Exploration about Afro-American Literature

Abstract

The developmental history of Afro-American literature is a piece of history for Afro-American to seek for acceptance and recognition towards the world of white people and to acquire respect. By recognizing and exploring Afro-American literature, it is able to discover the essence and soul included in Afro-American literature, and is also able to better understand American literature. This paper has introduced the origin of Afro-American literature, described the development process of Afro-American literature, and discussed the unique artistic creation mode of Afro-American literature. America is a multicultural nation permeated and integrated by each nation. In this culture melting pot, it has created a lot of unique and distinctive cultures, and black culture is undoubtedly one of the typical cultural forms in them. This requires us to regard time as a clue and go deep into the historical development process of Afro-American literature to examine the evolution process of black culture, so that to grasp the whole development context more clearly. From the development process of Afro-American literature, it is possible to deeply understand the strong will of the black race, and to feel their strong feelings to pursue freedom more closely. Origin of Afro-American Literature Afro-American's native place was Africa, who came to American with doubts from the beginning. At that time, they had ambiguous futures, which could be said that their life and death were unpredictable and their identities were not clear. This uniqueness of black people determined that they were very thirst for knowledge from the beginning and imaged a better future, which was the eternal theme of Afro-American literature kept for centuries, and at the same time was the unique ethnic spirit demonstrated in the survival and development process of Afro-Americans. Afro-American literature first appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and when African black people came to American continent, it had buried the development seed of black literature in this new piece of land. At the beginning of the black literature, the main forms were anthems, folk songs and secular songs in the oral singing, among which the one most reflected the real inner world of black people was anthem. This was because it expressed a strong melancholy of black people under very tragic situation. Early nineteenth century was the transition period of Afro-American literature from original oral literature to creation literature. In this period, the representative works of poetries are Jupiter's Quiet Night Thoughts - the Savior Jesus Christ and Phyllis Wheatley's Religion and Moral Poetry Collection, whose themes mainly reflected were to expose and denounce the extremely brutal apartheid policy of white people, and to describe the damage of ignorant and backward to the soul of blacks with sad brush strokes, so ignorance became an enduring and profound topic in Afro-American literature. In this period, the relatively famous black writers were Josiah Henson, Linda and Douglas, etc. Their works strongly expressed the good wishes of blacks to pursue freedom and courage to get rid of the constraints, so that to obtain the liberation and win happy lives.