Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic

Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic PDF Author: Madhu Dubey
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253318411
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Focus on the works of Toni Morrison, Gaye Jones, and Alice Walker.

Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic

Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic PDF Author: Madhu Dubey
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253318411
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Focus on the works of Toni Morrison, Gaye Jones, and Alice Walker.

The African American Male, Writing, and Difference

The African American Male, Writing, and Difference PDF Author: W. Lawrence Hogue
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791487008
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
In this wide-ranging analysis, W. Lawrence Hogue argues that African American life and history is more diverse than even African American critics generally acknowledge. Focusing on literary representations of African American males in particular, Hogue examines works by James Weldon Johnson, William Melvin Kelley, Charles Wright, Nathan Heard, Clarence Major, James Earl Hardy, and Don Belton to see how they portray middle-class, Christian, subaltern, voodoo, urban, jazz/blues, postmodern, and gay African American cultures. Hogue shows that this polycentric perspective can move beyond a "racial uplift" approach to African American literature and history and help paint a clearer picture of the rich diversity of African American life and culture.

Signs and Cities

Signs and Cities PDF Author: Madhu Dubey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226167283
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy. Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression.

Culture-Bearing Women

Culture-Bearing Women PDF Author: Izabella Penier
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788395609541
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This study examines the Black Women's Renaissance (BWR) - the flowering of literary talent among African American women at the end of the 20th century. It focuses on the historical and heritage novels of the 1980s and the vexed relationship between black cultural nationalism and black feminism. It argues that when the nation seemingly fell out of fashion, black women writers sought to re-create what Renan called "a soul, a spiritual principle" for their ethnic group. BWR narratives, especially those associated with womanism, appreciated "culture bearing" mothers as cultural reproducers of the nation and transmitters of its values. In this way, the writers of the BWR gave rise to "matrifocal" cultural nationalism that superseded masculine cultural nationalism of the previous decade and made black women, instead of black men, principal agents/carriers of national identity. This monograph argues that even though matrifocal nationalism empowered women, ultimately it was a flawed project. It promoted gender and cultural essentialism, i.e. it glorified black motherhood and mother-daughter bonding and condemned other, more radical models of black female subjectivity. Moreover, the BWR, vivified by middle-class and educated black women, turned readers' attention from more contentious social issues, such as class mobility or wealth redistribution. The monograph compares the cultural nationalist novels of the 1980s with social protest novels written by the same authors in the 1970s and explains the rationale behind the change in their aesthetic and political agenda. It also contrasts novels written by womanist writers (Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor to name just a few) and by African Caribbean immigrant or second-generation writers (Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid and Michelle Cliff) to show that, on the score of cultural nationalism, the BWR was not a monolithic phenomenon. African American and African Caribbean women writers collectively contributed to the flourishing of the BWR, but they did not share the same ideas on black identities, histories, or the question of ethnonational belonging.

Teaching African American Women’s Writing

Teaching African American Women’s Writing PDF Author: G. Wisker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137086475
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
The essays in Teaching African American Women's Writing provide reflections on issues, problems and pleasures raised by studying the texts. They will be of use to those teaching and studying African American women's writing in colleges, universities and adult education groups as well as teachers involved in teaching in schools to A level.

Black Internationalist Feminism

Black Internationalist Feminism PDF Author: Cheryl Higashida
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252093542
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Black Internationalist Feminism examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This vital yet largely overlooked feminist tradition built upon and critically retheorized the postwar Left's "nationalist internationalism," which connected the liberation of Blacks in the United States to the liberation of Third World nations and the worldwide proletariat. Black internationalist feminism critiques racist, heteronormative, and masculinist articulations of nationalism while maintaining the importance of national liberation movements for achieving Black women's social, political, and economic rights. Cheryl Higashida shows how Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou worked within and against established literary forms to demonstrate that nationalist internationalism was linked to struggles against heterosexism and patriarchy. Exploring a diverse range of plays, novels, essays, poetry, and reportage, Higashida illustrates how literature is a crucial lens for studying Black internationalist feminism because these authors were at the forefront of bringing the perspectives and problems of black women to light against their marginalization and silencing. In examining writing by Black Left women from 1945–1995, Black Internationalist Feminism contributes to recent efforts to rehistoricize the Old Left, Civil Rights, Black Power, and second-wave Black women's movements.

Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism PDF Author: GerShun Avilez
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252098323
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism explores the long-overlooked links between black nationalist activism and the renaissance of artistic experimentation emerging from recent African American literature, visual art, and film. GerShun Avilez charts a new genealogy of contemporary African American artistic production that illuminates how questions of gender and sexuality guided artistic experimentation in the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. As Avilez shows, the artistic production of the Black Arts era provides a set of critical methodologies and paradigms rooted in the disidentification with black nationalist discourses. Avilez's close readings study how this emerging subjectivity, termed aesthetic radicalism, critiqued nationalist rhetoric in the past. It also continues to offer novel means for expressing black intimacy and embodiment via experimental works of art and innovative artistic methods. A bold addition to an advancing field, Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism rewrites recent black cultural production even as it uncovers unexpected ways of locating black radicalism.

Eating the Black Body

Eating the Black Body PDF Author: Carlyle Van Thompson
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820479316
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Textbook

Spirit in the Dark

Spirit in the Dark PDF Author: Josef Sorett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199844941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Most of the major black literary and cultural movements of the twentieth century have been understood and interpreted as secular, secularizing and, at times, profane. In this book, Josef Sorett demonstrates that religion was actually a formidable force within these movements, animating and organizing African American literary visions throughout the years between the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the 1960s. Sorett unveils the contours of a literary history that remained preoccupied with religion even as it was typically understood by authors, readers, and critics alike to be modern and, therefore, secular. Spirit in the Dark offers an account of the ways in which religion, especially Afro-Protestantism, remained pivotal to the ideas and aspirations of African American literature across much of the twentieth century. From the dawn of the New Negro Renaissance until the ascendance of the Black Arts movement, black writers developed a spiritual grammar for discussing race and art by drawing on terms such as "church" and "spirit" that were part of the landscape and lexicon of American religious history. Sorett demonstrates that religion and spirituality have been key categories for identifying and interpreting what was (or was not) perceived to constitute or contribute to black literature and culture. By examining figures and movements that have typically been cast as "secular," he offers theoretical insights that trouble the boundaries of what counts as "sacred" in scholarship on African American religion and culture. Ultimately, Spirit in the Dark reveals religion to be an essential ingredient, albeit one that was always questioned and contested, in the forging of an African American literary tradition.

After the Pain

After the Pain PDF Author: Fiona Mills
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820478388
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
As a poet, playwright, novelist, short-story writer, and critic, Gayl Jones has always resisted labels in her quest to find a liberating voice for black women and herself. With a poet's lyricism and a musician's ear for rhythm, she continually seeks new ways to confront the barriers, traumas, insecurities, and prejudices oppressing black women, and, by extension, all women. After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones is the first comprehensive collection of essays dedicated solely to the exploration of Jones's work. Ranging from analyses of her use of language and music to reevaluations of her representation of sexuality and gender roles to examinations of the oft-overlooked connections between Latin America and African Americans, each of these essays investigates Jones's desire to continually complicate the process of identity formation.