Depictions of Home in African American Literature

Depictions of Home in African American Literature PDF Author: Trudier Harris
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793649642
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In Depictions of Home in African American Literature, Trudier Harris analyzes fictional homespaces in African American literature from those set in the time of slavery to modern urban configurations of the homespace. She argues that African American writers often inadvertently create and follow a tradition of portraying dysfunctional and physically or emotionally violent homespaces. Harris explores the roles race and religion play in the creation of homespaces and how geography, space, and character all influence these spaces. Although many characters in African American literature crave safe, happy homespaces and frequently carry such images with them through their mental or physical migrations, few characters experience the formation of healthy homespaces by the end of their journeys. Harris studies the historical, cultural, and literary portrayals of the home in works from well-known authors such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and August Wilson as well as lesser-studied authors such as Daniel Black, A.J. Verdelle, Margaret Walker, and Dorothy West.

Depictions of Home in African American Literature

Depictions of Home in African American Literature PDF Author: Trudier Harris
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793649642
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In Depictions of Home in African American Literature, Trudier Harris analyzes fictional homespaces in African American literature from those set in the time of slavery to modern urban configurations of the homespace. She argues that African American writers often inadvertently create and follow a tradition of portraying dysfunctional and physically or emotionally violent homespaces. Harris explores the roles race and religion play in the creation of homespaces and how geography, space, and character all influence these spaces. Although many characters in African American literature crave safe, happy homespaces and frequently carry such images with them through their mental or physical migrations, few characters experience the formation of healthy homespaces by the end of their journeys. Harris studies the historical, cultural, and literary portrayals of the home in works from well-known authors such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and August Wilson as well as lesser-studied authors such as Daniel Black, A.J. Verdelle, Margaret Walker, and Dorothy West.

Burnin' Down the House

Burnin' Down the House PDF Author: Valerie Sweeney Prince
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023113441X
Category : African American families in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
-- Cheryl A. Wall, Rutgers University

The Impact of Racism on African American Families

The Impact of Racism on African American Families PDF Author: Paul C. Rosenblatt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317027752
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
In spite of the existence of statistics and numerical data on various aspects of African American life, including housing, earnings, assets, unemployment, household violence, teen pregnancy and encounters with the criminal justice system, social science literature on how racism affects the everyday interactions of African American families is limited. How does racism come home to and affect African American families? If a father in an African American family is denied employment on the basis of his race or a wife is demeaned at work by racist slurs, how is their family life affected? Given the lack of social science literature responding to these questions, this volume turns to an alternative source in order to address them: literature. Engaging with novels written by African American authors, it explores their rich depictions of African American family life, showing how these can contribute to our sociological knowledge and making the case for the novel as an object and source of social research. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students of the sociology of the family, race and ethnicity, cultural studies and literature.

From Mammies to Militants

From Mammies to Militants PDF Author: Trudier Harris
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817360948
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Welfare queen, hot momma, unwed mother: these stereotypes of Black women share their historical conception in the image of the Black woman as domestic. Focusing on the issue of stereotypes, the new edition of Trudier Harris’s classic 1982 study From Mammies to Militants examines the position of the domestic in Black American literature with a new afterword bringing her analysis into the present. From Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Black writers, some of whom worked as maids themselves, have manipulated the stereotype in a strategic way as a figure to comment on Black-white relations or to dramatize the conflicts of the Black protagonists. In fact, the characters themselves, like real-life maids, often use the stereotype to their advantage or to trick their oppressors. Harris combines folkloristic, sociological, historical, and psychological analyses with literary ones, drawing on her own interviews with Black women who worked as domestics. She explores the differences between Northern and Southern maids and between “mammy” and “militant.” Her invaluable book provides a sweeping exploration of Black American writers of the twentieth century, with extended discussion of works by Charles Chesnutt, Kristin Hunter, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, William Melvin Kelley, Alice Childress, John A. Williams, Douglas Turner Ward, Barbara Woods, Ted Shine, and Ed Bullins. Often privileging political statements over realistic characterization in the design of their texts, the authors in Harris’s study urged Black Americans to take action to change their powerless conditions, politely if possible, violently if necessary. Through their commitment to improving the conditions of Black people in America, these writers demonstrate the connectedness of art and politics. In her new afterword, “From Militants to Movie Stars,” Harris looks at domestic workers in African American literature after the original publication of her book in 1982. Exploring five subsequent literary treatments of Black domestic workers from Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying to Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, Harris tracks how the landscape of representation of domestic workers has broken with tradition and continues to transform into something entirely new.

African American Literature in Transition, 1800-1830

African American Literature in Transition, 1800-1830 PDF Author: Jasmine Nichole Cobb
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781108632003
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"African American literature in the years between 1800 and 1830 emerged from significant transitions in the cultural, technological, and political circulation of ideas. Transformations included increased numbers of Black organizations, shifts in the physical mobility of Black peoples, expanded circulation of abolitionist and Black newsprint as well as greater production of Black authored texts and images. The perpetuation of slavery in the early American republic meant that many people of African descent conveyed experiences of bondage or promoted abolition in complex ways, relying on a diverse array of print and illustrative forms. Accordingly, this volume takes a thematic approach to African American literature from 1800 to 1830, exploring Black organizational life before 1830, movement and mobility in African American literature, and print culture in circulation, illustration, and the narrative form"--

African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910: Volume 7

African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910: Volume 7 PDF Author: Shirley Moody-Turner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108386571
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 653

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Book Description
African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910 offers a wide ranging, multi-disciplinary approach to early twentieth century African American literature and culture. It showcases the literary and cultural productions that took shape in the critical years after Reconstruction, but before the Harlem Renaissance, the period known as the nadir of African American history. It undercovers the dynamic work being done by Black authors, painters, photographers, poets, editors, boxers, and entertainers to shape 'New Negro' identities and to chart a new path for a new century. The book is structured into four key areas: Black publishing and print culture; innovations in genre and form; the race, class and gender politics of literary and cultural production; and new geographies of Black literary history. These overarching themes, along with the introduction of established figures and movement, alongside lesser known texts and original research, offer a radical re-conceptualization of this critical, but understudied period in African American literary history.

Children of Promise

Children of Promise PDF Author: Charles Sullivan
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
ISBN: 9780810982215
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Nearly 100 specially chosen poems, songs, and text excerpts vividly evoke the African-American experience for young readers.

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.

African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era

African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era PDF Author: E. Lâle Demirtürk
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498596223
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era: Transgressive Performativity of Black Vulnerability as Praxis in Everyday Life explores the undoing of whiteness by black people, who dissociate from scripts of black criminality through radical performative reiterations of black vulnerability. It studies five novels that challenge the embodied discursive practices of whiteness in interracial social encounters, showing how they use strategic performances of Blackness to enable subversive practices in everyday life, which is constructed and governed by white mechanisms of racialized control. The agency portrayed in these novels opens up alternative spaces of Blackness to impact the social world and effects transformative change as a forceful critique of everyday life. African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era shows how these novels reformulate the problem of black vulnerability as a constitutive source of the right to life in their refusal of subjection to vulnerability, enacted by white institutional and individual forms of violence. It positions a white-black-encounter-oriented reading of these “neo-resistance novels” of the Black Lives Matter era as a critique of everyday life in an effort to explore spaces of radical performativity of blackness to make happen social change and transformation.

The House Behind the Cedars

The House Behind the Cedars PDF Author: Charles W. Chestnutt
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
ISBN: 151326687X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
The House Behind the Cedars (1900) is African-American writer Charles Chesnutt’s debut novel. Inspired by his own experience as a Black man capable of passing for white—which Chesnutt consciously chose not to do—as well as by Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, The House Behind the Cedars explores themes of identity, race, and class in the post-Civil War South. Controversial for its portrayal of interracial romance, Chesnutt’s novel was critically acclaimed in its day, but failed financially. It was adapted into a 1927 silent film by pioneering Black director Oscar Micheaux. After years of living in the city, John Warwick visits his hometown to see his mother and sister. Hearing of his success as a lawyer and father, Rena, his sister, is intrigued with city life and decides to join him when he returns. With a black mother and white father, the two are able to pass for white, which allows them—Rena soon discovers—a certain amount of social mobility in the South. It being only a few years after the Civil War, there is of course some risk to this, but the opportunity is too enticing to pass up. Rena soon meets George, a wealthy white man and business partner of her brother, and the two fall in love. When she is called home to care for her sick mother, and as George begins to grow suspicious, it becomes more and more difficult to keep her secret—and her family—safe. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.