~ WILLIAM J. MAXWELL "Is It True What They Say About Dixie?" Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Rural/Urban Exchange in Modern African-American Literature

The complexly changing nature of American life and the vigorous versatility and all-encompassing spread of the written record are the marks of American literature. Social forces always make their imprint on literature. Especially in America where the democratic processes bring the people into immediate familiarity with and sensitive response to cultural forces, the literature has responded quickly to such pressures. African American literature consists of the literary work by the writers of Afro-origin settled in USA. The category“ slave narratives” were writings by people who had experienced slavery. It described their journeys to independence and their survival struggles. The concepts explored and issues raised were racism, slavery, and social equality.

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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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