The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination

The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination PDF Author: Dolan Hubbard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Characterized by oral expression and ritual performance, the black church has been a dynamic force in African American culture. In The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination, Dolan Hubbard explores the profound influence of the sermon upon both the themes and the styles of African American literature. Beginning with an exploration of the historic role of the preacher in African American culture and fiction, Hubbard examines the church as a forum for organizing black social reality. Like political speeches, jazz, and blues, the sermon is an aesthetic construct, interrelated with other aspects of African American cultural expression. Arguing that the African American sermonic tradition is grounded in a self-consciously collective vision, Hubbard applies this vision to the themes and patterns of black American literature. With nuanced readings of the work of Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, Hubbard reveals how the African American sermonic tradition has influenced black American prose fiction. He shows how African American writers have employed the forms of the black preaching style, with all their expressive power, and he explores such recurring themes as the quest for freedom and literacy, the search for identity and community, the lure of upward mobility, the fictionalizing of history, and the use of romance to transform an oppressive history into a vision of mythic transcendence. The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination is a major addition to the fields of African American literary and religious studies.

The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination

The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination PDF Author: Dolan Hubbard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
Characterized by oral expression and ritual performance, the black church has been a dynamic force in African American culture. In The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination, Dolan Hubbard explores the profound influence of the sermon upon both the themes and the styles of African American literature. Beginning with an exploration of the historic role of the preacher in African American culture and fiction, Hubbard examines the church as a forum for organizing black social reality. Like political speeches, jazz, and blues, the sermon is an aesthetic construct, interrelated with other aspects of African American cultural expression. Arguing that the African American sermonic tradition is grounded in a self-consciously collective vision, Hubbard applies this vision to the themes and patterns of black American literature. With nuanced readings of the work of Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, Hubbard reveals how the African American sermonic tradition has influenced black American prose fiction. He shows how African American writers have employed the forms of the black preaching style, with all their expressive power, and he explores such recurring themes as the quest for freedom and literacy, the search for identity and community, the lure of upward mobility, the fictionalizing of history, and the use of romance to transform an oppressive history into a vision of mythic transcendence. The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination is a major addition to the fields of African American literary and religious studies.

Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature

Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature PDF Author: Matthew Smalley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135040005X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
With seemingly obsessive regularity, American authors, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, evoke the sermon at culturally loaded moments in their works, deploying the form to underscore the cultural work they imagine their novels or poetry to perform. Examining this longstanding tradition of “literary preaching,” this book draws on literary applications of design theory to provide a nuanced account of American literature's complex, anxious, and persistent engagement with the Protestant sermon. Analyzing literary preaching as a transhistorical form that simultaneously attracts and repels authors, Smalley demonstrates how major US writers–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison–have subverted the sermon's predominantly religious content in order to reimagine profound moments of reform in a political, cultural, and aesthetic mode. This study elucidates new lines of literary kinship, offers fresh readings of familiar works, and establishes literary preaching as an undertheorized but significant tradition in American literature.

Africana

Africana PDF Author: Anthony Appiah
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195170555
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 3951

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Book Description
Ninety years after W.E.B. Du Bois first articulated the need for "the equivalent of a black Encyclopedia Britannica," Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., realized his vision by publishing Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience in 1999. This new, greatly expanded edition of the original work broadens the foundation provided by Africana. Including more than one million new words, Africana has been completely updated and revised. New entries on African kingdoms have been added, bibliographies now accompany most articles, and the encyclopedia's coverage of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean has been expanded, transforming the set into the most authoritative research and scholarly reference set on the African experience ever created. More than 4,000 articles cover prominent individuals, events, trends, places, political movements, art forms, business and trade, religion, ethnic groups, organizations and countries on both sides of the Atlantic. African American history and culture in the present-day United States receive a strong emphasis, but African American history and culture throughout the rest of the Americas and their origins in African itself have an equally strong presence. The articles that make up Africana cover subjects ranging from affirmative action to zydeco and span over four million years from the earlies-known hominids, to Sean "Diddy" Combs. With entries ranging from the African ethnic groups to members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Africana, Second Edition, conveys the history and scope of cultural expression of people of African descent with unprecedented depth.

The Motif of Hope in African American Preaching during Slavery and the Post-Civil War Era

The Motif of Hope in African American Preaching during Slavery and the Post-Civil War Era PDF Author: Wayne E. Croft
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498536484
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
The Motif of Hope in African American Preaching during Slavery and the Post-Civil War Era: There's a Bright Side Somewhere explores the use of the motif of hope within African American preaching during slavery (1803–1865) and the post-Civil War era (1865–1896). It discusses the presentation of the motif of hope in African American preaching from an historical perspective and how this motif changed while in some instances remained the same with the changing of its historical context. Furthermore, this discussion illuminates a reality that hope has been a theme of importance throughout the history of African American preaching.

African American Literature

African American Literature PDF Author: Hans Ostrom
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440871515
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
This essential volume provides an overview of and introduction to African American writers and literary periods from their beginnings through the 21st century. This compact encyclopedia, aimed at students, selects the most important authors, literary movements, and key topics for them to know. Entries cover the most influential and highly regarded African American writers, including novelists, playwrights, poets, and nonfiction writers. The book covers key periods of African American literature—such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and the Civil Rights Era—and touches on the influence of the vernacular, including blues and hip hop. The volume provides historical context for critical viewpoints including feminism, social class, and racial politics. Entries are organized A to Z and provide biographies that focus on the contributions of key literary figures as well as overviews, background information, and definitions for key subjects.

The Journey and Promise of African American Preaching

The Journey and Promise of African American Preaching PDF Author: Kenyatta R. Gilbert
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1451412533
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The Journey and Promise of African American Preaching is a constructive effort to examine the historical contributions of African American preaching, the challenges it faces today, and how it might become a renewed source of healing and strength for at-risk communities and churches. --from publisher description

Introduction to the Practice of African American Preaching

Introduction to the Practice of African American Preaching PDF Author: Frank A. Thomas
Publisher: Abingdon Press
ISBN: 1501818953
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The Introduction to African American Preaching is an important, groundbreaking book. This book acknowledges African American preaching as an academic discipline, and invites all students and preachers into a scholarly, dynamic, and useful exploration of the topic. Author Frank Thomas opens with a “bus tour” study of African American preaching. He shows how African American preaching has gradually moved from an almost exclusively oral to an oral/written tradition. Readers will gain insight into the history of the study of the African American preaching tradition, and catch the author’s enthusiasm for it. Next Thomas traces the relationship between homiletics and rhetoric in Western preaching, demonstrating how African American preaching is inherently theological and rhetorical. He then explores the question, “what is black preaching?” Thomas introduces the reader to methods of “close reading” and “ideological criticism.” And then demonstrates how to use these methods, using a sermon by Gardner Calvin Taylor as his example. The next chapter considers the question, “what is excellence in black preaching?” The next chapter seeks to create bridges and dialogue within the field of homiletics, and in particular, the Euro-American homiletic tradition. The goal of this chapter is to clearly demonstrate connections between the African American preaching tradition and the field of homiletics. Thomas next turns to questions about the relevancy of the church to the Millennial generation. Specifically, how will the African American church remain relevant to this generation, which is so deeply concerned with social justice?

Performing Blackness

Performing Blackness PDF Author: Kimberley W. Benston
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135078319
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Performing Blackness offers a challenging interpretation of black cultural expression since the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Exploring drama, music, poetry, sermons, and criticism, Benston offers an exciting meditation on modern black performance's role in realising African-American aspirations for autonomy and authority. Artists covered include: * John Coltrane * Ntozake Shange * Ed Bullins * Amiri Baraka * Adrienne Kennedy * Michael Harper. Performing Blackness is an exciting contribution to the ongoing debate about the vitality and importance of black culture.

The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction

The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction PDF Author: Darryl Dickson-Carr
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231510691
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
From Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison to Colson Whitehead and Terry McMillan, Darryl Dickson-Carr offers a definitive guide to contemporary African American literature. This volume-the only reference work devoted exclusively to African American fiction of the last thirty-five years-presents a wealth of factual and interpretive information about the major authors, texts, movements, and ideas that have shaped contemporary African American fiction. In more than 160 concise entries, arranged alphabetically, Dickson-Carr discusses the careers, works, and critical receptions of Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Jamaica Kincaid, Charles Johnson, John Edgar Wideman, Leon Forrest, as well as other prominent and lesser-known authors. Each entry presents ways of reading the author's works, identifies key themes and influences, assesses the writer's overarching significance, and includes sources for further research. Dickson-Carr addresses the influence of a variety of literary movements, critical theories, and publishers of African American work. Topics discussed include the Black Arts Movement, African American postmodernism, feminism, and the influence of hip-hop, the blues, and jazz on African American novelists. In tracing these developments, Dickson-Carr examines the multitude of ways authors have portrayed the diverse experiences of African Americans. The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction situates African American fiction in the social, political, and cultural contexts of post-Civil Rights era America: the drug epidemics of the 1980s and 1990s and the concomitant "war on drugs," the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, the struggle for gay rights, feminism, the rise of HIV/AIDS, and racism's continuing effects on African American communities. Dickson-Carr also discusses the debates and controversies regarding the role of literature in African American life. The volume concludes with an extensive annotated bibliography of African American fiction and criticism.

Paul Robeson's Voices

Paul Robeson's Voices PDF Author: Grant Olwage
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197637477
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Paul Robeson's Voices is a meditation on Robeson's singing, a study of the artist's life in song. Music historian Grant Olwage examines Robeson's voice as it exists in two broad and intersecting domains: as sound object and sounding gesture, specifically how it was fashioned in the contexts of singing practices, in recital, concert, and recorded performance, and as subject of identification. Olwage asks: how does the voice encapsulate modes of subjectivity, of being? Combining deep archival research with musicological theory, this book is a study of voice as central to Robeson's sense of self and his politics. Paul Robeson's Voices charts the dialectal process of Robeson's vocal and self-discovery, documenting some of the ways Robeson's practice revised the traditions of concert singing in the first half of the twentieth century and how his voice manifested as resistance.