African American Literature Research Articles

Noising Creole Abroad: Chatting about Voice; Some Thoughts on Belinda Edmondson’s Creole Noise

This essay reviews Belinda Edmondson’s literary yet cross-disciplinary study Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance (2022), which questions the Blackness of orality versus the Whiteness of narrative in the growth of Caribbean literature. Caribbean language history and discourse analysis have much to contribute to the exploration of ventriloquist beginnings of the regional narrative as well as to the nuancing of interpretation, and the review calls for such exchange across the relevant disciplines. The review also welcomes comparisons between literary developments of Black American and Caribbean literature that highlight the cross-cultural relevance of Edmondson’s analysis. Creole Noise is timely and useful in contributing positively to such matters as border disputes on Caribbeanness, with regard to regional and diasporic writing, and to challenges that face writers who are native speakers of Caribbean Creole as they convey local voices to foreign readers.

Roofscapes

This article reads several works of African American literature that depict the urban roofscape as a site of contemporary fugitive praxis, made in and against the enclosures of 20th century urban space. The forms of freedom rehearsed on the roof are intersecting, overlapping and, at times, contradictory. Ultimately, I argue that the roofscape offers an analytic object through which to explore the thorny questions of property, gender, enclosure, and mobility—questions that enrich and complicate the study of fugitive geographies and their use as models for escaping and living outside of the violent enclosures of gendered racial capitalism. The multivalence of the rooftop provides an opportunity to dwell with the complex questions of fugitive method: What forms do geographies of fugitivity take? Who do they limit or enable? And under what conditions? How do fugitive geographies both sustain and break from the social, political, and economic relations from which their producers flee?

From Zora Neale to Missionary Mary: Womanist Aesthetics of Faith and Freedom

In this essay, I discuss the art of Missionary Mary Proctor, a contemporary folk artist from Tallahassee, Florida, in the context of the literary aesthetics of the renowned twentieth-century anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston. In comparing these Southern-born African American women artists, I argue that both are rooted in an aesthetic praxis deriving from their shared womanist ethics. My goal in this inquiry is to highlight the faith-based aesthetic traditions of African American women and reveal the manner in which discourses of freedom intertwine with literary and visual aesthetics and faith-based practices in African American folk art and literature. To that end, I analyze the prevalence of themes of liberation within the spiritual discourses of Southern African American women artists such as Missionary Mary Proctor and theorize the manner in which a landscape of Black female liberation is envisioned within their works.

Acceptance of Black Culture Through Afro-American Folktales: The Voice of Enslaved Folk

Every culture has its own beauty, truth, customs, laws, and history and sometimes most of them are expressed through folktales. This is a short, precise, and aphoristic article about the cultural and social worlds of Afro-Americans which I will examine through the lens of Afro-American folktales. These tales are not human beings and yet they are alive for they contain the most unforgettable memories, emotions, and feelings of mankind. Zora Neale Hurston was one of the most gifted authors of twentieth-century Afro-American Literature who empowered and acknowledged black arts by giving it a unique identity. The best thing about Hurston’s literary works is that she allows her readers to visualize and investigate the true meaning of their individuality and personality. Hurston was like a true preacher who taught Afro-Americans that it is better to play with words than with the emotions and feelings of people. Through her writings, she unveiled White Americans who believed in controlling the lives of Black folk through slavery. She protests this propaganda in her literary works which have the essence of folktales.

Young Poets and Black Spaces: Vanessa Howard’s Poetics of Nature

This article explores the poetics of nature in the work of Vanessa Howard, a young poet involved with The Voice of the Children workshop, a group of Black and Latinx teenaged writers in Brooklyn, New York, who worked with poet June Jordan and educator Terri Bush from 1967 to 1971. A significant poet whose work has not received sufficient scholarly attention, Howard uses nuanced strategies to craft a poetics of nature that acknowledges injustice and remakes possibilities for envisioning and depicting Black spaces. Across a range of poems, Howard figures internal capacities of perception and imagination, and visions of natural and urban landscapes that counter external environments constrained by racial and economic injustice. The fact that Howard created her innovative poetics of nature as a young person demonstrates the importance of recovering and including young poets in considerations of African American poetry and poetics.

To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship by Elizabeth Mchenry (review)

To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship by Elizabeth Mchenry (review)

The Arts of Antifascist Black Transnationalism during the Spanish Civil War

This article asserts the critical role of art and literature in the resistance against fascism by situating the aesthetic work of African Americans as central to the transnational phenomenon of the Spanish Civil War. This article highlights the prehistory to the African American support of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 when news of Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia galvanized members of the Harlem Renaissance. These two conflicts triangulated the imaginaries of the United States, Spain, and Ethiopia, producing a distinct form of antifascist Black transnationalism that extends work by Brent Hayes Edwards, Robert F. Reid-Pharr, and Nadia Nurhussein. To manifest this argument, this article examines Paul Robeson’s speeches at rallies in London that he later reprinted in his autobiography Here I Stand (1958) and Claude McKay’s posthumously published novel Amiable with Big Teeth about 1936 Harlem. Using archival research, this article analyzes the collage aesthetic of the scrapbook that the activist Thyra J. Edwards compiled in 1937 to record the actions of the Negro People’s Committee to Aid Spain. In sum, this article demonstrates the integral role of African American visual culture and literature to the development of twentieth-century antifascist ideology within a transnational perspective.

"[S]ongs of allusion": Sterling Brown, Harryette Mullen, and the Roots of Poetic Recycling

Abstract: While recent works by well-known critics and poets such as Marjorie Perloff, Craig Dworkin, and Kenneth Goldsmith have persuasively positioned poetic recycling and "unoriginal genius" as central to the development of modern and contemporary poetry, these writings generally overlook the ways in which vernacular forms, particularly the ballad and the blues, have provided a potent model for poetic recycling and intertextual play for poets in the twentieth century. African American poetry has been particularly attuned to the experimental possibilities of vernacular forms, and the poems of Sterling Brown and Harryette Mullen show how the roots of "unoriginal genius" might be seen to lie in hoary oral traditions. These poets suggest a different origin story for modernist citationality and provide a model for lyric expression embedded in collective poetic making.

Duly Noted: Subversive Paratexts in Contemporary African American Poetry

Abstract: This article examines an ever-proliferating, little-discussed phenomenon: notes in contemporary African American poetry. Attending to the form and content of these threshold spaces elucidates how Black poets operate within but refuse incorporation into historically white institutions. Reading three examples— Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith, To Repel Ghosts by Kevin Young, and Dangerous Goods by Sean Hill—it argues that these successful poets do not view notes as of an "incidental nature" but manipulate them, operating in but not of the discourses they mimic. Poets exploit this textual space to subvert institutional limits; their annotation yields self-reflexive outcomes that demand attention as descended yet distinct from paratexts of Black precursors.

On the Andrew J. Kappel Prize Essay

The winner of this year’s prize is Conrad Steel’s “Standard Forms: Modernism, Market Research, and ‘Howl.’” The judge is Barbara Foley, Emerita Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. Foley’s chief scholarly and political interests are in the fields of African American literature, US literary radicalism, and Marxist literary criticism. Her most recent book is Marxist Literary Criticism Today (2019). She is past president of the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association and currently serves on the editorial board and manuscript collective of Science & Society.

To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship

To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship

Identities and aesthetic representations in the black diaspora literature

The representation of black identity in African American literature is a subject of great and critical concern. Scholars have made deliberate efforts to address the racial issues, language, its oral nature among others; but little attention has been given to the identity and the representation of these identities in African American Literature. This study therefore, is an attempt to examine the concept of identity and its aesthetic representations in African American literature. The study engages a survey of texts in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, speeches, musical forms, rap and film which are selected as a result of their relevance to the research focus. These texts are subjected to critical analysis while references are made to secondary texts where applicable. It is discovered that the literature of the black diaspora. considers identity as a major theme in its discourse and this is represented in all forms of their literature. Identity, which could refer to a sense of ownership, is a major concern in the literature of the Black diaspora.

(Self)Censored at Home and Away: Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) in Spanish

Native Son (Harper & Brothers, 1940), by Richard Wright (1908, Roxie, Mississippi–1960, Paris, France), contained a scene rewritten by the author to satisfy the Book of the Month Club, which had selected a Black author for the first time. In the censored scene, the main character, Bigger Thomas, engages in a lewd sexual act; other potentially offensive contents, however, were not subjected to the same treatment. The first Spanish translation, Sangre negra (Sudamericana, 1941), was banned in Spain twice (1944 and 1953) when the Argentinian publishers attempted to import it into the strongly autocratic country ruled by Francisco Franco from 1939 to 1975. The translation, by Pedro Lecuona, was finally published in Spain in 1987, under the literal title Hijo nativo (Ediciones Versal and Círculo de Lectores), with a revised text for the European-Spanish readership. The state censorship that banned this translation from Spain, the self-censorship that the Argentinian translation contains, and the Iberian revisions are all examined closely. In 1991, the Library of America published an uncensored edition which restored the unexpurgated text. However, Lecuona’s (revised) translation circulated until 2022, when an unexpurgated text, Hijo de esta tierra (Alianza Editorial) by Eduardo Hojman, was made from the restored text of this hugely significant example of African-American literature. This edition restores all previously (self)censored segments and also contains the first Spanish version of the epilogue “How Bigger Was Born”. Book reviews and social media reception pinpoint the importance of Wright’s contribution but are neglectful of this retranslation’s fascinating history

Racism in August Wilson’s Selected Plays: A Historical Background

Racism is a dominant them in the African American literature. Many writers and authors attempted to focus on this theme in their works. August Wilson, as a an American author and citizen, display the effect of this dangerous societal blight on the norms and cultural issues of the American society in general and African American in particular. His plays Fences, Two Trains Running and Piano Lesson treated this theme by offering some solutions for such problem. The paper displays the root of racism in the American society and define racism according to the norms and culture of the American. The paper also finds that Wilson traced the appearances of racism in the American society after the great migration and how the migration of the Black from the south to the North motivated the rise of racism in the American society.

Early onset marijuana use and suicidal ideation among African American college students

Between 2013 and 2019 the suicide rate for African American young persons 15–24 years of age rose by 47% for males and 59% for females. Presently, little is known about factors that contribute to the suicidal behavior of African Americans in late adolescence and emerging adulthood. However, considering the coinciding increase in high potency marijuana use among African American young persons and literature suggesting a potential link between marijuana use and suicidal behavior, we examined early onset marijuana use as a risk factor for suicidal ideation. The sample included 221African American students (70% female and M age = 20.3, SD = 1.97) attending an HBCU between 2019 and 2020. We employed multivariable logistic regression analysis that included suicidal ideation as the outcome variable and early onset marijuana use as the explanatory variable, while controlling for demographic factors and mental health treatment status. Approximately 19% of the sample reported suicidal ideation. Early onset marijuana use was reported by 28% of students. Compared to students who never used marijuana, early onset users were three times as likely to report suicidal ideation (AOR = 3.33, 95% CI = 1.06–10.44). In conclusion, early onset marijuana use may place African American young persons at increased risk for suicidal ideation. Marijuana use may be an important malleable risk factor that can be targeted in suicide prevention interventions designed for African American college students. More research is warranted.

ANALYZING RACIAL PROPAGANDA AGAINST SOCIO-CREATIVE PERSPECTIVE IN SELECTED POEMS OF COUNTEE CULLEN AND LANGSTON HUGHES

The social purpose of art expands its value and significance to problematize many social and political situations of day rather than limiting it to idea of aesthetic pleasure alone. African American philosophers, poets, and authors also attempt to project the issues of race and culture country is facing. They made an effort to create a strong literary framework despite various attempts at discrediting the significance of art and artists on global scale. Considering Alain Lock's idea of ‘Real art or Propaganda’ this paper examines true values of African American literature and takes it a step further to recognize the attempts made via literature to project their rights and preserve their culture and history. This influence never strays from true purpose of art and results in meaningful poems that appeal to human emotion and feelings on a universal level. They have historically given more weight to universal purpose of art, which is to arouse pleasure, and have utilized this as a platform to expose the systematic goal that disadvantages and presents negative picture of African American community.

Representing Dissent through Poetry: A Study of Select Poems of Maya Angelou

Literature in general and protest poetry in particular have been vocal about human condition and problems. This article examines Maya Angelou’s representation of dissent in selected poems, using the historical and socio-political context of her life as a lens. It analyses how Angelou’s work, including “Still I Rise,” “Caged Bird,” “Phenomenal Woman,” and some others, articulates resistance against racial, gender, and social inequalities. Through her powerful metaphors, repetitive phrases, and vivid imagery, Angelou defied societal norms and called for change. The study concludes by emphasizing Angelou’s enduring impact and legacy, not just in literature, but also in shaping civil rights discourse and inspiring social change. Her poetry exemplifies how art can be a potent instrument of protest. The article employs language for ‘writing back’, questioning norms, resisting atrocities and creating scope for change. Protest poetry, which is deeply embedded in American history, remains a prominent part of English literary corpus, contributing greatly to African American literature. The category of African American protest poetry is large owing to the huge expanse of time during which it has been written and also because of the great number of poets who have contributed to this form of writing. As a result, African American protest poetry is divided into three sub-categories– the first deals with protest during slavery, the second during segregation and Jim Crow Laws and the third after political obstacles to equality were presumably removed. This paper aims to deliberate on the following questions— what are the prominent themes of African American protest poetry? How have the African American poets used this genre of literature variously during different historical epochs? How are the concerns of female poets different from their male counterparts? What role has protest poetry played in political movements against inequality, social injustice, oppression, segregation etc.? The present paper aims to engage with this seemingly broad area of literature from the feminist and racial perspectives. The paper intends to deal with few important African American protest poets from foundational poets to the contemporary ones.

A Feminist study of Female Bildungsroman in Toni Cade Bambara’s “The lesson”

Every literary text can be considered as effective cultural and historical evidence to show human experiences in different ages. Likewise, African American Literature becomes a major tool to portray racial segregation and marginalizing women of colour. African American novelists have allowed women of colour to have their voices heard and their identities found.
 Toni Cade Bambara is among the best Afro-American authors who has displayed the difficulties that women of colour such as racism, sexism, racial discrimination, ethnic segregation, gender inequality and loss of identity. This study principally analyzes Bambara’s “The Lesson” by considering a Feminist Bildungsroman approach to deal with gender roles and gender inequality of the female characters.
 This paper investigates some questions such as: how does “The Lesson” ascribe to the beliefs of the Black Power Movement? What types of dialects have been used in the text to picture the life and culture of African American women? How is Female Bildungsroman employed by Bambara to build and reconstruct a new image for the characters to enable them to fulfil their dreams? The current study delineates the oppression and segregation of African American people under a white-dominated society. However, the author attempts to deconstruct the life of the characters again so that they can have a better and healthy life.

"Listening Between the Lines": Soundscapes in Yusef Komunyakaa's Poetry.

Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry is widely acclaimed for its sui generis soundscapes, which shows the poet's highly sensitive auditory perception in his literary creations. Soundscapes, in his poetry, play a pivotal role in revealing social malaise-racial inequalities and gender-biased black relations-in the multiracial US. This article thus explores race- and gender-related societal problems mirrored in Komunyakaa's poetry through the prism of soundscapes. It first aims to examine how soundscapes are presented between poetic lines as a culture carrier, and then investigates the disciplinary power and oppositional function of soundscapes. Combining textual close reading with interdisciplinary research methodology, this article brings to light the complexity and specificity of soundscapes in Komunyakaa's poetry. For one thing, the soundscape constructed by the privileged serves as an oppressive force to discipline the disempowered groups; for another, the soundscape the underprivileged produce is utilized as an instrument of resistance and healing, offering them a sonic weapon to deconstruct the oppressive sound imperialism as well as construct the affective community of African Americans. This study not only adds to the research on Komunyakaa's poetry by offering a renewed viewpoint of excavating this poet and his political proposition of equality and equity, but also attracts academic attention to the role of literary soundscape in Afro-American literature in revealing the long-standing societal problems in the US.

Decolonized Trauma: Narrative, Memory and Identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract Even though literary works serve as excellent media for bearing witness to trauma, postcolonial and diasporic literary texts are often dismissed for their falsified accounts of traumatic life experiences. Recent studies on African American literature have stressed the need for a decolonized conceptualization of trauma that would not only disrupt the long-existing white Global Northern perspectives but also recognize feelings of empathy and solidarity among members of the community in these literary corpora. The present study adopts a hybrid analytical framework to examine the representations of trauma in the Nigerian American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013). Specifically, we draw upon Gérard Genette’s narrative levels, Ron Eyerman’s collective memory, and Jeffrey Charles Alexander’s collective identity to argue that the novel defies conventional forms of narrative by depicting postcolonial and diasporic identities as volatile and dynamic constructs. The findings indicate the multiple ways in which the story presents diasporic Africans – that is, the female protagonist Ifemelu and her male lover Obinze – as capable of overcoming the adverse effects of traumatic memories by chronicling an authentic record of their experiences. The study also reveals that the leading female character, like the novelist Adichie, creates an empowering platform for migrants of various ethnicities to speak up about their traumatic experiences, and thereby establish what is called ‘cross-cultural solidarity’ in reconstructing a new community.