African American Narratives Research Articles

Life and death in the Delta: African American narratives of violence, resilience, and social change

Life and death in the Delta: African American narratives of violence, resilience, and social change

Bruce Jackson, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim like Me: African American Narrative Poetry from Oral Tradition

Bruce Jackson, <i>Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim like Me: African American Narrative Poetry from Oral Tradition</i>

The History of Miss Jane Pittman

This paper explores the ways in which Ernest J. Gaines uses fiction in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman to write a history of the African American from 1861 to 1961. The “Introduction” sets the novel going, but its direction has already been given in the unusual dedication to his grandmother, stepfather and aunt “who did not walk a day in her life but who taught me the importance of standing” (Gaines iv). The significance for Gaines is that what happened a hundred years ago is part of his present-day lived life. The nineteenth-century novel was possessed by history, and white nineteenth-century novelists found their great subject in the war of European nations that was fought between 1799 and 1815. But that was not an American war nor was it an African American war. For Gaines, the war that makes the great turning point of a nation and a people is the American Civil War, fought from 1861 to 1865. It resulted in a moment of history after which life would not be the same. However, one of the main points that Gaines makes about that great turning point in history is that everything changed and nothing changed. And his main fictional device to establish that truth is to tell the history of the hundred years since Emancipation as the story of one woman. Her autobiography becomes an ethno-biography. The continuity forwards from 1861 is given through the life of one woman, but Gaines’s uses another device to provide a continuity backwards from 1861. The young man who wants to get Miss Jane Pittman’s story upsets her with his persistence: “What you want know about Miss Jane for?’ Mary said. ‘I teach history,’ I said. ‘I’m sure her life’s story can help me explain things to my students.’ ‘What’s wrong with them books you already got?’ Mary said. ‘Miss Jane is not in them,’ I said” (Gaines v). Ernest J. Gaines wrote at a time when historians finally began to recognize that they could get no true history of the South if they allowed that history to be written by plantation owners. In the sixties and the seventies, the pre-Civil War slave narratives, so long dismissed as lies and fictions by white Southern historians, began to be read again, and began to tell African Americans another history. Gaines used the then un-mined resources of the slave narratives to provide structure, themes, characters and incidents for his novel. A comparison of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman with the Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave Written by Himself, published in 1847, will show how close these links are. But William Wells Brown’s Narrative is only one of at least sixty pre-Civil War slave narratives, and, though it is an exceptionally good one, there is another reason for singling out its author. William Wells Brown was the first African American to publish a novel: Clotel; or the president’s daughter. That appeared in 1853, and up to that date Brown, like Equiano, Douglass, Bibb, Henson, Pennington, and the many others who wrote an account of their life as a slave and their escape from the South had had to contend with the Southern cry that everything the fugitive slaves was saying was lies, and that they did not write their own stories but got white Northerners to write them for them. It was the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 which showed William Wells Brown (and Frederick Douglass) that fiction might serve the abolitionist cause as much as a true narrative faithfully attested. In 1853, with the publication of his novel Clotel, William Wells Brown took African American narrative in a direction that was new and dangerous. In 1971, with the publication of his novel Miss Jane Pittman, Ernest J. Gaines returned African American fiction to its roots, and he did so with a didactic purpose remarkably like that of William Wells Brown. For all that he had been a slave there, Brown seems to have loved the South more than he loved the North. He called his last work My Southern Home, and he was never at home in the North. To his dismay and disgust when he reached Ohio and freedom in 1834, he found a physical hatred of blacks that he had not experienced in the slave states. He had run from Slavery to Segregation. And that is the story that Miss Jane Pittman has to tell of African Americans running from 1861 to 1961.

Facilitating Low-Income Children's Narrative Performances Through Interviewer Elaborative Style and Reporting Condition

This research examined 2 strategies for encouraging children's narratives. Twenty-five European American and 31 African American children from low-income backgrounds (M age = 4.76) participated. Children were assigned randomly to either high or low elaborative narrative style conditions and to either a draw-and-tell or tell-only reporting condition. Afterward, each child participated in an in-class activity and then narrated about it with either high or low elaborative interviewers in either draw-and-tell or tell-only reporting conditions. Children's narratives were coded for narrative indicators. Children's narratives did not differ by ethnicity. However, analysis of variance tests documented that children provided more particular narrative indicators when narrating with high elaborative interviewers. The tell-only and draw-and-tell reporting conditions differentially benefitted African American and European American children's narratives. Implications for future work are discussed.

Cajun, Creole, and African American Literacy Narratives

This article examines students' narrative responses to reading professional literacy histories. Demonstrating the importance of narrative as a way of learning, it shows how elementary education majors of diverse backgrounds explore their relation with language in a traditional grammar class. Cajun, Creole, and African American students recover their literacy histories and articulate the relation between the loss of language and the loss of culture and heritage. Drawing on the parallels between their discourse histories and the discourse histories of other cultures, these narratives also suggest that the students are now able to establish their linguistic identity and develop a greater sensitivity to the situations of their own students in the multicultural classrooms of southwest Louisiana.

Representing the West in the Arabic Language: The Slave Narrative of Omar Ibn Said

In From Behind the Veil, a seminal text in African-American literary studies, Robert Stepto posits that for African-America, the ‘pregeneric myth’—a shared myth both predating the literary form and influencing the texts composing a culture’s literary canon—is ‘the quest for freedom and literacy’. His study takes as its starting point four slave narratives that represent the earliest period in the history of the African-American narrative as literary form. Introducing key phases in the slave narrative, Stepto charts the increasing independence of the slave’s voice. He notes the plethora of voices, represented by appended documents, which serve to authenticate the narrative, and he subsequently analyses slaves’ strategies of gaining authorial control over their texts. The work, a critical study of the slave narrative, could not have anticipated the 1995 rediscovery of a particularly significant text in the history of the African-American narrative, which would trouble this declared pregeneric myth: the 1831 slave narrative of Omar ibn Said. Commissioned to write in the Arabic language, Omar wrote the earliest piece of extant Arabic writing on American soil, and the only existing autobiography of an American slave in Arabic, thereby complicating Stepto’s statement regarding African-American literature. Omar’s narrative, written in the language of a slave already literate before coming to America, thus sets aside the driving myth of the quest for literacy. Furthermore, his having written in Arabic seems to dispense with the standard requirement for authenticating documents—endorsed

On the nature of personal narratives of high quality

This investigation explores the discourse devices associated with high-quality personal narratives. The study examined normative characteristics of 11 high-quality personal narratives of a frightening experience identified (from a larger set of 72 narratives) for their effectiveness in engaging the audience. Lay ratings and an ethnographic interview with seven of the excellent storytellers further characterized the stories and validated their selection. Narratives of both African Americans and Caucasians were represented, and were similar in nature. The excellent narratives were longer, conveyed more fearful topics, and were more dramatic than average narratives. Drama was achieved through direct speech, prosodic shifts, voice changes, inclusion of multiple characters, repetition, and syntactic and semantic parallelism. Illustrative narrative excerpts are provided. This study illustrates the potential in pairing holistic and analytical approaches to narrative analysis.

Life Narratives of African Americans in Iowa

Life Narratives of African Americans in Iowa

Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and the African American Narrative: Major's "Reflex", Morrison's "Jazz", and Reed's "Mumbo Jumbo"

Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and the African American Narrative: Major's "Reflex", Morrison's "Jazz", and Reed's "Mumbo Jumbo"

Using African American Narratives to Analyze Social Policy

This paper explores how African American literature can enrich the analysis of social policy in social work graduate courses. The historic debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois about black progress, and its reflection in subsequent works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Shelby Steele, and Cornel West, illustrate that the debate remains present in contemporary affirmative action and welfare reform policies. Using ethnic narratives can expand adult students' ability to analyze the purposes, consequences, and values underlying social policies and help social workers formulate, document and buttress new policy positions. Such abilities are especially critical for social policies in which race remains a critical influence.

"A Long Missing Part of Itself": Bringing Lucille Clifton's Generations into American Literature

Poet Lucille Clifton recently said that her early writings form part of a movement that to American literature a long missing part of itself (Rowell 67). Her 1976 memoir, Generations, traces her genealogy back to African matriarch first brought to and shows obstacles Clifton personally must overcome to bring this story into American literature. Clifton says of importance of incorporating her family's story into a larger tradition, All of our stories become Story. If mine is left out, something's missing. So I hope mine can be read as part of Story, of what it means to be human in this place at this time. I am a black human being, and that is part of Story (Rowell 58). obstacles Clifton overcomes in process of gaining her voice as a poet and contributing to The Story stem largely from what Regina Blackburn calls the double jeopardy of being both black and female in America (148). Those obstacles are what Eva Lennox Birch calls hitherto male preserve (127) of autobiography and mourning stories which Karla F. C. Holloway says form a (32) in African American culture. My purpose is to show how Clifton works within and against those obstacles to confront ways in which they would silence her and to find in them potential to bring her story into American literature. In confronting challenge of male autobiography, Clifton prefaces each chapter of her memoir with a quote from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, which embodies self-expressive impulse of traditional male autobiography with its focus on achievements and autonomous self-identity of author. As for Clifton's choice to use quotes from Whitman to indicate tradition of male autobiography, she could very well be responding to Albert Stone, who argues that the whole oratorio [of American autobiography] is ... composed of separate Songs of Myself (26). Whitman becomes a site for responding not only to tradition of male autobiography, but to whole of American literature, since, as Ed Folsom argues, At some point in lives of most twentieth-century American poets ... some encounter with Whitman takes place.... at some point, most American poets after Whitman have directly taken on--to argue with him, agree with him, revise, question, reject or accept him (21-22). In Generations, Clifton's response to Whitman's Song of Myself speaks with a double voice as she embraces Whitmanian spirit of inclusion and celebration, but replaces autonomous individuality informing so much of Song of Myself with a collective, generational sense of self based around an expanding African American family. narrative of Generations centers around death and burial of Clifton's father, which situates Clifton's story within what Holloway calls an African American cultural narrative of mourning stories, a narrative which she says differs from mainstream American writing in that the familiar literary theme of a character's for is revised in African American narrative to a body's search for a safe harbor (37). While mainstream American writing, especially autobiography, is concerned with of living self, African American literature often deals with specters of dead, beginning with slavery and extending to lynching and police brutality. These stories about dead pose an obstacle to traditional quest for identity at center of any memoir because of their overpowering presence in collective African American experience. But Clifton finds potential in this obstacle by harnessing power which comes from collective memory of deceased generations. As Holloway says, the bodies we would leave behind will challenge our own being unless we incorporate their stories into ours and, in so doing, claim their right to a memorial (38). Memory of dead, instead of silencing autobiographical impulse, becomes a way to memorialize generations. …

Dialectal variants of verbs in narratives of African Americans with aphasia: some methodological considerations

A focus on African American Vernacular English (AAVE) verb use in narratives is advantageous for examining the effects of dialect in aphasia. The inherent variability in speakers' use of dialect features is discussed. Verb morpho-syntax is examined in speakers of AAVE who have aphasia, and compared to that of African American normal controls. Dialect features were preserved despite the presence of aphasia, although there was variability in performance that could not readily be attributed to code-switching. While individuals with less mild aphasia used fewer AAVE verb forms in this sample, they also produced shorter narratives. The challenges of research in this area are discussed, and strategies are suggested for future efforts.

Repetition in Narratives of African Americans: The Effects of Aphasia

This study considers the use of repetition in the narratives of African Americans and the way in which this ethnic use of repetition might be altered or constrained by aphasia. Two groups of African Americans-1 neurologically normal and 1 with aphasia-produced narratives of a frightening experience. Instances of repetition were analyzed qualitatively for function and form of expression. We were interested specifically in the balance of various structural and functional types of repetition among individuals with aphasia and neurologically normal individuals as well as how this might reflect ubiquity or specificity of a given range of repetition types. Results suggested maintenance of ethnic repetitions in individuals with aphasia. The influences of culture, narrative topic, and aphasia severity on narrative repetition and its functions are discussed.

Progress, Labor, Revolution: The Modern Times of Antebellum African American Life Writing

In his influential study of black modernity, The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy writes that [i]n many respects white and black inhabitants of the antebellum plantation live[d] non-synchronously (57). Taking Gilroy a step further, I want to argue that non-synchronicity characterizes antebellum literature and life, traversing what have come to be viewed as discrete identity-based communities. The antebellum African American life narratives I will consider in this essay desire temporal homogeneity and yet still articulate time's actual variety, teaching us that time not only differed across the divide separating whites from African Americans but also differed elsewhere. In that the profound non-synchronicity that has been shown to define modernity under capitalism characterizes antebellum American literature as well, that literature is a literature of modernity.1 Even more importantly, this non-synchronicity of time in the African American life narrative, the definitive American and African American narrative genre, belies the canonical notion that in the antebellum US, identity evolved away from the local and particular toward the more general and abstract. Insofar as the literature of this period proposes that time fosters the emergence of national identity, racial identity, gender identity, and the like, literary history has mistaken this powerful rhetoric for a description of time's actual character and effect. Put another way, this literature argues that in its raw state time is singular and favors progress, which both allows for and necessitates the emergence of an abstract identity that binds individuals together as a group and at the expense of other local and individual features. For its part, literary history assumes that antebellum time was and did just these things and that as a result the antebellum US saw a flowering of such an identity.2 Yet, once we look past this literature's manifest commitment to imagining a causal relationship between time and generic identity, we see antebellum writing, including the life narrative,

The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (review)

??? COHPAnATIST women in Maghreb culture, the representations ofgender roles in women's narrative , or the "triple bind" that women are subjected to in developing countries (race, class, and gender). In this study she aims at "correcting the image of women in masculine writings" (60). The faults ofNagy-Zekmi's book have less to do with her work in particular and more with the limits ofpostcolonial criticism in general. In other words, her study, as I see it, is paradigmatic ofpostcolonial scholarship. For instance, NagyZekmi assumes a priori that "decolonization becomes contestatory ofdomination in all its forms, whether these are ideological or discursive" (5). Following in the wake ofSpivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" she often returns to the idea that all subjects in postcolonial contexts have been silenced by neo-colonialism or imperialism . Here, as when she deals with women—"feminine" writing or writing by women—Nagy-Zekmi treats postcolonial subjects or women en masse, while vacillating about issues ofsocial class and race. As a result, the categories she uses are stretched too far and the potentially interesting sociohistorical and literary material is thin (5-15). The author seems to recognize this on occasion, only then to deny that social class is important among "postcolonial" subjects. Nagy-Zekmi does address the issue of class difference in her discussion, where she cites the cases ofVictoria Ocampo, the upper-class Argentine writer, and Domitila Barrios de Chungara, the Bolivian worker/writer; but she then undermines the discussion by claiming that all classes are affected if their members are women from postcolonial nations (35-36). Consequently she favors abstractions over specific social and historical conditions. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu tells us that intellectuals are very skilled at veiling their own habitus, and Nagy-Zekmi is no exception. Despite her attempt to cast her study in sociohistorical terms, the author, like poststructuralists and postcolonialists , regards writing as a "subversive" act (33). Nagy-Zekmi must be referring to "postcolonial" intellectuals living in exile in the United States or Europe, since they are the subjects ofher analysis. For to claim that writers at work in the postcolonial world are subversive or resisting under the shadow ofdeath, as postcolonialists do, is misguided. As Ahmad affirms in his essay on postcolonialism, in "Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, the Arab world, millions ofpeople write and generally conduct the business of life in English or French," so writing from this regional context does not automatically constitute a subversive act (2). Needless to say, neither do postcolonial university professors in the United States or Europe face the angel ofdeath nor the scythe ofcensureship, so why state otherwise? I hasten to return to the point that Nagy-Zekmi is not responsible for these abstractions in her interesting book on North African and Latin American narrative; the "theoretical" model ofpostcolonialism, created in the US academy, is. Would we not be better offusing concrete biographical, historical, and political materials to bolster our analyses ofliterature in either region? Greg DawesNorth Carolina State University CARYL EMERSON. The FirstHundred Years ofMikhailBakhtin. Princeton : Princeton UP, 1998. xvi + 287 pp. Bakhtin has become a highly contested commodity on the American critical scene. Once his influence went beyond the semiotic boundaries established by his French Vol 23 (1999): 193 BOOK NOTES champions, a diverse group of Anglo-American scholars, readers, and thinkers launched a seemingly endless exposition and application of his "key concepts." This popularity fits into the larger structural pattern that, to extend a phrase of Michael Holquist's, I will call "Russia is always being discovered." Every discovery ofRussia, it seems, forges the ignorance over which the next discovery will triumph . This principle applies to Russians just as much as to their well-meaning Western colleagues: how many times have Russians claimed to have anticipated some achievement ofthe West, or even to have discovered it first? How many times have Western intellectuals looked to Russian culture for the "real" alternative to the West? By introducing an American audience to various stages ofRussian reception ofBakhtin's oeuvre, The First Hundred Years ofMichael Bakhtin attempts to break this vicious circle ofdiscovery and deception, whose effects in this case seem especially disorienting. Emerson's introduction offers a broad, but helpful and informative overview ofthe...

The Problem of Embodiment in Early African American Narrative

The Problem of Embodiment in Early African American Narrative

Clotel and the Historicity of the Anecdote

In or President's Daughter; A of Slave Life (1853), William Wells Brown makes use of several authenticating documents that are supposed-in context of novel-to be real. That is, these newspaper articles and advertisements, letters, legal tracts, religious publications, and prefatory narrative of author's own life and escape from slavery are assumed to exist outside fiction of novel. Although these documents are sometimes as much fictions as rest of novel, they do tend to have counterparts, and existence of such counterparts seems to have effect of authenticating story about Thomas Jefferson's slave mistress and slave daughters. As early as 1979, Robert Stepto delineated characteristics of authenticating machinery in narrative, arguing that in his personal narrative Brown authenticates himself and autobiographical narrative tends to authenticate novel: Brown's personal narrative functions...as a successful rhetorical device, authenticating his access to incidents, characters, scenes, and tales which collectively make up Clotel (30). In The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative (1990), William Andrews re-asserts notion that Brown uses authentic and argues that it calls into question or problematizes notion of stability of line between and fictive discourse. Brown subverts the relation of privilege that makes natural ground for fictive discourse (27). According to Andrews, the voice of black narrative broke most profoundly with discursive conventions and white expectations in an attempt to find new ways of authorizing itself (24). Other readers also elaborate notion of authenticating in novel.1 Richard O. Lewis, for example, argues that authentic documentation...supplies enough credibility in works to sustain his ironic situations and metaphorical characters (153).2 Despite their careful analyses of force of historical authentication, however, none of these essays contrasts own era

The role of religion and ethnicity in the help seeking of family caregivers of elders with Alzheimer's disease and related disorders.

Stages of help seeking during illness have been identified as follows: disease experience, symptom attribution, decision to seek care, and contact with care providers. These stages have not been evaluated amongst family caregivers of elders affected with Alzheimer's disease and related disorders (ADRD). Since minority families typically care for ADRD elders at home, it seems important to understand the help seeking of minority family caregivers in particular, and the role of religious/ethnic factors. Thematic analyses were conducted on in-depth interviews from 10 caregivers from 4 groups (total n = 40): African-American, Chinese-American, Puerto Rican, and Irish-American. Aside from the disease experience stage, where religious/ethnic themes were negligible, between-group differences existed in these themes at other stages. For example, themes of extended family support emerged around decision making, with much between-group variation. At the contact with providers stage themes of contacting religious or ethnic service organizations were present, again with between-group variation. Chinese-American and Puerto Rican narratives contained themes of language barriers to care, and a lack of culturally-competent services. Both Irish-American and African-American narratives showed themes of alienation from religious groups on the one hand, and using prayer to cope on the other. Narratives from all groups contained themes of religious and/or ethnic imperatives for providing care. Overall, findings reveal that religious/ethnic factors may both aid and impede the help seeking of caregivers.

Incidents in the Life of a White Woman: Economies of Race and Gender in the Antebellum Nation

This essay reconstructs the title of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in order to intervene in accounts of American literary history that view nineteenth-century AfricanAmerican writing as resisting, and thus deriving from, alreadyin-place models of discourse. By uncovering within Southern-yet still national-discourses of domesticity and sentimentality a countertradition that predates US literary history, I want to offer a critical genealogy of the antebellum plantation novel that revises the dependent relationship of African-American narrative to dominant literary models by suggesting that socially and commercially validated literature arises as a reaction to black autobiography and fiction. Yet this substitution of white woman for girl seems to dismiss attention given to minority writers over the past two decades and return to a canon of American literature that historically displaced and discounted black narrative expression. My argument seeks to recall and question this creation of a prototypical literary canon by examining how antebellum Southern writers subdued black narrative as part of the formation of a self-consciously national literature. Just as slave labor sustained the class privilege of landowners, African-American literary discourse was necessary to clean the national house of fiction. With repeated scenes of family separation, sexual harassment, and outraged motherhood, a text like Incidents certainly troubles the quaint domesticity of that house; however, as a muted presence whose stolen articulations are subsumed by feminist complaints of Southern belles, the warped slave narrative that is held hostage by the plantation novel ransoms an embattled and conflicted American national identity by appealing to womanhood. AfricanAmerican texts launch severe critiques that give evidence of a house divided, but once repressed and transfigured by an ideol-

RoadFrames: The American Highway Narrative

'Unusually lively, astute, and persuasive' - Publishers Weekly. 'There are two impulses after reading Kris Lackey's RoadFrames: The American Highway Narrative. One is to rush into a library. The other is to jump into a car...The author manages to convey the deep appeal of endless asphalt while still debunking many of the myths of Americans' romance with the road' - Chronicle of Higher Education. 'Lackey applies with relish a number of convincing ideas to a variety of novels and travel books. Beginning with America's first intercoastal highway narrative, From Ocean to Ocean in a Winton, and concluding with the postmodern rush of Stephen Wright's Going Native, he offers a sense of wide vistas...This is a book designed to connect its readers to other books, while providing conclusive evidence that America's literature may indeed be as expansive as its map' - Times Literary Supplement.'Lackey seeks to debunk the romantic idea of rediscovering America through the highway and the automobile. Of particular poignancy is a chapter on how African American narratives have shown that the highway often holds no romance for them' - Library Journal. RoadFrames surveys America's fascination with highway travel. In a lively discussion of books written as early as 1903 and as recently as 1994, Kris Lackey reveals the crucial roles the highway and automobile travel have played through generations of American writing. Kris Lackey is a professor of English at the University of New Orleans.