Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 181-186
Author(s):  
Eden Wales Freedman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Dual Versus ◽  
Collaborative Engagement ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Forms Of Violence

The conclusion explores how the theories of dual-witnessing and Venn liminality originated and summarizes how readers can position themselves to dual- versus anti-witness. This section also underscores the power of African American literature to promote dual-witnessing and explicates how readers may witness dually and communally black and female personhood, culture, trauma, and triumph through the African American literary tradition. Finally, the conclusion theorizes how dual-witnessing can extend out of the individual conversation between speaker-survivor and reader-listener into a larger, collaborative engagement with trauma, so that dual-witnessing serves not only as an intellectual exercise but also as a revolutionary response that helps redress racism, sexism, trauma, and other forms of violence.

Circling the Boundaries of the Tradition

2020 ◽  
pp. 27-46
Author(s):  
Guirdex Massé
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Peculiar Case

This chapter is not so much concerned with reviewing, assessing, or critically analyzing the body of Yerby’s work, as it is with delineating the writer’s relationship to these major literary moments that have characterized the black literary tradition at the midpoint of the twentieth century. To simply dismiss Frank Yerby as a peculiar case in African American writing is to miscalculate how significant turns in his literary career reflected dominant movements and trends, as well as formal and thematic innovations and limitations that have characterized the trajectory of African American literature from the early 1930s to the 1940s. This period ranges from the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro Movement to an era of social realism in African American fiction.

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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