“New and Better Stories”

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-118
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black American ◽  
New Era ◽  
Structural Role ◽  
American Experience ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
American Authors

This chapter analyzes Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) and Paul Beatty’s Slumberland (2008) as attempts to craft the “new and better stories” of the African American experience that Charles Johnson’s 2008 essay “The End of the Black American Narrative” calls for. Johnson’s “The End of the Black American Narrative” posits Obama’s election as a turning point in African American literature, reflecting a new era of representation for African American authors. Through an analysis of Johnson’s essay in concert with Whitehead’s and Beatty’s novels, this chapter argues that these works illuminate a brief moment of optimism for the transcendence not of race itself but of the structural role that race has played and continues to play in American governance. With their shared representation of racial identity as a form of branding, Whitehead and Beatty point towards new conceptualizations of Blackness that embrace contingency and fluidity.

Furiously Funny

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Literature ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Race Identity ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
African America

Furiously Funny: Comic Rage from Ralph Ellison to Chris Rock explores the simultaneous expression of militancy and humor in African American literature that came to fruition in the post–World War II moment. This book traces the increasing presence of African American works containing a combustible mix of fury and radicalism, of pathos and pain, of wit and love that fuse to create what I refer to as comic rage. I employ Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to argue that works of comic rage centralize African American experience and tradition in direct challenges to dominant (white) narratives and (black) counter-narratives about race, identity, and nation. Works of comic rage sit at the center of the discourse through humor’s connection to the familiar and the recognizable in mainstream and African America. Comic rage capitalizes on the inability of African Americans to be fully expelled from mainstream American constructions of its identity and culture. Therefore, as with the abject that cannot be expelled, works of comic rage cause the narratives and counter-narratives to collapse and initiate a re-visioning of fundamental, destructive assumptions within white supremacy. Whether those assumptions involve history, literature, or (white) superiority, comic rage aggressively promotes an African American subjectivity that rejects white stereotypes of blackness and African American responses that remain dependent on the power dynamics that reinforce white supremacy (master vs. slave, perpetrator vs. victim).

scholarly journals Five Times William Du Bois Travelled to the USSR

2021 ◽  
pp. 92-105
Author(s):  
Ol'ga Panova
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Gradual Transition ◽  
Social Experiment ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The Us ◽  
African American Authors

Soviet contacts with African-American authors are an important part of both Soviet-Ame­rican literary contacts and African-American literature history. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963), the most prominent African-American thinker, writer, public figure of the 20th century, occupies a special place. He travelled to the USSR five times (1926, 1936, 1949, 1958–1959, 1962) and had repeatedly addressed the subject of Russia and the USSR in his letters, essays, and fiction. The incentive for Du Bois’ first visit to the USSR was his interest in the Revolution of 1917 and the Russian social experiment, namely, the solution to the race and ethnicity problem. The following visits allow tracing not only the evolution of Du Bois’ viewpoint (which became increasingly leftist), but also the development of his public and literary reputation in the Soviet Union — from wariness (for Du Bois being a liberal and unreliable associate) to honoring him as a major African-American classic and a great friend of the USSR. The fact that William Du Bois had joined the US Communist Party six month before his death and his relocation from the US to Ghana finalized the Soviet idealistic attitude towards the writer’s life. The essence of Du Bois’ journey was perceived as a gradual transition from errors and misconceptions to a more complete acceptance of Marxism-Leninism.

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.

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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