Black empowerment and Afro-American values in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

IIUC Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 111-121
Author(s):  
Sajjadul Karim ◽  
Mohd Muzhafar Bin Idrus
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
American People ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Bluest Eye ◽  
American Values ◽  
White Culture ◽  
History Of

The Bluest Eye of Toni Morrison is extraordinarily significant, as it addresses the different sides of American literature, and the lives of the Afro-American people. Although the conventional theological aspects of white culture can negatively influence other characters of Morrison, it is Pecola whose life appears to be increasingly defenseless against the impulses of the individuals who have accepted the Western custom. In a democratic country, people generally have the same value, but there are still prejudices in the concepts of beauty and worthiness. The search for freedom, black identity, the nature of evil and the robust voices of African-Americans have become themes for African-American literature. Folklore covers the history of black and white interaction in the United States and also summarizes the feelings expressed in protest literature1. Morrison argues that the survival of the dark ladies in a white dominated society depends on loving their own way of life and dark race and rejecting the models of white culture or white excellence. This article attempts to examine The Bluest Eye from the perspective of empowerment of blacks and African American and their value system. IIUC Studies Vol.16, December 2019: 111-121

The Problematical Portrayal of Racial Discrimination in Jacqueline Woodson’s novel “The Brown Girl Dreaming”

Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 865-874
Author(s):  
Mrs. Jeni . S ◽  
Dr. J.G. Duresh
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Black People ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
White People ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Hearts And Minds

African American Literature can be defined as writings by people of African decent living in the United States.  The genre began during the 18th and 19th centuries with writers such as poet phillis Wheatley and Orator Frederick Douglass reached as an early highpoint with the Harlem Renaissance and continues with the authors such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Walter Mosley, James Baldwin etc.  The themes and issues explored in African American literature are tradition, culture, racism, religion, slavery, segregation, migration, and feminism and more. This paper deals with the perspectives of clashes between black and white communities through the novel The Brown Dreaming girl by Jacqueline Woodson. It clearly explains about the Whites ill-treatment and how the blacks suffer under the hands of white people. The essential part of human kind is Identification and Freedom which has been completely wiped off from the hearts and minds of the black people.

When Pushkin's Blackness Was in Vogue: Rediscovering the Racialization of Russia's Preeminent Poet and His Descendants

Slavic Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-257
Author(s):  
Korey Garibaldi ◽  
Emily Wang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Henry James ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Queen Of Spades ◽  
Racially Ambiguous

This essay investigates interconnections between the novelist, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Aleksandr Pushkin and identifies the racial subtext of these associations. Several scholars have connected Pushkin and James. But none of this scholarship has speculated on whether it was the poet's African heritage that was at the root of hidden connections between these authors. Moreover, though most scholarship on Pushkin's reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, his African heritage was publicized much earlier. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic frequently discussed Pushkin's racial heritage as a canonical European writer of African descent. This essay recovers how Henry James used Pushkin's daughter, the morganatic Countess Merenberg, as a model for the racially ambiguous “morganatic” Baroness Münster in The Europeans (1878). A decade later, James seems to have invoked the Countess Merenberg once more in his rewriting of Pushkin's “The Queen of Spades” (1833) in The Aspern Papers (1888). While James publicly attributed Byron and Shelley as inspirations, the discourse surrounding the African heritage of Pushkin and his heirs helps explain why the novelist minimized and erased the racial lineage at the center of The Europeans and The Aspern Papers.

scholarly journals Theorizing Black Power Movement in African American Literature: An Analysis of Morrison's Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol V (IV) ◽  
pp. 45-53
Author(s):  
Fayaz Ahmad Kumar ◽  
Colette Morrow
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Black Power ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Black Aesthetics ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Author

This paper analyzes the influence of the Black Power movement on the AfricanAmerican literary productions; especially in the fictional works of Toni Morrison. As an African-American author, Toni Morrison presents the idea of 'Africanness' in her novels. Morrison's fiction comments on the fluid bond amongst the African-American community, the Black Power and Black Aesthetics. The works of Morrison focus on various critical points in the history of African-Americans, her fiction recalls not only the memory of Africa but also contemplates the contemporary issues. Morrison situates the power politics within the framework of literature by presenting the history of the African-American cultures.

Post-Black Satire

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-140
Author(s):  
Yogita Goyal
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
Paul Beatty ◽  
Distinct Body

This chapter collides the idiom of post-blackness with the dominant genre of the neo-slave narrative in contemporary African American literature. This distinct body of work—post-black neo-slave narratives—mines the historical scene of slavery in the mode of satire. Through absurd juxtapositions, surreal analogies, and farcical adventures, post-black satirists expose the contradictions of the insistence on the unending history of slavery amid declarations of a break from previous racial regimes. Viewing satire as the lens through which debates about race and postracialism articulate, the chapter explores how fictions by Paul Beatty and Mat Johnson combat the sentimental template of abolition and neo-abolition by refusing to collapse past and present. The chapter concludes with a look at what might be termed a post-black post-satire, as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) stretches time and space to transform the slave narrative into a flexible portal to practices of exploitation worldwide.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Ishmael Reed ◽  
American Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter establishes the definition of comic rage and traces the history of humor and militancy in African American literature and history. It distinguishes between comic rage and satire, culminating in an examination of George Schuyler’s Black No More. It details how comic rage acts as an abjection (from Julia Kristeva) that breaks down simplistic ideas about race and representations that appear in literature and popular culture. While identifying Richard Pryor as the most recognizable employer of comic rage, this chapter also points to figures like Sutton Griggs, Ishmael Reed, and Malcolm X; who embody the multiple combinations of anger and comedy that appear in the chapters of the book. It outlines the contents of the chapters that trace the development of comic rage in relation to the various political and literary moments in American and African American life.

scholarly journals The Portraiture of Stockholm Syndrome: Cultural Dislocation in Phillis Wheatley’s Poetry Collection and Selected African American Texts

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Adeniyi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Defence Mechanism ◽  
Hurt Feelings ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Stockholm Syndrome

One of the tropes that have often been glossed over in African American literature is the concept of Stockholm Syndrome. The syndrome emphasises irrationality and abnormal psychological or mental disposition of Stockholm Syndrome sufferers towards individuals responsible for their pitiable conditions. This article examines the conception and its nexus with slavery and the use of religion (Christianity) as an ideological tool for the indoctrination or brainwashing of African slaves and their descendants in the United States of America. I argue that the syndrome, though conceived as a correlate of Freudian ego-defence mechanism, operates like a psychedelic or hallucinogenic drug which, according to Karl Marx, dulls the reasoning capacity and cerebration of the sufferers and prevents them from thinking rationally. Besides, it alters their perception of reality forcing them to accept abnormality as normality in a bid to create an escapist route for their fears, hurt feelings and pent-up wounds.

James Weldon Johnson

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nowlin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
New York University ◽  
Daily Newspaper ◽  
Fisk University

James Weldon Johnson (b. 1871–d. 1938) was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. After graduating with a BA from Atlanta University, he became principal of his former grammar school, established the first daily newspaper for Jacksonville’s African American population, and gained admission to the Florida bar. With his brother, the musician J. Rosamond Johnson, he also wrote the song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” for a commencement ceremony (in 1900), and it eventually became known as the “Negro National Anthem.” He joined his brother in New York in 1902 to launch a successful songwriting team with Bob Cole. Johnson gave up show business in 1906 to become US Consulate, first in Venezuela, then Nicaragua, where he completed his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which was published anonymously in 1912. In 1914 he moved to Harlem with his wife Grace Nail Johnson (whom he married in 1910). He began writing editorials on a range of subjects for the New York Age, a nationally circulating African American newspaper, and in 1915 he joined the recently established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He became secretary of the organization in 1920 and remained so until 1930. Fifty Years and Other Poems, his first collection, was published in 1917. In 1922 he edited The Book of American Negro Poetry, the first anthology of its kind, and established himself as a pioneering theorist of African American poetics and a guiding light of the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson modeled his poetic ideas in the 1927 volume God’s Trombones, which appeared in the same year he reissued The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man under his name. In 1929, a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship enabled him to devote a year to writing, which resulted in Black Manhattan, a history of African Americans in New York. From 1930 onward, Johnson taught creative writing and African American literature at Fisk University as well as New York University. His 1933 autobiography Along This Way was widely acclaimed, and he collected both new and old poems in the 1935 volume St. Peter Relates an Incident. When he died in a car accident in 1938, Johnson was one of the most honored and respected African Americans in the United States, recognized at once as a man of letters, an advocate of black America’s cultural achievements, and a tireless political opponent of America’s Jim Crow system.

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