scholarly journals Haunt or Home? Ethos and African American Literature

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
Richard Schur
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Self Healing ◽  
Rhetorical Tradition

The African American rhetorical tradition could be described as a shelter in an alien environment or as a way station on a long journey. A focus on ethos suggests that such a narrow approach to African American literature cannot do justice to these literary texts: how these writers employ images and symbols, craft and deploy examine identities, blend, criticize, and create traditions, explore contemporary issues, and create community. Because of cultural and racist narratives, African Americans could not simply use either the pre-Socratic or Aristotelian approaches to ethos in their fight for social justice. This essay demonstrates how a postclassical approach to ethos that draws on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and is focused on community-building and self-healing is central to the African American literature and rhetoric.

From Absence to Flight

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Black Power Movement

This chapter explores radicalization of comic rage in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada. Emerging in the middle of the transition from the integrationist period of the civil rights movement to the nationalism of the Black Power movement, both works openly challenge fundamental concepts about race. In addition to targeting fundamental assumptions of Western superiority, these works also question simplistic counter-representations that African Americans present to combat racist stereotypes. Using forms increasingly important in African American literature, like drama and neo-slave narratives, these works enact comic rage as way to depict unique and powerful forms of resistance.

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.

“This Thing We Have Done Together”

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-180
Author(s):  
Eden Wales Freedman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Reluctant Readers

This chapter analyzes Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) alongside Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) to investigate how contemporary African American literature witnesses the aftermath of slavery alongside the intersecting jeopardies of blackness, womanhood, and poverty. Both authors’ novels prompt readers to engage the trauma of American slavery. Ward’s books also treat other racially-charged traumas, such as the devastation of Hurricane Katrina (2005) and the incarceration of African Americans as a contemporary form of slavery. Both authors’ novels employ ghosts to symbolize the need for American trauma to be witnessed. In contrast to Morrison’s Beloved, however, Ward’s ghosts do not need to be exorcized in order for communities to heal. Instead, Ward’s ghosts resurrect to witness testimonies cut short and to impel even reluctant readers to confront, through fiction, America’s painful histories.

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....

Book Reviews

Transfers ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-150
Author(s):  
Heidi Morrison ◽  
James S. Finley ◽  
Daniel Owen Spence ◽  
Aaron Hatley ◽  
Rachael Squire ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Mountain Biking ◽  
Sexual Freedom ◽  
Michel Houellebecq

Oded Löwenheim, The Politics of the Trail: Reflexive Mountain Biking along the Frontier of Jerusalem (Heidi Morrison)Judith Madera, Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (James S. Finley)Jane Carey and Jane Lydon, eds., Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (Daniel Owen Spence)Gijs Mom, Atlantic Automobilism: Emergence and Persistence of the Car, 1895–1940 (Aaron Hatley)Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Rachael Squire)Sarah Jane Cervenak, Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Michael Ra-shon Hall)Yasmine Abbas, Le néo-nomadisme: mobilités, partage, transformations identitaires et urbaines (Stéphanie Vincent-Geslin)Suzan Ilcan, Mobilities, Knowledge, and Social Justice (Sibo Chen)Lesley Murray and Sara Upstone, eds., Researching and Representing Mobilities: Transdisciplinary Encounters (Tawny Andersen)Novel Review Michel Houellebecq, Soumission (Stéphanie Ponsavady)

The Reception of African American Literature in Prewar and Postwar Japan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keiko Nitta
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The North

Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s gunboat diplomacy provided the Japanese with the first known opportunity to observe a major American performing art inspired by black culture: the minstrel show. The “Ethiopian entertainment,” held on the USS Powhatan, presented “Colored ‘Gemmen’ of the North” and “Plantation ‘Niggas’ of the South” to shogunate officials four times in 1854. While this performance initiated a binational cultural exchange, the 1878 tour of the Fisk Jubilee Singers was an epoch-making event; the group’s successful concerts, given in three cities, offered Japanese audiences their first opportunity to appreciate genuine African-American artistic pieces—spirituals, distinguished from blackface minstrelsy. The Japanese attitude toward African Americans at this initial stage was a mixture of pity and wonder. A growing self-awareness of Japan’s inferior status vis‐à‐vis Western nations, however, gave rise to a strong interest in slavery and racial oppression. The popularity of studies focused on American race problems since 1905, including multiple versions of the biography of Booker T. Washington, attests to prewar intellectuals’ attempt to define the position of the Japanese people by both analogy and contrast with African Americans. In the meantime, a partial translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), serialized from 1897 to 1898 in a liberal paper, the Kokumin, and a translation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) in 1921 paved the way for Japan’s introduction to the New Negro literature, the first major body of black writings gaining in popularity in the American literary market in the 1920s. Successive publications of works by W. E. B. DuBois, Walter White, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes in translation in the 1930s generated a distinctive artistic backdrop comparable to the American Jazz Age. Various authors of the era—from novelists to haiku poets—learned about literary motifs informed by blackness and began to elaborate their own racial representations to delineate the affectional substructure of modernity. Even though World War II briefly disrupted the expansion of the Japanese literary imagination through the creative inspiration of African Americans, a translation of Richard Wright’s Native Son within the year of the original publication (1940) signifies the persistence of interest throughout the war period. Indeed, defeat in 1945, resentment over the subsequent U.S. occupation, coincident remorse for their country’s imperial aggression, and anger at its eventual rearmament following the Korean War, in conjunction, reoriented postwar authors toward the development of black characters in diverse works over the following four decades. In addition, the civil rights movement facilitated studies in African-American literature in universities from the 1960s onward. Today, African-American literature is one of the most popular areas in English departments in Japan; one can find virtually every subject from the slave narrative to rap music in undergraduate course syllabi.

Black Arts Publishing and the Politics of Design

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kinohi Nishikawa
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Politics Of Design ◽  
American Poets ◽  
Material Conditions

The Black Arts movement heralded an important turn in the history of African American literature. Between 1965 and 1975, a loose confederation of African American poets, playwrights, artists, and intellectuals set out to remake the world in their own image. Fed up with what they considered to be the oppressive logic of Euro-American cultural standards, these practitioners theorized and executed a program of black aesthetic self-determination. Contemporary critics followed suit, emphasizing Black Arts’ conjoined investments in nationalist politics and radical poetics—the discursive level at which the movement reshaped African American letters. That remained the dominant way of understanding the movement until the early 21st century, when scholars began examining Black Arts’ publishing networks and institutions, or the material conditions for creative expression. Since then, scholars have shown how the movement’s effort to redefine the black voice was achieved through a concomitant effort to redesign the black text. Their research has pointed to the need for historicizing the politics of design in this moment of literary transformation. For Black Arts publishers, the work of photographers, illustrators, and graphic designers was important not only for bringing specific literary texts to life but for inviting everyday readers into a robust, race-affirming literary culture.

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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