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.

scholarly journals Beyond the Color Line: A Postmodernist Reading of Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. p1
Author(s):  
Bi Boli Dit Lama Berté GOURE
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Creative Genius

Though African American literature can be regarded by some theorists as a means of defining the racial self, a postmodernist reading of Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada delves into the intrinsic value of that literature which supersedes the traditional racial connotation ascribed to it. Reed not only castigates the metanarrative of the American cultural and democratic thought through the exposure of its inconstancies and the criticism of traditional ideas on race and ethnicity, but he also gives proof of his creative genius by operating a carnivalization of the novel genre itself.

“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.

scholarly journals the brownies’ book: du bois e a construção de uma referência literária para identidade negra infanto-juvenil

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 01-27
Author(s):  
Valter Roberto Silvério
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Children And Young People ◽  
Jessie Fauset ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Alain Locke ◽  
American Black ◽  
African American Children's Literature

In the period from January 1920 to December 1921 a cooperation between Jessie Fauset, Augustus Dill and W.E.B. Du Bois resulted in the publication of a periodical called “The Brownies’ Book” (TBB) the first publication for North American black, and not white (colored people) children and young people. The creation of “The Brownies' Book” (TBB) was a pioneering event in African American literature in general and, more specifically, in the field of African American children's literature, as it was the first periodical composed and published by African Americans for black children who, until then, searched in vain for material that included a perspective on their experience and history. This article argues that the TBBs were one of the harbingers of the movement called the Harlem Renaissance, constituting a children's literary materialization of the path towards the emergence of what the philosopher Alain Locke called the New Negro. What was being formulated was both the deconstruction of stereotypes associated with blacks and the active projection/creation of a positive identification with their local and ancestral community. This paper seeks to identify the post-WWI discursive strategies and practices of de-racialization proposed for “the children of the sun”, as W.E.B. Du Bois called them, in order to stop seeing themselves “through the eyes of others” (Du Bois, 1903).

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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