Download Free Depictions Of Home In African American Literature Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Depictions Of Home In African American Literature and write the review.

In Depictions of Home in African American Literature, Trudier Harris analyzes fictional homespaces in African American literature from those set in the time of slavery to modern urban configurations of the homespace. She argues that African American writers often inadvertently create and follow a tradition of portraying dysfunctional and physically or emotionally violent homespaces. Harris explores the roles race and religion play in the creation of homespaces and how geography, space, and character all influence these spaces. Although many characters in African American literature crave safe, happy homespaces and frequently carry such images with them through their mental or physical migrations, few characters experience the formation of healthy homespaces by the end of their journeys. Harris studies the historical, cultural, and literary portrayals of the home in works from well-known authors such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and August Wilson as well as lesser-studied authors such as Daniel Black, A.J. Verdelle, Margaret Walker, and Dorothy West.
In spite of the existence of statistics and numerical data on various aspects of African American life, including housing, earnings, assets, unemployment, household violence, teen pregnancy and encounters with the criminal justice system, social science literature on how racism affects the everyday interactions of African American families is limited. How does racism come home to and affect African American families? If a father in an African American family is denied employment on the basis of his race or a wife is demeaned at work by racist slurs, how is their family life affected? Given the lack of social science literature responding to these questions, this volume turns to an alternative source in order to address them: literature. Engaging with novels written by African American authors, it explores their rich depictions of African American family life, showing how these can contribute to our sociological knowledge and making the case for the novel as an object and source of social research. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students of the sociology of the family, race and ethnicity, cultural studies and literature.
Reading Contemporary African American Literature focuses on the subject of contemporary African American popular fiction by women. Bragg’s study addresses why such work should be the subject of scholarly examination, describes the events and attitudes which account for the critical neglect of this body of work, and models a critical approach to such narratives that demonstrates the distinctive ways in which this literature captures the complexities of post-civil rights era black experiences. In making her arguments regarding the value of popular writing, Bragg argues that black women’s popular fiction foregrounds gender in ways that are frequently missing from other modes of narrative production. They exhibit a responsiveness and timeliness to the shifting social terrain which is reflected in the rapidly shifting styles and themes which characterize popular fiction. In doing so, they extend the historical function of African American literature by continuing to engage the black body as a symbol of political meaning in the social context of the United States. In popular literature Beauty Bragg locates a space from which black women engage a variety of public discourses.
Ain t Got No Home: America's Great Migrations and the Making of an Interracial Left"
Existentialist Thought in African American Literature Before 1940 is the first collection of its kind to break new ground in arguing that long before its classification by Jean-Paul Sartre, African American literature embodied existentialist thought. To make its case, this daring book dissects eight notable texts: Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I A Woman (1861), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861), Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). It explores and addresses a wide range of complex philosophical concepts such as: authenticity, potentiality-for-authentic living, bad faith, and existentialism from the Christian point of view. The use of interdisciplinary studies such as gender studies, queer studies, Christian ethics, mixed-race studies, and existentialism, allows the authors within this book to lend unique perspectives in examining selected African American literary works.
African American literature is over. With this provocative claim Kenneth Warren sets out to identify a distinctly African American literature—and to change the terms with which we discuss it. Rather than contest other definitions, Warren makes a clear and compelling case for understanding African American literature as creative and critical work written by black Americans within and against the strictures of Jim Crow America. Within these parameters, his book outlines protocols of reading that best make sense of the literary works produced by African American writers and critics over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. In Warren’s view, African American literature begged the question: what would happen to this literature if and when Jim Crow was finally overthrown? Thus, imagining a world without African American literature was essential to that literature. In support of this point, Warren focuses on three moments in the history of Phylon, an important journal of African American culture. In the dialogues Phylon documents, the question of whether race would disappear as an organizing literary category emerges as shared ground for critical and literary practice. Warren also points out that while scholarship by black Americans has always been the province of a petit bourgeois elite, the strictures of Jim Crow enlisted these writers in a politics that served the race as a whole. Finally, Warren’s work sheds light on the current moment in which advocates of African American solidarity insist on a past that is more productively put behind us.
Jean Toomer's Cane was advertised as a book about Negroes by a Negro, despite his request not to promote the book along such racial lines. Nella Larsen switched the title of her second novel from Nig to Passing, because an editor felt the original title might be too inflammatory. In order to publish his first novel as a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection Richard Wright deleted a scene in Native Son depicting Bigger Thomas masturbating. Toni Morrison changed the last word of Beloved at her editor's request and switched the title of Paradise from War to allay her publisher's marketing concerns. Although many editors place demands on their authors, these examples invite special scholarly attention given the power imbalance between white editors and publishers and African American authors. Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature examines the complex negotiations behind the production of African American literature. In chapters on Larsen's Passing, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Gwendolyn Brooks's Children Coming Home, Morrison's Oprah's Book Club selections, and Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, John K. Young presents the first book-length application of editorial theory to African American literature. Focusing on the manuscripts, drafts, book covers, colophons, and advertisements that trace book production, Young expands upon the concept of socialized authorship and demonstrates how the study of publishing history and practice and African American literary criticism enrich each other. John K. Young is an associate professor of English at Marshall University. His work has appeared in journals such as College English, African American Review, and Critique.
The six novels that John Edgar Wideman wrote from 1987 to 2017 enable reassessment of the quarantining of the Black Arts movement by African American literary history. These works transform the novel into a charm or functional tool of the black arts, taking writing beyond the act of written representation.
A study of Black aesthetics, Black consciousness, and the Black Radical Imagination through depictions of intimate, intraracial conflict in Black literature.