African American Novels Research Articles

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.

Rethinking Freedom: Slavery, Time, and Affect in the Global Novel

Rethinking Freedom:Slavery, Time, and Affect in the Global Novel Rita Barnard (bio) RUNAWAY GENRES: THE GLOBAL AFTERLIVES OF SLAVERY BY YOGITA GOYAL NYU Press, 2019 RUNAWAY GENRES: THE GLOBAL AFTERLIVES OF SLAVERY BY YOGITA GOYAL NYU Press, 2019 Even before the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd's murder in 2020, Yogita Goyal's erudite and nuanced study of "the global afterlives of slavery" would have been acclaimed as an important academic book. But in the months (and now years) that have followed, the work has come to seem even more important and urgent. It opens, after all, with a consideration of memorialization and monuments, which have become such an important point of contestation in the U.S. Specifically, Goyal cites Toni Morrison, whose enormously influential Beloved was shaped by the novelist's deep regret that there was "no suitable memorial" to the slave experience: not a "plaque or wreath or three-hundred-foot tower," not even a "small bench by the road" (1). Goyal uses this poignant starting point to comment on the massive body of literature about the slave experience that has arisen since the publication of Beloved in 1987. Whether in forms that replicate those of the nineteenth-century slave narrative or those that break with its tropes and structures of feeling, the remembrance of slavery has radically shaped contemporary writing in the U.S. and beyond over the past three decades. And yet, Morrison's lament over inadequate public memorialization still seemed completely apt and timely in the last years of the Trump presidency, [End Page 179] when monuments to the Confederacy became a divisive and burning issue—vividly affirming Saidiya Hartman's observation that "if the ghost of slavery still haunts our present, it because we are still looking for an exit from the prison" (7). For evidence of this entrapment, we need look no further than Caroline Randall Williams's reflections on her "rape-colored skin" in a devastating New York Times essay from July 2020 entitled "My Body is a Confederate Monument," or, by way of heartless contrast, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton's contemporaneous remark that slavery was "a necessary evil." The events of that year certainly reawakened and intensified an awareness of what Faulkner once described as America's "debt that cannot be amortized"; and the struggle between remembering and misremembering the past is clearly ongoing. Goyal's understanding of the stakes of her project can be grasped along these lines. Absent a "politics of recognition and restitution," she declares, we will remain haunted by slavery's often uncanny afterlives (233). But as the title, Runaway Genres, suggests, this study is as much literary and formal as political. One of its animating observations is the contrast between the wildly inventive and irreverent ways in which American slavery has recently been treated by African American novelists (we might think of Paul Beatty's The Sellout, Mat Johnson's Pym, and Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad) and the formally conventional ways in which others have narrated the new forms of "slavery," such as human trafficking, debt peonage, mass incarceration, and involuntary migration. Indeed, as Goyal's first chapter demonstrates, these new global works not only replicate the formulaic narrative structures and affective modalities of the nineteenth-century slave narrative, but they do so in ways that replicate two problems associated with the form. Packaged by abolitionists and marketed to a Northern audience, the earlier slave narratives often operated as "a black message in a white envelope," thereby diminishing the narrator's authorial agency (60). They offered, moreover, certain self-congratulatory satisfactions through what Goyal grasps as a kind of sentimental substitution, whereby the narrative serves to prove not only the humanity of the suffering subject but also that of the empathetic reader as well. Though the form still clearly works, as evidenced by the excellent sales of books like Francis Bok's Escape from Slavery or [End Page 180] Dave Eggers's What Is the What?, those two ethically problematic narrative strategies abide. Indeed, the application of formulae born in a very particular historical context to contemporary forms of global oppression tend to exacerbate these problems of authorship, affect...

Possible Futures

Possible Futures

The Chaneysville Incident and the Research Narrative in Contemporary African American Literature

The research narrative is a genre of contemporary African American novels told from the narrow point of view of one character who is obsessive in their frustrating and pleasurable pursuit of knowledge through long periods of textual study. The protagonist of a research narrative is often affiliated with an institution of higher education. Research narratives are littered with dissertations and academic books; many of these novels include excerpts from the texts that their protagonists study or write. Narration closely focalized through one character is necessarily unreliable; these novels invite readers to oscillate between sympathy for and skepticism of their protagonists. Research narratives are simultaneously invested in and skeptical of historical knowledge, particularly knowledge of enslavement and fugitivity. David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981) establishes traits of the research narrative. The genre has flourished in works including Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999), Victor LaValle's Big Machine (2010), Mat Johnson's Pym (2011), and Danzy Senna's New People (2017). This essay argues for the research narrative as a genre of Black novels that theorize an ambivalent relationship to the past.

‘A Whole Other World than What I Live in’: Reading Chester Himes, on Campus and at the County Jail

This essay first briefly examines African American novelist Chester Himes’ genre-defying position as prison writer turned detective writer, whose influence is clear not only in the usual suspects such as Walter Mosley but also in the Blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, and in the urban fiction tradition from Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim on down through today’s Triple Crown books and others. I then look at how Himes’ work has been received by the college students and incarcerated people who each spring for the past 20 years have worked together in reading groups set at the local county jail in a project linked to a class I teach, in order to raise questions about genre, audience and pedagogy. The two groups of readers, who may come to see each other as one group over the series of meetings, often develop readings of Himes’ novel that push back against the analysis I present in the classroom.

Ideological Dissension and Conciliation in Three African American Novels of the 1980s

Ideological Dissension and Conciliation in Three African American Novels of the 1980s

Toward a Black Vernacular Sexology

By the turn of the twentieth century, race science, ethnology, and sexology had conspired to calcify the racial and sexual limits of the “human.” This article posits that contemporaneous African American novelists responded to the anti-Blackness of American sexual scientific discourse by presenting their own investigations of sexual behavior through literary narrative. This practice, which we might call “Black vernacular sexology,” adapted the language and methods of institutionalized sexual science to refute the claims of scientific racism and to generate sexual knowledge from a Black standpoint. This essay examines Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) as a powerful example of Black vernacular sexology, arguing that the novel performs a case study of a Southern aristocrat to reveal how whiteness is constructed through a perverse and sexualized obsession with Blackness. Placing the novel in dialogue with American racial and sexual scientists, the article demonstrates how Chesnutt adapts the methods and refutes the racist claims of official sexology while also refusing to duplicate that field’s pathologization of individuals. This analysis suggests that the study of American sexual scientific discourse requires an understanding of how turn-of-the-century African American literature provided a Black vernacular sexology to combat anti-Black scientific truth-claims about sex itself.

Dismantling Gender Specificity and Establishing Women’s Space/Voice: A Womanist Study of Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland

The paper is a womanist study based on African-American novelist Alice Walker’s 1970 novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland. The study uses content analysis method, Walker’s theory of womanism, and Judith Butler’s theory of undoing gender performativity to explore how Walker’s women characters dismantle gender specificity and establish women’s space/voice. Walker’s women characters perceive womanism as a defensive strategy and a healing force as they find it self-healing in restoring their mental health, self-respect, and identity. They do not believe in separation from their male partners; they stand victorious over the racist-sexist society by taking men as partners and by taking their own decisions regarding life and death. Womanism, as their philosophy of life, allows them space for raising voice, forming identity, uplifting status, and finding wholeness of their lives accompanied by men. Their womanist identities reflect a conscious/subversive act of transfiguring differentiation and give them a vision of women’s space, a sense of hidden possibilities, and a sense of wholeness. They exercise their sexual freedom which poses a threat to the ideological and political basis of male supremacy. Their womanist performativity questions heteronormativities and stimulates social change. As such, their womanist identities speak more of a political preference than a mere sexual/non-sexual preference. The study explores how Ruth idealizes her womanist foremothers as her role models and takes her grandfather as her partner. She creates women’s space/possibilities, weaves her future, and journeys towards wholeness. In fact, she defines herself as one of those possibilities which womanism opens up. Spectrum, Volume 16, June 2021: 148-158

“Lusting after Relevance”: The Allegorical Import of the African American Novel

Abstract Observing that Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo both oscillates between present- and past-tense narration and traffics in historical anachronism, this article argues that these dual modes of temporal disjunction establish the novel as a work of historical allegory whose 1920s-era story registers as actually being about the post–civil rights period in which the novel was published. The essay goes on to suggest that such an allegorical function is served by the African American novel in general, insofar as African American novels are understood to thematize struggles for freedom that are always relevant for their present-day Black readership, irrespective of the historical contexts in which the novels themselves are set. Finally, the essay notes that the 1988 trade paperback edition of Mumbo Jumbo substitutes different images for some of the ones that were featured in the original 1972 edition and contends that, in so doing, it at once achieves and emblematizes the perennial allegorical relevance that characterizes the African American novel as such, thereby securing its status as a signal work within the canon.

Locating Female Transgression against Heteronormative Society: A Comparative Study of Three African American Novels

The study attempts to locate female transgressions against a racist and homophobic society as portrayed by Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor in their novels Loving Her (1974), The Color Purple (1982) and The Women of Brewster Place (1983), respectively. It applies the content-analysis method, lesbian feminist theory and intersectionality to explore the black women characters’ defiance of hetero-patriarchal culture. The novelists effectively challenge heterosexism, and advocate women’s solidarity and lesbian sexuality as acts of resistance to regulative sexual norms. The theoretical tools compare and analyse how different categorisations of race and sex are interwoven in the novels and how their intersection hinders lesbian relations and women’s solidarity. The commonality of the black lesbian characters lies in their experience of sexualised aggression as well as racial otherness. Walker’s characters, unlike Shockley’s and Naylor’s, powerfully threaten sexist, racist and homophobic society and promote universal sisterhood.

The Paradox of Invisibility

Teaching architectural history with a commitment to social justice presents an epistemological challenge for two key reasons. First, the spatialization of social justice is irredeemably political, raising the question as to how to discuss politics in the classroom. Second, how does an educator articulate an ethical framework within which to situate histories of injustice and exclusion in the realm of knowledge production? By analyzing diverse public reactions to the controversial Emancipation Memorial (also known as the Freedman’s Memorial) in Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC during the social justice movements of 2020, this paper examines the politics of social justice through an exploration of the notion of “invisibility,” a paradoxical condition that, as African American novelist Ralph Ellison suggests, can imply both a fantasy of empowerment and a tragedy of powerlessness. The Freedman’s Memorial was erected in 1876 to commemorate United States President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which many American textbooks credit with “freeing the slaves.” Set on a high pedestal, the monument depicts Lincoln as a towering savior and the unshackled man kneeling in front of him. Though sculptor Thomas Ball modeled the kneeling man after the formerly enslaved man Archer Alexander, the monument denies Alexander’s personal history and his traumatic escape to freedom. It is Lincoln’s heroism, and not that of formerly enslaved people like Alexander, that is disseminated through an entrenched web of hegemonic cultural consent. How does an educator discuss Alexander’s invisibility in the context of this memorial to deepen the understanding of racial ideologies undergirding the institution of slavery in America? The paper argues that microhistory can serve as a powerful historiographic antidote to the dehumanizing effects of invisibility.

Fantasizing a Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels and Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow

“Fantasizing a Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels and Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow” closely reads one novel and one play written in the early twenty-first century and set in the Jim Crow period. Analyzing how Toni Morrison’s novel Love (2005) and Lynn Nottage’s drama By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) take up Jim Crow era Black history together, I find that both works intentionally offer incomplete, subjective and fictive narrations of black life during Jim Crow to deny readers a sense of realism. In doing so, these authors represent a group of African American novelists and playwrights that contend with the decades following Black Arts Movement being so temporally removed from Jim Crow in two steps. Firstly, they acknowledge in their partial and obscure narratives that this historical Black experience cannot be fully recovered by treating Jim Crow Black history like a historical site to be discovered with a literary return. Secondly, they demonstrate in their direct appeal to their audiences to co-create the fictions’ narratives with the characters that black history can instead be a praxis of inter-generational, collaborative fiction writing that imagines past Black individuals, making them more transparent in the contemporary moment. These features of narrative and structural address signify that this group of post-Black Arts Movement authors consider Black individuals’ freedom during Jim Crow more accessible by conjecturing how it manifested with their audiences.

Hauntology in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Kim Sŏk-Pŏm’s The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost

This study compares the ontology of ghosts in African American novelist Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Zainichi Korean writer Kim Sŏk-Pŏm’s The Curious Tale of Mandogi s Ghost and explores the possibility of healing for historical scars. While Morrison s novel shows the physical and psychological scars left by the institutional violence of American slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law, Kim s novel deals with the annihilation of humanity itself surrounding the Jeju 4.3 Uprising and Massacre, a tragedy of modern Korean history. In these two novels, these ghosts are portrayed as reincarnations of victims of a tragic history who met unjust and untimely deaths or were not mourned sufficiently after death. By comparing the ways these ghosts haunt the survivors, this study tries to inquire how we should mourn the untimely return of the ghosts from time out-of-joint, what is true mourning, and what is the ethical basis for the impossible mourning, using Jacques Derrida s “hauntology” and the theory of mourning as frames of reference. This study concludes that while Beloved the ghost reminds us of the impossible mourning as a complete other who has died but lives in ourselves, Mandogi’s ghost lives with us as a ghostly other who has never left us.

Memória e o romance neo-escravo em The Underground Railroad de Colson Whitehead e A Dança Da Água de Ta-Nehisi Coates

ABSTRACT: This analysis investigates two recent African-American novels, namely, The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead and The Water Dancer (2019) by Ta-nehisi Coates from the configurations proposed by the literary genre known as neo-slave narratives. These narratives are postmodern fictional reinterpretations of 19th century slave narratives which had a fundamental role in the American process of abolition. First, I will provide a brief overview of neo-slave narratives, particularly with regards to the North American literary context, and proceed to investigate how the two novels can be classified as belonging to this genre. Second, I will focus on the role of memory in both novels as forgotten historical events and religious myths are revisited by the writers. As theoretical support, I will turn to authors such as Bernard Bell, Ashraf H.A. Rushdy, Toni Morrison, Valerie Smith, among others, who investigated not only the reasons for the emergence of neo-slave narratives, but also reflected on the implications that these postmodern narratives have for the memory of slavery.

Modernity and Personal Experiments in Walker’s The Color Purple (1982)

Women in the modern era have been defined as being revolutionary and opposed to the traditional representation of their lives. Alice Walker (February 1944-) a Pulitzer Prize-winning figure is an African-American novelist, critic and poet who has vigorously defended women's modernist innovations and African American civil rights in her works. Her novel The Color Purple (1982) explores the African American female experience through the life and struggles of the narrator of the novel. What distinguishes The Color Purple is the very feature of psychological state of the heroine whilst struggling for her minimal rights of being a woman and black. The heroine of the novel Celie is revolutionary and anti-traditional. Walker planted her own personal experience within The Color Purple through the sufferings and traumatic life of the female characters.Walker through “Womanism”, a term coined by herself representing Black feminism, combines critical elements in The Color Purple, namely the importance of black history and heritage and the centrality of female creativity and competence in that heritage, which are often symbolized by quilts, sisterhood, liberation, self-identity, double consciousness and other symbols. Further through exhibiting African American woman’s twice-oppressed state, as they were double-discriminated racially and sexually by Americans, on the one hand by white Americans, on the other, by their fellow black male counterparts. The epistolary style of The Color Purple is probably an essential feature of modern literary output. The letters are used to manifest Celie and other characters’ lives to readers. Furthermore, within The Color Purple, Walker employs the very modern African American literary feature which is “Neo-Slave Narrative”. Through Neo-Slave Narrative, she displays her black female characters’ still-enslaved status in the modern era to form a juxtaposition between narrations of her fellow oppressed black women and Slave-Narrations of enslaved African Americans like Harriet Jacobs and Sojourner truth.

The Remaking of the Radical in the Harlem Renaissance: Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem

Home to Harlem, one of the first successful African American novels, inspired from the urban lower classes’ life, produced both revulsion and fascination. W.E.B. Du Bois stated that Claude McKay had proved African Americans were “buffoons, thugs, and rotters anyway” (245). However, the novel was successful, pointing to a 1920s fascination with the lower classes. This article analyzes the intersection of race and class in Home to Harlem and shows that the novel proposes a composite model for a radical subject.

Continuity of Womanist Ethos: Intertextuality in Select Novels of Alice Walker

This study uses the relational content analysis method and theories of intertextuality, intersectionality, and womanism to explore the continuity of womanist ethos in select novels of the African-American novelist Alice Walker. It attempts to explore Walker’s use of womanism as an intertextual trope in The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992); Walker’s portrayal of Celie-Shug as a perfect womanist couple in Color Purple and their reappearance in Temple as mother trees; foremothers as role models in Third Life and Temple; Walker’s telling and retelling of Tashi’s life-long suffering from female genital mutilation (FGM) in Color Purple, Temple, and Possessing – the subject of this paper.

Imagining a Mestiza-Self Through the Double-Consciousness Trope

This paper is a comparative study between two African-American novels: Caucasia by Danzy Senna (1998) and Quicksand by Lenna Larsen(1928). It specifically discusses how their respective mixed-race protagonist re-appropriates the double-consciousness trope –a term originally coined by African-American scholar W. E. Du Bois to describe the existence of blacks in the United States. More specifically, I argue that Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia transcends traditional notions of mixed-race identity found in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. First, I establish that Helga, the mulatta protagonist of Quicksand is constructed to play the version of the double-consciousness which assumes that mixed people (black and white) in United States live with internalized racism. Next, I demonstrate that Caucasia challenges Quicksand by providing us with a mulatta protagonist who re-appropriates the notions of double-consciousness by making it instrumental to her own survival and birth-right to be mixed.

Geomemory and Genre Friction: Infrastructural Violence and Plantation Afterlives in Contemporary African American Novels

Abstract This essay argues that contemporary African American novels turn to the gothic in order to dramatize the uncanny infrastructural and spatial afterlives of the plantation through a literary strategy it identifies as geomemory: a genre friction between mimetic and gothic modes in which postplantation spaces in the US South are imbued with temporal slippages such that past and present meet through the built environment. Tracing the plantation’s environmental and infrastructural presence in the Gulf Coast and throughout the US South, this essay argues that the plantation’s presence is fundamentally gothic. Geomemory, a trope evident across the emerging canon of contemporary African American fiction, allows writers to address the representational challenge of infrastructural and spatial violence via a defamiliarizing chronotope in which past, present, and future come into uneasy contact. Further, geomemory’s particular enmeshment with spatial design and infrastructure means that it moves from identifying the modern afterlife of the plantation to situating the present in the long context of plantation modernity.

A Comparative Study: Anxiety as an Impact of Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!

This paper discusses the anxiety as an impact of slavery reflected in two outstanding African-American novels: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. These novels are set in around the slavery period which shows how cruel and brutal slavery practices in the United States. The plots consist of some traditions and beliefs among White and African-American which have emerged since the antebellum period. By using a comparative approach, this paper focuses on the types of anxiety mentioned by Sigmund Freud. The analysis shows that both neurotic and moral anxieties play a pivotal psychological element throughout the intense “black-white” binary narratives. In this case, Toni Morrison’s Beloved consists of neurotic anxiety in the form of trauma experienced by Sethe and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! consist of moral anxiety in the form of shame for having Negro bloodline in aristocrat Southern plantation culture. Both novels show that slavery, whether it stands as a tradition or as an economic value, has significantly shaped the direction of American society.