African American Postmodern Supernaturalism

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 200
Author(s):  
Nataša Vajić
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Postmodern Literature ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Last Stage ◽  
Cultural Features

African American postmodern supernaturalism is the last stage in the development of African American literature, but also contemporary world literature in general. By embracing one's own African elements and enriching postmodern literature, African American supernaturalism experimented with the syncretism of the past and the future, tradition and futurism. Seeking for a new kind of literary expressionism, the African American writer strives to preserve ancient cultural features by combining them into something completely new and what separates them from the rest of world literature.

An Afterword About Self/Communal Care

2019 ◽  
pp. 235-238
Author(s):  
Ayanna Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Graduate Student ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
The Other ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Literature Culture

It is interesting to note that the terms “Shakespeare” and “social justice” are neither assumed to be synonymous nor necessarily “relevant” to each other. I find this particularly ironic because as a black, female Shakespeare scholar, I have come to think of Shakespeare as my great secret weapon. I frequently wield him in the service of dialogues about equality, justice, and progress as a hidden dagger that slices to the heart of the matter. As a graduate student, I specifically chose not to specialize in African-American literature and culture because I thought (naively and mistakenly) that I would not get a large enough set of interlocutors; many who are resistant to pedagogies/scholarship of justice simply opt not to engage with (i.e. ignore all together) African-American literature, culture, and scholarship. Shakespeare, on the other hand, has been so thoroughly adopted as both the epitome of high culture and as quintessentially American (regardless of the pesky fact of his birth in Stratford-upon-Avon) that many come to his works on the page, the stage, and in the classroom with their defenses down. They are more open and available to complex social issues when they encounter them in Shakespeare’s works. My students regularly comment that they come to my classes to study Shakespeare but leave having learned so much more about our contemporary world. I know that many of you will have heard similar comments....

scholarly journals Excavating the Past: Rememories and Healing in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Em Tese ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 196
Author(s):  
Rosilene Cássia Freitas de Aquino
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Aesthetic

This essay discusses the possibility of the combination of the social with the aesthetic functions of African American literature. It analyses how the main characters of  Morrison’s Beloved are portrayed not just as individual and fictional types, but also as collective and historical ones, through which African American historical memory and culture are revealed in slavery time.

What Was Latino Literature?

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
General Audience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Latino Literature ◽  
Ethnic Literatures

My substitution in the hoary formulation what was x? must seem perverse. isn't latino literature in the united states a newcomer among subfields—a recent entry on the roster of MLA book prizes, a fast-growing site of knowledge production, faculty lines, and institutional visibility? How could that field of the future—propelled by a demographic surge—be already a thing of the past? It is to worry this commonsensical temporality of Latino issues that I invoke the title of Kenneth Warren's What Was African American Literature?, published in early 2011. In a neat coincidence, Warren's book was published in the same season as the first-ever Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (NALL), a project spearheaded by Ilan Stavans with the collaboration of five editors. Both publishing events sparked discussion beyond the academy among the shrinking general audience interested in literary culture; taken together, they illustrate the peculiar exigencies of periodizing ethnic literatures.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document