THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: AN INTRODUCTION

African American Studies ◽

Integrative Approach ◽

Topic Area ◽

Academic Courses ◽

The U.S

My purpose in compiling this book was to produce a “student-friendly” course book in African American Studies, the elective course I designed and introduced into the English Department curriculum at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš. The book is meant to provide a brief introduction into the history and culture of African Americans in the U.S., but could also be of interest to the general public, and, hopefully, may add to the practice of teaching African American literature and history already established at Serbian universities. The main purpose of the book is to get the readers/students acquainted with the key events in African American history, the most important political and cultural figures and the most prominent themes in African American culture. One of the goals would also be to spark further interest in this topic area and open possibilities for similar postgraduate academic courses. As most available books in African American studies deal either with history or literature, I have made an attempt to consider the subject from the perspective of cultural studies, integrating historical data with sociological, political and cultural commentary. I have deemed that such an integrative approach would provide the best insight into the study area and give the fullest picture of the African American contribution to the U.S. and world history and culture. The book is divided into eight chapters covering the period from the origins of the Atlantic slave trade to the contemporary period. The concept of individual chapters is as follows: an outline of the most important events, developments and historical figures of a particular period is followed by two or three brief excerpts from some of the most important works by major African American writers which illustrate the most important theme(s) covered in the chapter, accompanied by a brief commentary with topics and questions for further study.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

African American Studies ◽

10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0076 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Kinohi Nishikawa

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

American Studies ◽

Assistant Professor ◽

Harvard University ◽

African American Studies ◽

Literary Study ◽

Cornell University ◽

Henry Louis Gates

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is an African American literary critic, cultural historian, television host and scriptwriter, and educator. He is currently the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he is also professor of African and African American studies, professor of English, and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Gates is the most important critic, theorist, and editor of African American literature of his generation, and the central figure on whom the institutionalization of African American literary study rests. He was born on 16 September 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia, to a working-class family in a segregated part of town. A misdiagnosed hip injury in his teenage years left Gates with a disability that he was able to turn into an affectionate nickname, “Skip.” He received a degree in history from Yale University in 1973 and earned his PhD from Clare College, Cambridge, in 1979. One of his mentors at Cambridge was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, who helped Gates understand black literary expression as a diasporic phenomenon. Upon completion of his dissertation, Gates was appointed an assistant professor of English and Afro-American studies at Yale. He moved to Cornell University, which granted him tenure, in 1985, and then went on to Duke University in 1989, staying there for two years. Harvard University recruited him in 1991, and he has been at the institution ever since. While a faculty member at Harvard, Gates has expanded the reach of his work, writing general nonfiction for nationally circulating publications and hosting and producing documentaries for public-television broadcasting. Through that work, Gates has made African American studies recognizable as a robust intellectual project and an integral part of higher education to the broader public. Although he is best known today for his television appearances, Gates maintains his interest in African American literary study, continuing to edit key works from the tradition and writing criticism based on his findings.

Introduction

Black and More than Black ◽

10.14325/mississippi/9781496824516.003.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 3-32

Author(s):

Cameron Leader-Picone

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

Black Politics ◽

Double Consciousness ◽

Literary Aesthetics ◽

Black Arts ◽

Relationship Of ◽

The Relationship

The chapter length introduction, “The Post Era,” historicizes both popular cultural (i.e. colorblindness and post-racialism) and scholarly attempts to periodize contemporary African American culture and literary aesthetics (i.e. post-soul, post-black, and postrace). It connects these conceptualizations with the revision of Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness. The introduction locates these shifts in the new millennium in the context of Black politics and the rise of Barack Obama. It also addresses the relationship of the current moment in African American literature with past movements, focusing especially on the post era’s repudiation of the Black Arts Movement.

Dark-Skinned Servants Through the Eyes of a White Author: a case study of K. Stockett’s Novel “The Help”

Observatory of Culture ◽

10.25281/2072-3156-2020-17-3-306-318 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 17 (3) ◽

pp. 306-318

Author(s):

Yulia L. Sapozhnikova

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

Cultural Appropriation ◽

White People ◽

African American Authors ◽

Green Book ◽

Film Texts

If white authors speak on behalf of dark-skinned characters in their texts, African-American critics and writers often accuse them of attempting cultural appropriation. In this case, according to African-Americans, white people describe them only stereotypically and thus deprive them of a voice. Despite this, such attempts continue. In 2009, K. Stockett released her novel “The Help”, which is narrated by three women, including two dark-skinned maids (Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson). These characters tell about their experiences working for white masters in the early 1960s, in the city of Jackson, Mississippi, during a time of severe racial segregation. Newly arising after every release of such literary or film texts (just remember the recent film “Green book”), the ongoing controversy over cultural appropriation determines the relevance of addressing this topic. K. Stockett presents these characters as anti-racism fighters, with the word as their main weapon. Minny bluntly tells her employers what she thinks of them, which is in line with how African-American authors describe in their texts a way of speaking boldly to those you obey, called “to sass”. On the other hand, Aibileen tries not to show her attitude to white people and, in conversations with them, encodes the true content of her statements as much as possible, in fact using the practice of “signifying”, also characteristic of African-American culture: persuading other maids to tell a white girl about the relationship between masters and servants in their city, in order for it to be published. She deems the written preservation of an ethnic group history as a way to fight against racism. The author comes to the conclusion that K. Stockett follows, consciously or not, the traditions of African-American literature, in which many dark-skinned characters appear as tricksters.

Post-Soul Satire

10.14325/mississippi/9781617039973.001.0001 ◽

2014 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Civil Rights ◽

American Literature ◽

Visual Arts ◽

Cultural Production ◽

Interdisciplinary Approach ◽

Internet Culture ◽

African American Artists

This volume collects essays that explore the variety of satiric productions in contemporary African American culture. Often dubbed “Post-Soul,” the artists of this period mark a change in political and aesthetic concerns from those embraced by artists of the Civil Rights period. Building off of Bertram Ashe’s notion of “blaxploration” – or the troubling of African American identity – this volume investigates the variety of means that African American artists have used to trouble the understanding of what it means to be black in contemporary America. The chapters in this collection offers the first interdisciplinary approach to the study of satire in contemporary African American literature, film, television, theatre, music, visual arts, and internet culture. The essays in this collection work to discern the means by which “Post-Soul Satire” addresses both in-group and external satiric critique of many aspects of contemporary African American cultural production.

Mercy, Mercy Me: African-American Culture and the American Sixties; Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box; South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature

American Literature ◽

10.1215/00029831-76-1-191 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 76 (1) ◽

pp. 191-194

Author(s):

S. P. Knadler

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

American Culture ◽

African American Culture

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 ◽

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.