African American Novels Research Articles

Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998

In this study of novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Leon Forrest, Ernest Gaines, Randall Kenan, John Edgar Wideman, Gayl Jones, and Octavia E. Butler, Tuire Valkeakari examines the creative re-visioning and reshaping of Judeo-Christian idiom and imagery by African American novelists - specifically their use of sacred language for secular meaning. She shows that in writing about the complexities of American selfhood and nationhood, these authors neither abandon religious idiom nor evangelize. Rather, they delight in reshaping their chosen raw material for their own purposes, which often have little to do with the material's original context or function. Their use of biblically derived idiom is marked by innovative secular subversion and by stories of spiritual quest that defy conventional dogmatic definitions. These authors evoke religious rhetoric to study and revisit Martin Luther King Jr.'s concept of the beloved community and to express their yearning for an inclusive love ethic that could transcend any boundaries drawn in the name of race, class, gender, or religion. Beginning with the functions of Christian idiom in African American letters from the 1770s to the 1920s Harlem Renaissance and its aftermath, followed by an analysis of post-1950 novels, Valkeakari shows how, generation after generation, African American writers have evoked Christian rhetoric to advocate civil rights and democracy. Their treatment of this legacy reached a new level of creativity in the latter half of the 20th century, becoming a more pervasive characteristic of the African American novel than ever before.

Female genital mutilation in African and African American women's literature

The article builds on the existing dispute between African and African American women writers on the competence of writing about female genital mutilation (FGM), and tries to determine the existence and nature of the differences between the writings of these two groups. The author uses comparative analysis of two popular African and African American novels, comparing their ways of describing FGM, its causes and consequences, the level ob objectivity and the style of the narrations.This is followed by a discussion on the reasons for such differences, incorporating a larger circle of both African and African American women authors, at the same time analysing the deviance within the two groups. While the differences between African American writers are not that great, as they mostly fail to present the issue from different points of view, which is often the result of their lack of direct knowledge of the topic, African authors' writing is in itself discovered to be ambivalent and not at all invariable. The reasons for such ambivalence are then discussed in greater context, focusing on the effect of the authors' personal contact with circumcision as well as their knowledge and acceptance of Western values. The author concludes by establishing the African ambivalent attitude towards FGM, which includes different aspects of the issue, as the most significant difference between their and African American writers' description of this practice.

Toni Morrison and Classical Tradition

This article summarizes a significant new approach to the work of the African-American novelist Toni Morrison: analysis of her widespread engagement with classical tradition. After discussing the prior critical perspectives on this subject, and highlighting the importance of the classics in Morrison's intellectual formation, it demonstrates that the author's ambivalent classicism is central to the rewriting of American history that her oeuvre enacts. I go on to show that her insistence on the interactions between African and Graeco-Roman cultures contributes to her reinvention of classical tradition as a radical force, and I end by illuminating the implications for literary and American Studies that the recognition of her classicism must possess.

The works of William Wells Brown: using his "strong, manly voice"

Widely considered the first African-American novelist, William Wells Brown's (ca. 1814-1884) 1853 novel, Clotel, or the President's Daughter, chronicled the fate of the daughter of Thomas Jefferson and his black housekeeper. Yet, in his own day, Brown was perhaps more important as a rousing orator, scholar, and cultural critic. He escaped from slavery in 1834 and worked on Lake Erie steamboats in Buffalo, New York, helping slaves escape into Canada and lecturing for the New York Anti-Slavery Society. After moving to Boston in 1847, he began writing his autobiography, The Narrative ofWilliam W. Brown. By 1850, the book had appeared in four American and five British editions and rivaled the popularity of Frederick Douglass's Narrative written two years earlier. Throughout the late 1840s and 50s, Brown continued to lecture to further the antislavery cause and wrote prolifically. In addition to Clotel, he published the first drama written by an African American and the first military history of African Americans. In his writings and speeches, William Wells Brown deliberately resists the tone of heroic resistance and eloquent outrage set by Frederick Douglass. Brown's rhetorical strategy involved telling stories of individuals and individual encounters in which the art of simple understatement and guileless self-presentation prevailed over cant, bullying, and hypocrisy. Brown's often humorous and deceptively artless tone appealed to politically active women who were claiming the moral high ground not only on questions of abolition but also on temperance and women's rights. Unlike Douglass, whose literary output can be described as a long conversation with the founding fathers and literary lions about freedom, liberty, and what it means to be an American, Brown emphasized-- with humor and a cosmopolitan gentility-- the concerns of middle class family life: education, parenting, and the damage that slavery was doing to American society. This volume, with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., will introduce readers to Brown's lesser-known, but no less powerful works, placed in the context of the era's debates on slavery, gender, morality, and the discursive limits put on anti-slavery advocacy. The collection presents Brown's anti-slavery works and the contemporary response to them in light of Brown's own attention to the role of women writers and political advocates in this period. Garrett's and Robbins's introduction to these texts emphasizes Brown's awareness and even use of women's voices in political discourse as a way of distinguishing himself from other black male voices of the time. The selection of texts also demonstrates Brown's willingness to use and recycle any texts at hand-- including his own-- in order to appeal to his immediate audience or readership. While making Brown's more obviously political work available to a wider audience, the book reclaims Brown as an important black influence in the American nineteenth century.

Haunting and Haunted Queerness: Randall Kenan's Re-inscription of Difference in A Visitation of Spirits

Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits isn't your typical novel about African American family and community. A Visitation of Spirits is, in fact, a text that explicitly revises the traditional American gothic novel; its demonic hero seeks salvation from the exorcising church, the heroines are all oppressive, and the only safe haven in the novel is a ruinous, haunted house. As a queer African-American novelist, Kenan performs revisions of the Gothic that prove particularly noteworthy and complex. Kenan uses the genre to reveal the archetypal depictions of racial, sexual, and gendered Others as constructions useful in the production of (white) patriarchal dominance. A Visitation of Spirits repeatedly illustrates how formulations of black identity based upon sexual othering are problematic and how contemporary black refusal to challenge these formulations perpetuates oppression within their community. The text suggests that contemporary black identity is still dependent upon defining and containing bodies marginalized according to sexuality, gender, and colorism. Kenan implies that black selfhood dependent upon policing boundaries between normative and monstrous identity proves oppressive to the Other the self is defined against. Such a definition of black self likewise perpetuates erroneous mythologies of normative identity that inevitably prove destructive for the entire community. A Visitation of Spirits narrates the events leading to and surrounding the suicide of Horace Cross, the text's homosexual protagonist. The novel alternates among Jimmy's narrative documenting the impact his young cousin's death has had upon him, the nightmarish adventures Horace undergoes the night of his death, and Horace's flashbacks to his life in Tims Creek. Briefly, Horace Cross is the youngest member of Tims Creek's founding family. Realizing that his homosexuality dooms him among his family and community, Horace attempts to cast a spell to summon a demon who will transform Horace into a bird.1 The demon, however, takes Horace on a nightmarish tour through his past; the night culminates with Horace's suicide in front of Jimmy. Jimmy's confession is interwoven with Horace's story, and the structure suggests that what we are really reading is Jimmy's own remembrance of Horace's death. Kenan never reveals whether Horace's nightmare with the demon is real or imagined-the text suggests its actuality doesn't matter because the nightmare points to the real, lived horror of Horace's existence among Tims Creek. Through the tragedy and terror of Horace's death, Kenan's novel interrogates the horror of being forced to align yourself with a group that demonizes homosexuality and that defines itself by a singular, stable identity. Horace's memories illustrate that any part of self that departs from the group's concept of its identity is banished into tortured silence,

Remembering the past in contemporary African American fiction

This work describes twentieth-century survivor narratives and African American identity. With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historically. These writers earned widespread recognition for their writing in the 1980s, a period of African American commercial success, as well as the economic decline of the black working class and an increase in black-on-black crime. Byerman contends that a shared experience of suffering joins African American individuals in a group identity, and writing about the past serves as an act of resistance against essentialist ideas of black experience shaping the cultural discourse of the present. Byerman demonstrates that these novels disrupt the temptation in American society to engage history only to limit its significance or to crown successful individuals while forgetting the victims.

'If we only had some of what they have' Ralph Ellison in Wales

During his period as a merchant marine in the Second World War, the African American novelist Ralph Ellison was stationed in Swansea, Wales. His short story 'In a Strange Country', collected in Flying Home and Other Stories (1998), is based on these Welsh experiences, and there are two other unpublished Welsh-based stories among the Ellison papers at the Library of Congress: 'A Storm of Blizzard Proportions' and 'The Red Cross at Morriston, South Wales'. This article considers these stories as a basis for exploring the cultural and historical connections and correspondences between African Americans and the Welsh. In drawing inspiration from Ellison's critical writings, the article seeks to substantiate a genuinely comparative, transatlantic approach to literary and cultural texts. This approach leads to an exploration of the ways in which the diversity of the Welsh experience – manifested in language, politics and cultural practice – led Ellison to meditate in new ways on the issues of race, nationhood and identity that he would later famously address in Invisible Man.

Narrative as empowerment: Push and the signifying on prior African-American novels on incest

<titre>R&#233;sum&#233;</titre>Cet article propose de lire le roman naturaliste de Sapphire, Push (1996), dans son double aspect de r&#233;cit &#171;&#160;oralis&#233;&#160;&#187; et de texte jouant de son intertextualit&#233; avec des romans africains-am&#233;ricains c&#233;l&#232;bres ayant &#233;voqu&#233; les m&#234;mes th&#232;mes majeurs de l&#8217;invisibilit&#233;, de l&#8217;illettrisme (ou de l&#8217;apprentissage de la lecture), et de l&#8217;inceste dans la famille noire. Si la voix de Precious permet la repr&#233;sentation du traumatisme tout en cr&#233;ant un rapport empathique chez les lecteurs, son apprentissage p&#233;nible de la lecture est le r&#233;cit d&#8217;une &#233;mancipation qui se rattache &#224; la tradition des slave narratives. Finalement, on verra comment Sapphire rend hommage aux &#339;uvres de Toni Morrison et d&#8217;Alice Walker, tout en s&#8217;en d&#233;marquant, dans ce r&#233;cit r&#233;flexif qui met en sc&#232;ne la lib&#233;ration et la renaissance de Precious dans le processus m&#234;me d&#8217;&#171;&#160;accouchement&#160;&#187; de sa propre histoire.

Multicultural Modernism

American ÏGVÏGW" De Santis continuedfrom previous page Becoming an African American ScholarActivist," in which he distinguishes himself from theorists like Paul Gilroy as an "African Americentric scholar and critic"; the long first chapter that elucidates the critical and theoretical assumptions of the study; and the briefconclusion, which generally repeats information that appears earlier, there are thus only three chapters (about 132 pages) of entirely new material on the contemporary African American novel. Bell covers an impressive array of writers and subgenres in these pages, convincingly arguing through perceptive close readings how writers such as Paule Marshall, Leon Forrest, Gloria Naylor, Samuel Delany, Jr., Octavia Butler, and many others demonstrate authenticity, authority, and agency by working within a tradition highly influenced by the Du Boisian concepts of double consciousness and double vision and by residual oral forms including oratory, myth, legend, tale, and song. Of the seventeen writers granted extended treatment in chapters six through eight of The ContemporaryAfrican American Novel, only two—Trey Ellis and Colson Whitehead— were born after 1960. Missing here are writers such as Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Randall Kenan, Danzy Senna, Tananarive Due, Jake Lamar, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Jeffery Renard Allen, Shay Youngblood, and many other young African American novelists, all of whom surely merit acknowledgment for their contributions to and shaping of the tradition of the African American novel. Bell's failure to cover younger novelists is problematic, as is his dismissive attitude toward writers such as Trey Ellis, who, in his essay "The New Black Aesthetic" (1989), uses the term "cultural mulattoes" to describe many AfricanAmerican artists ofhis generation. Bell writes, "Anthropologically, then, because the beliefs and values of Ellis's cultural mulattoes were fundamentally shaped by immersion during theirformative years in predominantly white middle-class communities , their acculturation and identity formation could be reasonably viewed as less authentically black than those of contemporaries who were raised in predominantly black communities" (my emphasis). Such a comment tends more to curtail conversation than it does to open up inquiries about the dynamic tradition of the African American novel and how contemporary novelists are both participating in and revising that tradition. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches is a significant achievement inAfricanAmerican literary studies, but it does have its limitations. At the present time it is the definitive work in the field and an important reference tool, though additional studies are needed that offer a broader, more inclusive approach to the contemporary African American novel. Christopher C. De Santis is associate professor of AfricanAmerican andAmerican Literature atIllinois State University. Multicultural Modernism Charles Russell Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse Edited by Josef Helfenstein and Roxanne Stanulis Krannert Art Museum and The Menil Collection Distributed by University of Washington Press http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/ 208 pages; paper, $40.00 Bill Traylor and William Edmondson are "major figures in American and African American art history." What do we mean by this? What constitutes "major" and are American and African American art history quite the same? What criteria do we apply? Who constitutes this "we" that are doing the judging ? Normally, the determination of who is a "major " artist or what is meant by important art is the result of the collective opinion developed over time by members of the "mainstream" art world: the white critics, museum personnel, and academics who dominate the discourse about what is considered "fine," hence significant, art in our culture. This discourse is largely determined by a single narrative focus—the European-based art historical tradition of elite art traced from Greek classical art through the European Renaissance and to the emergence of modernism and now postmodernism. All of us who have attended college or watch PBS are well familiar with the tale. The story, however, has long excluded many types of artistic activity not grounded in this specific historical tradition and which, consequently, have been shunted off to separate art "histories," such as "African American," or to various subcategories of "lower" arts: e.g. craft, design, commercial, popular, folk, and "outsider" art. When artists relegated to any ofthese sub-groups have been deemed worthy ofnotice by the fine art world, it has largely been...

African-American Mysteries

African Americans who have spent formative years in the United States have a viewpoint grounded in a specific culture. This paper defines “African American mystery” as crime or detective fiction written by African Americans. African American mystery novels have grown in number and diversity over time. As the audience has grown, publishers and reviewers have given more attention to the genre. While the stories are not necessarily about race, they are richly imbued with African American culture and themes. An overview of review sources, an annotated bibliography of four essential background sources, a classified list of African American mystery novels, and a list of award-winning African American mysteries are included.

Postmodernism, Urbanism, and African American Literary Studies

I t was only a matter of time before we would have to feel guilty for enjoying novels of Toni Morrison. In her wonderfully insightful book Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism, Madhu Dubey (rightly) spares no author and no critic in her always astute, always rigorous, and almost always fair analysis of the postmodern moment (24) in African American literature and literary studies. Dubey's argument pivots on book-both as an object of exchange in a postmodern commodity culture and as a prized vehicle of modernist aesthetics and politics-as it is represented in a number of African American novels from late 1980s to present, by Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Sapphire, Gloria Naylor, John Edgar Wideman, Colson Whitehead, and Samuel Delany. To begin with, it is remarkable that so many contemporary African American novelists have explicitly engaged tropes of book and of textuality. But Dubey goes far beyond such simple, if compelling, observations to deliver powerful original analysis of an extraordinarily rich body of recent literature. Signs and Cities is, quite simply, essential reading for African Americanist and postmodernist scholars. Dubey categorizes her chosen novels and novelists according to four governing metaphors for book and for reading and

Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader

Martin R. Delany (1812-85) has been called the Father of Black Nationalism, but his extraordinary career also encompassed the roles of abolitionist, physician, editor, explorer, politician, army officer, novelist, and political theorist. Despite his enormous influence in the nineteenth century, and his continuing influence on black nationalist thought in the twentieth century, Delany has remained a relatively obscure figure in U.S. culture, generally portrayed as a radical separatist at odds with the more integrationist Frederick Douglass. This pioneering documentary collection offers readers a chance to discover, or rediscover, Delany in all his complexity. Through nearly 100 documents - approximately two-thirds of which have not been reprinted since their initial nineteenth-century publication - it traces the full sweep of his fascinating career. Included are selections from Delany's early journalism, his emigrationist writings of the 1850s, his 1859-62 novel, Blake (one of the first African American novels published in the United States), and his later writings on Reconstruction. Incisive and shrewd, angry and witty, Delany's words influenced key nineteenth-century debates on race and nation, addressing issues that remain pressing in our own time.

Me and Oscar Micheaux: An Interview with LeRoy Collins

Abstract The mystique of pioneering African-American novelist and film director Oscar Micheaux has never been greater, 50 years after his death. His last film, The Betrayal, was made in 1947, and all prints are lost, but Patrick McGilligan tracked down the star of the epic-length film, who played a character based on Micheaux himself, for a revealing interview about the Jackie Robinson of American film.

Liberation memories: the rhetoric and poetics of John Oliver Killens

No serious history of the development of the African American novel from the 1950s onward can be written without reference to John Oliver Killens. A two-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize and founding chairman of the legendary Harlem Writers Guild, Killens was regarded by many as a spiritual father who inspired a generation of African American novelists with his politically charged works. And yet today he rarely receives proper critical attention. Seeking to strengthen our understanding of this important literary figure, Keith Gilyard departs from standard critical frameworks to reveal Killens's novels as artful renderings of rich African American rhetorical forms and verbal traditions. Gilyard finds that many critics, adhering to ideals of for art's sake or narrative conciseness, are ill-equipped to appreciate the many ways in which Killens's fiction succeeds. Rejecting the pure art position, Killens sought to articulate Black heroism particularly within a family or community context, offering a set of values he deemed liberatory. He focused on rendering noble and polemical characters, and his work represents a distinguished fusion of sociopolitical persuasion (rhetoric) and literary artifact (poetics). To help illuminate such novels as Youngblood (1954), And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962), and The Cotillion (1971), Gilyard examines Killens's work as an essayist and cultural organizer, highlighting his activism. His life and literary production can be partly characterized, Gilyard suggests, by the African American jeremiad - a major rhetorical form in the Black intellectual tradition expressing faith that America's destiny is to become an authentic, pluralistic democracy.

Race and a rhetoric of motives: Kenneth Burke ‘s dialogue with Ralph Ellison

A Rhetoric of Motives is Kenneth Burke's only published work to consistently focus upon the subject of race. Although encouraged by the book's topic, this treatment was significantly shaped by Burke's friendship with African American novelist and critic, Ralph Ellison. Consequently, this essay offers one history of Burke's Rhetoric, drawing on both published work and unpublished correspondence between and concerning these two men. Based upon these materials, I isolate three texts as the central moments of the Burke/Ellison dialogue on race: Ellison's essay, “Richard Wright's Blues,”; Ellison's letter to Burke of November 23, 1945, and, finally. Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives.

Chinatown Black Tigers: Black Masculinity and Chinese Heroism in Frank Chin's Gunga Din Highway

Images of ominous villains and asexual heroes in literature and mainstream American culture tend to relegate Asian American men to limited expressions of masculinity. These emasculating images deny Asian American men elements of traditional masculinity, including agency and strength. Many recognize the efforts of Frank Chin, a Chinese American novelist, to confront, expose, and revise such images by relying on a tradition of Chinese heroism. In Gunga Din Highway (1994), however, Chin creates an Asian American masculinity based on elements of both the Chinese heroic tradition and a distinct brand of African American masculinity manifested in the work of Ishmael Reed, an African American novelist and essayist known for his outspoken style. Rather than transforming traditional masculinity to include Asian American manhood, Chin's images of men represent an appropriation of elements from two ethnic sources that Chin uses to underscore those of Asian Americans. While deconstructing the reductive images advocated by the dominant culture, Chin critiques the very black masculinity he adopts. Ultimately he fails to envision modes of masculinity not based on dominance, yet Chin's approach also can be read as the ultimate expression of Asian American individualism.

Ann Petry's In Darkness and Confusion and the Harlem Riot of 1943

The novella In Darkness and Confusion by Ann Petry (1908-1997) is a fictional portrayal of the causes and nature of the Harlem Riot of 1943. Working as a journalist in New York City during the Second World War, this African-American novelist and short-story writer captured the frustrations and grievances that actual residents of that city felt toward the police, city officials, and the segregated military. This article compares Petry's insights as a journalist and fiction writer with those of historians and sociologists who have studied the 1943 Harlem Riot and the other more destructive, more deadly riots from the 1960s on.

“To Demand Your Sympathy and Aid”: Our Nig and the Problem of No Audience

Race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known.... Thus it is in the United States the prejudice rejecting the Negroes seems to increase in proportion to their emancipation, and inequality cuts deep into mores as it is effaced from the laws. -Alexis de Tocqueville (1835) The effort to speak of the audience of a writer who, in her own time, gained almost no audience at all, is obviously problematic. But when the text explicitly claims for itself its desire to sell in the marketplace, it seems we are invited to interrogate both its potential contemporary audience and the reader constructed within the text, as well as the relationship between the two. This is the case with Our Nig, and Harriet Wilson faced the daunting challenge of addressing an audience she had good reason to doubt. Wilson took up the challenge and crafted a novel intent upon selling it, and to do so, she constructed a relationship with the reader within her text that sought to win the reader's sympathies though she crossed the boundaries of acceptable discourses on race found in any commercial antebellum literary market. However, examining Our Nig within a larger context of racial discourses beyond the commercially viable suggests a new means for understanding the complicated relationships between this text and its contemporary readers. Critics commonly treat Our Nig as something of an anomaly because of its long obscurity, questioning why it was that such a text never entered into the public anti-slavery dialogue though it was printed in Boston in 1859. I want to suggest that Our Nig is indeed an anomaly of sorts, but not in this regard. A look at the antebellum black press and other African-American novelists of her time demonstrates that Wilson was not at all alone in her efforts to redirect public attention from the narrow confines of pro and anti-slavery writings to a broader perspective of issues facing black Americans which were not to be solved by emancipation. These writings, and as a result, this larger context of race issues, have not been adequately explored and so Our Nig appears (wrongly) a singular, and (correctly) threatening, challenge to the status of prominent antebellum discourses on race. The anomaly that Our Nig does represent, however, is evident in the way Wilson chose to construct her challenge to prevailing and acceptable racial discourses. Mary Louise Pratt's definition of autoethnography as instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer's own terms, proves useful in understanding Wilson's project in Our Nig (7). Our Nig makes use of the dominant culture's literary strategies in order to subvert several prevailing ideologies, specifically by denying agency to her central protagonist, Frado, and by denying the efficacy of Sentimental Abolitionism (Douglass' Monthly 339). In this way, sentimental novel and slave narrative conventions are engaged and turned against their own predominant ethos. We see in Our Nig a partial collaboration with and of the idioms of the conqueror that subtly critique mainstream belief systems, particularly regarding racial identity, individual agency, and American freedom (Pratt 7). The often noted irony of Wilson's title and self-naming, our nig, is one obvious example of such an appropriation that redefines the conqueror's term. Because there was a multitude of literary markets available at mid-century, as Richard Brodhead has written of in Cultures of Letters, any discussion of the forces and mediations between writer and reader needs to be specifically contextualized. Thus, we can examine the market in terms of writings on slavery and abolitionism, for which there was a large audience; at the same time, there was also a strong market for pro-slavery and racist writing. …

African Settings in Contemporary American Novels

Preface Africa: What Place Is This? Antecedents: African Settings in British and American Fiction Before World War II Filling in the Blank Space: Contemporary American Novels Set in Invented African Nations Black on Black: African-American Novels with African Settings Genre Africa Africa: Postmodern, Postcolonial, and Other Wise Conclusions: African--A Continent of Words Bibliography Index

Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook

Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook