On Freedom and the Will to Adorn

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Wall
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
First Century ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The Status ◽  
June Jordan

Although they have written in various genres, African American writers as notable and diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker have done their most influential work in the essay form. The Souls of Black Folk, The Fire Next Time, and In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens are landmarks in African American literary history. Many other writers, such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Richard Wright, are acclaimed essayists but achieved greater fame for their work in other genres; their essay work is often overlooked or studied only in the contexts of their better-known works. Here Cheryl A. Wall offers the first sustained study of the African American essay as a distinct literary genre. Beginning with the sermons, orations, and writing of nineteenth-century men and women like Frederick Douglass who laid the foundation for the African American essay, Wall examines the genre's evolution through the Harlem Renaissance. She then turns her attention to four writers she regards as among the most influential essayists of the twentieth century: Baldwin, Ellison, June Jordan, and Alice Walker. She closes the book with a discussion of the status of the essay in the twenty-first century as it shifts its medium from print to digital in the hands of writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brittney Cooper. Wall's beautifully written and insightful book is nothing less than a redefinition of how we understand the genres of African American literature.

Wieland; or, The Transformation of American Literary History

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-60
Author(s):  
Duncan Faherty
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Early American ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Early American Novel

By considering the centrality of Wieland in the development of American literary history, this chapter moves to reaffirm its importance for students of US literature. The chapter begins by surveying the major editions of Wieland, from the first modern edition in 1926 through the scholarly editions in the early twenty-first century. In so doing, the chapter charts how scholars have often recursively positioned Wieland as a bellwether text in the formation of narratives about the development of American literary history, a practice that is often predicated on positioning the text as either the first or the first noteworthy early American novel. In tracing the evolution of the critical reception of the text, the chapter moves to underscore how Wieland’s enduring contribution to our understanding of the development of American literature and culture remains Brown’s insistence on the fallibility of isolationist narratives to register accurate genealogies or histories.

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.

The Genteel Tradition and the Emergence of the African American Sonnet

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-38
Author(s):  
Timo Müller
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter traces the emergence of the sonnet in African American literature to the pervasive influence of genteel conventions. These conventions have widely been regarded as conservative or even stultifying, but they provided black poets with various opportunities for self-assertion in the public sphere. The sonnet was a favourite genre among the genteel establishment, and poets pushed the boundaries of black expression by appropriating the form to subvert racial stereotypes, develop a black poetic subjectivity, and participate in the debate over the memory of the Civil War. In tracing these developments, the chapter repositions the outstanding poets of the period, Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson, alongside their less-known contemporaries, Samuel Beadle, William Stanley Braithwaite, Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr., T. Thomas Fortune, and Henrietta Cordelia Ray.

“Race,” Writing, and Difference: A Meditation

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1516-1521
Author(s):  
Farah Jasmine Griffin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
Literary History ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Literature

“Race,” Writing, and Difference first appeared in 1986. That Fall, I entered graduate school at Yale University; I still associate the book with those intellectually heady times. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., left the university before my arrival, but his influence was still felt, and we graduate students followed his every move. We also read and debated the essays of his volume with great excitement. The collection legitimated our intellectual concerns and delineated a set of questions that we would pursue throughout our graduate school careers. The volume set the bar high and helped prepare us for the task ahead. These were the days when we anticipated and greeted the appearance of works by Gates, Houston Baker, Jr., Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, and Cornel West with almost as much excitement that years earlier accompanied the release of recordings by Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind, and Fire. Many of us came to Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man through these brilliant theorists of African American literature and culture. Those were intellectually exciting times: the period also produced Black Literature and Literary Theory; the painful exchange between Gates, Baker, and Joyce Ann Joyce on the pages of New Literary History; Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood, and Spillers's “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Furthermore, through his books Black Literature and Literary Theory, Figures in Black, and The Signifying Monkey, Gates not only provided a theoretical framework for the study of African American literature, he also set forth an intellectual agenda that he would institutionalize in a number of projects, especially The Norton Anthology of African American Literature and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard. In fact, Gates's PBS series African American Lives might be seen as part of this larger project as well in that it demonstrates the fiction of race through scientific evidence without denying its power to determine the lived experience of those identified as black in the United States. Despite the appearance of texts such as Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve (and other arguments for the biological basis of race that rear their heads every so often), few people would disagree with the fundamental premise of “Race,” Writing, and Difference: that race was not fixed or naturalized but instead socially and historically constructed and institutionalized.

scholarly journals Domestic Violence and Psychological Oppression in Alice Walker’s the Color Purple

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4S4) ◽  
pp. 66-67
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Epistolary Novel ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
Color Purple

African-American literature is otherwise known as slave narratives. The popular African-American writers are Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Alice Walker etc. The Color Purple is a well-known epistolary novel written by Alice Walker in 1983. The novel brought her a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1983. This is a novel about a young fourteen year old black girl. She is tortured physically, emotionally, sexually by her step father and her husband. Later on she develops an intimate relationship with Shug. It has changed her life topsy-turvy. The poor, ugly, innocent, oppressed, inferior woman tremendously changed as a woman of self confident, beautiful and proud human being.

Reaping Something New

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Hack
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Borrowing

Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in much more intricate, sustained, and imaginative ways than previously suspected. From reprinting and reframing “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in an antislavery newspaper to reimagining David Copperfield and Jane Eyre as mixed-race youths in the antebellum South, writers and editors transposed and transformed works by the leading British writers of the day to depict the lives of African Americans and advance their causes. Central figures in African American literary and intellectual history—including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois—leveraged Victorian literature and this history of engagement itself to claim a distinctive voice and construct their own literary tradition. In bringing these transatlantic transfigurations to light, this book also provides strikingly new perspectives on both canonical and little-read works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and other Victorian authors. The recovery of these works' African American afterlives illuminates their formal practices and ideological commitments, and forces a reassessment of their cultural impact and political potential. Bridging the gap between African American and Victorian literary studies, the book changes our understanding of both fields and rewrites an important chapter of literary history.

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