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Racial Discourse And Cosmopolitanism In Twentieth Century African American Writing
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Book Synopsis Racial Discourse and Cosmopolitanism in Twentieth-Century African American Writing by : Tania Friedel
Download or read book Racial Discourse and Cosmopolitanism in Twentieth-Century African American Writing written by Tania Friedel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-06-21 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages the critical mode of cosmopolitanism through racial discourse in the work of several major twentieth-century African American authors, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes and Albert Murray.
Book Synopsis Black on Black by : John Cullen Gruesser
Download or read book Black on Black written by John Cullen Gruesser and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black on Black provides the first comprehensive analysis of the modern African American literary response to Africa, from W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk to Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Combining cutting-edge theory, extensive historical and archival research, and close readings of individual texts, Gruesser reveals the diversity of the African American response to Countee Cullen's question, "What is Africa to Me?" John Gruesser uses the concept of Ethiopianism—the biblically inspired belief that black Americans would someday lead Africans and people of the diaspora to a bright future—to provide a framework for his study. Originating in the eighteenth century and inspiring religious and political movements throughout the 1800s, Ethiopianism dominated African American depictions of Africa in the first two decades of the twentieth century, particularly in the writings of Du Bois, Sutton Griggs, and Pauline Hopkins. Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance and continuing through the Italian invasion and occupation of Ethiopia, however, its influence on the portrayal of the continent slowly diminished. Ethiopianism's decline can first be seen in the work of writers closely associated with the New Negro Movement, including Alain Locke and Langston Hughes, and continued in the dramatic work of Shirley Graham, the novels of George Schuyler, and the poetry and prose of Melvin Tolson. The final rejection of Ethiopianism came after the dawning of the Cold War and roughly coincided with the advent of postcolonial Africa in works by authors such as Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and Alice Walker.
Book Synopsis Reading Race by : Aldon Lynn Nielsen
Download or read book Reading Race written by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Race examines the work of twentieth-century white American poets from Carl Sandburg to Adrienne Rich, from Ezra Pound to Allen Ginsberg, revealing within their poetry and casual writings a body of literature that transmits racism, even as it sometimes speaks against it. Tracing the persistence of racial discourse, Aldon Nielsen argues that white Americans, throughout their history, have used a language of their own primacy, a language that treats blacks as an abstract other--an aggregate nonwhite--to be acted upon and determined by whites. White discourse drapes over blacks an intricate veil of images and understandings--assertions of inferiority; metaphors of exoticism; similes of animals; tropes of fertility, nothingness, and death--through which whites read race and beneath which blacks remain imprisoned. "Words," Nielsen writes, "create and maintain relationships of power as surely as do prisons and arms." Speaking of the discourse of race in America, Nielsen identifies "dead metaphors"--words, images, ideas--that operate in much the same way as the "charged detail" of Pound or the "objective correlative" of T.S. Eliot. Embedded in the language, they are instantly recognizable to the native speaker. Poets, when they draw upon these metaphors, demand racist thinking in order to be understood.
Download or read book Crossing the Line written by Gayle Wald and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-07-24 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial “order.” Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial “passing,” a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race’s authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fails to represent identity. She thus uses cultural narratives of passing to illuminate both the contradictions of race and the deployment of such contradictions for a variety of needs, interests, and desires. Wald begins her reading of twentieth-century passing narratives by analyzing works by African American writers James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen, showing how they use the “passing plot” to explore the negotiation of identity, agency, and freedom within the context of their protagonists' restricted choices. She then examines the 1946 autobiography Really the Blues, which details the transformation of Milton Mesirow, middle-class son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, into Mezz Mezzrow, jazz musician and self-described “voluntary Negro.” Turning to the 1949 films Pinky and Lost Boundaries, which imagine African American citizenship within class-specific protocols of race and gender, she interrogates the complicated representation of racial passing in a visual medium. Her investigation of “post-passing” testimonials in postwar African American magazines, which strove to foster black consumerism while constructing “positive” images of black achievement and affluence in the postwar years, focuses on neglected texts within the archives of black popular culture. Finally, after a look at liberal contradictions of John Howard Griffin’s 1961 auto-ethnography Black Like Me, Wald concludes with an epilogue that considers the idea of passing in the context of the recent discourse of “color blindness.” Wald’s analysis of the moral, political, and theoretical dimensions of racial passing makes Crossing the Line important reading as we approach the twenty-first century. Her engaging and dynamic book will be of particular interest to scholars of American studies, African American studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.
Book Synopsis Black Cosmopolitanism by : Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo
Download or read book Black Cosmopolitanism written by Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2005-07-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through readings of slave narratives, fiction, poetry, nonfiction, newspaper editorials, and government documents including texts by Frederick Douglass and freed West Indian slave Mary Prince, Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo explicates the growing interrelatedness of people of African descent through the Americas in the nineteenth century.
Book Synopsis Playing in the White by : Stephanie Li
Download or read book Playing in the White written by Stephanie Li and published by Oxford Studies in American Lit. This book was released on 2015 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels--that is, texts by African American writers focused almost exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth century black writer, including Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry and James Baldwin, published one of these anomalous texts. Controversial since their publication in the 1940s and 50s, these novels have since fallen into obscurity given the challenges they pose to traditional conceptions of the African American literary canon. Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects aims to bring these neglected novels back into conversations about the nature of African American literature and the unique expectations imposed upon black texts. In a series of nuanced readings, Li demonstrates how postwar black novelists were at the forefront of what is now commonly understood as whiteness studies. Novels like Hurston'sSeraph on the Suwanee and Wright's Savage Holiday, once read as abdications of the political imperative of African American literature, are revisited with an awareness of how whiteness signifies in multivalent ways that critique America's abiding racial hierarchies. These novels explore how this particular racial construction is freighted with social power and narrative meaning. Whiteness repeatedly figures in these texts as a set of expectations that are nearly impossible to fulfill. By describing characters who continually fail at whiteness, white life novels ask readers to reassess what race means for all Americans. Along with its close analysis of key white life novels, Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects also provides important historical context to understand how these texts represented the hopes and anxieties of a newly integrated nation.
Book Synopsis Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African-American Literature by : Stephen Knadler
Download or read book Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African-American Literature written by Stephen Knadler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a reading of periodicals, memoirs, speeches, and fiction from the antebellum period to the Harlem Renaissance, this study re-examines various myths about a U.S. progressive history and about an African American counter history in terms of race, democracy, and citizenship. Reframing 19th century and early 20th-century African-American cultural history from the borderlands of the U.S. empire where many African Americans lived, worked and sought refuge, Knadler argues that these writers developed a complicated and layered transnational and creolized political consciousness that challenged dominant ideas of the nation and citizenship. Writing from multicultural contact zones, these writers forged a "new black politics"—one that anticipated the current debate about national identity and citizenship in a twenty-first century global society. As Knadler argues, they defined, created, and deployed an alternative political language to re-imagine U.S. citizenship and its related ideas of national belonging, patriotism, natural rights, and democratic agency.
Book Synopsis South of Tradition by : Trudier Harris
Download or read book South of Tradition written by Trudier Harris and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With characteristic originality and insight, Trudier Harris-Lopez offers a new and challenging approach to the work of African American writers in these twelve previously unpublished essays. Collectively, the essays show the vibrancy of African American literary creation across several decades of the twentieth century. But Harris-Lopez's readings of the various texts deliberately diverge from traditional ways of viewing traditional topics. South of Tradition focuses not only on well-known writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, but also on up-and-coming writers such as Randall Kenan and less-known writers such as Brent Wade and Henry Dumas. Harris-Lopez addresses themes of sexual and racial identity, reconceptualizations of and transcendence of Christianity, analyses of African American folk and cultural traditions, and issues of racial justice. Many of her subjects argue that geography shapes identity, whether that geography is the European territory many blacks escaped to from the oppressive South, or the South itself, where generations of African Americans have had to come to grips with their relationship to the land and its history. For Harris-Lopez, "south of tradition" refers both to geography and to readings of texts that are not in keeping with expected responses to the works. She explains her point of departure for the essays as "a slant, an angle, or a jolt below the line of what would be considered the norm for usual responses to African American literature." The scope of Harris-Lopez's work is tremendous. From her coverage of noncanonical writers to her analysis of humor in the best-selling The Color Purple, she provides essential material that should inform all future readings of African American literature.
Book Synopsis The Postwar African American Novel by : Stephanie Brown
Download or read book The Postwar African American Novel written by Stephanie Brown and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-03-14 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. But the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the now-familiar Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and J. Saunders Redding. In this book, Stephanie Brown recovers the work of these innovative novelists, overturning conventional wisdom about the writers of the period and the trajectory of African American literary history. She also questions the assumptions about the relations between race and genre that have obscured the importance of these once-influential creators. Wright's Native Son (1940) is typically considered to have inaugurated an era of social realism in African-American literature. And Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) has been cast as both a high mark of American modernism and the only worthy stopover on the way to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. But readers in the late 1940s purchased enough copies of Yerby's historical romances to make him the best-selling African American author of all time. Critics, meanwhile, were taking note of the generic experiments of Redding, Himes, and Smith, while the authors themselves questioned the obligation of black authors to write protest, instead penning campus novels, war novels, and, in Yerby's case, "costume dramas." Their status as "lesser lights" is the product of retrospective bias, Brown demonstrates, and their novels established the period immediately following World War II as a pivotal moment in the history of the African American novel.
Book Synopsis African American Slavery and Disability by : Dea H. Boster
Download or read book African American Slavery and Disability written by Dea H. Boster and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disability is often mentioned in discussions of slave health, mistreatment and abuse, but constructs of how "able" and "disabled" bodies influenced the institution of slavery has gone largely overlooked. This volume uncovers a history of disability in African American slavery from the primary record, analyzing how concepts of race, disability, and power converged in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Slaves with physical and mental impairments often faced unique limitations and conditions in their diagnosis, treatment, and evaluation as property. Slaves with disabilities proved a significant challenge to white authority figures, torn between the desire to categorize them as different or defective and the practical need to incorporate their "disorderly" bodies into daily life. Being physically "unfit" could sometimes allow slaves to escape the limitations of bondage and oppression, and establish a measure of self-control. Furthermore, ideas about and reactions to disability—appearing as social construction, legal definition, medical phenomenon, metaphor, or masquerade—highlighted deep struggles over bodies in bondage in antebellum America.
Book Synopsis The African American Male, Writing, and Difference by : W. Lawrence Hogue
Download or read book The African American Male, Writing, and Difference written by W. Lawrence Hogue and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging analysis, W. Lawrence Hogue argues that African American life and history is more diverse than even African American critics generally acknowledge. Focusing on literary representations of African American males in particular, Hogue examines works by James Weldon Johnson, William Melvin Kelley, Charles Wright, Nathan Heard, Clarence Major, James Earl Hardy, and Don Belton to see how they portray middle-class, Christian, subaltern, voodoo, urban, jazz/blues, postmodern, and gay African American cultures. Hogue shows that this polycentric perspective can move beyond a "racial uplift" approach to African American literature and history and help paint a clearer picture of the rich diversity of African American life and culture.
Download or read book True Story written by Shanon Fitzpatrick and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The larger-than-life story of Bernarr Macfadden, a bodybuilder who turned his obsession with muscles, celebrity, and confession into a publishing empire that transformed global media. In True Story, Shanon Fitzpatrick tells the unlikely story of an orphan from the Ozarks who became one of history’s most powerful media moguls. Born in 1868 in Mill Spring, Missouri, Bernarr Macfadden turned to bodybuilding to transform himself from a sickly “boy” into a creature of masculine perfection. He then channeled his passion into the magazine Physical Culture, capitalizing on the wider turn-of-the-century mania for fitness. Macfadden Publications soon become a pioneer in mass media, helping to inaugurate our sensational, confessional, and body-obsessed global marketplace. With publications like True Story, a magazine purportedly written and edited by its own readers, as well as scores of romance, crime, and fan magazines, Macfadden specialized in titles that targeted women, immigrants, and the working class. Although derided as pulp by critics of the time, Macfadden’s publications were not merely profitable. They were also influential. They championed reader engagement and interactivity long before these were buzzwords in the media industry, breaking down barriers between producers and consumers of culture. At the same time, Macfadden Publications inspired key elements of modern media strategy by privileging rapid production of new content and equally rapid disintegration and reconfiguration of properties in the face of shifting market conditions. No less than the kings of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, Macfadden was a crucial player in shaping American consumer culture and selling it to the world at large. Though the Macfadden media empire is overlooked today, its legacies are everywhere, from true-crime journalism to celebrity gossip rags and fifteen-minute abs.
Book Synopsis The Twenty-first Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life by : E. Lâle Demirtürk
Download or read book The Twenty-first Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life written by E. Lâle Demirtürk and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-05-25 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the post-9/11 African American novels, developing a new critical discourse on everyday discursive practices of whiteness. The critique of everyday life in the racial context of post-9/11 American society is important in considering diverse forms of the lived experiences and subjectivities of black people in the novels. They help us see that African American representations of the city have political significance in that the “neo-urban novel” explores the possibility of a black dialogic communication to build a transformative social change. Since the real power of Whiteness lies in its discursive power, the book reveals the urgency to understand not only how whiteness works in everyday life in American society. But it also explores how to cultivate new possibilities of configuring and performing Blackness differently, as a response to the post-9/11 configurations of the culture of fear, to produce new ways of interactional social relations that can eventually open up the space of critical awareness for white people to work against rather than reinforce discursive practices of White supremacy in everyday life. This book explores how the multiple subjectivities and transformative acts of blackness can offer ways of subverting the discursive power of the white embodied practices. What defines post-9/11 America as a nation that is consumed by the fear of racialized terrorists is its roots in the fear of (‘uncontrollable’) Blackness as excess and ominous threat in the domestic terrain through which the ideology of White supremacy has constructed for governing through Whiteness. African-American urban novels published in the twenty-first century respond to the discursive power of normative Whiteness that regulates black bodies, selves and lives. This book demonstrates how black people contest white dominant social spaces as sites of black criminality and exclusion in an attempt to re-signify them as the sites of black transformative change through personal and grassroots activism through their performativity of Blackness as an agential identity formation in their interpersonal urban social encounters with white people. Hence, the vulnerable spaces of Whiteness in interracial urban encounters, as it pervasively addresses those moments of transformative change, enacted by Black characters, in the face of the discursive practices of whiteness in the everyday life. These novels celebrate multifarious representations of black individuals, who are capable of using their agency to subvert White discursive power, in finding ways in their personal and grassroots activism to transform the culture of fear that locates Blackness as such in an attempt to make a difference in the American society at large.
Download or read book The Real Negro written by Shelly Eversley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03-29 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Shelly Eversley historicizes the demand for racial authenticity - what Zora Neale Hurston called 'the real Negro' - in twentieth-century American literature. Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in 'the real Negro' transforms the question of what race an author belongs into a question of what it takes to belong to
Book Synopsis Freud Upside Down by : Badia Sahar Ahad
Download or read book Freud Upside Down written by Badia Sahar Ahad and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-07 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thought-provoking cultural history explores how psychoanalytic theories shaped the works of important African American literary figures. Badia Sahar Ahad details how Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Ralph Ellison, Adrienne Kennedy, and Danzy Senna employed psychoanalytic terms and conceptual models to challenge notions of race and racism in twentieth-century America. Freud Upside Down explores the relationship between these authors and intellectuals and the psychoanalytic movement emerging in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. Examining how psychoanalysis has functioned as a cultural phenomenon within African American literary intellectual communities since the 1920s, Ahad lays out the historiography of the intersections between African American literature and psychoanalysis and considers the creative approaches of African American writers to psychological thought in their work and their personal lives.
Book Synopsis Audience, Agency and Identity in Black Popular Culture by : Shawan M. Worsley
Download or read book Audience, Agency and Identity in Black Popular Culture written by Shawan M. Worsley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shawan M. Worsley analyzes black cultural representations that appropriate anti-black stereotypes. Her examination furthers our understanding of the historical circumstances that are influencing contemporary representations of black subjects that are purposefully derogatory and documents the consequences of these images.
Book Synopsis Transnational Italian Studies by : Charles Burdett
Download or read book Transnational Italian Studies written by Charles Burdett and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-17 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transnational Italian Studies is specifically targeted at a student audience and is designed to be used as a key text when approaching the disciplinary field of Italian studies. It allows the study of Italian culture to be construed and practised not simply as the inquiry into a national tradition but as the study of the interaction of cultural practices both within Italy itself and in those parts of the world that have witnessed the extent of Italian mobility. The text argues that Italian culture needs to be considered in a transnational/transcultural perspective and that an understanding of linguistic and cultural translation underlies all approaches to the study of Italian culture in a global context. Contributions deploy a range of methodological approaches to understand and illustrate how language operates, how culture inhabits and constitutes public and private space, how notions of time operate within people’s lives, and the multiple ways in which people experience a sense of personhood. Chapters stretch from the medieval period to the present and demonstrate how transnational Italian culture can be critically addressed through the examination of carefully chosen examples. Contributors: Alessandra Diazzi, Andrea Rizzi, Barbara Spadaro, Charles Burdett, Clorinda Donato, David Bowe, Derek Duncan, Donna Gabaccia, Eugenia Paulicelli, Fabio Camilletti, Giuliana Muscio, Jennifer Burns, Loredana Polezzi, Marco Santello, Monica Jansen, Naomi Wells, Nathalie Hester, Serena Bassi, Stefania Tufi, Teresa Fiore and Tristan Kay.
