So Black and Blue

So Black and Blue PDF Author: Kenneth W. Warren
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226873803
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
"So Black and Blue is the best work we have on Ellison in his combined roles of writer, critic, and intellectual. By locating him in the precarious cultural transition between Jim Crow and the era of promised civil rights, Warren has produced a thoroughly engaging and compelling book, original in its treatment of Ellison and his part in shaping the history of ideas in the twentieth century."—Eric J. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles What would it mean to read Invisible Man as a document of Jim Crow America? Using Ralph Ellison's classic novel and many of his essays as starting points, Kenneth W. Warren illuminates the peculiar interrelation of politics, culture, and social scientific inquiry that arose during the post-Reconstruction era and persisted through the Civil Rights movement. Warren argues that Ellison's novel expresses the problem of who or what could represent and speak for the Negro in an age of limited political representation. So Black and Blue shows that Ellison's successful transformation of these limits into possibilities has also, paradoxically, cast a shadow on the postsegregation world. What can be the direction of African American culture once the limits that have shaped it are stricken down? Here Warren takes up the recent, ongoing, and often contradictory veneration of Ellison's artistry by black writers and intellectuals to reveal the impoverished terms often used in discussions about the political and cultural future of African Americans. Ultimately, by showing what it would mean to take seriously the idea of American novels as creatures of their moment, Warren questions whether there can be anything that deserves the label of classic American literature.

So Black and Blue

So Black and Blue PDF Author: Kenneth W. Warren
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226873803
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
"So Black and Blue is the best work we have on Ellison in his combined roles of writer, critic, and intellectual. By locating him in the precarious cultural transition between Jim Crow and the era of promised civil rights, Warren has produced a thoroughly engaging and compelling book, original in its treatment of Ellison and his part in shaping the history of ideas in the twentieth century."—Eric J. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles What would it mean to read Invisible Man as a document of Jim Crow America? Using Ralph Ellison's classic novel and many of his essays as starting points, Kenneth W. Warren illuminates the peculiar interrelation of politics, culture, and social scientific inquiry that arose during the post-Reconstruction era and persisted through the Civil Rights movement. Warren argues that Ellison's novel expresses the problem of who or what could represent and speak for the Negro in an age of limited political representation. So Black and Blue shows that Ellison's successful transformation of these limits into possibilities has also, paradoxically, cast a shadow on the postsegregation world. What can be the direction of African American culture once the limits that have shaped it are stricken down? Here Warren takes up the recent, ongoing, and often contradictory veneration of Ellison's artistry by black writers and intellectuals to reveal the impoverished terms often used in discussions about the political and cultural future of African Americans. Ultimately, by showing what it would mean to take seriously the idea of American novels as creatures of their moment, Warren questions whether there can be anything that deserves the label of classic American literature.

Black and Blur

Black and Blur PDF Author: Fred Moten
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822372223
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
"Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination In Black and Blur—the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single being—Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms. Black and Blur is marked by unlikely juxtapositions: Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and José Esteban Muñoz and artists and musicians including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other. Moten holds that blackness encompasses a range of social, aesthetic, and theoretical insurgencies that respond to a shared modernity founded upon the sociological catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. In so doing, he unsettles normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing.

Black Literature Criticism: Ellison to Lorde

Black Literature Criticism: Ellison to Lorde PDF Author: Jelena O. Krstovic
Publisher: Gale Cengage
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Focuses on writers and works published since 1950. The majority of the authors surveyed are African American, but representative African and Caribbean authors are also included.

Black Literature Criticism: Achebe-Ellison

Black Literature Criticism: Achebe-Ellison PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780810379305
Category : Afro-Americans
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Recalling Religions

Recalling Religions PDF Author: Peter Kerry Powers
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572331273
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
"Peter Powers brings together critical sophistication in both theology and cultural history, while also demonstrating superior skills at literary analysis. There are few books that address the role of religion in American fiction, let alone ethnic American fiction. None do so in so profoundly revisionary a way as this."--Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., University of Massachusetts-Amherst In Recalling Religions, Peter Kerry Powers demonstrates the pervasive influence of religion in the literature produced by ethnic women writers in late-twentieth-century America. Through close readings of works by Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Cynthia Ozick, the author shows how particular religious traditions have served as a resource for ethnic women, enabling them to sustain their communities in the face of oppression. Powers's analysis serves as an important corrective to earlier investigations of literature and religion. Too often, he argues, such studies have functioned with an abstract or individualistic notion of religion, thus downplaying the significance of ethnic traditions and practices. Other studies have emphasized the religious traditions of discrete groups but have failed to see the points of contact and common purpose between different ethnic experiences. By examining writers with disparate religious heritages, Powers introduces important new insights. He finds that even as traditions and cultural memories have nurtured ethnic wormen writers, their works have frequently rewritten or recreated such traditions for the present day--seeking, for instance, to overcome or transcend the sexism that may have characterized earlier periods. In its explorations of Walker, Kingston, Silko, and Ozick, Recalling Religions identifies broader trends that further our understanding of both American literatureand religious culture. The Author: Peter Kerry Powers is associate professor of English at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania. His articles and reviews have appeared in South Atlantic Review, African American Review, American Literature, MELUS, and other publications.

Black Literature and Literary Theory

Black Literature and Literary Theory PDF Author: Henry Louis Gates, Jr
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134838344
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The imaginative literature of African and Afro-American authors writing in Western languages has long been seen as standing outside the Western literary canon. In fact, however, black literature not only has a complex formal relation to that canon, but tends to revise and reflect Western rhetorical strategies even more than it echoes black vernacular literary forms. This book, first published in 1984, is divided into two sections, thus clarifying the nature of black literary theory on the one hand, and the features of black literary practice on the other. Rather than merely applying contemporary Western theory to black literature, these critics instead challenge and redefine the theory in order to make fresh, stimulating comments not only on black criticism and literature but also on the general state of criticism today.

Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995

Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995 PDF Author: Julius E. Thompson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786422647
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
In 1965 Dudley F. Randall founded the Broadside Press, a company devoted to publishing, distributing and promoting the works of black poets and writers. In so doing, he became a major player in the civil rights movement. Hundreds of black writers were given an outlet for their work and for their calls for equality and black identity. Though Broadside was established on a minimal budget, Randall's unique skills made the press successful. He was trained as a librarian and had spent decades studying and writing poetry; most importantly, Randall was totally committed to the advancement of black literature. The famous and relatively unknown sought out Broadside, including such writers as Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Mae Jackson, Lance Jeffers, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde and Sterling D. Plumpp. His story is one of battling to promote black identity and equality through literature, and thus lifting the cultural lives of all Americans.

Acting Out

Acting Out PDF Author: John Glenn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781425948252
Category : African Americans in literature.
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
John Glenn's innovative criticism champions the connection between African and African American literature, unfolding a new theory that elaborates on the black experience itself. Linking resistance to the literary history and to the expressiveness of blacks, Glenn provides the basis for a study of African and African American fiction at the social level. He shows how empiricism and action are both central to African and African American methods of social adaptation or "acting out." Investigating performance in black literature by exploring the social resistance and adaptation of fictional archetypes, Glenn elaborates what he calls the three performative modes: linguistic, narrative, and theatrical-modes that describe the interaction of fictional characters. Glenn's critical approach analyzes the work of major authors in African and African American literature, including Chinua Achebe, Ralph Ellison, Sam Greenlee, Buchi Emecheta, Wole Soyinka, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Okot p'Bitek, and Paul Laurence Dunbar-showing that these author's works are performative in context. A remarkable piece of work, Glenn's book examines the nature of the African diaspora. It looks within the action of performance to categorize self-identity. Through a pleasing tenacity, his research makes the black community as a whole aware of an "acting out" niche, which has paved an enduring road through black oppression. Truly, this book is a great contribution to African and African American literature.

Ulysses in Black

Ulysses in Black PDF Author: Patrice D. Rankine
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299220036
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking work, Patrice D. Rankine asserts that the classics need not be a mark of Eurocentrism, as they have long been considered. Instead, the classical tradition can be part of a self-conscious, prideful approach to African American culture, esthetics, and identity. Ulysses in Black demonstrates that, similar to their white counterparts, African American authors have been students of classical languages, literature, and mythologies by such writers as Homer, Euripides, and Seneca. Ulysses in Black closely analyzes classical themes (the nature of love and its relationship to the social, Dionysus in myth as a parallel to the black protagonist in the American scene, misplaced Ulyssean manhood) as seen in the works of such African American writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen. Rankine finds that the merging of a black esthetic with the classics—contrary to expectations throughout American culture—has often been a radical addressing of concerns including violence against blacks, racism, and oppression. Ultimately, this unique study of black classicism becomes an exploration of America’s broader cultural integrity, one that is inclusive and historic. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

Acting Out

Acting Out PDF Author: John Glenn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781425948245
Category : African Americans in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
John Glenn's innovative criticism champions the connection between African and African American literature, unfolding a new theory that elaborates on the black experience itself. Linking resistance to the literary history and to the expressiveness of blacks, Glenn provides the basis for a study of African and African American fiction at the social level. He shows how empiricism and action are both central to African and African American methods of social adaptation or acting out. Investigating performance in black literature by exploring the social resistance and adaptation of fictional archetypes, Glenn elaborates what he calls the three performative modes: linguistic, narrative, and theatrical-modes that describe the interaction of fictional characters. Glenn's critical approach analyzes the work of major authors in African and African American literature, including Chinua Achebe, Ralph Ellison, Sam Greenlee, Buchi Emecheta, Wole Soyinka, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Okot p'Bitek, and Paul Laurence Dunbar-showing that these author's works are performative in context. A remarkable piece of work, Glenn's book examines the nature of the African diaspora. It looks within the action of performance to categorize self-identity. Through a pleasing tenacity, his research makes the black community as a whole aware of an acting out niche, which has paved an enduring road through black oppression. Truly, this book is a great contribution to African and African American literature.