Make Revolution Irresistible: The Role of the Cultural Worker in the Twenty-First Century

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (2) ◽  
pp. 481-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salamishah Tillet
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
The Public ◽  
African American Music ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
June Jordan ◽  
Black Public Intellectual

I was introduced to the term public intellectual almost twenty years ago when I was an undergraduate in a literary course on African American music taught by the cultural critic Farah Jasmine Griffin. The class conversations began with readings of jazz and hip-hop artists as “organic intellectuals” in the sense developed by Antonio Gramsci. We quickly moved to the debates sparked by Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual (1993) and to the rise of the black public intellectual as demonstrated by the formation by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of an academic “dream team” in African American studies at Harvard, Cornel West's publication of Race Matters (1994), and Robert Boynton's March 1995 article in the Atlantic entitled “The New Intellectuals,” which added Toni Morrison, Stanley Crouch, Patricia Williams, Michael Eric Dyson, Derrick Bell, June Jordan, and many others to that category. By the time I arrived at Harvard in 1999, for graduate study in African American literature, the idea of the black public intellectual served as a backdrop and a blueprint for how my generation of scholars could live inside and beyond the campus walls. As beneficiaries of that era, my peers and I did not necessarily have to prove that our work belonged in the public; instead, we had to wrestle with newer questions of format and forum in the digital age.

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.

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Wall
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
First Century ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The Status ◽  
June Jordan

Although they have written in various genres, African American writers as notable and diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker have done their most influential work in the essay form. The Souls of Black Folk, The Fire Next Time, and In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens are landmarks in African American literary history. Many other writers, such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Richard Wright, are acclaimed essayists but achieved greater fame for their work in other genres; their essay work is often overlooked or studied only in the contexts of their better-known works. Here Cheryl A. Wall offers the first sustained study of the African American essay as a distinct literary genre. Beginning with the sermons, orations, and writing of nineteenth-century men and women like Frederick Douglass who laid the foundation for the African American essay, Wall examines the genre's evolution through the Harlem Renaissance. She then turns her attention to four writers she regards as among the most influential essayists of the twentieth century: Baldwin, Ellison, June Jordan, and Alice Walker. She closes the book with a discussion of the status of the essay in the twenty-first century as it shifts its medium from print to digital in the hands of writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brittney Cooper. Wall's beautifully written and insightful book is nothing less than a redefinition of how we understand the genres of African American literature.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kinohi Nishikawa
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
American Studies ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Assistant Professor ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
African American Studies ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Henry Louis Gates

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is an African American literary critic, cultural historian, television host and scriptwriter, and educator. He is currently the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he is also professor of African and African American studies, professor of English, and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Gates is the most important critic, theorist, and editor of African American literature of his generation, and the central figure on whom the institutionalization of African American literary study rests. He was born on 16 September 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia, to a working-class family in a segregated part of town. A misdiagnosed hip injury in his teenage years left Gates with a disability that he was able to turn into an affectionate nickname, “Skip.” He received a degree in history from Yale University in 1973 and earned his PhD from Clare College, Cambridge, in 1979. One of his mentors at Cambridge was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, who helped Gates understand black literary expression as a diasporic phenomenon. Upon completion of his dissertation, Gates was appointed an assistant professor of English and Afro-American studies at Yale. He moved to Cornell University, which granted him tenure, in 1985, and then went on to Duke University in 1989, staying there for two years. Harvard University recruited him in 1991, and he has been at the institution ever since. While a faculty member at Harvard, Gates has expanded the reach of his work, writing general nonfiction for nationally circulating publications and hosting and producing documentaries for public-television broadcasting. Through that work, Gates has made African American studies recognizable as a robust intellectual project and an integral part of higher education to the broader public. Although he is best known today for his television appearances, Gates maintains his interest in African American literary study, continuing to edit key works from the tradition and writing criticism based on his findings.

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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