The Ideologies of African American Literature

The Ideologies of African American Literature PDF Author: Robert E. Washington
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742509504
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This book challenges the long-held assumption that African American literature aptly reflects black American social consciousness. Offering a novel sociological approach, Washington delineates the social and political forces that shaped the leading black literary works. Washington shows that deep divisions between political thinkers and writers prevailed throughout the 20th century. Visit our website for sample chapters!

The Ideologies of African American Literature

The Ideologies of African American Literature PDF Author: Robert E. Washington
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742509504
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book challenges the long-held assumption that African American literature aptly reflects black American social consciousness. Offering a novel sociological approach, Washington delineates the social and political forces that shaped the leading black literary works. Washington shows that deep divisions between political thinkers and writers prevailed throughout the 20th century. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature

Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature PDF Author: Houston A. Baker
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022616084X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Relating the blues to American social and literary history and to Afro-American expressive culture, Houston A. Baker, Jr., offers the basis for a broader study of American culture at its "vernacular" level. He shows how the "blues voice" and its economic undertones are both central to the American narrative and characteristic of the Afro-American way of telling it.

Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars

Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars PDF Author: Anthony Dawahare
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1628469889
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
During and after the Harlem Renaissance, two intellectual forces—nationalism and Marxism—clashed and changed the future of African American writing. Current literary thinking says that writers with nationalist leanings wrote the most relevant fiction, poetry, and prose of the day. Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box challenges that notion. It boldly proposes that such writers as A. Philip Randolph, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, who often saw the world in terms of class struggle, did more to advance the anti-racist politics of African American letters than writers such as Countee Cullen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Alain Locke, and Marcus Garvey, who remained enmeshed in nationalist and racialist discourse. Evaluating the great impact of Marxism and nationalism on black authors from the Harlem Renaissance and the Depression era, Anthony Dawahare argues that the spread of nationalist ideologies and movements between the world wars did guide legitimate political desires of black writers for a world without racism. But the nationalist channels of political and cultural resistance did not address the capitalist foundation of modern racial discrimination. During the period known as the “Red Decade” (1929–1941), black writers developed some of the sharpest critiques of the capitalist world and thus anticipated contemporary scholarship on the intellectual and political hazards of nationalism for the working class. As it examines the progression of the Great Depression, the book focuses on the shift of black writers to the Communist Left, including analyses of the Communists' position on the “Negro Question,” the radical poetry of Langston Hughes, and the writings of Richard Wright.

Ideology and Classic American Literature

Ideology and Classic American Literature PDF Author: Sacvan Bercovitch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521273091
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
For more than a decade, Americanists have been concerned with the problem of ideology, and have undertaken a broad reassessment of American literature and culture. This volume brings together some of the best work in this area.

Black Visions

Black Visions PDF Author: Michael C. Dawson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226138619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
This comprehensive analysis of the complex relationship of black political thought identifies which political ideologies are supported by blacks, then traces their historical roots and examines their effects on black public opinion.

What Was African American Literature?

What Was African American Literature? PDF Author: Kenneth W. Warren
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674268261
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
African American literature is over. With this provocative claim Kenneth Warren sets out to identify a distinctly African American literature—and to change the terms with which we discuss it. Rather than contest other definitions, Warren makes a clear and compelling case for understanding African American literature as creative and critical work written by black Americans within and against the strictures of Jim Crow America. Within these parameters, his book outlines protocols of reading that best make sense of the literary works produced by African American writers and critics over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. In Warren’s view, African American literature begged the question: what would happen to this literature if and when Jim Crow was finally overthrown? Thus, imagining a world without African American literature was essential to that literature. In support of this point, Warren focuses on three moments in the history of Phylon, an important journal of African American culture. In the dialogues Phylon documents, the question of whether race would disappear as an organizing literary category emerges as shared ground for critical and literary practice. Warren also points out that while scholarship by black Americans has always been the province of a petit bourgeois elite, the strictures of Jim Crow enlisted these writers in a politics that served the race as a whole. Finally, Warren’s work sheds light on the current moment in which advocates of African American solidarity insist on a past that is more productively put behind us.

Exodus Politics

Exodus Politics PDF Author: Robert J. Patterson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 081393527X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Using the term "exodus politics" to theorize the valorization of black male leadership in the movement for civil rights, Robert J. Patterson explores the ways in which the political strategies and ideologies of this movement paradoxically undermined the collective enfranchisement of black people. He argues that by narrowly conceptualizing civil rights in only racial terms and relying solely on a male figure, conventional African American leadership, though frequently redemptive, can also erode the very goals of civil rights. The author turns to contemporary African American writers such as Ernest Gaines, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Charles Johnson to show how they challenge the dominant models of civil rights leadership. He draws on a variety of disciplines—including black feminism, civil rights history, cultural studies, and liberation theology—in order to develop a more nuanced formulation of black subjectivity and politics. Patterson's connection of the concept of racial rights to gender and sexual rights allows him to illuminate the literature's promotion of more expansive models. By considering the competing and varied political interests of black communities, these writers reimagine the dominant models in a way that can empower communities to be self-sustaining in the absence of a messianic male leader.

The Black Arts Movement

The Black Arts Movement PDF Author: James Smethurst
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080787650X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. In this comprehensive analysis, James Smethurst examines the formation of the Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply influenced the production and reception of literature and art in the United States through its negotiations of the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement. Taking a regional approach, Smethurst examines local expressions of the nascent Black Arts Movement, a movement distinctive in its geographical reach and diversity, while always keeping the frame of the larger movement in view. The Black Arts Movement, he argues, fundamentally changed American attitudes about the relationship between popular culture and "high" art and dramatically transformed the landscape of public funding for the arts.

Race and Ideology

Race and Ideology PDF Author: Arthur Kean Spears
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814324547
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Race and Ideology proposes an understanding of racism as a divide-and-conquer mechanism. Race and Ideology reveals how various strands of racial thinking and behavior are crucial for maintaining the unequal distribution of wealth that is more pronounced in the U.S. than in any other advanced industrial country. Though primarily concerned with the U.S., this collection contains chapters on other societies in order to highlight commonalties and the global nature of the race/color problem. This book proposes a new understanding of racism by examining a variety of issues that show how racism and colorism, along with other forms of oppression, are interconnected and maintained by language, symbolism, and popular culture. It includes such topics as how blackness is the symbolic bottom of the U.S. social structure; how the teaching of language and culture can be a tool for understanding inequality; and how the media contribute to the dissemination of stereotypes of people of color. Race and Ideology offers provocative ideas that must be confronted if we are to construct an understanding of racism that can be useful for social change.

The Black Intellectual Tradition

The Black Intellectual Tradition PDF Author: Derrick P. Alridge
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052757
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
Considering the development and ongoing influence of Black thought From 1900 to the present, people of African descent living in the United States have drawn on homegrown and diasporic minds to create a Black intellectual tradition engaged with ideas on race, racial oppression, and the world. This volume presents essays on the diverse thought behind the fight for racial justice as developed by African American artists and intellectuals; performers and protest activists; institutions and organizations; and educators and religious leaders. By including both women’s and men’s perspectives from the U.S. and the Diaspora, the essays explore the full landscape of the Black intellectual tradition. Throughout, contributors engage with important ideas ranging from the consideration of gender within the tradition, to intellectual products generated outside the intelligentsia, to the ongoing relationship between thought and concrete effort in the quest for liberation. Expansive in scope and interdisciplinary in practice, The Black Intellectual Tradition delves into the ideas that animated a people’s striving for full participation in American life. Contributors: Derrick P. Alridge, Keisha N. Blain, Cornelius L. Bynum, Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, Stephanie Y. Evans, Aaron David Gresson III, Claudrena N. Harold, Leonard Harris, Maurice J. Hobson, La TaSha B. Levy, Layli Maparyan, Zebulon V. Miletsky, R. Baxter Miller, Edward Onaci, Venetria K. Patton, James B. Stewart, and Nikki M. Taylor