Black Poetry and Black Folk Narratives

Black Poetry and Black Folk Narratives PDF Author: Dr. James Oliver Richardson
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
ISBN: 1490713042
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 133

Get Book

Book Description
Perhaps the greatest human understanding lies within the hearts and souls of Black people. The old Negro folk songs entered the African American church and became prayer songs and sorrow songs that still trouble our souls. These songs were spirituals groans and mournful meanings that are ever present in the old Negro spirituals; they were narratives and expressions of hope and of tragedy. The songs we hear were a prophecy of pride and self-respect. Through all of the unhappiness of the sorrow songs, there breathes a hope and a faith in the final justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to victory and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, and sometimes reassurance of boundless justice in some unknown world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, all men will be judge by their souls and not by the color of their skins. Perhaps, in America, many Black men cannot endure their life-world of Blackness. Nevertheless, there will come a time when individuals will be required to accept full accountability for their cruelty, hypocrisy, exploitation, and for empowering a reality of Whiteness. It will be a time when secrets of the hearts will be known.

Black Poetry and Black Folk Narratives

Black Poetry and Black Folk Narratives PDF Author: Dr. James Oliver Richardson
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
ISBN: 1490713042
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 133

Get Book

Book Description
Perhaps the greatest human understanding lies within the hearts and souls of Black people. The old Negro folk songs entered the African American church and became prayer songs and sorrow songs that still trouble our souls. These songs were spirituals groans and mournful meanings that are ever present in the old Negro spirituals; they were narratives and expressions of hope and of tragedy. The songs we hear were a prophecy of pride and self-respect. Through all of the unhappiness of the sorrow songs, there breathes a hope and a faith in the final justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to victory and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, and sometimes reassurance of boundless justice in some unknown world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, all men will be judge by their souls and not by the color of their skins. Perhaps, in America, many Black men cannot endure their life-world of Blackness. Nevertheless, there will come a time when individuals will be required to accept full accountability for their cruelty, hypocrisy, exploitation, and for empowering a reality of Whiteness. It will be a time when secrets of the hearts will be known.

Life

Life PDF Author: Thomas Brainerd
Publisher: Wentworth Press
ISBN: 9781010076063
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 454

Get Book

Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Annotated African American Folktales (The Annotated Books)

The Annotated African American Folktales (The Annotated Books) PDF Author: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 0871407566
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 1022

Get Book

Book Description
Winner • NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Fiction) Winner • Anne Izard Storytellers’ Choice Award Holiday Gift Guide Selection • Indiewire, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis Star-Tribune These nearly 150 African American folktales animate our past and reclaim a lost cultural legacy to redefine American literature. Drawing from the great folklorists of the past while expanding African American lore with dozens of tales rarely seen before, The Annotated African American Folktales revolutionizes the canon like no other volume. Following in the tradition of such classics as Arthur Huff Fauset’s “Negro Folk Tales from the South” (1927), Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), and Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly (1985), acclaimed scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar assemble a groundbreaking collection of folktales, myths, and legends that revitalizes a vibrant African American past to produce the most comprehensive and ambitious collection of African American folktales ever published in American literary history. Arguing for the value of these deceptively simple stories as part of a sophisticated, complex, and heterogeneous cultural heritage, Gates and Tatar show how these remarkable stories deserve a place alongside the classic works of African American literature, and American literature more broadly. Opening with two introductory essays and twenty seminal African tales as historical background, Gates and Tatar present nearly 150 African American stories, among them familiar Brer Rabbit classics, but also stories like “The Talking Skull” and “Witches Who Ride,” as well as out-of-print tales from the 1890s’ Southern Workman. Beginning with the figure of Anansi, the African trickster, master of improvisation—a spider who plots and weaves in scandalous ways—The Annotated African American Folktales then goes on to draw Caribbean and Creole tales into the orbit of the folkloric canon. It retrieves stories not seen since the Harlem Renaissance and brings back archival tales of “Negro folklore” that Booker T. Washington proclaimed had emanated from a “grapevine” that existed even before the American Revolution, stories brought over by slaves who had survived the Middle Passage. Furthermore, Gates and Tatar’s volume not only defines a new canon but reveals how these folktales were hijacked and misappropriated in previous incarnations, egregiously by Joel Chandler Harris, a Southern newspaperman, as well as by Walt Disney, who cannibalized and capitalized on Harris’s volumes by creating cartoon characters drawn from this African American lore. Presenting these tales with illuminating annotations and hundreds of revelatory illustrations, The Annotated African American Folktales reminds us that stories not only move, entertain, and instruct but, more fundamentally, inspire and keep hope alive. The Annotated African American Folktales includes: Introductory essays, nearly 150 African American stories, and 20 seminal African tales as historical background The familiar Brer Rabbit classics, as well as news-making vernacular tales from the 1890s’ Southern Workman An entire section of Caribbean and Latin American folktales that finally become incorporated into the canon Approximately 200 full-color, museum-quality images

Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me

Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me PDF Author: Bruce Jackson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book

Book Description


Negro Poetry and Drama

Negro Poetry and Drama PDF Author: Sterling a Brown
Publisher: Westphalia Press
ISBN: 9781935907541
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 142

Get Book

Book Description
Commissioned by the great Alain Locke and edited by Sterling A. Brown, Negro Poetry and Drama was an essential tool in the African American adult education movement during the early twentieth century. The fight for civil rights was accompanied by a move to educate African Americans who were forcibly ignorant to the histories and contributions of those before them. By showcasing the various works and biographies of black writers, poets, playwrights, and dramatists, Negro Poetry uncovers and celebrates voices of the past, offering unique stories which had previously been marginalized or otherwise ignored within the American canon. Complete with the original discussion questions at the end of each chapter, this edition of Negro Poetry gives us a glimpse of the steps African Americans took to re-educate and reclaim their narratives in the fight towards equality. Whitney Shepard has a background in English and African American Studies, with an interest in critical race theory and social justice. She is currently the Director of Development and Programs at the Policy Studies Organization in Washington DC.

Field Study

Field Study PDF Author: Chet'la Sebree
Publisher: FSG Originals
ISBN: 0374722641
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 109

Get Book

Book Description
Winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets "Layered, complex, and infinitely compelling, Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study is a daring exploration of the self and our interactions with others—a meditation on desire, race, loss and survival." --Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Memorial Drive Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study is a genre-bending exploration of black womanhood and desire, written as a lyrical, surprisingly humorous, and startlingly vulnerable prose poem I am society’s eraser shards—bits used to fix other people’s sh*t, then discarded. Somehow still a wet nurse, from actual babes to Alabama special elections. Seeking to understand the fallout of her relationship with a white man, the poet Chet’la Sebree attempts a field study of herself. Scientifically, field studies are objective collections of raw data, devoid of emotion. But during the course of a stunning lyric poem, Sebree’s control over her own field study unravels as she attempts to understand the depth of her feelings in response to the data of her life. The result is a singular and provocative piece of writing, one that is formally inventive, playfully candid, and soul-piercingly sharp. Interspersing her reflections with Tweets, quips from TV characters, and excerpts from the Black thinkers—Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Tressie McMillan Cottom—that inspire her, Sebree analyzes herself through the lens of a society that seems uneasy, at best, with her very presence. She grapples with her attraction to, and rejection of, whiteness and white men; probes the malicious manifestation of colorism and misogynoir throughout American history and media; and struggles with, judges, and forgives herself when she has more questions than answers. “Even as I accrue these notes,” Sebree writes, “I’m still not sure I’ve found the pulse.” A poem of love, heartbreak, womanhood, art, sex, Blackness, and America—sometimes all at once—Field Study throbs with feeling, searing and tender. With uncommon sensitivity and precise storytelling, Sebree makes meaning out of messiness and malaise, breathing life into a scientific study like no other.

Black Nature

Black Nature PDF Author: Camille T. Dungy
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820334316
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Get Book

Book Description
Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated. Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry--anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild. Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson as well as newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements. Black Nature brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole. A Friends Fund Publication.

Build Yourself a Boat

Build Yourself a Boat PDF Author: Camonghne Felix
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608466140
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 73

Get Book

Book Description
2019 National Book Award Longlist: “Centering on black, female identity, [this is] an exquisite and thoughtful collection.” —Bustle This is about what grows through the wreckage. This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains. A finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through lyric and memory. “With Build Yourself a Boat, Camonghne Felix heralds a thrillingly new form of storytelling.” —Morgan Parker, author of Magical Negro

Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me

Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me PDF Author: Bruce Jackson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113587929X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Get Book

Book Description
Chapter The Toast World -- chapter The Toasts -- chapter Books and Articles Cited.

Citizen

Citizen PDF Author: Claudia Rankine
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555973485
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 165

Get Book

Book Description
* Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry * * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more . . . A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.