Author: Trudier Harris
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253319951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Get Book Here
Book Description
By lynching, burning, castrating, raping, and mutilating black people, contends Trudier Harris, white Americans were perfomring a rite of exorcism designed to eradicate the "black beast" from their midst, or, at the very least, to render him powerless and emasculated. Black writers have graphically portrayed such tragic incidents in their writings. In doing so, they seem to be acting out a communal role--a perpetuation of an oral tradition bent on the survival of the race. Exorcising Blackness demonstrates that the closeness and intensity of black people's historical experiences sometimes overshadows, frequently infuses and enhances, and definitely makes richer in texture the art of black writers. By reviewing the historical and literary interconnections of the rituals of exorcism, Harris opens up the hidden psyche--the soul--of black American writers.
Author: James W. Coleman
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807138150
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Get Book Here
Book Description
One of the most critically acclaimed yet least recognized contemporary writers, African American author John Edgar Wideman creates work often described as difficult, even unfathomable. In Writing Blackness, James Coleman examines Wideman's prolific body of work with the goal of making his often elusive imagery and dense style more accessible and thus broadening his readership. More so than for most writers, Coleman shows, Wideman's life has affected his writing. Born in 1941, Wideman grew up in a Pittsburgh suburb where he attended an integrated high school, starred on the basketball team, and was senior class president and valedictorian. At the University of Pennsylvania he studied creative writing and became an all--Ivy League basketball player. Winning a Rhodes scholarship, he studied at Oxford, after which he returned to Penn and became its first black tenured professor. Wideman published his first novel, A Glance Away, at age twenty-six and by 1973 had published two more works of fiction. But for all this success, something began to wear on him. In 1973, his grandmother died, and after listening to family stories when he traveled home for the funeral, Wideman began to change his world view. Between 1973 and 1981 Wideman published nothing and immersed himself in African American culture, reading widely and -- even more important -- moving much closer to his family. Since 1981, Wideman has refocused his life and writing on blackness and published twelve experimental works, all very different from his earlier books. Coleman examines nearly all of Wideman's work, from A Glance Away (1967) to Fanon (2008). He shows how Wideman has developed a unique style that combines elements of fiction, biography, memoir, history, legend, folklore, waking life, and dream in innovative ways in an effort to grasp the meaning of blackness -- an effort that makes his writing challenging but that holds more than ample rewards for the perceptive reader. In Writing Blackness, Coleman demonstrates why Wideman ranks among the best of contemporary American writers.
Author: Wendy W. Walters
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452907226
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Get Book Here
Book Description
Although he never lived in Harlem, Chester Himes commented that he experienced “a sort of pure homesickness” while creating the Harlem-set detective novels from his self-imposed exile in Paris. Through writing, Himes constructed an imaginary home informed both by nostalgia for a community he never knew and a critique of the racism he left behind in the United States. Half a century later, Michelle Cliff wrote about her native Jamaica from the United States, articulating a positive Caribbean feminism that at the same time acknowledged Jamaica’s homophobia and color prejudice. In At Home in Diaspora, Wendy Walters investigates the work of Himes, Cliff, and three other twentieth-century black international writers—Caryl Phillips, Simon Njami, and Richard Wright—who have lived in and written from countries they do not call home. Unlike other authors in exile, those of the African diaspora are doubly displaced, first by the discrimination they faced at home and again by their life abroad. Throughout, Walters suggests that in the absence of a recoverable land of origin, the idea of diaspora comes to represent a home that is not singular or exclusionary. In this way, writing in exile is much more than a literary performance; it is a profound political act. Wendy W. Walters is assistant professor of literature at Emerson College.
Author: Erica Renee Edwards
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816675457
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274
Get Book Here
Book Description
How a preoccupation with charismatic leadership in African American culture has influenced literature from World War I to the present
Author: Carol P. Marsh-Lockett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317944941
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Get Book Here
Book Description
This collection of critical essays on plays by African American female playwrights from the post-reconstruction period to the present provides thematic analyses of plays by major and less widely known African American women playwrights The contributors examine the plays as vehicles of public discourse, and as explorations of issues of African American identity. Essays explore the themes of sexuality, agency, anger, and self-concept in the plays of African American Women.
Author: LaToya Jefferson-James
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793606714
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Get Book Here
Book Description
New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers is a collection of critical and pedagogical essays that shed new light on the creative depths of Black women writers. On the one hand, some Black women writers have been heavily anthologized, they have more often than not been restricted by critical metanarratives. Some of their works have been lionized while others remain neglected. On the other hand, some Black women writers have been ignored and understudied. This collection corrects the gaps in our critical thinking about Black women writers by introducing them to a new generation of undergraduate and graduate students, and by presenting pedagogical essays to our colleagues currently working in the field.
Author: Dickson D. Bruce, Jr.
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807118061
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this wide-ranging study, Dickson D. Bruce. Jr., analyzes post-Reconstruction and turn-of-the-century black writing, treating minor as well as major authors and considering a broad range of genres. Bruce shows that black writers confronted the conditions of an increasingly racist society in almost every aspect of their work—from their choice of subject matter to the way they drew their characters to the mood they portrayed. At the same time, these writers, most of whom were members of a small but growing black professional class, displayed a concern for middle-class aspirations and values. Bruce underscores the significance of discerning the tensions between these opposing forces in studying the literature of the time. Bruce’s attention to the body of work produced by minor writers, most of whom have remained obscure to all but a few literary scholars and historians, adds an important dimension to our understanding of African-American history and literature. His discussion of such better-known writers as Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois places them in a fuller literary context, defining more clearly their significance as individuals. Black American Writing from the Nadir is an insightful, well-focused work that will benefit social and cultural historians as well as students of literature
Author: Jane Campbell
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870495939
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Mark S. Weiner
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307425037
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450
Get Book Here
Book Description
From a brilliant young legal scholar comes this sweeping history of American ideas of belonging and citizenship, told through the stories of fourteen legal cases that helped to shape our nation. Spanning three centuries, Black Trials details the legal challenges and struggles that helped define the ever-shifting identity of blacks in America. From the well-known cases of Plessy v. Ferguson and the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings to the more obscure trial of Joseph Hanno, an eighteenth-century free black man accused of murdering his wife and bringing smallpox to Boston, Weiner recounts the essential dramas of American identity—illuminating where our conception of minority rights has come from and where it might go. Significant and enthralling, these are the cases that forced the courts and the country to reconsider what it means to be black in America, and Mark Weiner demonstrates their lasting importance for our society.
Author: Stephen C. Finley
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474473725
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Get Book Here
Book Description
Critically analyses the historical, cultural and political dimensions of white religious rage in America, past and present This book sheds light on the phenomenon of white rage, and maps out the uneasy relationship between white anxiety, religious fervour, American identity and perceived black racial progress. Contributors to the volume examine the sociological construct of the "e;white labourer"e;, whose concerns and beliefs can be understood as religious in foundation, and uncover that white religious fervor correlates to notions of perceived white loss and perceived black progress. In discussions ranging from the Constitution to the Charlottesville riots to the evangelical community's uncritical support for Trump, the authors of this collection argue that it is not economics but religion and race that stand as the primary motivating factors for the rise of white rage and white supremacist sentiment in the United States.
