To the extent that sectarian strife over the morality of African American bondage spurred armed strife in Missouri from the spring of 1854 through 1860, it played an important role in generating the larger sectional tensions that led to secession and the Civil War.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Black Press ◽  
The Public ◽  
Introductory Section ◽  
African American Sexuality ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere

This introductory section introduces the book’s major arguments and provides an overview of the history of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. The introduction also explores the theoretical conceptualization of the public sphere in relationship to African American life and the scholarship on pleasure and class in African American history. In laying out these terms, the introductory section of the book makes the case that they are useful categories of analysis for a deeper understanding of African American sexuality, pleasure, and the Black Press. Finally, the introduction features a discussion of the significance of the interwar period and its relationship to the history of African American sexuality in the Black Press.

Surpassing Certainty with Janet Mock: A Dialogue

MELUS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Timothy S Lyle
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Transgender Women ◽  
First Century ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Abstract Janet Mock—writer, activist, television host, director—has become a leading voice for transgender women of color in the twenty-first century. In 2014, Mock published Redefining Realness with Atria Books. Shortly thereafter, Mock became a New York Times best-selling writer and garnered the critical praise of folks such as bell hooks, Melissa Harris-Perry, Oprah Winfrey, and more. Hooks described Mock’s work as a guide to transformation, Harris-Perry situated her work in the deep tradition of life writing in African American literature, and Winfrey called her a “fearless new voice” who “changed my way of thinking.” In 2017, Mock published her second memoir, Surpassing Certainty, marking a rare moment in which a transgender woman-of-color writer released a second book with a major publisher. During our conversation at Babbalucci, a restaurant in her beloved Harlem neighborhood, Mock reflected on her first book in light of the writing of her sophomore release. She also shared insight about writing love and dating storylines for transgender women of color, an amplified focus in Surpassing Certainty, and she discussed the dynamics of disclosure in narrative and life. Further, she ruminated about what constitutes home for her and how to write about space and place. Such remarks importantly center her Hawaiian roots and her multi-ethnic identity. Finally, Mock offered her most recent thoughts on being a trans woman of color in the public sphere in a turbulent national climate—particularly for folks on the margins of the already-marginalized.

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.

James Weldon Johnson

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nowlin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
New York University ◽  
Daily Newspaper ◽  
Fisk University

James Weldon Johnson (b. 1871–d. 1938) was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. After graduating with a BA from Atlanta University, he became principal of his former grammar school, established the first daily newspaper for Jacksonville’s African American population, and gained admission to the Florida bar. With his brother, the musician J. Rosamond Johnson, he also wrote the song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” for a commencement ceremony (in 1900), and it eventually became known as the “Negro National Anthem.” He joined his brother in New York in 1902 to launch a successful songwriting team with Bob Cole. Johnson gave up show business in 1906 to become US Consulate, first in Venezuela, then Nicaragua, where he completed his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which was published anonymously in 1912. In 1914 he moved to Harlem with his wife Grace Nail Johnson (whom he married in 1910). He began writing editorials on a range of subjects for the New York Age, a nationally circulating African American newspaper, and in 1915 he joined the recently established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He became secretary of the organization in 1920 and remained so until 1930. Fifty Years and Other Poems, his first collection, was published in 1917. In 1922 he edited The Book of American Negro Poetry, the first anthology of its kind, and established himself as a pioneering theorist of African American poetics and a guiding light of the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson modeled his poetic ideas in the 1927 volume God’s Trombones, which appeared in the same year he reissued The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man under his name. In 1929, a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship enabled him to devote a year to writing, which resulted in Black Manhattan, a history of African Americans in New York. From 1930 onward, Johnson taught creative writing and African American literature at Fisk University as well as New York University. His 1933 autobiography Along This Way was widely acclaimed, and he collected both new and old poems in the 1935 volume St. Peter Relates an Incident. When he died in a car accident in 1938, Johnson was one of the most honored and respected African Americans in the United States, recognized at once as a man of letters, an advocate of black America’s cultural achievements, and a tireless political opponent of America’s Jim Crow system.

Twerking and Cultural Appropriation: Miley Cyrus' Display of Racial Ignorance

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shereen Zink
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Miley Cyrus’ recent habit of twerking has sparked debate over whether the pop star is misappropriating African American culture; some even going so far as to accuse her of racism. This paper reviews the literature that exists in the public sphere on the topic, and delves into a scholarly analysis of Cyrus’ actions, statements, and the implications they have. My own post-analysis interpretation of the issue is addressed in the concluding paragraphs. Ultimately, twerking’s political context, and Cyrus’ lack of regard for said context, suggest that she is perpetuating harmful stereotypes about black women while her own white privilege allows her to maintain her integrity. Cyrus may not be intentionally exploiting black culture, but she is certainly communicating more than she may have bargained for.  

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