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Author: T. Walters
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230608876
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
This is a groundbreaking study exploring the significant relationship between western classical mythology and African American women's literature. A comparative analysis of classical revisions by eighteenth and nineteenth century Black women writers Phillis Wheatley and Pauline Hopkins and twentieth century writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove reveals that Black women writers revise specific classical myths for artistic and political agency. The study demonstrates that women rework myth to represent mythical stories from the Black female perspective and to counteract denigrating contemporary cultural and social myths that disempower and devalue Black womanhood. Through their adaptations of classical myths about motherhood, Wheatley, Ray, Brooks, Morrison, and Dove uncover the shared experiences of mythic mothers and their contemporary African American counterparts thus offering a unique Black feminist perspective to classicism. The women also use myth as a liberating space where they can 'speak the unspeakable' and empower their subjects as well as themselves.
Author: T. Walters
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230608876
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Get Book Here
Book Description
This is a groundbreaking study exploring the significant relationship between western classical mythology and African American women's literature. A comparative analysis of classical revisions by eighteenth and nineteenth century Black women writers Phillis Wheatley and Pauline Hopkins and twentieth century writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove reveals that Black women writers revise specific classical myths for artistic and political agency. The study demonstrates that women rework myth to represent mythical stories from the Black female perspective and to counteract denigrating contemporary cultural and social myths that disempower and devalue Black womanhood. Through their adaptations of classical myths about motherhood, Wheatley, Ray, Brooks, Morrison, and Dove uncover the shared experiences of mythic mothers and their contemporary African American counterparts thus offering a unique Black feminist perspective to classicism. The women also use myth as a liberating space where they can 'speak the unspeakable' and empower their subjects as well as themselves.
Author: Tracey L. Walters
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
This book explores the significant relationship between western classical mythology and African American women's literature.
Author: William W. Cook
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226789985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 466
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Book Description
Constraints on freedom, education, and individual dignity have always been fundamental in determining who is able to write, when, and where. Considering the singular experience of the African American writer, William W. Cook and James Tatum here argue that African American literature did not develop apart from canonical Western literary traditions but instead grew out of those literatures, even as it adapted and transformed the cultural traditions and religions of Africa and the African diaspora along the way.Tracing the interaction between African American writers and the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome, from the time of slavery and its aftermath to the civil rights era and on into the present, the authors offer a sustained and lively discussion of the life and work of Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Rita Dove, among other highly acclaimed poets, novelists, and scholars. Assembling this brilliant and diverse group of African American writers at a moment when our understanding of classical literature is ripe for change, the authors paint an unforgettable portrait of our own reception of “classic” writing, especially as it was inflected by American racial politics.
Author: Margaret Malamud
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1788315790
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
A new wave of research in black classicism has emerged in the 21st century that explores the role played by the classics in the larger cultural traditions of black America, Africa and the Caribbean. Addressing a gap in this scholarship, Margaret Malamud investigates why and how advocates for abolition and black civil rights (both black and white) deployed their knowledge of classical literature and history in their struggle for black liberty and equality in the United States. African Americans boldly staked their own claims to the classical world: they deployed texts, ideas and images of ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt in order to establish their authority in debates about slavery, race, politics and education. A central argument of this book is that knowledge and deployment of Classics was a powerful weapon and tool for resistance-as improbable as that might seem now-when wielded by black and white activists committed to the abolition of slavery and the end of the social and economic oppression of free blacks. The book significantly expands our understanding of both black history and classical reception in the United States.
Author: Anthony Grafton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674035720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1188
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Book Description
The legacy of ancient Greece and Rome has been imitated, resisted, misunderstood, and reworked by every culture that followed. In this volume, some five hundred articles by a wide range of scholars investigate the afterlife of this rich heritage in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, and science.
Author: Eric Ashley Hairston
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1572339845
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
In The Ebony Column, Eric Ashley Hairston begins a new thread in the ongoing conversation about the influence of Greek and Roman antiquity on U.S. civilization and education. While that discussion has yielded many exceptional insights into antiquity and the American experience, it has so regularly elided the African American component that all classical influence on black writing and thought seems to vanish. That omission, Hairston contends, is disturbing not least because of its longevity— from an early period of overt stereotyping and institutionalized racism right up to the contemporary and, one would hope, more cosmopolitan and enlightened era. Challenging and correcting that persistent shortsightedness, Hairston examines several prominent black writers’ and scholars’ deep investment in the classics as individuals, as well as the broader cultural investment in the classics and the values of the ancient world. Beginning with the late-eighteenth-century verse of Phillis Wheatley, whose classically inspired poems functioned as a kind of Trojan horse to defeat white oppression, Hairston goes on to consider the oratory of Frederick Douglass, whose rhetoric and ideas of virtue were much influenced by Cicero, and the writings of educator Anna Julia Cooper, whose classical training was a key source of her vibrant feminism. Finally, he offers a fresh examination of W. E. B. DuBois’s seminal The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and its debt to antiquity, which volumes of commentary have largely overlooked. The first book to appear in a new series, Classicism in American Culture, The Ebony Column passionately demonstrates how the myths, cultures, and ideals of antiquity helped African Americans reconceptualize their role in a Euro-American world determined to make them mere economic commodities and emblems of moral and intellectual decay. To figures such as Wheatley, Douglass, Cooper, and DuBois, classical literature offered striking moral, intellectual, and philosophical alternatives to a viciously exclusionary vision of humanity, Africanity, the life of the citizen, and the life of the mind.
Author: David Withun
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197579582
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
The classical education of W. E. B. Du Bois -- American Archias : Cicero, epic poetry, and The Souls of Black Folk -- The influence of Plato on the thought of W. E. B. Du Bois -- racist metamorphoses in Du Bois's classical references -- The history of the "darker peoples" of the world : Afrocentrism and cosmopolitanism in the later thought of W. E. B. Du Bois.
Author: Daniel Orrells
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191618799
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
The appearance of Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987 sparked intense debate and controversy in Africa, Europe, and North America. His detailed genealogy of the 'fabrication of Greece' and his claims for the influence of ancient African and Near Eastern cultures on the making of classical Greece, questioned many intellectuals' assumptions about the nature of ancient history. The transportation of enslaved African persons into Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, brought African and diasporic African people into contact in significant numbers with the Greek and Latin classics for the first time in modern history. In African Athena, the contributors explore the impact of the modern African disapora from the sixteenth century onwards on Western notions of history and culture, examining the role Bernal's claim has played in European and American understandings of history, and in classical, European, American and Caribbean literary production. African Athena examines the history of intellectuals and literary writers who contested the white, dominant Euro-American constructions of the classical past and its influence on the present. Martin Bernal has written an Afterword to this collection.
Author: Katy L. Chiles
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199313512
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331
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Book Description
As surprising as it might seem now, during the late eighteenth century many early Americans asked themselves, "How could a person of one race come to be another?" Racial thought at the close of the eighteenth century differed radically from that of the nineteenth century, when the concept of race as a fixed biological category would emerge. Instead, many early Americans thought that race was an exterior bodily trait, incrementally produced by environmental factors and continuously subject to change. While historians have documented aspects of eighteenth-century racial thought, Transformable Race is the first scholarly book that identifies how this thinking informs the figurative language in the literature of this crucial period. It argues that the notion of "transformable race" structured how early American texts portrayed the formation of racial identities. Examining figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Samson Occom, and Charles Brockden Brown, Transformable Race demonstrates how these authors used language emphasizing or questioning the potential malleability of physical features to explore the construction of racial categories.
Author: Nyasha Junior
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191062510
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
Reimagining Hagar illustrates that while interpretations of Hagar as Black are not frequent within the entire history of her interpretation, such interpretations are part of strategies to emphasize elements of Hagar's story in order to associate or disassociate her from particular groups. It considers how interpreters engage markers of difference, including gender, ethnicity, status and their intersections in their portrayals of Hagar. Nyasha Junior offers a reception history that examines interpretations of Hagar with a focus on interpretations of Hagar as a Black woman. Reception history within biblical studies considers the use, impact, and influence of biblical texts and looks at a necessarily small number of points within the long history of the transmission of biblical texts. This volume covers a limited selection of interpretations over time that is not intended to be a representative sample of interpretations of Hagar. It is beyond the scope of this book to offer a comprehensive collection of interpretations of Hagar throughout the history of biblical interpretation or in popular culture. Junior argues for the African presence in biblical texts; identifies and responds to White supremacist interpretations; offers cultural-historical interpretation that attends to the history of biblical interpretation within Black communities; and provides ideological criticism that uses the African-American context as a reading strategy. Reimagining Hagar offers a history of interpretation, but also expands beyond interpretation among Black communities to consider how various interpreters have identified Hagar as Black.
