Black Feminism and Traumatic Legacies in Contemporary African American Literature

Black Feminism and Traumatic Legacies in Contemporary African American Literature PDF Author: Apryl Lewis
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666921394
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
Black Feminism and Traumatic Legacies in Contemporary African American Literature expands on a literary tradition where Black writers articulate the impact of slavery's legacy over time. Along with Black Feminist studies, this book demonstrates how trauma studies can transcend Eurocentric roots by encompassing traumatic experiences of other cultures through intersectionality.

Black Feminism and Traumatic Legacies in Contemporary African American Literature

Black Feminism and Traumatic Legacies in Contemporary African American Literature PDF Author: Apryl Lewis
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666921394
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
Black Feminism and Traumatic Legacies in Contemporary African American Literature expands on a literary tradition where Black writers articulate the impact of slavery's legacy over time. Along with Black Feminist studies, this book demonstrates how trauma studies can transcend Eurocentric roots by encompassing traumatic experiences of other cultures through intersectionality.

Reading Contemporary African American Literature

Reading Contemporary African American Literature PDF Author: Beauty Bragg
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739188798
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
Reading Contemporary African American Literature focuses on the subject of contemporary African American popular fiction by women. Bragg’s study addresses why such work should be the subject of scholarly examination, describes the events and attitudes which account for the critical neglect of this body of work, and models a critical approach to such narratives that demonstrates the distinctive ways in which this literature captures the complexities of post-civil rights era black experiences. In making her arguments regarding the value of popular writing, Bragg argues that black women’s popular fiction foregrounds gender in ways that are frequently missing from other modes of narrative production. They exhibit a responsiveness and timeliness to the shifting social terrain which is reflected in the rapidly shifting styles and themes which characterize popular fiction. In doing so, they extend the historical function of African American literature by continuing to engage the black body as a symbol of political meaning in the social context of the United States. In popular literature Beauty Bragg locates a space from which black women engage a variety of public discourses.

Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives

Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives PDF Author: Kristina S. Gibby
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666909653
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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Book Description
Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction examines four novels by Erna Brodber, Zoé Valdés, Sandra Cisneros, and Maryse Condé. In this unique comparative analysis, Kristina S. Gibby explores the significance of female ghosts—specifically maternal figures, who haunt female narrators, inspiring them to transcribe the dead’s obfuscated (hi)stories and recover their family memory. The author argues that these female ghosts subvert historiographic power structures through a matrilineal succession of knowledge via oral traditions of storytelling, inevitably broadening historical consciousness and asserting the value of fiction in the face of historical rupture. Gibby contends that in form and content, these novels disrupt patriarchal and Western expectations of time and epistemology. They favor cyclical temporality (highlighted by the spirits’ uncanny return), which underscores relational understanding and challenges the exclusive and limiting constraints of linear time. This book makes important contributions to inter-American literary criticism with its narrow focus on female authors who confront the horrors of history through maternal spirits.

Masculinity Under Construction

Masculinity Under Construction PDF Author: LaToya Jefferson-James
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793615306
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Masculinity Under Construction: Literary Re-Presentations of Black Masculinity in the African Diaspora analyzes Black male identity as constructed by Black male authors. In each chapter, Dr. Jefferson-James discusses a different "construction" or definition of masculine identity produced by men of African descent on the continent of Africa, in the Caribbean, and in North America. Combing through the works of James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, Ralph Ellison, George Lamming, and other pan-African authors, Masculinity Under Construction argues for the importance of analyzing the historical context that contributed to the formation of Black male identity. Additionally, Dr. Jefferson-James draws a relationship between Black feminists and writers, such as Anna Julia Cooper and her contemporaries, and these works of literature viewed as primarily about Black masculinity.

The Jazz Trope

The Jazz Trope PDF Author: Alfonso Wilson Hawkins
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 9780810861268
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The Jazz Trope takes a look at the African American lifestyle through the lens of jazz, blues, and spirituals. Through the pioneering efforts of Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, and other notable scholars who have related jazz, spirituals, and blues to African American life and culture, The Jazz Trope offers an opportunity to add scholarship to the perception of African American identity as a creative attempt to survive a unique history and struggle. Transcending structure and the perimeters that it limits, African American musical statements were produced out of a human need to be free. Using jazz as a metaphor for escaping slavery, jazz can be seen as a creative attempt to exceed restriction through the act of improvisation; jazz takes a known melody and changes it to create a personal identity. The literary genre of African American life reflects this melding of musical milieu. It tells through tropes of the folktale, novel, self-script, slave narrative, myth, and legend a unique American experience and history. This book also explores motives and schemes that were hidden behind musical codes, illustrating that jazz (interrelated with its foundation in blues and spirituals) existed as a pre-musical statement and, then, manifested as it is more popularly known: as a musical statement. The Jazz Trope allows students to grasp the jazz song structure within this work and liken it to the tropes that it emits: a true American identity.

Existentialist Thought in African American Literature before 1940

Existentialist Thought in African American Literature before 1940 PDF Author: Melvin G. Hill
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498514812
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 111

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Book Description
Existentialist Thought in African American Literature Before 1940 is the first collection of its kind to break new ground in arguing that long before its classification by Jean-Paul Sartre, African American literature embodied existentialist thought. To make its case, this daring book dissects eight notable texts: Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I A Woman (1861), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861), Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). It explores and addresses a wide range of complex philosophical concepts such as: authenticity, potentiality-for-authentic living, bad faith, and existentialism from the Christian point of view. The use of interdisciplinary studies such as gender studies, queer studies, Christian ethics, mixed-race studies, and existentialism, allows the authors within this book to lend unique perspectives in examining selected African American literary works.

African Heartbeat

African Heartbeat PDF Author: Nancy Ann Watanabe
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0761870075
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 105

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Book Description
This book critically examines classic works of literature and film to suggest ways in which study of fictional characters, cultural themes, and vivid imagery helps us to grapple with, understand, and find resolutions for, problems that seriously concern Americans, including uniformed officers and public officials, as well as the general populace in today’s turbulent times. Chapter 1 analyzes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State to support the author’s theory that contemporary police violence against young African-American men is a result of “persistence of vision” whereby the powerful Fugitive Slave Laws of the American Civil War era exert a continuing influence upon the minds of law enforcement officers and almost all African Americans. Chapter 2 “Zora Neale Hurston: Africa Transported to America” discusses Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God to reveal the West African Vodun cosmological theology that informs and determines the lifelong trajectory of macho male protagonist John Buddy Pearson and feminist female protagonist Janie Mae Crawford in their quests for love and spiritual fulfillment. She suggests the Civil War disrupted a theological affinity shared by African Americans with Christian Americans, a kinship at the heart of Hurston’s oeuvre. Chapter 3 reveals the West African origin of the theological design in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo: A Novel of Mexico and in short fiction works by several contemporary Mexican writers while also investigating the impact, in particular the toll in human suffering, of violent confrontations taking place along the border shared by Mexico and the U.S. Her critical analysis highlights the stream of consciousness narrative technique, which probes the depths of human agony exacted by violations of international boundaries. She demonstrates Shakespeare’s influence. Moreover, as a specialist in Comparative and English Literature, she contributes to Shakespeare scholarship on Hamlet, Prince of Denmark unprecedented insight into the meaning and significance of King Hamlet’s ghost, expanding traditional Christian perspectives and providing historical and textual explications that encompass West African Vodun cosmology. Dr. Watanabe diagnoses Hamlet’s madness as a funky aspect of Shakespeare’s knowledge of “voodoo.”

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison PDF Author: Carmen Gillespie
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 161148491X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
Toni Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature, published her first novel in 1970. In the ensuing forty plus years, Morrison's work has become synonymous with the most significant literary art and intellectual engagements of our time. The publication of Home (May 2012), as well as her 2011 play Desdemona affirm the range and acuity of Morrison's imagination. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison's cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades. Some of the highlights of the collection include contributions from many of the major scholars of Morrison's canon: as well as art pieces, music, photographs and commentary from poets, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez; novelist, A.J. Verdelle; playwright, Lydia Diamond; composer, Richard Danielpour; photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the first published interview with Morrison's friends from Howard University, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn; and commentary from President Barack Obama. What distinguishes this book from the many other publications that engage Morrison's work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work. This book adopts Morrison's metaphor as articulated in her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved. The narrative describes the clearing as "a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what. . . . In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees." Morrison's Clearing is a complicated and dynamic space. Like the intricacies of Morrison's intellectual and artistic voyages, the Clearing is both verdant and deadly, a sanctuary and a prison. Morrison's vision invites consideration of these complexities and confronts these most basic human conundrums with courage, resolve and grace. This collection attempts to reproduce the character and spirit of this metaphorical terrain.

Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture

Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture PDF Author: Gregory Jerome Hampton
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739191462
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 115

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Book Description
Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture: Reinventing Yesterday's Slave with Tomorrow's Robot is an interdisciplinary study that seeks to investigate and speculate about the relationship between technology and human nature. It is a timely and creative analysis of the ways in which we domesticate technology and the manner in which the history of slavery continues to be utilized in contemporary society. This text interrogates how the domestic slaves of the past are being re-imaged as domestic robots of the future. Hampton asserts that the rhetoric used to persuade an entire nation to become dependent on the institution of chattel slavery will be employed to promote the enslavement of technology in the form of humanoid robots with Artificial Intelligence. Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture makes the claim that science fiction, film, and popular culture have all been used to normalize the notion of robots in domestic spaces and relationships. In examining the similarities of human slaves and mechanical or biomechanical robots, this text seeks to gain a better understanding of how slaves are created and justified in the imaginations of a supposedly civilized nation. And in doing so, give pause to those who would disassociate America’s past from its imminent future.

Overlapping Inequalities in the Welfare State

Overlapping Inequalities in the Welfare State PDF Author: Başak Akkan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031522273
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description