CONTINUITY OF AFROCENTRIC TROPES ABOUT AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY FORMATION IN THE NOVELS BY PAULE MARSHALL AND GLORIA NAYLOR

African American literature that is fundamentally a socially symbolic linguistic construct, seeks different ways to expand and continue the use of Afrocentric vernacular tropes of personal and collective identity formation. The five residual oral forms – oratory (including everyday speech acts), myth/ritual performance, legend, tale, and song – as well as satire, irony, and paradox are used by contemporary African American novelists. This paper points to how the legendary black ancestors and elder members of the community, the gifted and often rebellious orator, musician, artist, the spiritual leader, and the messianic figure are equally enduring symbols and tropes. The aim of this work is to show the way in which the contemporary African American novelists Paule Marshall and Gloria Naylor use these (above mentioned) characters and symbols to reconstruct their long struggle as individuals and as community against anti-black racism. Therefore, the focus of this paper is on continuity of Afrocentric tropes in African American personal/collective and female/male identity formation as represented in selected novels by Paule Marshall and Gloria Naylor.

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The Self in Society: Exploring Cultural Embeddedness in Gloria Naylor’s Fiction

IRA-International Journal of Management & Social Sciences (ISSN 2455-2267) ◽

10.21013/jmss.v7.n2.p24 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 329

Author(s):

Anjila Singh Mehla

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

African American Literature ◽

The Self ◽

American Fiction ◽

Gloria Naylor ◽

Contemporary American Literature ◽

Significant Development ◽

Fiction Writers ◽

Literary Phenomenon

<div><p><em>A most significant development that has taken place on the global literary scene during the last few decades or so is the dramatic emergence of African-American voices as a distinct and dominant force. Along with Toni Morrison scores of African American Fiction writers, poets, playwrights, autobiographers, and essayists have mapped bold new territories; they have firmly entrenched themselves in the forefront of contemporary American Literature. This article retraces this exciting literary phenomenon in the context of the lives, works, and achievements of Gloria Naylor and her contemporaries. Naylor discovered feminism and African American Literature, which revitalized her and gave her new ways to think about and define herself as a black woman.</em></p></div>

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The Uncommons (Danez Smith)

Minnesota Review ◽

10.1215/00265667-7737325 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 2019 (93) ◽

pp. 102-110

Author(s):

Christian P. Haines

Keyword(s):

Political Economy ◽

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

Collective Identity ◽

African American Literature ◽

Political Practice ◽

Social Death ◽

The Face ◽

Black Life ◽

Literature Culture

This article examines the poetry of Danez Smith as a practice of commoning. It introduces the concept of the uncommons as a way of thinking about how African American literature, culture, and political practice develop egalitarian forms of life in the face of white supremacism. It considers the ways in which the violences of white supremacism uncommon black life—that is, bar blackness from belonging—as well as the ways in which poetry and politics become avenues through which black life invents alternative socialities. From this perspective, the lyric qualities of Smith’s verse are social not because they prescribe a proper collective identity but because they invent modes of relation that transform social death into the possibility of another way of living. This is the uncommons: a reckoning with the racialized political economy of death that constructs commonality through dissonance, disruption, passion, and power.

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Consciousness of FBI Ghostreading Fills a Deep and Characteristic Vein of African American Literature

F.B. Eyes ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691130200.003.0006 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

William J. Maxwell

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Black Women ◽

American Literature ◽

African American Literature ◽

Richard Wright ◽

Gloria Naylor ◽

Modernist Literature ◽

Chester Himes ◽

Danzy Senna ◽

The One

This part argues that Afro-modernist literature “pre-responded” to FBI inspection, internalizing the likelihood of Bureau ghostreading and publicizing its implications with growing bluntness and embellishment over the years from 1919 to 1972 and beyond. Thus, the fifth and last of the book's five theses, and the one that finally involves closer encounters with black poems, stories, essays, and novels than with their silhouettes in FBI files: Consciousness of FBI ghostreading fills a deep and characteristic vein of African American literature. Section 1 examines decisive responses to FBI surveillance in both the early journalism and the foundational poetry of the Harlem movement. Section 2 charts the FBI's migrant status in Afro-modernism from the mid-1930s through the early Cold War. Section 3 focuses on the expatriate trio of Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and Chester Himes, and their interlocking fictions of Paris noir in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Section 4 widens its focus, owing to the profusion of black Bureau writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The final section sketches African American literature's less heated skirmish with the FBI after Hoover's death—a skirmish now led by black women including Ai, Audre Lorde, Danzy Senna, and Gloria Naylor.

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Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

Ethnic Studies Review ◽

10.1525/esr.2009.32.1.55 ◽

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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