scholarly journals Exacavating the Memory of Slavery in Léonora Miano’s La Saison de l’ombre (2013) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1988)

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 12-22
Author(s):  
Abib SENE ◽  
Fatoumata Keïta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Whole Process ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
History Of ◽  
Maternal Love

Regarded as a state of servitude through which an individual or a group of persons is compelled to work their guts out without any possibility to get compensated or rewarded, slavery, for some centuries, had been implemented under various forms from one country to another. From the antiquity to the twentieth century, thralldom had been a profitable business that gangrened the African continent. Thus being, African and African American thinkers shoulder the mission to dust archives and lift the curtain of history to retell and re-narrate the episode of drudgery; among them Leonoa Miano and Toni Morrison. The purpose of this article is to examine the trauma of slavery from a comparative, matrifocal, and Afrocentric perspective so as to highlight commonalities and differences between Leonora Miano’s La Saison de l’ombre and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Inspired by the infamous history of slavery, these two award-winning novels not only conjure up the ordeal of slavery, but they also catalyze its haunting memory for the sake of healing, so that both characters and readers could be cleansed off its tantalizing grip and achieve catharsis and redemption. To this end, La Saison de l’ombre and Beloved are woven around feminine counter-narratives that exhibit counter-memories which are often glossed over or overlooked in both African and Euro-American phallocentric official narratives. Whereas La Saison de l’ombre spotlights the Africans’ role in the process of slavery, Beloved highlights the tragedy of a maternal love in a context of bondage. Through a comparative approach, we have spotlighted the whole process of slavery, from the captivity in Africa to enslavement in America.

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.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Black Press ◽  
The Public ◽  
Introductory Section ◽  
African American Sexuality ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere

This introductory section introduces the book’s major arguments and provides an overview of the history of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. The introduction also explores the theoretical conceptualization of the public sphere in relationship to African American life and the scholarship on pleasure and class in African American history. In laying out these terms, the introductory section of the book makes the case that they are useful categories of analysis for a deeper understanding of African American sexuality, pleasure, and the Black Press. Finally, the introduction features a discussion of the significance of the interwar period and its relationship to the history of African American sexuality in the Black Press.

scholarly journals The Experience of Alienation in Toni Morrison’s Work: Man’s Fragmentation and Concomitant Distortion

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 65
Author(s):  
Mohammed Mahameed ◽  
Majed Abdul Karim
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
Bluest Eye ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary Work

The question of alienation has always been a pervasive theme in the history of modern thought, and it occupies a considerable place in contemporary work. Literature in general, and fiction in particular, raise this issue to reveal its influence on human beings and communities. Novelists have been trying to unravel its complexities and concomitant consequences. The paper aims to explore the experience of alienation through depicting the issue not as a purely racial reality, or something restricted to the colour of the skin or gender of the victim. It is rather presented as a distressing state which cripples the victims and makes them susceptible captives of the dominant forces. In the selected novels, Toni Morrison has delved deep into the experience of alienation through her male and female characters, showing the different forms of this experience. The present research investigates Morrison’s portrayal of the issue from an African-American prospect. References will be made to novels such as Tar Baby, Sula, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved.

’Garde ici et ’garde lá-bas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jared Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
The Core ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores the history of the Creole accordion. Black Creoles in Louisiana have created their own, distinctive accordion music adapted from French, Native American, and African cultures. While Creole musicians in the early twentieth century were often hired for Cajun dances, where they played Cajun dance music, at their own gatherings they played a uniquely Creole repertoire that drew from the African American blues—a repertoire later developed by accordionists such Clifton Chenier and Boozoo Chavis. Zydeco, as this music eventually was labeled, has become a symbol of Louisiana Creole culture. It is argued that despite the pressure on modern zydeco bands to adapt to the demands of the music industry, the traditional accordion and rubboard remain the core instruments, and zydeco accordionists keep playing in a distinctively Creole style.

scholarly journals LANGUAGES OF FREEDOM IN DECOLONISING AFRICAThe Gladstone Prize Winner

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 253-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

ABSTRACTThe ‘triumph of liberalism’ in the mid-twentieth-century west is well known and much studied. But what has it meant for the way the decolonisation of Africa has been viewed, both at the time and since? In this paper, I suggest that it has quietly but effectively shaped our understanding of African political thinking in the 1950s to 1960s. Although the nationalist framing that once led historians to neglect those aspects of the political thinking of the period which did not move in the direction of a territorial nation-state has now been challenged, we still struggle with those aspects of political thinking that were, for instance, suspicious of a focus on the individual and profoundly opposed to egalitarian visions of a post-colonial future. I argue that to understand better the history of decolonisation in the African continent, both before and after independence, while also enabling comparative work with other times and places, we need to think more carefully and sensitively about how freedom and equality were understood and argued over in local contexts.

scholarly journals Sexuality and Healing in the African Diaspora: A Transnational Approach to Toni Morrison and Gyasi

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 183
Author(s):  
Mar Gallego
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
African American ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Identity And Agency ◽  
Black Bodies

This article examines the literary production of two writers from the African diaspora, specifically African American Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), and Ghanaian-American Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016), to explore their significance as counter-narratives that defy the “official” historiography of enslavement times in order to set the records straight, as it were. By highlighting these women writers’ project of resistance against normative definitions of black bodies, it is my contention that these works effectively mobilize notions of race, gender, and sexuality. Revisiting the harmful and denigrating legacy of stereotypical designation of enslaved women, these writers make significant political and literary interventions to facilitate the recovery, wholeness, and sanctity of the violated and abjected black body. In their attempt to counter ongoing processes of commodification, exploitation, fetishization, and sexualization, I argue that these writers chronicle new forms of identity and agency that promote individual and generational healing and care as forms of protest and resistance against toxic definitions of hegemonic gender and sexuality.

Counter-Narratives

2020 ◽  
pp. 178-184
Author(s):  
Horizan Prasanna Kumar ◽  
Meadows Bose ◽  
Alagesan M.
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Modern Era

The term ‘narrative' has attained a contemporary connotation of identity tales and has stepped outside the bounds of literature to enter into realms of sociology, anthropology, law, and even medicine. Narrative is not just the medium used by writers to tell their stories, but also a powerful tool of self-expression, with a strong reference to individual stories set in a significant cultural background. This nature of narrative has been observed in one of the most significant African American writers of the modern era – Toni Morrison. With the rise of in-betweenness and the need for a space to emerge as an individual identity, it is important for people to create narratives to counter prevalent dominant narratives.

Queer Encounters in the Music of Billy Strayhorn

2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 771-824 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Barg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Queer Identity ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Complex Relationships

AbstractThis article addresses issues of queer identity, aesthetics, and history in jazz through a focus on two midcentury works composed and/or arranged by Billy Strayhorn: a set of four pieces written in 1953 for an Off-Broadway production of Federico García-Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in Their Garden (Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín); and several movements from the Strayhorn-Ellington adaptation of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite (1960). My study considers how the two works engage artistic figures, themes, topics, and aesthetic practices that have strong queer historical affiliations. These include failed or impossible love, masking, stylized exotica, and other liminal spheres of identificatory ambiguity and reversal. Taken together, these works enable a positioning of Strayhorn within modernist queer cultural history and, more specifically, within the history of African American gay cultural production. At the same time, through showing how queerness inhabits jazz's past, my analyses of Strayhorn's queer musical encounters provide a critical vantage point from which to examine historical and cultural understandings of jazz at midcentury and, more broadly, the complex relationships between social identities (race, sexuality, gender) and composition, arrangement, and collaboration in twentieth-century music.

Surmounting Adversities in the Land of Lincoln

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher C. Fennell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sundown Towns ◽  
Almost All

The history of New Philadelphia illustrates significant elements of the systemic impacts of racism on citizens and communities in the United States. Similar experiences are presented in the development of other communities that struggled against such adversities. This chapter examines additional case studies of structural racism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Illinois. In his study of “sundown towns,” James Loewen found that many Illinois towns engaged in extensive discrimination in this period. Such sundown jurisdictions permitted African Americans access to their terrain as laborers during the day, but not as residents. His research showed that “almost all all-white towns and counties in Illinois were all-white on purpose” by the early twentieth century. In contrast, other communities embodied African-American aspirations. Fennell examines such racial dynamics using examples from archaeological and historical analysis of three more African-American communities in Illinois: Miller Grove, Brooklyn, and the Equal Rights settlement outside of Galena.

Chicago’s African American Visual Arts Renaissance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murry N. Depillars
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Students ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Gold Medal ◽  
Sojourner Truth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Artistic Tradition

This chapter examines the history of black visual arts in Chicago and highlights the distinctive influence of the Art Institute of Chicago, formed in 1879, in the emergence of a black visual artistic tradition. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, the Art Institute of Chicago was one of a handful of arts schools that admitted black Americans. Among the earliest black students to attend the school was figurative painter Lottie E. Wilson, who created the famous picture of Abraham Lincoln and Sojourner Truth that appeared on the cover of the NAACP's Crisis in August 1915. Meanwhile, William Edouard Scott attended the Art Institute from 1904 to 1907 and won acclaim from 1912 to 1914 in Paris. In 1927, Scott received the Harmon Foundation's gold medal for his work as a muralist.

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