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.

Rediscovering Frank Yerby

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
African American ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
The Social ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Social Protest Novels

During his career, Frank Yerby wrote 33 novels, numerous short stories, and poetry, making him one of the most prolific and financially successful African American authors of all time. However, while some critics such as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps initially praised Yerby, many began to become frustrated with his lack of overt engagement with segregation and racial oppression in his work and personal statements. Infamously, Robert Bone called Yerby “the prince of the pulpsters” in his 1958 The Negro Novel in America. Reconsidering Frank Yerby positions Yerby within the African American literary tradition and emphasizes his role, as Darwin Turner puts it, as the “debunker of myths.” Reconsidering Frank Yerby achieves these goals by highlighting Yerby’s shifting perceptions regarding his role as a writer throughout his career and through an examination of his work in relation to the social protest novels and literature of writers such as Richard Wright, the reactions of his readers, his exploration of religion and existentialism, his deconstruction of race, his transnational focus, and other topics.

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.

The Postblack Ethos in “Texts Out of Time”: Rosa Parks and the African American Freedom Struggle in Cultural Memory

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Bunch Davis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
African American Identity ◽  
The 1960S

This book challenges the cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle era that hinges on a master narrative focused on the “heroic period” of the Civil Rights Movement. It argues that this narrative limits the representation of African American identity within the Civil Rights Movement to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest leadership in the segregated South and casts Malcolm X's advocacy of black nationalism and the ensuing Black Power/Arts Movement as undermining civil rights advances. Through an analysis of five case studies of African American identity staged in plays between 1959 and 1969, the book instead offers representations that engage, critique, and revise racial uplift ideology and reimagine the Black Arts Movement's sometimes proscriptive notions of black authenticity as a condition of black identity and cultural production. It also posits a postblack ethos as the means by which these representations construct their counternarratives to cultural memory and broadens narrow constructions of African American identity shaping racial discourse in the U.S. public sphere of the 1960s.

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.

The Washington Park Relocation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Rocksborough-Smith
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American History ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Physical Development ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The University

Chapter 5 of this book looks at how the DuSable Museum conducted its expansion and physical development in the Black Power era. The museum’s relocation to Washington Park, next to the University of Chicago, reimagined a historically African American social space and neighborhood in the city’s geography and can be considered alongside the highly diverse engagements of Black Power and black arts movement activists around the country with civic-level politics. The politics this expansion effort brought into play also demonstrate how museum work became a significant part of local movements for urban racial equality through the 1960s and early 1970s, a process that further reflected growing interest in African American history.

The Aesthetics of Anticipation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo Natalie Crawford
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
Gwendolyn Brooks ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Black Aesthetics

The first chapter argues that black aesthetics pivot on the spirit of anticipation. The first section of this chapter focuses on the 1920 and 30s Harlem Renaissance anticipation of the Black Arts Movement. Crawford then shows how the Black Arts Movement anticipates the post-black maneuvers of the 21st century. This chapter examines literature written by Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Claudia Rankine, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others.

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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