African American Poet Research Articles

Socialist Feminism in the Select Poems of Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou is one of the most inspirational African-American poets, novelists, activists, and feminists, who has also been recognized as a prominent and influential voice in literature. This study aimed to engage in an analytical investigation of socialist feminism in the select poems of Maya Angelou using biographical approach and Johannna Brenner’s socialist feminism perspective. The select poems included Woman Work, Alone, On Working White Liberals, When You Come to Me, When I Think about Myself and Caged Bird. The research method of textual analysis was used in the literary investigation of the select poems. The study revealed that Maya Angelou had a challenging and colorful life. Her range of experiences from childhood to adulthood had influenced how she wrote. Her vision and legacy as mirrored in her works especially in her poetry continue to inspire others to fight for equality of all forms in the society. It was also found out that there are a number of significant factors that aided in the development of her work as a writer and a poet. Her life experiences along with her education recreated the way she saw the world. The sociocultural environment in Arkansas during her period also contributed to her profound writings. The salient characteristics of socialist feminism of Brenner such as representation of women, images of women at home and in the workplace and role of women in the society are highly evident in her body of work. As a socialist feminist, Brenner yearns to end the exploitation of women at home, in the workplace, and in the community. Since this research found out that Angelou is regarded a socialist feminist, it is recommended to analyze other types of feminism such as eco-feminism, liberal, and radical feminism to explore other salient characteristics of feminism embedded in Angelou’s works.

Factors Influencing Quiet Quitting and Employee Commitment in Casino Gaming Workplaces: Implications for Employee Retention Strategies

Maya Angelou is one of the most inspirational African-American poets, novelists, activists, and feminists, who has also been recognized as a prominent and influential voice in literature. This study aimed to engage in an analytical investigation of socialist feminism in the select poems of Maya Angelou using biographical approach and Johannna Brenner’s socialist feminism perspective. The select poems included Woman Work, Alone, On Working White Liberals, When You Come to Me, When I Think about Myself and Caged Bird. The research method of textual analysis was used in the literary investigation of the select poems. The study revealed that Maya Angelou had a challenging and colorful life. Her range of experiences from childhood to adulthood had influenced how she wrote. Her vision and legacy as mirrored in her works especially in her poetry continue to inspire others to fight for equality of all forms in the society. It was also found out that there are a number of significant factors that aided in the development of her work as a writer and a poet. Her life experiences along with her education recreated the way she saw the world. The sociocultural environment in Arkansas during her period also contributed to her profound writings. The salient characteristics of socialist feminism of Brenner such as representation of women, images of women at home and in the workplace and role of women in the society are highly evident in her body of work. As a socialist feminist, Brenner yearns to end the exploitation of women at home, in the workplace, and in the community. Since this research found out that Angelou is regarded a socialist feminist, it is recommended to analyze other types of feminism such as eco-feminism, liberal, and radical feminism to explore other salient characteristics of feminism embedded in Angelou’s works.

“Hereafter there will be no intimacy”: Charles Francis Adams, Charles Sumner, and the Emerging Divisions within the Republican Party

Abstract This essay investigates the formative years of African-American poet, educator, and human rights activist Charlotte Forten [Grimké] in 1850s Salem, Massachusetts, to discuss her conflicted racial and gender identity. It also explores how various personal and professional challenges hindered young Forten's efforts to establish an independent, fulfilling life.

A Free Woman of Color in Antebellum Salem: Charlotte Forten's Struggles against Slavery, Racism, and Female Dependence

Abstract This essay investigates the formative years of African-American poet, educator, and human rights activist Charlotte Forten [Grimké] in 1850s Salem, Massachusetts, to discuss her conflicted racial and gender identity. It also explores how various personal and professional challenges hindered young Forten's efforts to establish an independent, fulfilling life.

Existentialism: A Strive for Identity in the Select Poems of Maya Angelou

Existentialism is an approach that emphasizes human existence. It opposes rationalist tradition and culture by emphasizing action, and freedom, and choosing them as important to human existence. This study is an attempt to unveil Maya Angelou’s existential themes in her poems. Angelou, as an African-American poet naturally possess the existentialistic attitude and fought for the freedom of her community. The selected poems for this study are: “Times-Square-Shoeshine-Composition”, “Harlem Hopscotch”, and “Africa”. Most of her poems are found with the themes of pain, hope, quest for freedom and self-love. This paper examines an in-depth analysis of Angelou’s select poems which aids to explore the world of Angelou where she lives with her own perspectives of life and strives for the freedom of humanity. Her writings are the mirror of herself. The paper concludes by showing how Angelou has turned all of her struggles into victories and how she has battled for black liberation and became an icon among the blacks’.

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.

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.

THE FUNCTION OF POETRY IN THE MODERN WORLD: A CASE STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN AND AUDRE LORDE’S POEMS

Lyric poetry has historically referred to a genre that we think of as brief, musical, and personal as well as subjective. This article addresses the role of lyric poetry in the modern world, and how critical analysis enables us to better appreciate the potential impact of poetry today. Specifically, we will offer brief contrastive assessments of two landmark exemplars of American poets, Walt Whitman and Audre Lorde. These two figures demonstrate some of the varied ways of the American poetry tradition. We compare Walt Whitman, a canonical white male poet from the 19th century, with an equally important 20th century African American woman poet, Audre Lorde. These American poets differ in historical periods, sex, race, and other factors, yet both uphold the conventional functions of lyric poetry and prove its continuing relevance to a global readership. The results show that as the reflection of human life, poetry could represent honesty, realism, democracy and even power.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Selected Poems of “Maya Angelou” (“Equality”, “Cage Birds” and Other Poems as Examples)

Language users’ choices of linguistic forms and expressions are usually guided by their thoughts, feelings, attitudes and their stance in the real world. Language, according to CDA, is never neutral and it always has some implications of the world that surrounds us. Critical studies are concerned with scrutinizing power relations, ideological manifestations and hegemony in social practices. The current paper is a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of selected poems of Maya Angelou, who is an African American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. It sheds light on the figurative language of the poems that are selected randomly for the purpose of analysis. The five selected poems:  "Still I Rise, Equality, Caged Bird, On the Pulse of Morning and Phenomenal Woman."  are analyzed based on Fairclough’s model of CDA. The study tries to show the implicit figurative language in the poems and identify different figures of speech that have implicit meaning in the poems. It also examines how figurative language is used to enhance the meaning of the poems and communicating the ideas more effectively.                   .                                                                                     &nbsp

Boneyarn by David Mills

Reviewed by: Boneyarn by David Mills Ilka Scobie (bio) boneyarn David Mills Ashland Poetry Press https://www.ashlandpoetrypress.com/online-catalog/other-books/boneyarn 144 pages; Print, $17.95 Along the city's jawline bythe wharf where a peck of slaveswere auctioned In 1630, one hundred enslaved Africans (one-third of the population) lived in New Amsterdam, soon to be New York City. By 1712 New York was an epicenter of the slave trade, and a cemetery was created for Negroes, enslaved or free, as well as Native Americans and indentured whites. About fifteen thousand bodies were unceremoniously buried there, and it was not until October 1991 that an excavation crew for a new federal building discovered the remains of 419 human skeletons. Thus was the African Burial Ground, the oldest and largest slave cemetery in America, unearthed. "See: all of us / now mothered by mother earth / and murder's milk." With a powerful trifecta of history, lyricism, and empathy, David Mills creates a sweeping poetic vision of this story. Voices of the enslaved Africans explore the fraught complexity, the abuse of power, and slavery's unspeakable horrors. One block from today's New York Stock Exchange a slave market thrived, and more enslaved Africans lived in New York than in any other American city except for the booming slave center of Charleston, South Carolina. Mills delves into a hidden history of pre-Revolutionary New York. Slave rebellions, early African American writers, interracial love affairs, colonial history—all are fodder for his poetic masterpiece. We learn that the kidnapped African-born slaves maintained strong teeth (some of which were sculpted into various shapes, indicating their African birthplace) but their enslaved children were starved on a carbohydrate diet, thus the toothless child corpses. "In the child graves, their teeth were almost always gone. / Cause they were the here born. The start / life. The too-often sugar and corn suppers." [End Page 116] The slaves were often buried with artifacts, buttons, bracelets, and beads, some of which were made in Africa. In the haunting poem "to the Bones; About the Beads: Talking," a forty-year-old woman's skeleton was found with beads belted around her waist. Using this fact as the basis for the poem, Mills presents the West African beads as the secret the woman wore throughout her enslaved years, a symbol of her ancestral heritage. "Imagine / feeling like you're carrying a country around your waist / … or maybe just clinched echoes of that ocean, salt / reminders of a white man's transatlantic tantrum." The reader is introduced to the profound shame of child slave chimney sweeps, their young bodies starved and deformed from the dangerous task of climbing up and cleaning narrow, creosote-infested chimney flues. "Started printcin' when I was I was six … My life up in nothin' but smoke." "My should-be-blooming bones squashed from twist and scrunch; limbs wrung from heavin' bags of soot twice my teeny self." Equally horrifying is the fact that the fledgling Columbia University students (some as young as fifteen) regularly robbed graves at the African Burial Ground, using the cadavers for anatomy class. "Talking to the Bones: Columbia Graverobber Victim" begins with the punch: "Who did this? Abuse's students." Continuing to delve into this travesty, "Autopsy's insights, legged real / estate could've properly been considered property. / Hell, at the end of the day, they were just homework." When free Negroes petitioned for the enslaved bodies to at least be treated with dignity, "the Bone Bill" would have stopped grave-robbing but was not passed by the Common Council (today's equivalent of the City Council). Dividing his book into nine sections, Mills excavates a hidden American history with intellectual vigor and grand poetic expansiveness. Thus he is able to introduce Phillis Wheatley in two poems. "An Almost Audience" details facts about the first published African American female poet. "Bought then brought on the Middle Passage but would one day read passages of her work in London." And in "Sable Marginalia" the brilliant writer and first Negro woman published in the New World is freed, but her "final days were spent shriveling / as a scullery maid / in...

"To take my freedom is to take my breath": Lillian Myricks and Young Black Poets' Poetics of Freedom

In this essay, I explore how young African American poets shaped visions of and possibilities for Black liberation by focusing primarily on the invocation of freedom crafted by one young poet, Lillian Myricks, whose poem "Freedom" was entered in a poetry contest sponsored by poet Gwendolyn Brooks in the early 1960s. Along with discussion of Brooks's advocacy for young poets, I read Myricks's poem alongside a poem by Wanda McGee, also from the early 1960s, in an effort to center the agency and authorship of these young Black poets for their contributions to crafting a poetics of freedom.

:Modernism’s Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics

:<i>Modernism’s Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics</i>

A Poetics of Thingification: Dawn Lundy Martin and the Black Took Collective

Abstract In the last two decades, African American poets working in innovative and avant-garde forms have produced poetry focused upon the theme of racial objectification. Individual and collaborative projects by Dawn Lundy Martin, Duriel E. Harris, and Ronaldo V. Wilson, who write and perform together as the Black Took Collective, practice what this article calls a poetics of thingification: a poetry that draws attention to language's capacity for reification in general and for racial objectification in particular. Drawing upon thing theory and recent scholarship on race and avant-garde poetry, this article focuses on Dawn Lundy Martin's poetics in order to demonstrate how poets combine innovative techniques with racial stereotypes to scrutinize hegemonic expectations at the level of poetic form, especially within the tradition of African American poetry. Rather than adopting the humanizing rhetoric and lyrical modes of conventional African American poetry, these poets use the trope of the objectified Black body to deconstruct linguistic processes of racial reification from within.

Castro at the Hotel Theresa

Castro at the Hotel Theresa

Trauma, History, and Terror in the Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa and Sinan Antoon

In her comparative study “Trauma, History, and Terror in the Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa and Sinan Antoon,” Hessa A. Alghadeer considers the work of the African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1941) and the (Arab) Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon (b. 1967) through the lens of trauma theory of some notable theorists including; Freud, Cathy Caruth, Jean Laplanche, Roger Luckhurst, and Shoshana Felman—have negotiated in this field. The article explores the literary manifestations of trauma in two distinct historical periods and geographical settings to show the specificities of each prototype and how the historical-cultural significance and textual meanings of trauma have intertwined into a plural space. Drawing upon a cluster of selected poems, the article investigates through textual analysis how Komunyakaa and Antoon bring to light, articulate, and address their historic traumas, and how they elaborate similar discourses of trauma across their distinct cultures. The article thereby underlines the power of the poetic word and image to unveil several complex manifestations of trauma. It asserts that these two poets are situated within a global context that empowers the poetic voice and brings vitality to the predicaments of the traumatized subjects through a broad sense of connectivity and belonging regardless of their distinct histories, cultures, and homelands.

Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition by Hollis Robbins

Reviewed by: Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition by Hollis Robbins Peter Howarth Hollis Robbins. Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2020. 264 pp. $32.95. In 2018, Hollis Robbins went to hear poet Natasha Trethewey give a prestigious lecture. Trethewey spoke about her mixed-race family, the "racial determinism" of her Southern upbringing, and her fondness for the sonnet, a "received European form" (2). Preempting the inevitable criticism that such forms are endemically white, privileged and male, Trethewey quoted Audre Lorde's warning that the master's tools could be never used to dismantle the master's house, but then added that in her own writing life, "I have turned to such forms to contain the subject-matter necessary to challenge the master narrative." After the applause, Robbins asked a question: "How many sonnets have to be written before someone says she received the form from a Black poet?" (2). Trethewey was silent, and then acknowledged that for her, the sonnet had indeed come from Gwendolyn Brooks, not from Europe. Forms of Contention argues that this has been true for a good while. The sonnet is no longer a form borrowed from Europe or white America but is instead one Black writers now own themselves, given the superb sonnets and sequences written by Brooks, Margaret Walker, Robert Hayden, Terrance Hayes, Marilyn Nelson and Trethewey herself. It also maintains that a distinct Black sonnet-writing tradition has been there all along but has been lost by the nineteenth-century newspaper, the anthologies of the twentieth century, and the late modernism of the Black Arts movement. The result is that a sonnet like Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" is never considered "representative" of influential Black poetry the way Langston Hughes is, and the great number of Black sonnets in newspapers and anthologies are overlooked as inauthentic and genteel. "Too many ancestors have been forgotten," Robbins writes, "too much nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry was banished from the Black poetry canon in the 1960s because it was too 'traditional'" (2). Forms of Contention aims to correct this act of selective memory on both counts. It wants to recover the Black sonneteers from the eighteenth-century onward, and to show that their work forms an authentic tradition of influences, inheritances and rewritings, a multigenerational chain of sonnets. It succeeds admirably at the first task, but to find a "distinct genre" (118) of the African American sonnet is harder work, historically. This is not because Black poets have not brilliantly wrested the form into shapes that express distinctly African American situations and struggles. Robert Hayden's boundary-bursting sonnet "To Frederick Douglass" or Gwendolyn Brooks's "Gay Chaps" sequence about the US Navy officers penned below decks and their fiancées hemmed in at home are among the best sonnets ever written, without doubt. But the act of adapting the sonnet's pleading to new causes is also part of its tradition. Petrarch made the sonnet famous with his addresses of sexual desire and thwarted ambition, but those appeals were soon transformed into wrestlings with God, or demands for political honor to be restored, or from Milton onward, for both. Wordsworth and Southey took over Milton's enjambed lines and used them to thunder against slavery itself. In that sense, African American poets have been fully traditional from the start, Phillis Wheatley's 1768 appeal to King George: Great God, direct, and guard him from on high,And from his head let every evil fly!And may each clime with equal gladness seeA monarch's smile can set his subjects free! [End Page 242] Scholars debate the degree to which her blessing of the King for repealing the hugely unpopular Stamp Act (a tax paying for British troops in the colonies) contains a plea for other kinds of freedom. But given Wheatley's captive status, to write a sonnet to God and the sovereign at all gave the genre new vigor by giving it a new range of causes to plead. The trickier task that Forms of Contention has set itself, though, is to find a self-aware...

Narrative Activism: Writing Desire For Injury-Bound Individuals

Narrative Activism: Writing Desire For Injury-Bound Individuals

급진적 돌봄과 흑인 모성시학: 그웬돌린 브룩스와 오드리 로드의 경우

The presidency of Donald Trump, pandemics, and wars have triggered a widespread discussion of care theory. In the era when care has reentered “the zeitgeist,” radical care, “a set of vital but underappreciated strategies for enduring precarious worlds” has focused on constituting a feeling with, rather than a feeling for, others. This article, rereading the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks and Audre Lorde, explores the poetic praxis of these two poets as the form of radical care embodying othermothering in the community. In poems about Till and Glover, both Brooks and Lorde reflect the brutal realities of black people, which are narrated by mothering figures. Their mother-centered voices, whether they were of the actual mothers of victims or not, demonstrate how the poets confronted the violence of black community and how they sifted the importance of their collective identity-based care mostly fulfilled by women. This article goes on proposing that their poems show the responsibilities and potentialities of poetic practices that remind readers of the importance of radical care in contradiction to the self-care, or self-management, of neoliberal society. Revisiting the underexamined poetic praxis of these two African American poets, this article lastly aims at expanding the discourse of care as the driving force of new collective movements in today’s world, especially along with the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement as well as the StopAsianHate movement.

African American Gay Men

African American Gay Men

Derridean Hauntology in Selected Poetry of Maya Angelou and Lucille Clifton

This paper deals with aspects of Derridean hauntology in the poetry of May Angelou and Lucille Clifton , two prominent , albeit understudied, African American women poets. Starting with an overview of Jacque Derrida’s postulations disclosed in his book Specters of Marx, the study is then to situate his theory in selected poetry by the two poets afore-mentioned with the attempt of showing how it helps delve deeper into the nuances of African American consciousness. The paper argues that given the intensive studies on specters, legacies and memories, what distinguishes Derrida’s theory is its tripartite link to temporality, existentialist being and hegemony. With Derrida asserting that specters control the present and the future and determine being and becoming besides governing the quest for hegemony, Derridean hauntology not only unsettles the taken-for-granted notions of temporality but also disrupts the conventional concepts of existentialist being and power. Bringing the three-aspected hauntology to Angelou and Clifton’s poetry helps shed light on the role of textuality and the author in the struggle over hegemony and in the attempt to reconcile the conflicting poles of being in the case of black American subjects. To achieve its objectives, the study is to follow an expository analytic approach wedding theory to practice and foregrounding the poetic devices that help hammer forth the Derridean perspective.