Author: Jeffrey B. Ferguson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300133464
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
This book is the first to focus a bright light on the life and early career of George S. Schuyler, one of the most important intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. A popular journalist in black America, Schuyler wielded a sharp, double-edged wit to attack the foibles of both blacks and whites throughout the 1920s. Jeffrey B. Ferguson presents a new understanding of Schuyler as public intellectual while also offering insights into the relations between race and satire during a formative period of African-American cultural history. Ferguson discusses Schuyler’s controversial career and reputation and examines the paradoxical ideas at the center of his message. The author also addresses Schuyler’s drift toward the political right in his later years and how this has affected his legacy.
Author: Josef Sorett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199844941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :
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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.
Author: Chad Louis Williams
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807833940
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 470
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Book Description
"In this important, sophisticated, and original study, Chad Williams establishes the centrality of black soldiers and veterans to the struggles against racial inequality during World War I as no other book does. Torchbearers of Democracy sensitively examines the fraught connections between citizenship, obligation, and race while highlighting the diversity of black soldiers' experiences in fighting on behalf of a democracy that denied them rights and dignity. This is a major contribution to political, military, and civil rights history."--Eric Arnesen, George Washington University.
Author: Joshua L. Miller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199792674
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Book Description
American literary works written in the heyday of modernism between the 1890s and 1940s were playfully, painfully, and ambivalently engaged with language politics. The immigrant waves of the period fed into writers' aesthetic experimentation; their works, in turn, rewired ideas about national identity along with literary form. Accented America looks at the long history of English-Only Americanism-the political claim that U.S. citizens must speak a singular, shared American tongue-and traces its action in the language workshop that is literature. The broadly multi-ethnic set of writers brought into conversation here-including Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos, Lionel Trilling, Am?rico Paredes, and Carlos Bulosan-reflect the massive demographic shifts taking place during the interwar years. These authors share an acute awareness of linguistic standardization while also following the defamiliarizing sway produced by experimentation with invented and improper literary vernaculars. Rather than confirming the powerfully seductive subtext of monolingualism-that those who speak alike are ethically and politically likeminded-multilingual modernists compose literature that speaks to a country of synthetic syntaxes, singular hybrids, and enduring strangeness.
Author: Kenneth T. Jackson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300182570
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 4282
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Book Description
Covering an exhaustive range of information about the five boroughs, the first edition of The Encyclopedia of New York City was a success by every measure, earning worldwide acclaim and several awards for reference excellence, and selling out its first printing before it was officially published. But much has changed since the volume first appeared in 1995: the World Trade Center no longer dominates the skyline, a billionaire businessman has become an unlikely three-term mayor, and urban regeneration—Chelsea Piers, the High Line, DUMBO, Williamsburg, the South Bronx, the Lower East Side—has become commonplace. To reflect such innovation and change, this definitive, one-volume resource on the city has been completely revised and expanded. The revised edition includes 800 new entries that help complete the story of New York: from Air Train to E-ZPass, from September 11 to public order. The new material includes broader coverage of subject areas previously underserved as well as new maps and illustrations. Virtually all existing entries—spanning architecture, politics, business, sports, the arts, and more—have been updated to reflect the impact of the past two decades. The more than 5,000 alphabetical entries and 700 illustrations of the second edition of The Encyclopedia of New York City convey the richness and diversity of its subject in great breadth and detail, and will continue to serve as an indispensable tool for everyone who has even a passing interest in the American metropolis.
Author: Ann Hulbert
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101971320
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
Ann Hulbert’s in-depth exploration of the lives of sixteen extraordinary children over the course of the past century casts new light on America’s current obsession with early achievement. The figures she profiles include math genius Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics; two girls whose fiction and poetry stirred debate in the 1920s; the movie superstar Shirley Temple; the African-American pianist and composer Philippa Schuyler; the chess champion Bobby Fischer; computer pioneers and “prodigious savants” with autism; and musical prodigies, present and past. Hulbert probes the changing roles of parents and teachers as well as of psychologists and a curious press. Above all, she delves into the feelings of the prodigies themselves, whose stories so intriguingly raise hopes about untapped human potential and questions about how best to nurture it.
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.
Author: Gene Andrew Jarrett
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081220235X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
For a work to be considered African American literature, does it need to focus on black characters or political themes? Must it represent these within a specific stylistic range? Or is it enough for the author to be identified as African American? In Deans and Truants, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the shifting definitions of African American literature and the authors who wrote beyond those boundaries at the cost of critical dismissal and, at times, obscurity. From the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, de facto deans—critics and authors as different as William Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka—prescribed the shifting parameters of realism and racial subject matter appropriate to authentic African American literature, while truant authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, George S. Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison—perhaps the most celebrated African American author of the twentieth century—wrote literature anomalous to those standards. Jarrett explores the issues at stake when Howells, the "Dean of American Letters," argues in 1896 that only Dunbar's "entirely black verse," written in dialect, "would succeed." Three decades later, Locke, the cultural arbiter of the Harlem Renaissance, stands in contrast to Schuyler, a journalist and novelist who questions the existence of a peculiarly black or "New Negro" art. Next, Wright's 1937 blueprint for African American writing sets the terms of the Chicago Renaissance, but Yerby's version of historical romance approaches race and realism in alternative literary ways. Finally, Deans and Truants measures the gravitational pull of the late 1960s Black Aesthetic in Baraka's editorial silence on Toni Morrison's first and only short story, "Recitatif." Drawing from a wealth of biographical, historical, and literary sources, Deans and Truants describes the changing notions of race, politics, and gender that framed and were framed by the authors and critics of African American culture for more than a century.
Author: Ewa Barbara Luczak
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137545798
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
A disturbing but ultimately discredited strain in American thought, eugenics was a crucial ideological force in the early twentieth century. Luczak investigates the work of writers like Jack London and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to consider the impact of eugenic racial discourse on American literary production from 1900-1940.
Author: Cornelius L. Bynum
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252035755
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
A. Philip Randolph's career as a trade unionist and civil rights activist shaped the course of black protest in the mid-20th century. This book shows that Randolph's push for African American equality took place within a broader progressive program of industrial reform.
