Furiously Funny

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Literature ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Race Identity ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
African America

Furiously Funny: Comic Rage from Ralph Ellison to Chris Rock explores the simultaneous expression of militancy and humor in African American literature that came to fruition in the post–World War II moment. This book traces the increasing presence of African American works containing a combustible mix of fury and radicalism, of pathos and pain, of wit and love that fuse to create what I refer to as comic rage. I employ Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to argue that works of comic rage centralize African American experience and tradition in direct challenges to dominant (white) narratives and (black) counter-narratives about race, identity, and nation. Works of comic rage sit at the center of the discourse through humor’s connection to the familiar and the recognizable in mainstream and African America. Comic rage capitalizes on the inability of African Americans to be fully expelled from mainstream American constructions of its identity and culture. Therefore, as with the abject that cannot be expelled, works of comic rage cause the narratives and counter-narratives to collapse and initiate a re-visioning of fundamental, destructive assumptions within white supremacy. Whether those assumptions involve history, literature, or (white) superiority, comic rage aggressively promotes an African American subjectivity that rejects white stereotypes of blackness and African American responses that remain dependent on the power dynamics that reinforce white supremacy (master vs. slave, perpetrator vs. victim).

“New and Better Stories”

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-118
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black American ◽  
New Era ◽  
Structural Role ◽  
American Experience ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
American Authors

This chapter analyzes Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) and Paul Beatty’s Slumberland (2008) as attempts to craft the “new and better stories” of the African American experience that Charles Johnson’s 2008 essay “The End of the Black American Narrative” calls for. Johnson’s “The End of the Black American Narrative” posits Obama’s election as a turning point in African American literature, reflecting a new era of representation for African American authors. Through an analysis of Johnson’s essay in concert with Whitehead’s and Beatty’s novels, this chapter argues that these works illuminate a brief moment of optimism for the transcendence not of race itself but of the structural role that race has played and continues to play in American governance. With their shared representation of racial identity as a form of branding, Whitehead and Beatty point towards new conceptualizations of Blackness that embrace contingency and fluidity.

Tracking Faulkner in the Paths of Black Modernism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Hutchinson ◽  
Jay Watson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black Characters ◽  
Black Modernism ◽  
The Relationship

This essay tracks the relationship between Faulkner’s career and the development of modern African American literature. It shows how the development of black modernism created a new environment for his work, for his work’s reception, and ultimately for his literary imagination—as well as how black writers responded to his work. Faulkner’s approach to fiction developed out of many of the same intellectual cross-currents that gave rise to interest in African American writing, and the shift in his use of black characters in the 1940s registers his awareness of black-authored fiction and his anger over American racism in the midst of World War II. Finally, the essay addresses his problematic response to the Civil Rights movement in relationship to critiques of white southerners’ “tragic misconceptions of time” by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Toni Morrison.

The Reception of African American Literature in Prewar and Postwar Japan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keiko Nitta
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The North

Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s gunboat diplomacy provided the Japanese with the first known opportunity to observe a major American performing art inspired by black culture: the minstrel show. The “Ethiopian entertainment,” held on the USS Powhatan, presented “Colored ‘Gemmen’ of the North” and “Plantation ‘Niggas’ of the South” to shogunate officials four times in 1854. While this performance initiated a binational cultural exchange, the 1878 tour of the Fisk Jubilee Singers was an epoch-making event; the group’s successful concerts, given in three cities, offered Japanese audiences their first opportunity to appreciate genuine African-American artistic pieces—spirituals, distinguished from blackface minstrelsy. The Japanese attitude toward African Americans at this initial stage was a mixture of pity and wonder. A growing self-awareness of Japan’s inferior status vis‐à‐vis Western nations, however, gave rise to a strong interest in slavery and racial oppression. The popularity of studies focused on American race problems since 1905, including multiple versions of the biography of Booker T. Washington, attests to prewar intellectuals’ attempt to define the position of the Japanese people by both analogy and contrast with African Americans. In the meantime, a partial translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), serialized from 1897 to 1898 in a liberal paper, the Kokumin, and a translation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) in 1921 paved the way for Japan’s introduction to the New Negro literature, the first major body of black writings gaining in popularity in the American literary market in the 1920s. Successive publications of works by W. E. B. DuBois, Walter White, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes in translation in the 1930s generated a distinctive artistic backdrop comparable to the American Jazz Age. Various authors of the era—from novelists to haiku poets—learned about literary motifs informed by blackness and began to elaborate their own racial representations to delineate the affectional substructure of modernity. Even though World War II briefly disrupted the expansion of the Japanese literary imagination through the creative inspiration of African Americans, a translation of Richard Wright’s Native Son within the year of the original publication (1940) signifies the persistence of interest throughout the war period. Indeed, defeat in 1945, resentment over the subsequent U.S. occupation, coincident remorse for their country’s imperial aggression, and anger at its eventual rearmament following the Korean War, in conjunction, reoriented postwar authors toward the development of black characters in diverse works over the following four decades. In addition, the civil rights movement facilitated studies in African-American literature in universities from the 1960s onward. Today, African-American literature is one of the most popular areas in English departments in Japan; one can find virtually every subject from the slave narrative to rap music in undergraduate course syllabi.

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

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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