The Souls of Black Folk

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Nava
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Black American ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Black Musicians ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores some of the synergies between Spanish soul and black American traditions through Ralph Ellison's depiction of soul. In turning to Ellison, a contemporary of Lorca, this chapter falls in the thick of musical and cultural currents of soul. Like many black writers of the twentieth century, Ellison brought musical cadences and flows into the mighty river of American literature, injecting some of its stagnant waters with a fresh tributary of style. By adding his lyrical voice to American literature, he used his pen the way black musicians used their instruments, making it sing on behalf of a black American experience that was invisible in many parts of America. He not only honored conceptions of soul in black music, folklore, literature, and religion in this way, but also simultaneously exposed the blindness and tone deafness of many Americans.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. xviii-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Gerald Kennedy ◽  
Scott Peeples
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Literature ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Critical Approaches

Edgar Allan Poe has long occupied a problematic place in discussions of American literature. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, an intensive reexamination of his relationship to nineteenth-century print culture and the controversies of Jacksonian America reframed our understanding of his work. Whereas scholars once regarded his dark fantasies as extraneous to American experience, we now recognize the complex and nuanced ways in which Poe’s work responded to and questioned core assumptions of American culture. The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe offers a wide-ranging exploration of Poe, rereading his works through a variety of critical approaches and illuminating his ultimate impact on global literature, art, and culture. The introduction to the volume traces the development of scholarship on Poe from the time of his death in 1849 to the beginning of the twenty-first century, exploring the future possibilities for the study of Poe in the digital era.

scholarly journals The (Mis)Representation of African American Music: The Role of the Fiddle

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACQUELINE COGDELL DJEDJE
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Black People ◽  
American Music ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Black Musicians ◽  
African American Music ◽  
Musical Traditions

AbstractDuring the early twentieth century, research on African American music focused primarily on spirituals and jazz. Investigations on the secular music of blacks living in rural areas were nonexistent except for the work of folklorists researching blues. Researchers and record companies avoided black fiddling because many viewed it not only as a relic of the past, but also a tradition identified with whites. In the second half of the twentieth century, rural-based musical traditions continued to be ignored because researchers tended to be music historians who relied almost exclusively on print or sound materials for analyses. Because rural black musicians who performed secular music rarely had an opportunity to record and few print data were available, sources were lacking. Thus, much of what we know about twentieth-century black secular music is based on styles created and performed by African Americans living in urban areas. And it is these styles that are often represented as the musical creations for all black people, in spite of the fact that other traditions were preferred and performed. This article explores how the (mis)representation of African American music has affected our understanding of black music generally and the development of black fiddling specifically.

“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.

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