African American Characters Research Articles

Name and Power Relation to African-American Identity in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

This study aims to explore the relationship between names and African-American identity in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Through a qualitative descriptive analysis, the study investigates how power relations influence the construction of African-American identity in the novel. This study used semiotic approach by applying Charles Sander Peirce’s semiotic theory in examiningg the use of name, as well as sociological approach by applying Michel Foucault's concept of power relations in analyzing power relation to social identity. The findings reveal that names, while significant, are not the sole determinants of African-American identity. The study discovers that, after the Civil War, many African-American characters in the novel chose names of European origin in an attempt to avoid negative racial stigma and discrimination. Instead, the study finds that identity construction is primarily shaped by social categorization and comparison and that power relations play a crucial role in limiting positive representations of African-American identity. This study sheds new light on the relationship between names, power, and African-American identity in literature and provides insights into the ongoing discourse surrounding these important cultural and social issues.

The Representation of Earlier African American Vernacular English by Charles W. Chesnutt

This article examines the validity of regional speech represented in the writings of an African American short story writer, essayist, lawyer, and stenographer Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) with a corpus of dialogues extracted from his literary works (approximately 40,000 words). As a touchstone for exploring its accuracy, the Atlas data from Fayetteville, North Carolina, and the surrounding regions in Cape Fear and Pee Dee Valley− a region where the author spent his youth and his stories are set−are compared with the speech of his African American characters. The result reveals that the Atlas records and Chesnutt’s dialogues share many expressions in their regional lexicons ranging from single words to phrases. Considering the difficulty of recording all the synonyms and semantically related words from the same informant during the interview, the overall agreement between the two provides further evidence that as an African American writer who spent his formative years in a rural community in North Carolina, Chesnutt’s literary dialect offers a glimpse of earlier AAVE spoken in the region in the mid-nineteenth century. Furthermore, this article touches on Chesnutt’s racial identity and what led him to enter the literary world as it is pertinent to his linguistic background and the motive behind the use of literary dialect.

The Recirculation of an African American Slave Narrative in Canada: Thomas Jones's The Experience of Thomas Jones and Two Religious Newspapers in Nova Scotia, 1851–53

abstract: This article examines how antebellum slave narratives by self-liberated individuals in the United States, which were circulated and read in Canada, are contextualized within a wider body of little-known stories about slavery in Canada. Critics have argued that antebellum slave narratives by self-liberated people are part of the Canadian literary canon, but they have not explored the connection between slave narratives and Canadian newspapers, which recirculated narratives about slavery. This article uses Gérard Genette's concept of the paratext, functioning as the "threshold" to a text, to place a slave narrative back into the threshold of the newspaper that framed it for its religious readers. The self-liberated Wesleyan preacher and abolitionist Thomas H. Jones first arrived in Saint John, New Brunswick in May 1851, and in 1853 his narrative was reprinted in Saint John. The article shares the results of research on two religious newspapers in Nova Scotia and three popular Saint John newspapers, 1851–53, arguing that Thomas H. Jones's The Experience of Thomas Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years was read within a context that gave priority to its evangelical imperatives. Through examining a wider body of newspaper narratives that feature fictional enslaved African American characters and function as moral tales for evangelical readers, this article provides a more contextual reading of Jones's narrative in Nova Scotia. When we place book-length slave narratives back into a wider body of newspaper narratives, it problematizes an oversimplified view of Canadian antislavery divorced from other imperatives and agendas. Book-length narratives, in their US and Canadian circulation context, should be read alongside lesser-known newspaper narratives.

PREJUDICE TOWARDS AFRICAN-AMERICAN IN SMALL GREAT THINGS NOVEL

Prejudice is a negative assumption towards others which is not certain to be right or wrong yet. One of the problems of prejudice that still exists in the modern era is prejudice against African Americans. This research aimed to reveal the kinds of prejudice experienced by African-Americans and the responses of African-American characters as the victims of prejudice. To conduct this research, the researcher used qualitative methodology. The data in this research were taken in the form of narrations and dialogues in Small Great Things (2016) novel written by Jodi Picoult which related to the negative actions of prejudice experienced by African-American characters and their responses to the prejudices that suitable with prejudice theory by Gordon Allport and the response to prejudice theory by Simpson and Yinger. The results showed that African-American characters in Small Great Things novel experience four kinds of prejudice, namely: antilocution, avoidance, discrimination and physical attack. Furthermore, the result also showed how African-American characters responded to the prejudices that they experienced, namely: aggression, acceptance and reformism. Therefore, the researcher concluded that prejudice based on individual beliefs can make someone behave negatively toward others and sometimes it can be manifested through hostile actions.

Prejudice towards African American Characters in 12 Years a Slave Film

Prejudice towards African American Characters in 12 Years a Slave Film

Constructions of Race and Revolution in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Porter”

Abstract: In this essay, Ian Marshall analyzes Ernest Hemingway’s writing methodology in his short fiction, paying particular attention to constructions of labor, landscape, and African American male identity. Marshall argues that Hemingway was incapable of imagining a black working-class revolution, or a racially unified working-class revolution in the United States. This inability shapes his characters actions, particularly George, the main African American character in “The Porter,” and contributes to our understanding of revolutionary and social class consciousness in the U.S. as presented in Hemingway’s fiction.

“Injustice Everywhere”: Confronting Race and Racism in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

Abstract: The Sun Also Rises contains troubling depictions of African-American characters framed by a vile racial epithet. Although critics have addressed this topic using the familiar contexts of Hemingway’s life, his iceberg theory, or intertextuality, this article argues that a fluid, combinatory context is necessary in the twenty-first century classroom. Acknowledging Toni Morrison’s important intervention in Playing in the Dark , this essay seeks neither to dismiss or ignore the novel’s racist content nor to banish the novel from the canon, but rather to engage the novel in a complex ongoing dialogue about race and racism in American culture and literature.

Immobile Cabmen and Single-track Railroads: Images of Stasis and Redundancy in August Wilson’s Jitney and Two Trains Running

ABSTRACT August Wilson’s celebrated ten-play cycle in which he focuses on the African American condition during the twentieth century has been hailed for the way the playwright grapples with issues of history and identity. This paper adopts aspects of the New Mobilities Paradigm (NMP) as it carries forward the theme of alienation, confusion and despair in Wilson’s plays. It argues that Jitney and Two Trains Running deploy highly deceptive cause-to-effect linear plot structures in order to present African American characters who are caught-up or trapped in desultory predicaments of confinement in ways that echo tropes of memory, journeying, hope and despair. The two plays present interesting nuances and contradictions of tropes of journeying and entrapment as well as progression and stagnation, which are paradoxically connected to acts of self-assertion. This occurs in ways that are highly reminiscent of the modernist style of absurdism. Our choice of the two plays is informed by the way in which the play titles reference technologized forms of mobility and communication as they also echo African American memory, travel and the journey motif in ways that are reminiscent of the underground railroad and the promise of freedom, even as Wilson decries a palpable lack of movement, growth and social progress that has historically characterized the African American experience during the course of the twentieth century.

Race and Gender Discrimination in Toni Morrison's Jazz

In her 1992 novel Jazz, Toni Morrison—an African American Nobel laureate—examines the ways in which African American women experience various forms of discrimination. This paper investigates the discriminations involving race, class, and gender and portrays Harlem as a discriminatory setting in the novel, using the qualitative technique on the bibliographic study. Jazz tells the story of the hardships faced by African American women who settled in Harlem at the beginning of the 20th century. The female African American characters in the book, who are still troubled by memories of slavery, find themselves oppressed both inside their own black community and in the society that is ruled by white people. In the book, Harlem is referred to as "the City" and describes itself as the relational setting where black women encounter the overlapping alienation and subjection from their racial, social class, and gender roles.

ANALYSIS OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION ASPECTS BASED ON GORDON ALLPORT’S THEORY DEPICTED IN FRUITVALE STATION MOVIE (2013)

Fruitvale Station is a movie based on the true story of a shooting at a Fruitvale Station in Oakland, California, by a white police officer named Johannes Mehserle against a black man named Oscar Grant III. Oscar Grant, who was the victim of a conflict on a train that stopped at Fruitvale Station, was instead made a suspect in the incident by police officers who wanted to secure the train and was shot dead without any evidence of guilt or legal proceedings first. Thus, using Gordon Allport's Intentional, Explicit Discrimination theory, the authors analyzed the types of racial discrimination in the movie Fruitvale Station. Racial discrimination includes verbal antagonism, avoidance, segregation, physical attacks, and extermination. The author’s method to collect data is qualitative descriptive by examining the Fruitvale Station movie to understand the movie as the primary data. The authors will also include the dialogue from the script as secondary data. The findings of this study reveal five discriminatory behaviors (particularly discrimination based on race) committed by white characters against African-American characters in this movie.

Of Monsters and Women: Two Female Characters and Trans/Posthumanism in HBO’s Lovecraft Country

There has been, in recent times, a resolution to make up for the traditional lack of prominent female representation in audiovisual popular culture. HBO’s series Lovecraft Country (2020) constitutes one of such proposals. By focusing on a group of African American characters who must struggle with the terrifying reality of Jim Crow U.S. as well as with magic and other-worldly creatures, the show constitutes a fascinating platform whence a powerful social criticism is proposed to the audience. Being the series a version of Matt Ruff’s novel of the same name, it is my intention to analyze one of the transmedia alterations which took place in the adaptation process. The creators of Lovecraft Country deemed it necessary to gender-swap two of the characters from the novel, with the possibilities this change opened. The inclusion of two female characters in the series in detriment of their male counterparts in the novel is quite telling and has an underlying significance, for it points out to a strong determination to alter female representation in Science Fiction and the Gothic. Additionally, Christina Braithwhite and Dee Freeman are the only two characters to acquire a posthuman state. It is therefore this paper’s main aim to provide an examination of their characters and their process of ‘transhumanization’ through the lens of Transhumanism and Posthumanism. Both represent different trends of transhumanism and embody disparate stands to posthumanism, hence the necessary analysis of the latent subtexts which these two characters catalyze.

‘Ingratitude! Treachery! Revenge!’: Race, Empire, and Mutinous Femininities in Harriette Gordon Smythies’A Faithful Woman(1865)

Harriette Gordon Smythies’ overlooked sensation novel A Faithful Woman (1865) engages with two cultural formations instrumental in shaping the Victorians’ representations of race, and to a large degree, also their understanding of it: The Indian Rebellion of 1857 and minstrelsy. As its various symbolic appropriations of mutinous women show, the novel is highly critical of the easy and essentialising recriminations of ‘vile’ Indianness and offers a keen appreciation of the parallels between the Empire’s racialising oppressions abroad and its gendered oppressions at home. At the same time, however, its representations of African American characters seek to enshrine Britain’s moral superiority vis-à-vis the United States’ slavery system. Particularly, A Faithful Woman’s examinations of racialised imaginations of Indian Britons and African Americans – contrasting, for instance, British sculpture and portraiture with (allegedly) American minstrelsy – speak to its attempt to dissociate the practices of Empire from its former colonies across the Atlantic. Its critical examination of imperial notions of race in post-Rebellion sensation fiction, this article argues, helps to reaffirm the very colonial practices that it seeks to undermine.

Beauty, Blackness and Humanity: The Hyperreal Operation of Beauty Standards in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

It remains impossible to produce an analysis of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye that ignores her treatment of beauty. Morrison conceives physical beauty as a form of racial reification which drastically informs the social and personal development of the novel’s Black characters. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison likens the standards of physical beauty to whiteness and in turn, virtue: “beauty” becomes an objective term, one entirely defined in relation to whiteness despite its projection onto African American characters. This paper thus explores the effects of the pernicious application of White beauty standards onto Morrison’s African American characters. As a character encounters a representation of such standards, they either mold themselves through actions to approach this ideal, or harshly realize the impossibility of succeeding to the standard of physical beauty. In their rigid adoption of traits, virtues, or actions to approach themselves to Whiteness and in turn beauty, these characters neglect their own identity in favor of this ideal. The result is a stripping of one’s individual identity, culture, and personal value; the very traits which make them human. This approach is fundamental, as it examines the effects that social beauty standards have on the self. Morrison’s work remains a powerful artefact of the cultural and social treatment of African Americans which still exist today: Black Americans are denied their cultural status and humanity. Instead, Morrison’s work showcases how they are instead perceived as something to be molded and altered into something that may attempt to absorb into whiteness yet remain entirely different and ultimately subaltern.

Racial Discrimination in Novel We Cast A Shadow (2019) by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

AbstractThis study is aimed to seek how far the novel of We Cast A Shadow (2019) by Maurice Carlos Ruffin reflected the issues of racial discrimination. Racial discrimination refers to the character who face discrimination through mistreatment and violence that make a great impact in the future. The unnamed character had been through a difficult time since he was a child. This analysis is related to the postcolonial theory proposed by Pieterse and Powell (2016). The use of theory was based on the interpretation in the text and context of the novel. The data was collected from the quotation in the novel. The data collection was in the form of sentences and paragraphs. This research was a descriptive and content analysis study. The result of the study shows that the racial discrimination of African-American character can be seen through violence to African-American and arbitrary Policy on Economic Aspect. In conclusion, in this post-civil rights movement era, African-Americans still face racial discrimination.

Navigating Black Identity and White Desire: Seven-Eleven and the 1920s Crossover Musical Comedy

Navigating Black Identity and White Desire: <i>Seven-Eleven</i> and the 1920s Crossover Musical Comedy

Book Review: James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and the Rhetorics of Black Male Subjectivity

James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and the Rhetorics of Black Male Subjectivity', Aaron Oforlea, analyses the strategies that Toni Morrison and James Baldwin employ in their quest to tell the African-American story. He uses subjectivity, intersectionality, discursive divide, among others, to explain to the reader the issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. He analyses their African American characters and how they thrived despite their problems of social alienation, sexual preferences, and class status. The discursive divide is a concept discussed throughout the novel; it entails moving from the objects of discourse to an empowered agent. In this paper, we will highlight the various concepts addressed by the authors in each chapter.

Reunion with Self in Terry McMillan’s I Almost Forgot About You

The novel I Almost Forgot About You by Terry McMillan, which deals with the problem of finding your own identity by studying the components of personality and the context in the formation of identity, is examined. African American feminist literature consists of common themes like sense of being different, managing multiple selves and quest for identity. Terry McMillans works represent African American female characters struggle for self-realization that help them in better understanding of the present and planning for the future by reestablishing their identity. The predicament of Georgia, protagonist of the novel, is that she has lost selfhood after subsequent divorces. In due course of time, her role in the family becomes diminished; also she loses interest in the professional life. Her aimlessness and strong desire to restore self leads her to search for male companion among her old boyfriends. She believes that self-satisfaction is possible with exploration of self for that she decides to go on a train trip and tries to focus on nurturing the hobby of woodwork. It helps her in regaining her internal and external self. Thus, the leitmotif of the novel is the search for your own identity as an attempt of inquiry for the destined future.

Lesbian Identity and “Personal Dishonesty” in Lorraine Hansberry’s “Flowers for the General”

ABSTRACT Misconceptions and myths that surround Hansberry and her most famous play, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), are examined through a close reading of an unpublished play from Lorraine Hansberry’s archived papers, “Flowers for the General” (1955). In this play, Hansberry articulates lesbian identity fully in the character Marcia. The play’s major themes of the importance of upholding sociopolitical beliefs, the possibility of a sustainable lesbian identity, and the commonalities between the lesbian, Jewish, African American, and working-class characters combine to create a significant statement at an early point in Hansberry’s career. Various cultural, social, and political obstacles prevented Hansberry’s writing on sexuality—which anticipates current critical conceptions of female sexuality, same-sex relationships, and homosocial bonds—from being published or staged. However, examination of archival materials such as “Flowers for the General” is a necessary step in expanding the view of Hansberry’s complex and contradictory life and work outside of A Raisin in the Sun.

The importance of surrounding communities in identity formation within afrofuturistic context

Afrofuturism is one of the less known areas of study in terms of African American literature. Even though the term was coined by Mark Dery at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the examples of the movement can be seen much earlier. Its direct colonial roots and political aspects differentiate Afrofuturism from science fiction and fantasy. Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) is accepted as one of the key texts of early Afrofuturism. The novel demonstrates the ways Butler creates alternative areas especially for African American women and highlights the importance of the protagonist’s survival depending on the survival of her respective community. Instead of idealizing the slave community, Butler describes a realistic slave community that is rich in diversity. In the forced situations, Dana discovers the need of her community in the essence for surviving in the past and reaching to a realization about herself. This article analyzes how—with the help of the surrounding communities of antebellum slave community—the main character develops an autonomous identity that helps her to accept her fragmented self to decolonize her mind as well as to have wider understanding of her African American roots. The analysis benefits from Frantz Fanon’s thoughts on colonialism and emphasis on the double-voicedness of African Americans to create a discussion on the effects of surrounding communities on African American characters’ decolonization process.

Institutional Racism in American Post-Civil Rights Movement in Dear Martin by Nic Stone (2017)

This thesis is an analysis of a novel written by Nic Stone entitled Dear Martin (2017). It explores the issue of institutional racism in the post-civil rights era. The concept of systemic racism by Joe R.Feagin is employed to analyze this novel. This analysis focuses on four issues of systemic racism as seen through several African-American characters. This analysis also depends on the narrator to determine which parts of the novel are used as the data. The result of the study shows that African-American characters experience four forms of institutional racism which are The White Racial Frame and Its Embedded Racist Ideology, Alienated Social Relations, Racial Hierarchy with Divergent Group Interest, and Related Racial Domination: Discrimination in Many Aspects. In conclusion, in this post-civil rights movement era, African-Americans still face institutional racism.