A Comparative Analysis of the Treatment of Black Characters by White and Black Playwrights in America Before World War II. PDF Download
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Author: Esteban Vega
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Author: Esteban Vega
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Author: Matea Butković
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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This dissertation examines the interplay between the historical context of the World War II period and the literary works produced by Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Chester Himes, the three leading members of the "Richard Wright School of Protest" of the wartime years. My primary concern is with the literary rendition of both the communal and individual Black experiences in the wartime fiction, and with the meaning of the term "radical" that has been used to describe Black aspirations for equality during this period. Special attention is also paid to the manner in which these three authors approach institutional racism during the wartime presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the United States the genre of social protest resurfaced in the so-called "Richard Wright School of Protest" during the period of two major migratory movements when the "race issue" became pronounced possibly more than ever before. Wright, Petry, and Himes, whose works have to this day remained classified as protest fiction, are today considered as the first professional group of Black literary activists. Unlike the Harlem Renaissance, whose aim was to produce uplifting pieces of art, music, and literature, Black writers of the 1940s period no longer felt the need to prove to the predominately White readership the Blacks' creative abilities. Now, guided by the revolutionary spirit of nationalist streams, detached from Booker T. Washington's accommodationist approach and fortified by the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, World War II literature became used primarily for political reasons, i.e. for the advancement of the socio-political position of Black Americans. In this undertaking, naturalism, environmental determinism, and traces of existentialism, which form the backbone of the protest fiction of the early 1940s, became convenient means of addressing the reality of life within the Black community of the wartime period. The literary analysis includes Richard Wright's novels Native Son (1940) and Black Boy. (American Hunger). A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945), Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), and Ann Petry's short story Like a Winding Sheet (1945), which were published during the wartime years, but also her post-war novel The Street (1946) as the sole example of a female protagonist's perspective on the racial dynamics in the United States. A historical overview of the development of racism under the impact of philosophical and pseudo-scientific 9 practices, the importance and role of the Black press amidst the new world conflict, the Blacks' contribution to the war conflict and industry, the meaning of left-wing ideologies for the Black communities, as well as findings from sociological and psychological research on the perception of the Black identity in the first half of the twentieth century help to articulate the impact of New Deal and Jim Crow policies on the portrayal of the Black community and provide a starting point for my exploration of the inner world of Wright's, Petry's, and Himes's protagonists. By examining the underlying historical context and the subject matter discussed in the literature of the World War II period, conclusion can be drawn that the revolutionary and militant character of the wartime genre of Black social protest is found in individual acts of psychological and physical resistance against the oppressive wartime environment. The protagonists, shaped by different geographical and political forces, yet all epitomizing Alain Locke's inquisitive, politically conscious, and highly sensitive "New Negro," rebel against the discriminatory American socio-political structure because they become aware of the unattainability of their American Dream and that there is no escape from institutional racism, not even in the more liberal North. While Wright's, Petry's, and Himes's literary endeavors certainly belong to the broad genre of social protest, the purpose of their diverse voices is not a mere description of Black suffering, but is rather a call to individual resistance against racial oppression during a time when the nation was fighting a war against discrimination abroad. Their fiction is a reflection of an emerging Black consciousness that would in the following decades challenge the Jim Crow apparatus. Therefore, I propose the term literature of resistance when discussing the "Richard Wright School of Protest" as a more accurate nomenclature for the political activism found in World War II protest literature.
Author: Bernard A. Drew
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786474106
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Even well-meaning fiction writers of the late Jim Crow era (1900-1955) perpetuated racial stereotypes in their depiction of black characters. From 1918 to 1952, Octavus Roy Cohen turned out a remarkable 360 short stories featuring Florian Slappey and the schemers, romancers and ditzes of Birmingham's Darktown for The Saturday Evening Post and other publications. Cohen said, "I received a great deal of mail from Negroes and I have never found any resentment from a one of them." The black readership had to be satisfied with any black presence in the popular literature of the day. The best known white writers of black characters included Booth Tarkington (Herman and Verman in the Penrod books), Irvin S. Cobb (Judge Priest's houseman Jeff Poindexter), Roark Bradford (Widow Duck, the plantation matriarch), Hugh Wiley (Wildcat Marsden, the war veteran who traveled the country in the company of his goat) and Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden (radio's Amos 'n' Andy). These writers deservedly declined in the civil rights era, but left a curious legacy that deserves examination. This book, focusing on authors of series fiction and particularly of humorous stories, profiles 29 writers and their black characters in detail, with brief entries covering 72 others.
Author: James V. Hatch
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 081433847X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 460
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Book Description
Biographic information and a bibliographyof other plays follow each script, providing readers with added sources for study.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 664
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Author: Helene Keyssar
Publisher: New York : B. Franklin
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Author: Christy Gavin
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780815323846
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Author: Julia S. Charles
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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This dissertation mines the intersection of racial performance and the history of the so-called "tragic mulatto" figure in American fiction. I propose that while many white writers depicted the "mulatto" character as inherently flawed because of some tainted "black blood," many black writers' depictions of mixed-race characters imagine solutions to the race problem. Many black writers critiqued some of America's most egregious sins by demonstrating linkages between major shifts in American history and the mixed-race figure. Landmark legislation such as, Fugitive Slave Act 1850 and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) are often plotlines in African American passing literature, thus demonstrating the failure of America to acknowledge its wrongdoings against people of color. While this project surveys passing narratives collectively, it pays careful consideration to those novelists whose presentations of the mixed-race figure challenge previously conceived notions of the "tragic mulatto" figure. I investigate how the writers each illuminate elements of the history of slavery and its aftermath in order to remark on black disenfranchisement at the turn of the century. Ultimately, however, I argue for the importance of the mixed-race figure as a potent symbol for imagined resolution between the larger narrative of American freedom and enslavement of blacks in the United States. I examine several works of African American racial passing literature: William Wells Brown's The Escape; Or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), the first published play by an African American writer. It explores the complexities of American culture at a time when tensions between North and South were about to explode into the Civil War. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860), tells the true story of the mixed-race Ellen Craft and her husband who escaped to freedom through various racial performances. Nella Larsen sets her novella Passing (1929) in Harlem in the 1920s. The story centers on two childhood friends reunited, but each dealing with their mixed-race ancestry in different ways. Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928) and The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931) and Charles W. Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth" and "A Matter of Principle" (1900). endeavors to depict a better class of blacks through her examination of the fair-skinned bourgeois-striver Angela Murray. Each of these stories address American legacies of racism and representation beginning with the Civil War. I investigate how these authors use the mixed-race figure (mostly) following the Civil War to mark the continuing impact that its legacy has had on black Americans through the New Negro Harlem Renaissance, but also to gesture to the mythic moment of freedom symbolized by successfully crossing the so-called color line. In addition to cataloguing an era of migration, the African American passing narrative represents the moment in which we shift from only seeing characters in terms of monoracial identities. These writers suggest that new performative modes of racial affiliation are necessary to achieve freedom. Reminding us that characters of mixed status practiced race in ways that enabled them to build shared identity despite an often disparate cultural heritage, these works suggest that identities like blackness are always constituted through performance. I argue that racial passing facilitated the "performance" of whiteness together with, an acknowledgment of what is accepted as blackness.
Author: Christina Lyons
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3346505111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 14
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Academic Paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: A, Southern Illinois University Carbondale (Department of English), course: English Drama (August Wilson), language: English, abstract: In his play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre on April 6, 1984, the African American playwright August Wilson evokes provocation, individualism versus general conceptions of the Black man’s world, conservatism versus progressiveness, and exploitation. The play surprises by its unanticipated, cruel ending, is relatively poor in action but subtly embeds external conflicts (respectively, racial issues), as well as internal conflicts (trivial quarrels among the characters). Since I see a crucial juxtaposition between two characters – Toledo, the intellectual, and Levee, the ignorant, who theatrically become opponents in the final man-slaughter scene – I am focusing on a comparison between those two after a brief description of the plot and the set of characters. The first third of the play bears a faint resemblance with Waiting for Godot, because it depicts the impatient White producer and manager, as well as the quarrelling Black band members waiting for their singer, the famous Ma Rainey, who takes her time getting her “big black bottom” to the rehearsal scheduled for 1:00 p.m. She banishes one band member, ignorant, conceited, and vain Levee (who is constantly seen polishing his shoes), from future productions. Levee dreams of establishing his own band, anyway, hoping to become famous with his more modern songs – “not this old jug band shit” (16) – that the White producer has promised to record with him. However, the latter retracts his offer, offering him ridiculous five dollars for each of his songs, leaving Levee stranded, who is already so overheated that he overacts, pulls his knife, and in affect stabs his colleague Toledo who accidentally steps on his shiny shoe. This shoe stepping scene (which takes place on page 87: “Hey! Watch it... shit! You stepped on my shoe!”) is foreshadowed by a similar event when another band member, Slow Drag, by mistake commits the same “crime” (p. 26: “Damn, Slow Drag! Watch them big-ass shoes you got.”) The irony of the play is that the most understanding of all characters is killed for nothing, for having left a tiny mark on the unstained, immaculate, eleven-dollars-worth of shoes.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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EBONY is the flagship magazine of Johnson Publishing. Founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, it still maintains the highest global circulation of any African American-focused magazine.
