African American Literary Tradition Research Articles

The developmental trajectory of African American masculinity in African-American Drama

Notwithstanding the belated emergence and subsequent acknowledgment of African American dramaturgy, its impact has proven salient in elucidating cultural, social, and political occurrences. Thus, this study constructs a triangular framework for twentieth-century African-American drama, delineating three distinct periods through the analysis of selective works by Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), and August Wilson. The selected literary works delineate the developmental trajectory of African American men across the dimensions of individuality, manhood, and fatherhood. By juxtaposing the historical context of each playwright's oeuvre with the unfolding chapters of the Civil Rights Movement, this study endeavors to unravel the intricate interplay between artistic expression and the broader socio-political landscape. In elucidating the multifaceted dimensions of African American drama through thematic underpinnings, narrative strategies, and stylistic choices of each writer, this study provides a nuanced understanding of how these playwrights grappled with the exigencies of their times and aims to contribute to a richer comprehension of the complexities inherent in the intersection of artistic creation and social activism within the African American literary tradition. The stages of creating an identity, defiant resistance to the status quo and a mature protestation tone are three selective eras that have been associated with the works to understand the parallelism between dramatic works and civil rights movement.

The Racial Economy of Perception: Reading Black Sociality in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract This article investigates a central problem for literary aesthetics in the nineteenth century: why literature won't directly represent Black revolution. It argues that in Blake; or, The Huts of America, Martin Delany thinks through the structural impossibility of conceptualizing a specifically Black sociality by continually refusing to depict Black revolution at the level of the plot. Instead, Blake ties together Black labor with revolution to suggest that within the context of the system of capital in the nineteenth century, Black labor's central role in the world economy renders the social nature of Black revolution similarly imperceptible. Blake reproduces this imperceptibility and unthinkability through its structure. The book, which is famously incomplete, ends just as a violent revolution is about to erupt in Cuba. Whether the final chapters were lost or never written in the first place, this article tracks how this same anticlimactic and nonrepresentational narrative mode is repeated throughout the novel. It suggests that these conspicuous absences serve as formal literary interventions that point toward the impossibility of thinking, sensing, and thereby representing a specifically Black sociality. The article explores how Delany adopts the literary technique of withholding used in the slave narrative to actively play with the formal and generic bounds of the novel and the slave narrative alike. By adopting this familiar technique, Delany asks what role the novel has within the African American literary tradition and what role fiction can play in interrogating the limits of a mode of political thought hemmed in by a racialized political economy.

Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Tara Green’s in-depth literary biography, Love and Activism: The Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, examines the life and works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, first-generation freeborn, post-emancipation Black woman activist and creative artist. Green’s work follows in the line of literary biographies such as Miriam Decosta-Willis’ Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (1995); Vivian May’s Anna Julia Cooper: Visionary Black Feminist (2007); Hanna Wallinger’s Pauline Hopkins: A Literary Biography (2012); and Valerie Boyd’s Wrapped in Rainbows (2003). As with these works, Green demonstrates the wellspring of unexamined histories that await us through archival work focusing in Black studies. Tracing the personal and career trajectory of Dunbar-Nelson, Green shows that African American art and advocacy are products of a long arc across the history of Blacks in the United States. It is the post-emancipation New Orleans and its legacy of enslavement that informed the social world into which Dunbar-Nelson was born. Green captures the significance of Dunbar-Nelson’s biracial heritage—its importance as biological and cultural DNA that shaped the personal, psychic, and social visions of Black identity across enslaved populations and their posterity. Green reveals Dunbar-Nelson’s key place in African American literary tradition and women’s advocacy, a legacy that spans fiction, nonfiction, periodicals, and playwriting. The biography underscores Dunbar-Nelson’s impact in what might be called the emergence into a twentieth-century Black women’s modernist ethos. This case is made through the biography’s demonstration of Dunbar Nelson’s work and life that clearly anticipated the boldness of Black women artists of the Harlem Renaissance and their groundbreaking work.The biography is a chronological structure organized by key eras and movements in America and in Dunbar-Nelson’s life. A key thread running throughout the biography is the matter of respectability politics in the lives of post-emancipation African Americans. Green masterfully balances the use of archives, historical and critical scholarship, and Dunbar-Nelson’s own writings to convincingly establish the importance of this biography. The book is organized into twelve chapters that begin in chapter 1 with historical and biographical overview of the New Orleans and southern milieu into which Dunbar-Nelson was born. Tracing Dunbar-Nelson’s life and career from her New Orleans birthplace, the biography concludes with coverage of the final months of her life and her death at age sixty in Philadelphia. Here Green circles back to the work’s central focus—respectability—and how Dunbar-Nelson’s life may have been articulated by her contemporaries through the prism of respectability, the archives underscore what was arguably a radical life.Between the first and final chapter are ten chapters that trace and detail the life and works of Dunbar-Nelson. Chapter 2 establishes her importance as an early and key voice in the turn of the century New Negro Women’s movement which rejected conventional nineteenth-century notions that “women must be pious, submissive, pure, and domestic” (30). Chapters 3 and 4 cover the years of Alice’s marriage to Paul L. Dunbar. Green provides an insightful look at how the tensions between the Dunbars and their desire for middle-class respectability were informed by the shadows of slavery that had dictated their family lives as young children. Chapter 5 looks at Alice’s life and literary production in the early period after Paul’s death. Green’s look at her work among the circle of Black women peers, Hurston, Fausett, and Larsen offers an important lens into the era of Black women’s writing that Dunbar-Nelson operates.Chapters 6 and 11 are separated by four chapters but work as bookends to the focus on Dunbar-Nelson’s navigation of same-sex and heterosexual relationships, revealing her independence of thought and manners when it came to her sexuality. Chapter 7 introduces the phase of Dunbar-Nelson’s third marriage—a period of almost twenty years in which she was an active speaker and campaigner for women’s suffrage and racial uplift. These chapters underscore Dunbar-Nelson’s deep-seated role in Black activism and her determination and work in circles where Black women were not always respected as equals.Tara Green’s biography stands not only as a major contribution in African American literary studies but is also important for its connections of literature and culture. Most poignant is the book’s critical look at the life and works of Dunbar-Nelson that captures the ongoing precarious impact of racism and sexism on Black health and mortality, safety, and financial stability undergirding Black life across socioeconomic levels. Educated, professional, middle- and upper-class Blacks of Dunbar-Nelson’s era were no less immune to racism and sexism than in the twenty-first century.

African American Canon and Criticism: Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey

Henry Louis Gates in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988) examines the significance of the Signifying Monkey, a trickster figure in African folklore, and whose manner of speaking produces uncertainty and double meanings. He examines how the specific language usage of the Signifying Monkey is altered and appears in African American texts by analyzing the trope of the talking book in early slave narratives and contemporary African American literary works. Gates’s book is hailed as one of the most original and groundbreaking works, and critics’ responses in its twenty-fifth-anniversary edition show its continuing impact. However, it has also been criticized for an intertextual and apolitical reading of slave narratives and for reproducing essentialism of Black literature. Focusing on the trope of the talking book, I examine how Gate’s theory and related contentions reveal critical issues of the African American literary tradition and problems of canon formation, regarding the concept of distinctive and coherent African American aesthetics, elitism, and its relationship with African American readers.

“Hokum and Hack Work” as Crucible for Black Utopian Development: Tracing the Blueprint in George Schuyler’s Anti-Utopian Black Empire

“Hokum and Hack Work” as Crucible for Black Utopian Development: Tracing the Blueprint in George Schuyler’s Anti-Utopian Black Empire Christopher Allen Varlack (bio) The concept of the Black utopia is one deeply rooted in the African-American literary tradition, explored in science fiction and Afrofuturist works by authors dedicated to envisioning potential counter-futures1 for African and African-descended peoples untainted by the problematic notions of white supremacy and the traumas of repeated anti-Black violence across history. This includes landmark works such as Martin Delany’s 1859 Blake; or the Huts of America, W. E. B. Du Bois’ 1928 Dark Princess, and Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 Parable of the Sower, to name just a few. While “literary utopias have been written predominantly by white men and (to a lesser extent) women” (Veselá 270), the opportunity to erase the color line and to combat the systems of white supremacy that seemed so deeply ingrained in the social, economic, and identity politics of their time moved, and continues to move, Black writers to create in fiction what BIPOC have struggled to create in life, aided by science, technology, and an undying drive for race progress. The history of these projects is catalogued in part in scholarly works such as Landscapes of Hope: Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America (2009) by Dohra Ahmad as well as Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism (2019) by Alex Zamalin. Each acknowledges the importance of such Black-authored visions of “collective life and racial identity,” for these novels “outlined futuristic ways of being. They warned about the disastrous ways of contemporary life, while espousing radical notions of freedom. . . . They theorized what was scientifically improbable and the new black citizen that seemed impossible” (Zamalin 1). They created that possibility and envisioned a pathway for bringing their utopias to life. [End Page 74] In his engagement with the concept of the Black utopia in fiction, George S. Schuyler—a conservative Black satirist—devoted his work partly to challenging the United States’s obsession with race and not just with the white hegemonic structures in place that consistently work to keep African-American peoples oppressed. From his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926) to his inflammatory novel Black No More (1931), Schuyler also worked to oppose that same perceived race obsession within the Black community, often criticizing figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey and the organizations they came to represent for manipulating Black racial fears and the collective desire for social equity. Because of that opposition, Schuyler, according to Alexander M. Bain, “remains calcified in literary history as an iconoclastic satirist who marginalized himself by denouncing Pan-Africanism, dismissing ideas of ‘Negro Art’ formulated by Langston Hughes and others, and turning virulently conservative after World War II” (938).2 Yet, it is exactly that calcification that encourages additional study of Schuyler in the twenty-first century, his dual critique of the machinations of Black and white society providing scholars invaluable insight into the sociopolitical stagnation of U.S. society and, equally as important, contributing hindrances to development of the Black utopia. Much existing study of Schuyler’s utopian/anti-utopian work then tends to focus on his infamous Harlem Renaissance-era novel Black No More and the possibility for radical change explored with the deconstruction of the U.S. color line, if not socially or politically then through technological and scientific means. And while Black No More is an important text certainly worthy of additional exploration, especially given Schuyler’s revelations of the improbability of upending the racial dynamics upon which the nation’s very identity was historically based, there are other important works just as vital in their suggestion of African-American counter-futures and experimentation with Black utopia-building in fictional space. For instance, one of his lesser discussed works, Black Empire, offers what [End Page 75] many consider an Afrofuturist satire3 that, on the one hand, critiques structures of white racism that relegate African-descended peoples to second-class status and, on the other hand, critiques the internal problems within the Black community that hinder the unification of the Black...

“What Good is Science Fiction and Fantasy to Black People?”: Afrofuturism as Hope and Movement

“What Good is Science Fiction and Fantasy to Black People?”: Afrofuturism as Hope and Movement Shelby Crosby (bio) and Terrence Tucker (bio) In the essay, “Positive Obsession,1” Octavia Butler explores how she became a writer and, more importantly, why she chose to write science fiction (or what we now call Afrofuturism). Terribly shy, Butler’s love of science fiction and fantasy began as a way to escape and build worlds where she could be “a magical horse, a Martian, a telepath…. There I could be anywhere but here, any time but now, with any people but these” (128). To be anywhere but here is part of Afrofuturism’s appeal. While these worlds can explore the realities of being Black in our current world, it also creates new images and feelings about said world. And that’s what we hope this issue will do for y’all—we want these essays to expand your minds and maybe even change how you see the world as the 80th CLA Convention we organized in Memphis in 2021 did for us. That conference inspired us to develop this issue. We want to keep the conversations started there going. The convention’s theme, Afrofuturism: Diasporic Visions, carved out space to discuss explicitly the extensive presence of Black futurity, of race and technology, and of fantasy and science fiction as key parts of African American literary tradition. Black writers have always infused their work with speculative elements even as they chronicle Black life with unmatched forms of realism. And while we see Afrofuturism present in art, music, and fashion, as Isiah Warner III and Lisa Yasezk claim in their introduction to Literary Afrofuturism, “such powerful artistic statements derive from a much older entertainment medium: the printed word” which can “extend back to the writing of eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley and nineteenth century abolitionist, solider, and journalist Martin Delany and continue today with the award-winning SF of Delany, Jemisin, and a host of other authors” (3). Our ideas for the convention and this issue stand on the shoulders of the Memphis native Sheree Renee Thomas, whose 2000 edited collection Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora served as a launch point to study Black speculative fiction and Afrofuturism as traditions that reach as far back as the production of African American literature itself, as well as the history of CLA, itself founded in Memphis and still committed to the study and teaching of Black literature and language. We felt it critical to explore the history this tradition [End Page 1] while simultaneously celebrating the contemporary explosion of Afrofuturism in the mainstream, embodied by 2018’s Black Panther, and the well-known, overdue credit that Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler have begun to garner. These mainstream, public discussions of what Reynaldo Anderson has termed “Afrofuturism 2.0” appear at a crucial time in the history of Black folks because even as the technological advances and social media platforms that fuel this moment have brought Black people around the world more access, opportunities, and autonomy to be seen and heard, the external forces of white supremacy, colonialism, and market fundamentalism continue to oppress and dehumanize communities. Some of those forces have been emboldened over the last fifteen years as the post-Civil Rights, post-Obama period has failed to reverse the institutional impact of white supremacist hegemony. The persistence of police brutality and the explosion of mass incarceration, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the upsurge of white nationalism into mainstream rhetoric and policy have led many to abandon hope of ever achieving the equity that many have sought for generations. For some, the result has been the descent into the violence and apathy that engulfed the Black community in the 1980s and 1990s. The second, perhaps more insidious has been the abandonment of collective action in favor of an individualism that prioritizes the self-consciousness or assimilation of the one but rejects the philosophies of collective uplift over which activists, intellectuals, and artists battled deep into the 20th century. Historically African Americans relied on faith traditions, specifically through Black liberation theology and the black prophetic tradition...

Standing at the Border

Abstract If we were to heed Edward Said’s call to see our age as “the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration,” we would need to reimagine identity, citizenship, and human rights on global and intimate scales. This essay explores how we might redefine the boundaries of our literary canons from the specific vantage point of the refugee. How do existing frames for understanding American literary history—whether those of nation and migration, slavery and segregation, Indigenous dispossession and settler colonialism—help fathom the experience of forced migration? Focusing on the African American literary tradition in particular, and guided by the efforts of Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead, I outline how centering the figure of the refugee leads to new meanings of home and uprooting, requiring a radical rethinking of citizenship and belonging.

«Точка сборки»: «Хижина дяди Тома» и американская культурная модель черной расы

Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (1852) being the most powerful statement on the racial issue in the 19th century American literature, succeeded to incorporate and rethink everything that the national tradition had in stock on the problem of slavery and race relations. The Black racial / cultural identity model that was taking shape in the 18th century Anglo-American literature, later was being enriched and transformed throughout American (and African-American) literary history. Uncle Tom's Cabin became another crucial text (the next one after Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia) that provided the emerging Black cultural / racial identity model with a new quality: it became universal, nationally recognized — and at the same time a point of controversy provoking endless debates and open for dynamic change and transformations, as was the case with anti-Tom literature and the ambivalent reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in African American literary tradition. The analysis of The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854) by Caroline Lee Hentz, a typical example of anti-Tom novels, gives an idea of the pro-slavery response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The final part of the paper is a survey of the main stages in African American response since the 1853 argument between Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass that became a matrix for the further polemic, and up to Henry Louis Gates’s subversive “double-voiced” interpretation of the novel which is in full agreement with the tendency to revise the role of white Abolitionists in the antislavery movement and African American history, typical for African American studies in the 1990s–2000s.

The “Vernacular Process” and the (Re)construction of Tradition in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

The present paper is an attempt to explore, in and through the prism of Ralph W. Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the workings of Ellison’s “vernacular process” as a concept that informs the author’s critical views incorporated in the novel. More specifically, Ellison’s revisionary enterprise in this narrative demonstrates his view of African-American tradition as integrated in American and Western tradition. While the form of “invisible criticism” in which Ellison engages is a rather self-conscious manifestation of his critical model of the “vernacular process,” the present work contends that this Ellisonian model actually foreshadows Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s critical paradigm of “Signifyin(g).” What Gates names “literary Signification” stands for an indigenous African-American form of literary revision consisting in a black text’s repeating with difference of another black text’s tropes or rhetorical strategies, or such text’s appropriation of aspects of form in a white antecedent text. Through “literary Signification,” Invisible Man revises African-American texts exemplified in the present article by Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and Native Son (1940). Likewise, Ellison’s narrative also revisits American and European texts, an enterprise to be seen in the present work’s examination of Ellison’s revision of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Walt Whitman’s romantic poetry, and T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). By establishing through “literary Signification” his African-American literary “relatives” as well as his Western and American “ancestors,” Ellison ultimately constructs the African-American literary tradition as embedded in the Euro-American tradition and thus underlines the syncretic character of American literature and culture. Keywords: Integrative, Revision, Tradition, Signifyin(G), “Vernacular Process”.

Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery by Yogita Goyal, and: Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination ed. by Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal

Reviewed by: Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery by Yogita Goyal, and: Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination ed. by Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal Gwen Bergner Yogita Goyal. Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery. New York: New York UP, 2019. 271 pp. $30.00. Eds. Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal. Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2020. 248 pp. $30.00. If Stephen Best wrote "the epitaph of the Beloved moment" to free Black identity from a melancholic relation to slavery and disrupt the assumed continuity between slavery's past and racial inequalities today, then these two books examine how the next generation makes use of slavery's history. Both acknowledge the neo-slave narrative, emblematized by Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), reigned for several decades as the "paradigmatic mode for thinking about African American identity and history" (Goyal 1), but hail new ways of reckoning with slavery's meaning today. Goyal sticks with the slave narrative form, but asks what happens when it goes global. Current human rights abuses, from trafficking to undocumented immigration, from conscription of child soldiers to forced marriage, from debt bondage to domestic servitude, now use the neo-slave narrative as an analogic template. Goyal asks how this analogy functions, "what histories does it summon, what hidden relations between power and knowledge make visible?" (10). Ashe and Saal recognize its globalization, but declare a radical break with the neo-slave narrative paradigm by post-Black artists in the United States. Branching beyond the literary, the essays explore how Black cultural productions since 1987 "refigure canonical, popular, and sacrosanct narratives, motifs, memes, and iconographies" to stage new encounters with slavery (Ashe and Saal 17). Together, these books explore how new aesthetic forms "counter[] the hegemony of any single genealogy of blackness" (Goyal 15). Arguing the slave narrative is now a "world literary genre" (4-5), Goyal examines this global proliferation through a variety of literary contexts, from narratives of conscripted African child soldiers to the new African diaspora in the United States. With chapters organized by genre, including the sentimental, the gothic, satire, surrogation, and revisionism, she asks how the analogy between transatlantic slavery and contemporary phenomena of migration, trauma, and global racial formations functions. In two chapters on narratives of African child soldiers, Goyal is critical of sentimental narratives, such as a memoir by Francis Bok and a novel by Dave Eggers that let Western readers imagine themselves as global citizens "via their humanitarian empathy for the African victim of atrocity" (13), but in the process dehistoricize and universalize the particular causes of the traumas they narrate. By contrast, Goyal appreciates the "gothic" narratives by Chris Abani and Ahmadou Lourouma that "refus[e] closure or redemption" (13). These versions depart from the classic slave narrative's sympathetic appeal by uncovering silenced histories and "challeng[ing] the absolute innocence demanded by human rights advocates" (13). Like the gothic narratives, Goyal appreciates recent African American post-Black satires of slavery by Mat Johnson, Paul Beatty, and Colson Whitehead that use "absurd juxtapositions, surreal analogies, and farcical adventures" (14) to expose the contradiction inherent in the previous generation's neo-slave narratives, which claimed that slavery persists while narrating escape from its regime. Succeeding [End Page 341] chapters include an exploration of texts Goyal sees as challenging Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s tradition-founding premise that literacy delivered Black freedom by allowing the objectified slave to write him or herself into Enlightenment subjectivity. Rather than accepting the Western equation of literacy with subjectivity, Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, Robin Coste Lewis, and M. NourbeSe Philip "refigure the relations among liberal Enlightenment ideas of humanity, the black presence in the West, and the expansion of the African American literary tradition to a more global one across time and space" (145) by "ventriloquizing" the words, language, and texts of the Western tradition to unsettle their racial epistemologies. The final chapter considers how writers of "the new African Diaspora," such as Chris Abani, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Teju Cole, and Dinaw Mengetsu provide narratives of migration, postcolonial Africa, and the vicissitudes of globalization. These texts indicate that the Black Atlantic diasporic...

“Flesh that Needs to Be Loved”

#SayHerName developed in reaction to the increase of police brutality cases that name black women as victims, signifying a pervasive issue. Interrogating the legacy of the black female body in North America, this article proposes a theology of beauty that considers black women as a primary subject. Theological aesthetics is not only a philosophical concern but represents a starting place for problematizing how black humanity is often excluded. Drawing on African American literary traditions and reflections from black Catholic theologians this article, primarily reflecting on events prior to 2020, argues for a theological response to systemic violence against black women’s bodies that articulates black life through theologies of beauty.

The Slave Narrative in African-American Literature: A Study of Solomon Northup, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/65-03 Publication date: February 29 th 2020 Between 1770 when Ukawsaw Gronniosaw's work announced the birth of the African-American literary tradition and 1860, the most dominant form of narrative focused on the experience of slavery as encountered by blacks in the United States. Although identifiable as a unique genre of its own, the typical slave narrative is essentially a form of autobiography. Generally speaking, an autobiography is a self portrait narrative construed and constructed by the subject himself. Precisely, between 1820 and 1860, there were a wide range of publications by Afro-Americans on America's peculiar institution. These publications exposed in details their complex ethnical and psychological orientation toward slavery, demanding in very strict terms, the abolition of the Southern tyranny. It was these collective utterances that made up what the Afro-American writer, Arma Bontemps, calls an ""American genre" of literary narrative, otherwise known as "Slave narrative" (See Ogude 30 -31). Written by ex-slaves, the narratives reveal a common pattern of representation, revealing the author's circumstances and experiences under servitude, his heroic journey from slavery to freedom as well as his subsequent identification with the abolitionist cause, For instance, in the preface to her Narrative, Linda Brent aimed at arousing the members of the public, particularly, the women to rise up against the institution of slavery in the South in the spirit of abolitionist cause. Thus she says: I have not written my experience in order to attract attention to myself; on the contrary, it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history. Neither do I come to excite sympathy for my own sufferings. But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of able pens to convince the people of the free states what slavery really is. Only by experience can anyone realize how deep and dark and foul is that pit of abomination (6). For our purpose, our focus in the present essay is to undertake a comparative study of three Afro-American slave narratives namely Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs. In doing these specific and crucial aspects of the narratives such as: region of servitude, life in the plantation, Master-slave relationship, religion and slavery, and education and slave emancipation will be highlighted and discussed. This is finally capped with a conclusion. An elaborate specification and description of the region of servitude involved is a fundamental aspect of the three slave narratives considered here. The three narratives focus on those Southern states of the United State of America characteristically branded slave states. In the slave states, agricultural economy prevailed. There were large-scale cotton, corn, sugar cane and tobacco plantations, where slaves were deployed to work under conditions of servitude.

Etheridge Knight’s Prison Poetry

Etheridge Knight’s value to the African American literary tradition and the Anglo-American literary canon extends beyond his legacy as a preeminent voice associated with the Black Arts Movement. In his books of poetry, The Essential Etheridge Knight and Poems from Prison, published while he was an inmate at Indiana State Prison, Knight employs language, themes, characters, and spaces that do not only locate places and liberating identities within a confined space, but also ushers in new kinds of rhetorics and sensibilities from the limited space within which he finds himself to assert the politics of race, the agency of the familial, and the psychological restoration of memory. Black American art forms served as a vibrant tool that enriched his poetic vision. Thus, the prison environment did not deter Knight’s creative mindset but instead gave him room for constant communication between his creative mind and the physical world that existed outside of prison. The aim of this essay is essentially to demonstrate that constructed identities accounts for the distinctiveness of Knight’s poems about his prison experience. Also crucial to our understanding of these poems is how his dependence on the imagined spaces of memory, solidarity, and kinship helped him to overcome the psychological and emotional trauma of incarceration on the poet’s art.

Race Leaders, Race Traitors, and the Necropolitics of Black Exceptionalism in Paul Beatty’s Fiction

Abstract This essay examines two oppositional figures in Paul Beatty’s debut novel, The White Boy Shuffle (1996), and most recent novel, The Sellout (2015): the exalted race leader and the excoriated race traitor. Positioned at extreme ends of the spectrum of exceptionalism, these figures function to perpetuate a phenomenon that the essay’s author terms the necropolitics of black exceptionalism, the paradox of justifying the violent oppression of the majority of black people by celebrating or censuring a single black figure. In exploring the absurd dimensions of these extreme figures through the lens of satire, both novels denounce black exceptionalism as a necropolitical tool of oppression that entrenches the social death and civic exclusion of black people in a modern US society that purports to be color-blind and postracial. Emerging within the postmodern turn of the African American literary tradition, these novels take on a nihilistic tone to raise questions about how the black community might effectively (if at all) achieve civil progress in the contemporary age. Ultimately, these satirical novels reimagine historically necropolitical spaces, such as the basketball court, the plantation, and the segregated urban neighborhood, as potential, albeit vexed sites of black agency, empowerment, and community building.

“Burn all he has, but keep his books”: Gloria Naylor and the Proper Objects of Feminist Chaucer Studies

Abstract Through a reading of Gloria Naylor's 1992 novel Bailey's Cafe, this article asks whether feminist scholarship can engage Chaucer without reproducing the misogynist and white supremacist values that shape the canon and his central place in it. By evoking and undercutting references to the Canterbury Tales in Bailey's Cafe, Naylor's literary allusion both illuminates how a desire for Chaucer shapes interpretation and reframes Chaucer's text in terms of its relation to Naylor's novel and African-American literary traditions. Following the intersectional feminist methodology proposed in Bailey's Cafe, this article centers Naylor's medievalism in feminist medieval studies of the early 1990s and reads the Franklin's Tale for its allusions to Bailey's Cafe. Ultimately, it concludes that proper objects for new feminist approaches to Chaucer include the sources suppressed in the Canterbury Tales and the legacies of black feminist thought elided in our own critical genealogies.

Before The Brownies’ Book

Before The Brownies’ Book Brigitte Fielder (bio) Long before I was assigned any piece of African American literature in any classroom (in which Black writers would be few and far between for the first twenty years of my formal education), it was my own father who put Black literature into my hands.1 My experience is not unique, but representative of a long history of African American people’s attention to the study of Black people and Black writing, an interest that has always extended beyond the bounds of academic institutions and formal education. Black parents (and some nonblack parents of Black children) of every socioeconomic class have long sought out texts, images, and other media that would affirm and celebrate, rather than ignore or disparage, their children’s existence. As we celebrate the trajectory of African American children’s literature from The Brownies’ Book to #BlackLivesMatter, I want to contemplate the important place of Black children in the African American literary tradition more broadly. The importance of Black children extends beyond African American children’s literary studies, illustrating what we know in theory about the necessarily interdisciplinary work in this genre, but which still bears repeating: that children’s literary studies has much to gain from conversations with African American studies, and vice versa. For each of these fields, attending to Black children allows us to read more rigorously, as we consider racialized readers, perspectives, and methodologies for understanding the texts we study. The focus on Black children I suggest here is not meant to choose sides in the differences in disciplinary orientation between what Peter Hollindale has referred to as “book people” and “child people” (26). Rather, I mean to argue that even “book people” (in all fields of literary studies) need to pay closer attention to how questions of racialized readership affect our textual analyses. Moreover, to do this within African American children’s literary studies is not to explore new methodologies, but to better understand historical practices of authorship, editorship, and literary analysis. Attending to Black children allows us to [End Page 159] extend our readings toward readerships that are often ignored, allowing for more rigorous reading in and beyond children’s literary studies. Before The Brownies’ Book The Brownies’ Book represents not a beginning, but a continuation of Black print culture’s engagement with Black children. An important milestone in this longer tradition of African American literature that recognized and cared about Black children, The Brownies’ Book nevertheless employed familiar tactics to that of earlier Black cultural work. Technological developments in and Black access to the infrastructures of print and visual culture had long been turned toward various strategies of racial uplift. In this, they would often also be oriented toward Black futures, and thus toward the Black children who would occupy that future. As an early twentieth-century periodical, The Brownies’ Book was not the first Black periodical to have had (and acknowledged) a child readership. The children’s sections of early African American newspapers such as the Colored American and the Christian Recorder recognized the need to address Black children in the larger context of nineteenth-century African American print culture. Nazera Sadiq Wright shows how the selections published in the Children’s Department of the Colored American between 1840 and 1841 “demonstrate early evidence of a devoted black child readership in the early black press” (148). In this, only the second known African American newspaper to be published in the United States, child readers were already acknowledged and taken seriously. Wright’s and the other essays in Katherine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane’s collection Who Writes for Black Children? show that, even in the earliest moments of the written record that would later be called “African American literature,” Black authors and editors considered Black children among their readers. When African American literature appeared in the Black press, newspapers included accounts of racial violence that children very well may have read as parts of the paper circulated among family members. Black child readers also encountered writing by white authors that was never intended for them but that was reframed by editors who placed this writing in the larger context of Black newspapers...

“Our racket’s within th’ law, ain’t it?”: Miscegenation and Literary Form in the Plessy Era

A rhetoric of strangeness marks so many of the texts of the African American literary tradition written during the Plessy era, a strangeness inextricably tied to the law’s effort to maintain the fiction of “separate but equal.” Anti-miscegenation laws, perhaps the most emotionally charged of the many legal attempts to police the color-line, were also some of the most difficult to parse and yet also the most entrenched. And so, it is no surprise that the illogic of the legal predicament in which blacks found themselves was often articulated in literary texts in two related ways: first, through the figure of the miscegenated baby; and second, through the narrative structure of the absurd. This article argues that while the possibility of a baby is usually read to reveal the anxiety of a text’s passing protagonists, in fact many Plessy-era works by African American writers deploy the combination of a troubling black baby and the farce of racial taxonomies as a kind of reductio ad absurdum, satirizing the law’s doomed attempts to protect the “purity” of the white race. An assessment of the law’s affective attachment to whiteness reveals the formal mode of the absurd—read through George Schuyler’s 1931 novel Black No More—as a pointed challenge to the rationale underlying segregation as the law of the land.

The Haunted Black South and the Alternative Oceanic Space: Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

In Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward places herself within the modern African American literary tradition and lays out the unending “historical traumas” of blacks and cultural haunting in her narra tive. She brings to the fore the story of a young black boy and demonstrates the difficulty of living while a black man in the American rural South. Living or dead, black males remain spectral as their frustrated black bodies are endlessly rejected and disembodied. It’s through Ward’s close attention to the notions of black masculinity and retrieval of (black) humanity that the black South is remembered, recuperated, and historicized. Shrewdly enough, Ward expands it further into the tradition of American literature. Instead of singularizing African American identity and its histori cal traumas, she renders them the part of American history and universaliz ing the single black story as the story of the American South. Filling in the gaps that Faulkner and other white writers have left in their novels, Ward writes stories about the unspeakable, the invisible, the excluded to decon struct white narratives and rebuild the American history; and reasserts African roots and history, spirituality, black raciality and locality within the American tradition. I examine the symbolic significance of Jojo’s claim of black masculinity within the socio-political contexts of contemporary America. I also look closely at Ward’s portrayal of Jojo’s black family gene alogy on account of its traumatic experiences of incarceration in notorious Parchman Farm. Locating Jojo as the inspiration of linking the past and the present, the unburied and the living, I contend that Ward creates “home” for blacks in an atemporal oceanic space where the past and the present are able to meet simultaneously. I argue that the oceanic space is an alternative space of affect that functions against the space of white rationality.

Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

Cesar Lyndon's Lists, Letters, and a Pig Roast: A Sundry Account Book

This article examines the lesser-known account book of Cesar Lyndon, an enslaved man in Newport, Rhode Island. Lyndon's extant account book—from 1761 to 1771—chronicles his financial transactions with Newport's famed slave traders as well as free and enslaved persons. Lyndon—by way of double-entry bookkeeping—itemizes the sale and acquisition of goods and services. He notes deaths, marriages, and a pig roast. Lyndon and his nearly thirty-five-page account book invites us to consider the ordinary and to examine the account book as a literary genre, despite the ways in which it may trouble a presentist African American literary tradition. Lyndon's lists document the kinds of everyday living that are complicit in slavery's business rather than decidedly resistant to it.