Justifying the Margin: The Construction of “Soul” in Russian and African-American Texts

Slavic Review ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 749-757 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale E. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Free Expression ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Interesting Fact ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Alain Locke ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation

The scholarly world has little noted nor long remembered the interesting fact that the emancipation proclamation of a culturally separate African-American literature was accompanied by a generous acknowledgment of Russian precedent. In 1925 Alain Locke issued the first manifesto of the modern Black Arts movement, The New Negro. There could not have been a clearer call for the free expression of a suppressed native voice: “we have lately had an art that was stiltedly selfconscious, and racially rhetorical rather than racially expressive. Our poets have now stopped speaking for the Negro—they speak as Negroes.“ Even so, this liberating word of the Harlem Renaissance was uttered with a sideward glance at the prior success of nineteenth century Russia's soulful literature and music. Locke himself cited the testimony of his brilliant contemporary, the author of Cane, a poetic distillation of the pungent essence of slavery's culture of oppression: “for vital originality of substance, the young Negro writers dig deep into the racy peasant undersoil of the race life.

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).

Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
GerShun Avilez
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Black Nationalist ◽  
Experimental Works

This book explores the long-overlooked links between Black Nationalist activism and the renaissance of artistic experimentation emerging from recent African American literature, visual art, and film. The book charts a new genealogy of contemporary African American artistic production that illuminates how questions of gender and sexuality guided artistic experimentation in the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. As the book shows, the artistic production of the Black Arts era provides a set of critical methodologies and paradigms rooted in the disidentification with Black Nationalist discourses. The book studies how this emerging subjectivity, termed aesthetic radicalism, critiqued nationalist rhetoric in the past. It also continues to offer novel means for expressing black intimacy and embodiment via experimental works of art and innovative artistic methods. A bold addition to an advancing field, this book rewrites recent black cultural production even as it uncovers unexpected ways of locating black radicalism.

Coda Maintenance, Reconstruction, and Demolition

2019 ◽  
pp. 171-182
Author(s):  
Jonathan Fenderson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts

The coda gives a snapshot of three critical institutional arrangements that offer a framework for understanding the end of the Black Arts movement. Each of these three institutions--Howard University’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities; the seminar on the Reconstruction of African-American Literature, co-sponsored by the Modern Language Association and National Endowment for the Humanities; and the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (and larger surveillance state)--were tied to Fuller’s life and the closing window of opportunity he faced at the end of the movement. More importantly, the coda contends that the presence (or absence) of these institutions in our collective memory help to shape our broader understanding of the Black Arts movement. It not only offers a three-pronged conclusion to the narrative arch of the book, but it also argues that cultural politics played a tremendous role in shaping African American intellectuals’ access to institutional resources.

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.

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