essays about african american literature

Our Favorite Essays by Black Writers About Race and Identity

Books & Culture

A personal and critical lens to blackness in america from our archives.

It’s fitting that two of the first three essays in this roundup are centered on examining the Black American experience as one of horror. In a year when radical right-wing activists are truly leaning in, we’ve already seen record numbers of anti-LGBTQ legislation, the very real possibility of the end of Roe v. Wade, and more fervent redlining measures to keep Black people (and other marginalized communities) from voting. Gun violence is at an all time high, in particular mass shootings.

Since the success of Jordan Peele’s runaway hit film Get Out , there has been a steady rise in films depicting the Black American experience for the fraught, nuanced, dangerous life that it can be. This narrative isn’t entirely new, but this is the first time these films have gained critical acclaim and commercial attention. The reason is simple. Whatever the cause—social media, an increasingly diverse population—America can’t run from itself anymore. Our entertainment is finally asking the question that Black people have been asking for generations: In America, who is the real boogeyman?

Naturally, the discourse and critical analyses must follow suit. But it doesn’t stop there: the essays on this list span far and wide when it comes to subject matter, critical lens, and personal narrative. There are essays about Black friendship, the radical nature of Black people taking rest, and the affirmation of Black women writing for themselves, telling their own stories. Icons like Michelle Obama, Toni Morrison, and Gayle Jones get a deep dive, and we learn that we should always have been listening to Octavia Butler. This Juneteenth, I hope you’re taking a moment to reflect, on America’s troubled legacy, and to celebrate the ways that Black people continue to thrive.

Modern Horror Is the Perfect Genre for Capturing the Black Experience

Cree Myles writes about the contemporary Black creators rewriting the horror genre and growing the canon:

“Racism is a horror and should be explored as such. White folks have made it clear that they don’t think that’s true. Someone else needs to tell the story.”

Modern Narratives of Black Love and Friendship Are Centering Iconic Trios

Darise Jeanbaptiste writes about how Insecure and Nobody’s Magic illustrate the intricacy of evolving Black relationships:

“The power of the triptych is that it offers three experiences in addition to the fourth, which emerges when all three are viewed or read together.”

I Was Surrounded by “Final Girls” in School, Knowing I’d Never Be One

Whitney Washington writes that the erasure of Black women in slasher films has larger implications about race in America:

“Long before the realities of American life, it was slasher movies that taught me how invisible, ignored, and ultimately expendable Black women are. There was no list of rules long enough to keep me safe from the insidiousness of white supremacy… More than anything, slasher movies showed me that my role was to always be a supporting character, risking my life to be the voice of reason ensuring that the white girl makes it to the finish line.”

“Palmares” Is An Example of What Grows When Black Women Choose Silence

Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies , writes that Gayl Jones’ decades-long absence from public life illuminates the power of restorative quiet:

“These women’s silences should not be interpreted as a lack of understanding or awareness, but rather as an abundance of both, most especially the knowledge of what to keep close to the vest, and the implications for failing to do so. They know better than to explain themselves, their powers and their origins, their beliefs and reasons, their magic. These women are silent not because they don’t know anything. They are silent because they know better.”

Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” Showed Me How Race and Gender Are Intertwined

For the 50th anniversary of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye , Koritha Mitchell writes how the novel taught her that being a Black woman is more than just Blackness or womanhood:

“I didn’t have the gift of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of ‘intersectionality,’ but The Bluest Eye revealed how, in my presence, racism and sexism would always collide to produce negative experiences that others could dodge. It was not simply being Black or being dark-skinned that mattered; it was being those things while also being female.”

The Delicate Balancing Act of Black Women’s Memoir

Koritha Mitchell writes about how Michelle Obama’s Becoming illustrates larger tensions for Black women writing about themselves:

“In other words, when Black women remain enigmas while seeming to share so much, they create proxies at a distance from their psychic and spiritual realities because they are so rarely safe in public. Despite the release of her memoir, audiences will never be privy to who Michelle Obama actually knows herself to be, and that is more than appropriate.”

50 Years Later, the Demands of “The Black Manifesto” Are Still Unmet

Carla Bell writes about James Forman’s famous 1969 address, The Black Manifesto , and its contemporary resonances:

“But the Manifesto is as vital a roadmap in our marches and protests today as the day it was first delivered. We, black people in America, remain compelled by the power and purpose of The Black Manifesto, and we continue to demand our full rights as a people of this decadent society.”

You Should Have Been Listening to Octavia Butler This Whole Time

Alicia A. Wallace writes that Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower isn’t just a prescient dystopia—it’s a monument to the wisdom of Black women and girls:

Through her protagonist Lauren Olamina, Butler has been telling the world for decades that it was not going to last in its capitalist, racist, sexist, homophobic form for much longer. She showed us the way injustice would cause the earth to burn, and the importance of community building for survival and revolution. Through Parable of the Sowe r, we had a better future in our hands, but we did not listen.

The Book You Need to Fully Understand How Racism Operates in America

Darryl Robertson writes about Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning and its examination of the history of overt and covert bigotry:

“While How to Be an Antiracist is an informative and necessary read, it is his National Book Award-winning, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America that deserves extra attention. If we want to uproot the current racist system, it’s mandatory that we understand how racism was constructed. Stamped does just that.”

I Reject the Imaginary White Man Judging My Work

Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts turns to Black writers as inspiration for resisting white expectations:

“…it doesn’t only matter that I’m a Black woman telling my story. What matters is the lens through which I’m telling it. And sometimes, many times, that lens, if we’re not careful, can be tainted by the ever-present consciousness of Whiteness as the default.”

Toni Morrison Gave My Own Story Back to Me

The incomparable literary powerhouse showed Brandon Taylor how to stop letting white people dictate the shape of his narrative:

“That’s the magic of Toni Morrison. Once you read her, the world is never the same. It’s deeper, brighter, darker, more beautiful and terrible than you could ever imagine. Her work opens the world and ushers you out into it. She resurfaced the very texture and nature of my imagination and what I could conceive of as possible for writing and for art, for life.”

Art Must Engage With Black Vitality, Not Just Black Pain

Jennifer Baker writes that books like The Fire This Time give depth and nuance to a reflection of Blackness in America:

“These essays provided a deeper connection because Black pain was part of the story; Black identity, self-recognition, our own awareness brokered every page. Black pain was not the sole criterion for the anthology’s existence.”

When Black Characters Wear White Masks

Jennifer Baker writes that whiteface in literature isn’t a disavowal of Blackness, but a commentary on privilege:

“Whiteface stories interrogate the mentality that it’s better to be white while examining how societal gains as well as societal “norms” inflict this way of thinking on Black people. Being white isn’t better, but, for some of these characters, it seems a hell of a lot easier, or at least preferable to dealing with racism.”

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A frican A merican R eview is a scholarly aggregation of insightful essays on African American literature, theatre, film, the visual arts, and culture; interviews; poetry; fiction; and book reviews. Published quarterly, AAR has featured renowned writers and cultural critics including Trudier Harris, Arnold Rampersad, Hortense Spillers, Amiri Baraka, Cyrus Cassells, Rita Dove, Charles Johnson, Cheryl Wall, and Toni Morrison. The official publication of LLC African American of the Modern Language Association, AAR fosters a vigorous conversation among writers and scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

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The African American Literature Essay

Historical events from other parts of the world, works cited.

The major outstanding and pivotal event that greatly influenced the African American literature in the 1764-1865 was slavery and its anti-movements. This fact is buttressed by Krise (3) in succinctly stating that “Early representations of opposition to slavery tend to be overlooked or disregarded in sweeping accounts of the rise and success of the antislavery movement – particularly in accounts that focus on literary representations of opposition to slavery”. African American literature during this turbulent period in the lives of African Americans was heavily influenced by the rise in radicalism, enlightenment and the advent of industrialization.

The earliest surviving works of African American literature date from the mid-1700 and were written by Africans brought to America as slaves. These include the poem “Bars Fight ” by Lucy terry about the raid in Massachusetts and a number of poems recorded by Phillis Wheatley in 1773. The most important factor is that all these literal works touched on slavery in their themes. Rise of anti-slavery movements characterized major themes of these Literatures. Krise (5) portrays that “The antislavery movement of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is often associated with progressive movements and ideas: radicalism, enlightenment, natural rights, as well as sensibility, nascent industrialism and the simultaneous decline of the master–servant relationship and the rise of wage labor”. The most documented article of the seventeenth century that centered on slavery as its theme is the Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, also referred to as the Royal Slave. This is a true story that was later published in 1968. Centering on the theme of slavery during this period and its influence on the African American literature, it focused on other aspects of slavery such as enslavement and the relationship between the master and the servant.

Another notable literature that portrays the influence of slavery on the African American literature was “A Discourse in way of Dialogue”. This is a literal work that details the social life of an Ethiopian or Negro-Slave, and a Christian Master in America that was documented by Tyron in 1942. A synthesis of the dialogue as documented here reveals themes that captured social existences and relationship between the servant and the master. Calls for freedom and equality for all regardless of race and color marked the early part of the 18 th Century. This was precipitated by nascent industrialization and the growth of knowledge and rise in wages. Changes in the lifestyles and decline in the master to servant form of slavery brought with it the understanding that African Americans could make their lives better if they wished so. The African American literature thus centered on the better living conditions and the struggle to achieve high social status measured by the level of living standards.

Lastly, the historical events from other parts of the world notably the political, social and economic events in the European countries were easily imported to the United States. Political instabilities such as civil wars in the European countries and changes in ruler ship often found their way in to the themes of African American literature (Carretta, 4). This was due to the fact that slaves in European countries had their roots in Africa and shared a common ancestry with the African Americans. A good example is demonstrated by Rosenberg (17) in stating that “The characters of George III, the circumstances accompanying his accession to the throne, and the forced abandonment by France of her colonial empire in America were probably the chief causes of the struggle between the practically unconnected American colonies and the mother-country heavily had an impact on the literal works”.

Carretta, Vincent. Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005.

Krise, Thomas W. An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657-1777 Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Rosenberg, Philippe. Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-Century Dimensions of Antislavery. The William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series, 64:1. 2004.

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IvyPanda. (2024, March 16). The African American Literature. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-african-american-literature/

"The African American Literature." IvyPanda , 16 Mar. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/the-african-american-literature/.

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IvyPanda . 2024. "The African American Literature." March 16, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-african-american-literature/.

1. IvyPanda . "The African American Literature." March 16, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-african-american-literature/.

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IvyPanda . "The African American Literature." March 16, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-african-american-literature/.

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Black Refusal, Black Magic: Reading African American Literature Now

Candice M. Jenkins is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her book, Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy , won the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize in 2008. Her current manuscript explores the narrative dilemma of black bourgeois embodiment in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century African American literature.

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Candice M Jenkins, Black Refusal, Black Magic: Reading African American Literature Now, American Literary History , Volume 29, Issue 4, Winter 2017, Pages 779–789, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajx033

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This essay comments on the collected essays in the ALH special issue on twenty-first-century African American literature. Taken together, these contributors’ essays make clear that there is no single idea, issue, or story that defines our current literary era—only a shared accumulation of upheavals, dissonances, and resonances that come together under the rubric (itself contested) of the contemporary. Guided by the suggestive content of the essays in the collection, I offer in this response my sense of the present black literary landscape. My thoughts coalesce around four central ideas that these essays raise either explicitly or implicitly: audience, form, region, and labor. I consider how contemporary African American literature is received, and how and why it should be understood as a “devastated form”; I address, as well, why the omission of the South in these essays is so troubling, and how we might think about the roles that capitalism, class, and commodity culture play in black literary production. My essay concludes, ultimately, that black refusal and what might be called black magic are crucial heuristics for understanding both what is, and what is possible, in the field.

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Building a New Canon of Black Literature

Which older novels, plays and poems by African American writers are being — or should be — rediscovered?

By Adam Bradley

Artwork by Dominic Chambers and Tajh Rust

Adam Bradley, a T writer, is a professor and the author of multiple books on music and culture. He is the founding director of the Laboratory for Race and Popular Culture at U.C.L.A.

I FIRST HEARD the name J. California Cooper last November. Cooper, who died in 2014 at 82, was the author of five novels, seven short-story collections and 17 plays. Her books are folksy, funny and wise. They center on Black characters, most of them women. As Alice Walker, 79, who published Cooper’s debut collection of fiction, “ A Piece of Mine ” (1984), wrote, Cooper “reminds us of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.”

Why had I never heard her name? I’ve been an English professor for nearly two decades, teaching surveys of Black American literature, even seminars focused on Black women writers. Before that, I was a graduate student at Harvard during the era of the Black studies “ Dream Team ,” learning from scholars like Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr., and writing a dissertation that includes chapters on Walker, Toni Morrison and Gayl Jones . Before that, while growing up in Salt Lake City in the 1980s and ’90s, I looked to Black literature as a lifeline; I read every book I could find, including works by Ishmael Reed and Paule Marshall , Ernest J. Gaines and Maya Angelou — all Cooper’s contemporaries. Since childhood, I’ve been amassing a collection of Black fiction, drama and poetry that exceeds a thousand volumes. So how is it that Cooper escaped my willing attention?

Of course, we all have these lacunas in our reading histories. It can be a small blessing to encounter such gaps, particularly when you’ve read enough to fool yourself into thinking you’ve mapped all territories. Some will no doubt find it inexplicable — or inexcusable — that I remained ignorant of Cooper’s work for so long. It’s not the sort of thing one usually admits to in my field.

I count this late discovery as both a correction of personal oversight and evidence of something far more significant: the emergence of new arbiters of literary culture reshaping the canon of Black American literature. The word “canon” comes to English by way of the ancient Greek kanōn , meaning “rule.” When applied to literature, it refers to a list, actual or conjectural, of great works that define the terms of a literary education. Historically, canon construction is the work of the few, foremost among them academics who edit anthologies and design syllabuses. But this is changing: I didn’t come across Cooper in the pages of a scholarly journal; I saw her name on Instagram.

On social media in particular, Cooper has a growing following among Black women writers and other creative people who see in her work a model for making powerful, accessible art. “Everyone should read more J. California Cooper,” says the screenwriter and novelist Attica Locke , 49, whose credits include writing and producing for the TV melodrama “ Empire ” (2015-20). (“I was foolish because I believed in you. You are a fool because you believe in yourself,” Cooper’s character Sally snaps at her big sister, Carlene, in her 1994 multigenerational novel of small-town life, “ In Search of Satisfaction ,” in an exchange that would fit right into an “Empire” episode.) Among Cooper’s fans are the singer and actor Jill Scott, 50, who once flew Cooper out to New York for a performance at Carnegie Hall, and the actor Halle Berry, 56, who first read Cooper’s fiction in grade school.

This re-engagement with Black authors of the past like Cooper is being led by a fresh cohort of literary tastemakers: younger authors in search of ancestors; publishers eager to excavate Black literature — for passion and for profit — film and television executives in search of intellectual property; social media influencers on Bookstagram, blogs and podcasts bringing older works to the fore. Operating outside of academia, these groups are making the canon less prescriptive and more descriptive, a dynamic record of what people are actually reading and enjoying now. If the Harlem Renaissance is commonly understood as a period during which Black creatives were in vogue, then we’re in the midst of a new renaissance today, nearly a century later — not just of recent art but of the archive.

In 2021, Alice Childress’s “Trouble in Mind” (1955) made its belated Broadway debut . Beyond Broadway, Lorraine Hansberry’s lesser-known “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” (1964) began its run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this past February . On television, a series adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s once overlooked novel “Kindred” (1979) debuted in late 2022, with several other Butler projects in production or development. In publishing, works are resurfacing from both widely established authors (the 2022 reissue of Morrison’s 1983 short story “ Recitatif ” in a stand-alone edition) and from neglected literary giants (new editions of five books by the novelist and short-story writer William Melvin Kelley , who died in 2017 at 79; and a forthcoming edition of the incendiary 1967 novel “ The Man Who Cried I Am ,” by John A. Williams, who died in 2015 at 89). Together, these efforts are unsettling the story of Black American literature.

Make no mistake: Past generations have labored and sacrificed for us to enjoy such curatorial privilege. A brief history of chronicling the Black literary tradition might be told in three phases: During the Harlem Renaissance, anthologies like James Weldon Johnson’s “ The Book of American Negro Poetry ” (1922) sought to showcase Black artistic achievement for the purposes of racial uplift. “No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior,” Johnson writes. By the ’60s, Black editors took cues from Black Power politics and the Black Is Beautiful movement. In an expansive though not exhaustive list posted in January to his blog, the literary scholar Howard Rambsy II identified 127 anthologies published between 1967 and 1976, from the iconic (1968’s movement-defining “ Black Fire ,” edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal) to the obscure (1970’s “Right On!: An Anthology of Black Literature,” edited by Bradford Chambers and Rebecca Moon). Together, these publications recast the story of Black American literature as insurgent, independent and driven to define a distinctly Black aesthetic.

But the most important phase of canon building came in the 1980s and ’90s, a period that institutionalized Black American literature, securing it as a field of academic study. The key book of that time was “ The Norton Anthology of African American Literature ” (1996), edited by Gates and the literary critic Nellie Y. McKay, alongside an editorial board of other leading scholars. “The Norton” asserted that Black writers, in defiance of the racist mismeasure of Black intelligence and artistry, forged a tradition in conversation with all Western literature and in relation to “the repetitions, tropes and signifying” that would come to define a distinct canon of Black American literature. “While anthologies of African American literature had been published at least since 1845,” the editors write in the introduction to the 2014 third edition , “ours would be the first Norton Anthology, and Norton — along with just a few other publishers — had become synonymous to our generation with canon formation.”

Ironically, scholars were constructing this Black canon just as literary studies was deconstructing the canon of Western literature as a whole: globalizing it, feminizing it, queering it, racially diversifying it. Yet thanks to the efforts of successive generations, the Black canon is now durable enough not only to withstand but to demand attempts to deconstruct and reconstruct what Black American literature means. “African American studies remains an archaeological project,” says Soyica Diggs Colbert, 44, a Georgetown University professor and the author of a recent biography of Lorraine Hansberry, “ Radical Vision ” (2021). She credits a tweet from her fellow Hansberry biographer Imani Perry with the insight that being a student of Black American literature and culture demands constant acts of recovery. As writers and scholars, publishers and readers think about Black American literature now, they increasingly do so with a backward glance for writers and works that have been overlooked or underappreciated, forgotten or misunderstood.

Although canons may enshrine the past, they are instruments of the present. So what do readers require of Black American literature today? Works that confront the resurgence of white supremacy. Works that challenge orthodoxies of racial representation. Works that unsettle assumptions about gender and sexual identity. Works that expand the frames of formal experimentation. Works that imagine Black futures. “What does it mean for our generation to understand that the work [of shaping the canon] is incomplete?” Colbert asks. This essay is one response, proposing five categories of my own in which the Black American canon is already — or could soon be — growing to embrace underrecognized works of the past and the writers who made them.

1. ‘Bad’ Books

“WHAT DO YOU show?” Almost a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois asked this of artists in a column simply titled “A Questionnaire,” published in a 1926 issue of The Crisis, the N.A.A.C.P.’s magazine, for which he served as founding editor. With seven leading questions, Du Bois cautions against portraying the race in a manner that might confirm racist stereotypes. “Is not the continual portrayal of the sordid, foolish and criminal among Negroes convincing the world that this and this alone is really and essentially Negroid, and preventing white artists from knowing any other types and preventing Black artists from daring to paint them?” Implicit in this question is Du Bois’s conviction that the only responsible Black literature is propaganda, marshaling a benevolent Blackness as an antidote to white supremacy’s pernicious specters.

And what do you teach? Canons are often forged in the classroom — contentious spaces these days, whether in K-12 schools, where a renewed wave of book bans disproportionately targets Black authors, or on college campuses, where academic freedom and cultural sensitivities sometimes collide. “We’re always in the business of expanding and constricting the canon in our decisions as teachers of African American literature,” the Vassar English professor Eve Dunbar says. For years Dunbar taught the rapper turned author Sister Souljah’s best-selling novel “The Coldest Winter Ever” (1999), a crime drama narrated in the voice of a teenage mother who is the daughter of a Brooklyn drug kingpin. “They loved it,” Dunbar recalls. “Now I think, ‘Would I [teach that] now?’” Because she is Black and many of her students are not, she considers what her choices might invite her students to take away — not just about Black literature but about Black people.

In 2006, when I was beginning my career as a professor at a small, predominantly white liberal arts college in Southern California, I taught “Pimp: The Story of My Life,” the 1967 memoir by Robert Beck, who published under the name Iceberg Slim . “Pimp” is a brutal book, unrelenting in its portrayals of sex, violence and addiction. It helped to codify the conventions of the now thriving genre of street lit, to which Souljah’s fiction also belongs. As a young Black professor assigning “Pimp” to students of multiple racial, gender and sexual identities, I was taking a chance. Fortunately, the class had generated enough trust that we could express ourselves freely: cringing at some passages and laughing at others, agreeing on the book’s importance while allowing for divergent assessments of its literary merit.

I have not taught “Pimp” since, but I have carried forward from the experience a guiding conviction that, despite Du Bois’s admonitions to the contrary, the Black canon must embrace “bad” books — not works of inferior craft but books that show Black characters courting racist stereotype as the cost of being free. This is increasingly relevant today, as contemporary Black writers reject the politics of respectability. Raven Leilani’s “ Luster ” (2020) and Zakiya Dalila Harris’s “ The Other Black Girl ” (2021) are just two recent books that reveal the human frailties, venalities and duplicities of Black protagonists. Du Bois might have thought of them what he thought of “ Home to Harlem ” (1928), Claude McKay’s novel that showcases all manner of vices in the Black urban underworld. “For the most part it nauseates me,” he wrote, “and after the dirtiest parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.”

Eva Medina Canada did not take a bath after she killed and castrated her abusive lover. Instead, she “washed [her] hands, finished [her] brandy, wiped his mouth and left.” Gayl Jones described her 1976 novel, “ Eva’s Man ,” as a “horror story.” It’s a first-person narrative both lyrical and claustrophobic, told in fragments of “crumbled sheets and blood and whiskey and spit.” Together with Jones’s debut novel, “ Corregidora ” (1975), it excavates an imaginative territory for Black characters that only such outrageous transgressions can make visible. “I’m not interested in normal characters,” Jones told the Black feminist scholar Claudia Tate in 1979. “What does a Black writer do who is not interested in the normal?” Though Jones’s work has garnered acclaim (her most recent novel, “ Palmares ,” was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize), her first two novels merit renewed attention in a cultural moment that finds liberation in embracing Black characters behaving badly.

2. Experimentalists

WANDA COLEMAN, THE Los Angeles-based poet who died in 2013 at 67, just wanted to be read. Instead, she found her writing labeled experimental. Coleman’s work, which also includes fiction and essays, testifies to her fluency with conventional forms like the sonnet, as well as to her restless urge to innovate. “I had little interest in piggybacking or social climbing, but a great interest in the politics of literary greatness in America,” she writes. “Were I to ever achieve greatness, I wanted it on my own very stringent terms.”

In the decade since her death, Coleman’s greatness is gaining widespread recognition, thanks in part to recent reissues featuring illuminating introductions by other poets: 2022’s “ Heart First Into the Run ,” introduced by the 46-year-old Mahogany L. Browne , and 2021’s “ Wicked Enchantment ,” edited and introduced by the 51-year-old Terrance Hayes. In Coleman’s poem “My Bleak Visitation,” published in her 2001 collection, “ Mercurochrome ,” her genius expresses itself in plain-spoken language and measured lines:

And so the strength I pray for and the freedom I seek bear convolutions heretofore unaddressed, make me the radical’s radical, inspire a sacrifice so deep it rattles the old bones and the old stones.

Her radicalness here is not one of formal experimentation but of accountability for her damaged yet resilient psyche as a child born in 1946, during Jim Crow segregation. She gives voice to that which might otherwise remain unspoken.

“Experimental” might be the most reliable keyword for uncovering unheralded voices in the Black tradition. For all the radical political energies expressed in Black American literature, the literary mainstream has often been marked by formal conservatism. The novelist William Demby , who died on Long Island in 2013 at 90, after years spent living abroad outside of Florence, Italy, and in Rome, was long banished to the peripheries of the canon, largely because of his formal experimentation. His most beguiling book, “ The Catacombs ” (1965), adopts a semi-autobiographical perspective, in the character of Bill Demby. The writer seeds the narrative with newspaper clippings, stream-of-consciousness forays and philosophical speculations. A 2022 special issue of the journal African American Review makes the case for his surging importance. “Demby’s body of work has struggled to gain a lasting foothold in the African American literary canon and in classrooms, perhaps for the very fact of his living off the radar for decades in Italy,” the editors write. Now his experimentalism and transnationalism aren’t discouragements but invitations to a larger global audience.

3. Pioneers

IN SEPTEMBER 2020, Butler , the groundbreaking writer of Black speculative fiction, finally achieved her goal of making it onto the New York Times best-seller list. It came 14 years after her death. Butler’s eventual inclusion among the first rank of Black American authors is testament to a confluence of factors, especially the emergence of a community of Black women science fiction writers with literary capital — Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Sheree Renée Thomas and Nnedi Okorafor among them — who’ve prompted a backward glance in search of ancestors.

Other, less famous literary forebears are similarly surfacing in response to the cultural currents and social conditions of our time. The novelist William Gardner Smith, who died in 1974, was antiracist before “antiracist” was a ubiquitous term. His 1963 novel, “ The Stone Face ,” about a Black expat in Paris forced to confront the snarl of injustice beyond a Black-white American context, “resonates with contemporary concerns about privilege and identity,” the writer Adam Shatz argues in his introduction to the 2021 reissued edition. Or consider the recent proliferation of Black queer fiction, from Brandon Taylor’s “ Real Life ” (2020) to Daniel Black’s “ Don’t Cry for Me ” (2022). Though certain canonical books, central among them James Baldwin’s “ Giovanni’s Room ” (1956), are vital to that lineage, the roots stretch much further back, in works often hidden or suppressed.

Angelina Weld Grimké, already canonized as a writer of propagandist plays of racial uplift and pastoral lyrical poetry, might more provocatively be recast as a queer and feminist pioneer. Her best-known work, the anti-lynching play “Rachel” (1916), is of more interest to modern readers as artifact than art. However, her erotic poetry, much of it unpublished in her lifetime and still not widely read, is a revelation, articulating same-sex desire in scrupulously formal verse. “Caprichosa” (1901) is an erotic poem of unrequited love written in a truncated trochaic tetrameter: a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one, repeated four times but left with only the stressed syllable at each line’s end, as in Shakespeare’s famous lines delivered by the witches in “Macbeth” (“When shall we three meet again / In thunder, lightening or in rain?”). In Grimké’s hands, the meter generates an unsettled urgency:

Little lady coyly shy With deep shadows in each eye Cast by lashes soft and long, Tender lips just bowed for song, And I oft have dreamed the bliss Of the nectar in one kiss. …

Longing quickens the pulse of these lines: their singsong regularity followed by sudden disruption, a conscious stumbling as Grimké’s first-person speaker makes her passion plain, before returning to the rigid music of the form.

As a teacher at Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., Grimké nurtured many young writers before dying in 1958 at 78. Among her brightest pupils was Richard Bruce Nugent , who worked across the literary and visual arts. Where his teacher had to seek subterfuge, Nugent, who died in 1987 at 81, could give fuller and freer expression to his identity — in the words of Thomas H. Wirth, his friend and literary executor, Nugent was “the first African American to write from a self-declared homosexual perspective.” His most enduring work, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” published when he was 20, is an erotic prose composition published in the first (and only) issue of the Harlem Renaissance-era literary magazine Fire!! (1926). Nugent uses ellipses after nearly every phrase, which function both as indication of omission and a break in linear time. In one scene, his protagonist encounters a man on the street at 4 in the morning and returns to his room, where “they undressed by the blue dawn … Alex knew he had never seen a more perfect being … his body was all symmetry and music … and Alex called him Beauty. …”

4. Fan Favorites

BUILDING CANONS REQUIRES architects: writers and scholars, teachers and publishers. Reshaping them is everybody’s work. “When it comes to Black authors, at least for me as a Black woman, so much has been culled for us,” says Traci Thomas, 36, the Los Angeles-based host of the literary podcast “ The Stacks ,” which features interviews with contemporary authors alongside book club episodes in which Thomas and guests discuss the literary past. “Going back to the archive is about trying to figure out why those people were given the magical treatment, and maybe figure out who else is there, too.”

In the 1980s and ’90s, Black women writers finally began receiving that magical treatment. Though literary prizes are a notoriously unreliable way to measure artistic merit, they nonetheless helped bring critical attention to Black literature after decades of exclusion. In 1983, Walker’s “ The Color Purple ” won both the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. A decade later, Morrison, who died in 2019 at 88, won the Nobel Prize in Literature . The National Book Award for poetry, established in 1950, did not name its first Black recipient until 1999, when Ai — whom the poet Major Jackson once described as “a poet with an inner complexity and perceptiveness that felt truly American because she was Black” — won for her collection “Vice,” a decade before her death. The years since, however, have seen seven Black winners and nearly two dozen Black finalists.

But there’s another kind of acclaim worth reconsidering — in the deep strain of populist Black American literature, celebrated by readers who prioritize literature’s communal function as entertainment. Being Black in America is work enough; it’s all right for reading to be funny and fun, controversial and straight up scandalous. Such is the case with Terry McMillan, whose novels, including “ Waiting to Exhale ” (1992) and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” (1996), also became popular films . McMillan, 71, not only writes impressive, escapist fiction but she “was the first visible, industry-recognized African American writer to be unapologetic in promoting her work,” says Malaika Adero, 66, a writer, editor and literary agent. McMillan had to hustle, compiling mailing lists to connect directly with booksellers. She amassed power, Adero says, “not by the industry but by her own energy.”

5. Victims of the Jane Austen Effect

IN A WASHINGTON Post essay published last November, the pre-eminent Jane Austen scholar Devoney Looser, 55, author of “The Making of Jane Austen” (2017), described how the towering reputation of the early 19th-century English novelist — both in her own time and today — prompts writers to follow her formula and readers to look for imitators. Similarly, through no fault of their own, certain singular talents in the Black American canon have at times so thoroughly dictated literary fashion as to render other ways of writing unrecognizable. What artists have we lost in the long shadows cast by our most canonical figures?

In April 1967, an aspiring poet and scholar named William J. Harris, then a 25-year-old undergraduate at the historically Black Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, attended a lecture by LeRoi Jones, who later that year would take the name Amiri Baraka . The 32-year-old Baraka was already a literary celebrity, author of the groundbreaking play “ Dutchman ” (1964) and other important essays, novels and poems. By 1967, Baraka was entering a new phase of art and identity, one more militant and strident, that would come to define the Black Arts Movement. “He was really very startling,” Harris recalls of Baraka, who arrived at the gathering, which he insisted should be Black only, flanked by bodyguards.

The following year, Harris, by then a Stanford graduate student, decided to write his dissertation on Baraka, leading to a lifelong friendship. Now, more than 55 years later, and nearly a decade after Baraka’s death (and his own retirement) in 2014, Harris is recognized as the leading Baraka scholar. While working on the “ LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader ” (1991), Harris recalls challenging Baraka over the inclusion of a poem that Harris thought was more agitprop than art. “Well, we just have different aesthetics,” Baraka told him.

Indeed they do. Constitutionally, Harris, now 80, is easygoing and playful, hopeful and kind — not words that even Baraka’s closest friends would have often applied to him. And Harris’s own voice as a poet is much the same. Where Baraka often employs long, Whitmanesque lines, Harris’s are short and staccato. Where Baraka is lyrical and confrontational, Harris is sometimes silly or surreal; he looks to humor as a “way to get over,” he says. In “For Bill Hawkins, a Black Militant,” a poem Harris wrote around the time he first saw Baraka, reprinted as part of a portfolio published last month in Poetry magazine, he declares his independence — as a Black American and as a writer — in language suited to so many Black writers belatedly making their way into the canon: “Night, let me be part of you / but in my own dark way.”

THE POET ADRIAN Matejka assumed leadership of Poetry as its first Black editor, just in time to oversee the journal’s 110th anniversary issue. In his inaugural editor’s note , published last October, Matejka , 51, makes plain both his reverence for the magazine’s rich tradition (it was first to publish T.S. Eliot’s “ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ”) and his commitment to “illuminating some of the brilliant poets who weren’t given access in the previous decades.” Matejka opened up access almost immediately by extending the magazine’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, an annual award given to “a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition,” to 10 additional poets for the 2022 cycle. The 11 recipients ranged from Sonia Sanchez , 88, to Nikki Giovanni , 79, Juan Felipe Herrera , 74, and Patti Smith , 76. Some of them had never, or rarely, published in Poetry. Many of them are Black.

“Unwelcome,” Matejka says, when asked about the message that American literary institutions have often communicated to Black writers. In the face of diminished opportunity, Black writers created their own welcome spaces: independent publishing houses and magazines, writers’ workshops and collectives. “The thing that made it welcome [to be a Black poet] were those movements of poets that institutionalized Black art,” Matejka says. He thinks back to the ’60s and the upstart Black-owned Broadside Press , or to the ’90s and the Dark Room Collective , which birthed two national poet laureates in Natasha Trethewey and Tracy K. Smith .

By definition, canons bind past to present. Eliot, writing in “ Tradition and the Individual Talent ” (1919), observes that “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.”

Black American literature at once affirms and expands Eliot’s sense of tradition. Conditions in the United States hostile to producing and protecting Black art have robbed us of many monuments, upsetting the idea of order. These works — lost or never written — comprise a canon of their own: forgotten stories of the oral tradition, the brilliance of those James Weldon Johnson called the “Black and unknown bards of long ago,” the personal archives and manuscript drafts that precarity did not allow their authors to preserve. It is a testament to the efforts of our ancestors that so much remains, and remains still to discover.

African American Literature

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African / African American / African Diaspora Authors: A Selected List

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• African American Review
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Periodical Indexes and Bibliographic Databases

• Independent voices : an open access collection of an Alternative Press A four-year project to digitize over 1 million pages from the magazines, journals, and newspapers of the alternative press archives of participating libraries. Starting with collections by feminists and the GI press, the collection will grow to include small literary magazines, underground newspapers, LGBT periodicals, the minority press (Latino, Black and Native American) and the extreme right-wing press.
• International Index to Black Periodicals Full Text IIBP Full Text includes current and retrospective bibliographic citations and abstracts from over 150 scholarly and popular journals, newspapers and newsletters from the United States, Africa and the Caribbean--and full-text coverage of over 20 core Black Studies periodicals (1998 forward).
• Proquest Historical Newspapers Multi-database search interface that allows for simultaneous searching of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Defender, Pittsbugh Courier and Wall Street Journal
• Race Relations Abstracts Bibliographic records covering essential areas related to race relations, including ethnic studies, discrimination, immigration studies, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline.

Other Databases

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• 20th Century African American Poetry A database of modern and contemporary African-American poetry from the early twentieth century to the present. Features 10,000 poems by around 70 of the most important African-American poets of the last century.
• Accessible Archives Accessible Archives offers several historic collections, from African American newspapers to Civil War periodicals.
• African American Poetry, 1750-1900 Nearly 3,000 full-text poems written by African-American poets in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• Black Drama: 1850 to present, second edition Contains approximately 1,462 plays by 233 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. Some 600 of the plays are published here for the first time, including a number by major authors.
• Black Economic Empowerment: The National Negro Business League From Archives Unbound. This collection comprises the National Negro Business League files in Part III of the Booker T. Washington Papers in the possession of the Library of Congress.
• Black power movement. Papers of the revolutionary action movement, 1962-1996 This collection of Papers of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) consists of the personal files of RAM founder and National Field Chairman Muhammad Ahmad and of RAM members John H. Bracey Jr. and Ernie Allen Jr. RAM was organized in 1962 by Muhammad Ahmad (known as Max Stanford until 1970).
• Black Studies in Video Award-winning documentaries, newsreels, interviews and archival footage surveying black culture in the United States.
• Black Thought and Culture Non-fiction writings by major American black leaders-teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures-covering 250 years of history. In addition to the most familiar works, Black Thought and Culture presents a great deal of previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trial transcripts.
• Black Women Writers Searchable fulltext for writings by women from Africa and the African diaspora worldwide. Includes more than 460 fiction, nonfiction, and poetry texts in more than 100,000 pages in English, French, French Creole, Portuguese, and Luganda. Slightly more than half of titles are American, with Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Trinidad, and Senegal well-represented among the two dozen countries covered.
• Clotel: Electronic Scholarly Edition The first African American novel, Clotel was published when its author was still legally a slave. This digital edition presents, for the first time together, the full extant texts of the novel’s four versions, published between 1853 and 1867. Imaged and coded, the fully searchable texts may be read individually or in parallel and are accompanied by generous biographical, critical, and historical commentary as well as line-by-line annotations and textual collation.
• Ethnic NewsWatch Full text, comprehensive archival database providing access to more than 400,000 articles in nearly 200 ethnic, minority and native press newspapers, magazines, and journals. Full text archive of Phila Tribune, Jewish Exponent , and nearly 200 other ethnic, minority and native press newspapers, magazines, and journals -- both English and Spanish.
• Federal Surveillance of African Americans, 1920-1984 Between the early 1920s and early 1980s, the Justice Department and its Federal Bureau of Investigation engaged in widespread investigation of those deemed politically suspect. Prominent among the targets of this sometimes coordinated, sometimes independent surveillance were aliens, members of various protest groups, Socialists, Communists, pacifists, militant labor unionists, ethnic or racial nationalists, and outspoken opponents of the policies of the incumbent presidents. Date range: 1920-1984, from the FBI Library.
• Liberation Movement in Africa and African America Composed of FBI surveillance files on the activities of the African Liberation Support Committee and All African People’s Revolutionary Party; this collection provides two unique views on African American support for liberation struggles in Africa, the issue of Pan-Africanism, and the role of African independence movements as political leverage for domestic Black struggles.
• Making of Modern Law: American Civil Liberties Union Papers, 1912-1990 Consists of two major collections comprising myriad subseries. The Roger Baldwin Years, 1912-1950, contains subseries with clippings and files on academic freedom; censorship; legislation; federal departments and federal legislation; state activities; conscientious objectors; injunctions; and labor and labor organization correspondence. Years of Expansion, 1950-1990, encompasses foundation project files on the Amnesty Project, 1964-1980; the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, 1964-1976; and subject files on freedom of belief, expression, and association; due process of law; equality before the law; international civil liberties; and legal case files, 1933-1990.
• Making of Modern Law: American Civil Liberties Union Papers, Part II: Southern Regional Office Comprised of never-before-digitized materials, this unique collection documents the ACLU’s legal battle to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in thirteen Southern states…Consisting of case files, correspondence, newspaper clippings, manuscripts, and more, this collection offers a primary source perspective on civil rights issues from voting rights to the dismantling of the Jim Crow system.
• NAACP Papers -Board of Directors, Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and National Staff Files -The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Education, Voting, Housing, Employment, Armed Forces, Scottsboro, Anti-Lynching, Criminal Justice, Peonage, Labor, and Segregation and Discrimination Complaints and Responses. -Legal Department Files -Special Subjects -Branch Files
• Oxford African American Studies Center Features more than 10,000 articles by top scholars in the field, over 1,750 images, more than 300 primary sources with specially written commentaries, nearly 150 maps, 150 charts and tables, and over 6,000 biographies. The core content includes: Africana: the encyclopedia of the African and African American experience, second ed.; Encyclopedia of African American history, 1619-1895; Encyclopedia of African American history, 1896 to the present; Black women in America, second ed.; African American national biography.
• Papers of Amiri Baraka, Poet Laureate of the Black Power Movement  The collection consists of materials from the years 1913 through 1998 that document African American author and activist Amiri Baraka and were gathered by Dr. Komozi Woodard in the course of his research. The extensive documentation includes poetry, organizational records, print publications, articles, plays, speeches, personal correspondence, oral histories, as well as some personal records. The materials cover Baraka's involvement in the politics in Newark, N.J. and in Black Power movement organizations such as the Congress of African People, the National Black Conference movement, the Black Women's United Front. Later materials document Baraka's increasing involvement in Marxism.
• ProQuest History Vault: Black Freedom I Digital Archive The Organizational Records and Personal Papers bring a new perspective to the Black Freedom Struggle via the records of major civil rights organizations and personal papers of leaders and observers of the 20th century Black freedom struggle.The three major civil rights organizations are the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.
• Race Relations in America Based at Fisk University from 1943-1970, the Race Relations Department and its annual Institute were set up by the American Missionary Association to investigate problems in race relations and develop methods for educating communities and preventing conflict. This resource showcases the speeches, reports, surveys and analyses produced by the Department’s staff and Institute participants, including Charles S. Johnson, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall.

Encyclopedias and Reference Works

• Cambridge Companions related to African American Literature
• Oxford Bibliographies: African American Studies

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African American Literature And Literature Essay

African American literature is the body of work produced in the United States by writers of African descent. This particular genre traces back to the works from the late eighteenth century by writers such as Phillis Wheatley to later reaching early high points with slave narratives and the Harlem Renaissance, and thus continuing today with authors such as Colson Whitehead and Maya Angelou. Among the themes and issues explored within African American literature are the roles of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American culture, racism, slavery, and equality. African American writing has also tended to incorporate oral forms such as spirituals, gospel music, jazz, and rap. Dating back to the pre-Revolutionary War period, African American writers have engaged in a creative dialogue with American letters. The result is a literature rich in culture and social insight. These pieces offer illuminating assessments of American identities as well as its history. Since the time of early slavery African American literature has been overlooked within the literature criticism. This essay thrives to show that within the English profession African American literature does belong alongside the great works such as A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and poetry as A Road less taken by Robert Frost. I will dive deep into history to not only investigate what critics think about African American literature, but why is it not held to a higher standard just as American

Essay On African American Studies

African American Studies is a very complex subject. To confuse African American studies with black history is a common occurrence. African American studies is much deeper and more profound than just Black history alone. There are many unanswered and unasked questions among the Black American culture which causes confusion and misunderstanding in modern day society. In unit one there were many themes, concepts, and significant issues in the discipline of Africana studies. Both W.E.B Du Bois and Vivian V. Gordan touched on many concerns.

Narrative Essay On African American Culture

As Americans, we are privileged with diverse experiences. With this comes a perceived understanding of many cultures and their influences but in fact full cultural literacy is impossible to achieve.

African American History Essay

• 1 Works Cited

During my early years of school, I remember being taught white accomplishments and wondering if blacks and other people of color had made any significant contributions to today's world. I noticed that television consist of all white people. Throughout my research paper I hope to cover certain aspects of African American heritage. Aspects such as blacks making up the largest minority group in the United States, although Mexican-Americans are rapidly changing that. The contributions blacks have provided to our country are immeasurable. Unfortunately though rather than recognizing these contributions, white America would rather focus on oppressing and degrading these people. As a consequence American

• 4 Works Cited

Slavery began in the late 16th century to early 18th century. Africans were brought to American colonies by white masters to come and work on their plantations in the South. They were treated harshly with no payments for all their hard work. In addition, they lived under harsh living conditions, and this led to their resistance against these harsh conditions. The racism towards the African Americans who were slaves was at its extreme as they did not have any rights; no civil nor political rights.

Essay On African Americans

African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated; that is 60% of 30% of the African American population. African Americas are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites. “Between 6.6% and 7.5% of all black males ages 25 to 39 were imprisoned in 2011, which were the highest imprisonment rates among the measured sex, race, Hispanic origin, and age groups." (Carson, E. Ann, and Sabol, William J. 2011.) Stated on Americanprogram.org “ The Sentencing Project reports that African Americans are 21 percent more likely to receive mandatory-minimum sentences than white defendants and are 20 percent more likely to be sentenced to prison.” Hispanics and African Americans make up 58% of all prisoners in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately one quarter of the US population. (Henderson 2000). Slightly 15% of the inmate population is made up of 283,000 Hispanic prisoners.

African American Culture Essay example

Culture is not a fixed phenomenon, nor is it the same in all places or to all people. It is relative to time, place, and particular people. Learning about other people can help us to understand ourselves and to be better world citizens.

African Americans are the most judged group of individuals in the U.S. and around the world. Many American and non-American citizens see African American males as threating and thugs, while others view African American females as angry and ghetto. These stereotypes have led to Blacks being least likely to date outside of their race compared to other races. In this study we will discussing the reasons why White Americans would either object or not object to a member of their family bringing home an African American for dinner, we will also look at how education, gender, and region affect these decisions. In this study we will go into detail about why these attributes can cause different responses with White American. This research is important because there has been little to no research done on how whites really feel about family members dating outside their race and to test why White Americans would either except or object this notion. While White and Black Americans have come a long way in our hatred for each other we still have so far to go. Americans (White, Black, Hispanic, and other) are all entitled to our own opinions but these opinions should not be based off of racism.

Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass Essay

Writing in the favor of black people has always remained controversial from the very beginning. Critics regard such writing as “a highly conventionalized genre” indicating that “its status as literature was long disputed but the literary merits of its most famous example such as Frederick Douglass 's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass…are widely recognized today.” (Ryan:537) Despite of such severe resistance, writers like Douglass have penned down their autobiography to present the misery of their fellow beings.

The Book of Negroes Expository Essay

It is impossible for anyone to survive a horrible event in their life without a relationship to have to keep them alive. The connection and emotional bond between the person suffering and the other is sometimes all they need to survive. On the other hand, not having anyone to believe in can make death appear easier than life allowing the person to give up instead of fighting for survival. In The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, Aminata Diallo survives her course through slavery by remembering her family and the friends that she makes. Aminata is taught by her mother, Sira to deliver babies in the villages of her homeland. This skill proves to be very valuable to Aminata as it helps her deliver her friends babies and create a source of

Black American Culture Essay

Inmy research paper I will be defining African American Culture and I also will be discussing things such as slavery, family relations, hairstyles, art forms, food, heath issues, symbolism, traditional beliefs and also why this topic is relevant to today culture and how this information can benefit Black American in today society. African American Culture in the United States refer to the cultural contributions of African ethnic groups to the culture of the United States, either as part of or distinct from American Culture.   African

White Privilege Has Happened To Me

Before a White person can even consider joining the fight for the liberation of Black people or any other racial or ethnic minority, that individual must acknowledge that because our society is rooted in White Supremacy and the belief that people of color are inferior, being White is a distinct and tangible advantage.

Book of Negroes Essay

“The Book of Negroes is a master piece, daring and impressive in its geographic, historical and human reach, convincing in its narrative art and detail, necessary for imagining the real beyond the traces left by history.” I completely agree with The Globe and Mail’s interpretation of this story. One could almost see the desolate conditions of the slave boats and feel the pain of every person brought into slavery. Lawrence Hill created a compelling story that depicts the hard ships, emotional turmoil and bravery when he wrote The Book of Negroes.

The Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacob Essay

The introductory line of Harriet Jacob’s preface to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction”, is short yet serving (Jacobs 224). Although brief in its nature, this statement manages to encompass two major aspects that characterize African-American literature: audience and truth. In all writing, understanding the target audience and how to arrange an argument or essay to appeal to that specific crowd is paramount. However, it is especially important for African-American authors, who typically need to expose injustices or call for social change in their works. In particular, two African-American authors who understood their audience and how to manipulate that understanding were Charles W. Chesnutt and Marcus Garvey. Although they were born only twenty-nine years apart, Chesnutt and Garvey technically wrote for different time periods. While Chesnutt’s work is associated with “Literature of the Reconstruction”, Garvey was grouped with authors and activists from the Harlem Renaissance (Gates and Smith 580 ). The separation of their literary epochs drove Chesnutt and Garvey to write for contradistinctive audiences that demanded unique written techniques and rhetorical strategies, but that both asked for utmost honesty.

Comparing W. E. B. Dubois And Alice Walker

The role of African American literature in recent years has been to illuminate for the modern world the sophistication and beauty inherent in their culture as well as the constant struggle they experience in the oppressive American system. When writers such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois and Alice Walker present their material, they manage to convey to a future world the great depth of feeling and meaning their particular culture retained as compared with the culture of their white counterparts. Without this attempt at preservation, much of the richness of this community might have been lost or forgotten. At the same time, they illuminated some of the problems inherent within their society, including lack of education, lack of

Richard Wright's Assessment for the Negro Writers Essay

• 10 Works Cited

Richard Wright’s plead in the Blueprint for Negro Writing could be very well summarized in one of the famous words from Thomas Kempis, “Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.” In this popular essay, Richard Wright denounced the Negro writers as he perceived them to be merely begging for the sympathy of the bourgeoisie instead of striving to present a life that is more worth living for the Black Americans (Mitchell 98). This paper argues that Richard Wright was justified in his assessment that literature was so concentrated on pandering to white readers thereby neglecting the needs of the “Negro

Related Topics

• African American
• Black people

SUNY Potsdam Faculty Members Publish Study of Contemporary Black Satire

Suny potsdam english professors dr. derek c. maus & dr. james j. donahue co-publish ‘greater atlanta: black satire after obama’  .

SUNY Potsdam English Professors Dr. Derek C. Maus and Dr. James J. Donahue co-edited “Greater Atlanta: Black Satire After Obama,” recently published by the University of Mississippi Press.

Ten years after the publication of their first book-length collaboration, two faculty members from SUNY Potsdam’s Department of English have again teamed up to co-edit a collection of scholarly essays about contemporary African American literature and popular culture.   

Professors Dr. Derek C. Maus and Dr. James J. Donahue co-edited “Greater Atlanta: Black Satire After Obama,” which was published by the University Press of Mississippi on April 23 and is now available in hardcover, paperback, and eBook versions.  

“This project began as a way to manage the stresses of the early months of the pandemic,” said Maus. “In those spare moments when we weren’t teaching online or trying to find a store that had toilet paper and hand-sanitizer for sale, we were both re-watching the first two seasons of ‘Atlanta’ for comic relief. Before long, we realized that we might have stumbled upon the follow-up to our previous collection and by May of 2020 we had a contract for it.”  

“Greater Atlanta” builds on “Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights,” which was published in 2014 , also by the University Press of Mississippi. Whereas the first book featured essays that examined how a generation of African American artists who came of age after the Civil Rights Movement have used satire to express themselves, the new collection focuses much more closely on creative works that have appeared in the years after the sense of “hope and change” surrounding Barack Obama’s election as president faded.  

“Although we’re both huge fans of the show, we didn’t want the book to be just about ‘Atlanta,’” said Donahue. “We instead were looking for essays that considered how the show is a perfect example of a more general shift within African American satire. Everywhere we looked, we saw stuff coming out that fit this new mold, so we wanted to think about why that was happening.”  

The 17 essays in “Greater Atlanta” collectively survey more than a dozen novels, films, and television shows that together reveal the ways in which contemporary Black satire has largely dispensed with satire’s presumed expectations of social reform and instead offers an exasperated self-affirmation that echoes the straightforward declaration that Black Lives Matter.  

The collection has already been favorably reviewed by ‘Publisher’s Weekly,” which praises the way its “erudite analysis unpacks the complex ideas embedded in the series’s surreal vision of Atlanta.”  

About the authors:  

James J. Donahue is Professor of English at SUNY Potsdam. He is primarily interested in the study of narrative form, particularly with how authors construct their narratives to engage in social and political commentary. In his scholarship, he works primarily at the intersection of narrative theory and identity studies, with a particular focus on race and representation. His other interests include historical fiction, experimental narratives, and the Beat movement. Donahue is the author of “Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: Studies in Genre,” “Contemporary Native Fiction: Toward a Narrative Poetics of Survivance” and “Failed Frontiersman: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance.” Donahue also co-edited “Narrative, Race and Ethnicity in the United States,” along with Jennifer Ho and Shaun Morgan. Donahue earned his bachelor’s degree from Northeastern University and a master’s degree from Boston College before completing his Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut. He has been on the SUNY Potsdam faculty since 2007.  

Derek C. Maus is Professor of English at SUNY Potsdam. He received his bachelor’s degree in history and English from the University of Arkansas, and went on to earn his master’s and his Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina. Since joining the SUNY Potsdam faculty in 2001, he has taught more than 50 different courses on a wide range of topics, primarily dealing with contemporary literature. Maus has received both the SUNY Potsdam President’s Award and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award, as well as a Fulbright Lecturing Grant to Austria, the Eakin Visiting Fellowship in Canadian Studies at McGill University, and the American Council of Learned Societies Project Development Grant. He is the author of “Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire,” “Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire,”  “Understanding Colson Whitehead,” and co-edited “Finding a Way Home: Critical Essays on Walter Mosley” with Owen E. Brady.   

SUNY Potsdam’s Department of English challenges its students with courses that develop their abilities to interpret a variety of written, oral, and multimedia forms in which humans communicate with one another, as well as to express themselves effectively in those forms. For more information, visit www.potsdam.edu/academics/AAS/Engl .  

About SUNY Potsdam:   

Founded in 1816, The State University of New York at Potsdam is one of America’s first 50 colleges—and the oldest institution within SUNY. Now in its third century, SUNY Potsdam is distinguished by a legacy of pioneering programs and educational excellence. The College currently enrolls approximately 2,500 undergraduate and graduate students. Home to the world-renowned Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam is known for its challenging liberal arts and sciences core, distinction in teacher training and culture of creativity. To learn more, visit www.potsdam.edu .  

For Media Inquiries

Alexandra jacobs wilke, you also might be interested in:, suny potsdam celebrates second annual public health day, suny potsdam professor dr. claudia ford receives fulbright scholar award.

2 SUNY Potsdam English Professors “Greater Atlanta: Black Satire After Obama” published

P OTSDAM, N.Y. (WWTI) – Professors Dr. Derek C. Maus and Dr. James J. Donahue, two faculty members from SUNY Potsdam’s Department of English , have teamed up to co-edit a collection of scholarly essays about contemporary African American literature and popular culture, it’s been ten years since their first book-length collaboration.

The pair co-edited “Greater Atlanta: Black Satire After Obama,” which was published by the University Press of Mississippi on April 23 and is now available in hardcover, paperback and eBook versions.

“ This project began as a way to manage the stresses of the early months of the pandemic ,” said Maus. “ In those spare moments when we weren’t teaching online or trying to find a store that had toilet paper and hand-sanitizer for sale, we were both re-watching the first two seasons of ‘Atlanta’ for comic relief. Before long, we realized that we might have stumbled upon the follow-up to our previous collection and by May of 2020 we had a contract for it .”

The new publication builds on “Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights,” which was published in 2014 , also by the University Press of Mississippi. The first book featured essays that examined how a generation of African American artists who came of age after the Civil Rights Movement have used satire to express themselves. The new collection focuses more closely on creative works that have appeared in the years after the sense of “hope and change” surrounding Barack Obama’s election as president faded.

“ Although we’re both huge fans of the show, we didn’t want the book to be just about ‘Atlanta ,'” said Donahue. “ We instead were looking for essays that considered how the show is a perfect example of a more general shift within African American satire. Everywhere we looked, we saw stuff coming out that fit this new mold, so we wanted to think about why that was happening .”

The 17 essays in “Greater Atlanta” survey over a dozen novels, films and television shows that together reveal the ways in which contemporary Black satire has largely dispensed with satire’s presumed expectations of social reform and instead offers an exasperated self-affirmation that echoes the declaration that Black Lives Matter.

The collection has already been favorably reviewed by Publisher’s Weekly.

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