Prologue

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Wall
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Zora Neale Hurston ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Subject ◽  
American Authors

Despite the centrality of the essay to the African American literary tradition, this genre still enjoys little critical currency. Theprologue provokes and engages the question: What is the essay? Through analyzing authors as diverse as W.E.B Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, the book illustrates how black author sutilized the genre of the essay to make critical interventions in political and aesthetic debates. Freedom, it argues, is the subject which engages the black essayist across three centuries. The “will to adorn,” a phrase coined by Zora Neale Hurston, conveys the essayists’ attitude toward language—the desire to make language an expression of beauty. Building on three concepts: democratic eloquence, troubled eloquence, and vernacular process, the author signals a way, a method, for reading the African American essay. These terms do not follow a linear progression but are constantly in movement, and it is through their use that African American authors continued to offer new variations on the genre of the essay. The prologue argues for the centrality of the essay to the African American literary tradition. It moves the genre of the essay from the margin to the center.

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn

2019 ◽  
pp. 10-35
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Wall
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Zora Neale Hurston ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
The Will ◽  
Artistic Interventions ◽  
American Authors

This chapter discusses how black essayists worked through and around ideas of freedom to produce new variations of the genre of the essay. The author shows how the African American essay serves as the medium through which authors make crucial political, social, and artistic interventions. At the same time the author is attentive to formal changes in the essay. Through a series of representative examples from authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Zora Neale Hurston, this chapter charts the way the essay at its best expresses both a determination to be free and the “will to adorn.” Although the emphasis changes, black essayists use three rhetorical strategies to make these crucial interventions: democratic eloquence, troubled eloquence and vernacular process. Frederick Douglass utilizes democratic eloquence to make crucial interventions in anti-slavery discourse. W.E.B. Du Bois’ troubled eloquence marks a historical shift in which freedom becomes aligned as much with individual identity as with a people’s collective freedom. Zora Neale Hurston uses a “vernacular process” to fuse high and low styles in her meditation on freedom and racial identity. It is through the use of these strategies that African American authors make a mark on the genre itself.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-228
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Wall
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
First Century ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
American Authors

This chapter considers the status of the essay in the twenty-first century as it shifts its medium from print to digital. It is argued that given the ability for the essay to speak to moments of political and social crisis, comment on and define aesthetic debates, and reflect on the meaning of individual and collective identities, it remains a crucial genre for twenty-first century African American authors. Through analyzing the work of Brittney Cooper and Ta-Nehisi Coates amongst others, this chapter illustrates how black essayists continue to work through the subject of freedom and express the will to adorn. Deploying the vernacular process, one inflected with a hip-hop beat, these authors blur the line between the digital and print, and continue to highlight the centrality of the essay to the African American literary tradition.

Reversal of Stereotypes in Alice Walker's The Color Purple: God, Gender, Narrative and Sexuality

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-21
Author(s):  
Morshedul Arifin ◽  
◽  
Shah Ahmed ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Color Purple ◽  
American Authors

Unlike most African-American authors, who constantly mirror the repressive effects of racism, classicism and gender discrimination, Alice Walker (1944–) in her The Color Purple (1982) compulsively deals with sexism that was still pervasive within African American communities during the early twentieth century. She argues that just as black groups are relegated to an underclass due to the colour of their skin in a wider milieu of white society, in the same way the black women are reduced to a more inferior class due to their sex in their own community. For women’s self-emancipation from such an inhibitory patriarchy, the novel gives an overarching emphasis on the formation of language, execution of voice, review of sexual preference and redefinition of identity of her female characters, the protagonist Celie in particular. This paper examines how, by a fusion of the bildungsroman and epistolary conventions, the novelist melds a unique way for her women creating a God for their own and carving out a niche in social and economic concerns. It assesses the strategic reversal of gender stereotype as well as sexual orientation in order to establish the independence and equality of women on a par with men. The paper ends up with the claim that the novel is predicated upon the theoretical prism of womanism, previously premised by Walker herself, which puts extensive emphasis on a deeper, empathetic relationship and camaraderie of women.

scholarly journals “Obligations to Negroes who would be kin if they were not Negro”

Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-153
Author(s):  
Werner Sollors
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
African American ◽  
First Century ◽  
Half Century ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
American Authors

The 1965/1966 Dcedalus issues on “The Negro American” reveal how America's racial future was imagined nearly a half-century ago, and at least one of the prophecies - voiced by sociologist Everett C. Hughes - found its fulfillment in an unexpected way at President Obama's inauguration in 2009. Short stories by Amina Gautier (“Been Meaning to Say” and “Pan is Dead”), Heidi Durrow's novel The Girl WhoFellfrom the Sky, plays by Thomas Bradshaw (Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist and Cleansed), and poems by Terrance Hayes (“For Brothers and the Dragon” and “The Avocado”) suggest trends in recent works by African American authors who began their publishing careers in the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals Editor’s Note: CSK Awards Celebrate Fifty Years

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
Sharon Verbeten
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Fiftieth Anniversary ◽  
Book Publisher ◽  
The World ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Martin Luther King

The world was a very different place in 1969 when the Coretta Scott King Award was instituted to honor African-American authors. Dr. Martin Luther King had recently been assassinated. And there was no organized group to advocate for We Need Diverse Books.But, thankfully, several librarians and a book publisher came together to establish the CSK Award, which will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 2019.

Generations

2019 ◽  
pp. 51-71
Author(s):  
Lisa Woolfork
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
Black Life ◽  
A Site ◽  
Post Civil Rights ◽  
American Authors

This essay explores the ways in which African American authors of that era reclaim the slave past as a site of memory for a nation eager to forget. Lucille Clifton’s Generations (1976), Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) are the chapter’s main focus. These works resist the tide of historical amnesia and “lost cause” mythology that would minimize or relegate the enslaved to mere props in the larger Civil War drama of rupture and reconciliation. By centering the stories of the enslaved as ancestral foundations of post-civil rights black life, these authors promote a model for historical memory and genealogy that elevates black resilience.

Along the Streets of Bronzeville

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Gwendolyn Brooks ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
Chicago Renaissance ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
State Street ◽  
American Authors ◽  
South Side Chicago

This book examines the flowering of African American creativity, activism, and scholarship in the South Side Chicago district known as Bronzeville during the period between the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Poverty stricken, segregated, and bursting at the seams with migrants, Bronzeville was the community that provided inspiration, training, and work for an entire generation of diversely talented African American authors and artists who came of age during the years between the two world wars. This book investigates the institutions and streetscapes of Black Chicago that fueled an entire literary and artistic movement. It argues that African American authors and artists—such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, painter Archibald Motley, and many others—viewed and presented black reality from a specific geographic vantage point: the view along the streets of Bronzeville. The book explores how the particular rhythms and scenes of daily life in Bronzeville locations, such as the State Street “Stroll” district or the bustling intersection of 47th Street and South Parkway, figured into the creative works and experiences of the artists and writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance.

scholarly journals To Make Negro Literature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth McHenry
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Black Literature ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
American Authors

In To Make Negro Literature Elizabeth McHenry traces African American authorship in the decade following the 1896 legalization of segregation. She shifts critical focus from the published texts of acclaimed writers to unfamiliar practitioners whose works reflect the unsettledness of African American letters in this period. Analyzing literary projects that were unpublished, unsuccessful, or only partially achieved, McHenry recovers a hidden genealogy of Black literature as having emerged tentatively, laboriously, and unevenly. She locates this history in books sold by subscription, in lists and bibliographies of African American authors and books assembled at the turn of the century, in the act of ghostwriting, and in manuscripts submitted to publishers for consideration and the letters of introduction that accompanied them. By attending to these sites and prioritizing overlooked archives, McHenry reveals a radically different literary landscape, revising concepts of Black authorship and offering a fresh account of the development of “Negro literature” focused on the never published, the barely read, and the unconventional.

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