African American Writers Research Articles

MEMORY OF THE ROARING 1960S IN ALICE RANDALL’S NOVEL “REBEL YELL”

The paper discusses the novel “Rebel Yell” by the popular African American writer Alice Randall, in which she goes back to recent American history trying to understand the tendencies in the attitudes of Afro-Americans that were determined by the turbulent events of the 1960s–70s on the example of the novel’s protagonist Abel Jones. Memory, which is present in the reminiscences of Randall’s characters, helps to reveal the gap between the reality and people’s expectations that explains human traumas and accounts for the split in people’s psyche. The novel delves into the problems of a person who is torn between two communities – black and white, trying to adapt to the norms of the white middle class, which results in a disaster. Key themes of the novel are discussed, and an outline of central events that contributed to the transformation of the protagonist’s character is given. A link between the recent US past and the complex present is drawn. Keywords: contemporary African American novel, the roaring 1960s, the Civil Rights movement, race relations.

XVIIAmerican Literature: The Twentieth Century

This chapter has eight sections: 1. Poetry; 2. Fiction 1900–1945; 3. Fiction since 1945; 4. Drama; 5. Comics; 6. African American Writing; 7. Native Writing; 8. Latino/a, Asian American, and General Ethnic Writing. Section 1 is by James Gifford and Margaret Konkol; section 2 is by James M. Clawson; section 3 is by Mary Foltz; section 4 is by Sophie Maruéjouls-Koch; section 5 is by Orion Ussner Kidder; section 6 is by James Gifford and Mary Foltz; section 7 is by James Gifford; section 8 is by Lindsay Parker.

Driving West on I-75, and: Even in Dark Times

Driving West on I-75, and: Even in Dark Times Mary Moore Easter (bio) Driving West on I-75 I slam the car door in Richmondadjust the mirror, tune to black radio.Wipers flash rain away on the routetoward Charlottesville where I will not stopbecause Nazis scared me shitlesson television last week. Shades of my pastin Virginia. Riding shotgun is Sandra Blandblack garbage bag that hanged her still around her neck.She says nothing, sits unresisting for the drive.Traffic stalls, highway still as a grave full of cars,no news of obstruction.Thirty minutes of ignorant patience required,we meet the challenge head on, tongues tied. Renisha McBride appears behind meface a gaping gunshot wound in my back seat,still considerate in her unanswered quest for help in the night,careful not to bleed black on my upholstery. Who knows why the traffic clears?Our trio moves out of rain and mist toward our destinations.My phone battery edges toward zero percent,my body wants to release all it holds.I stop over in the very place I sought to avoid.For safety, I lock them in the car at the Waffle House.I pee and drink black coffee while I charge my phone. [End Page 77] When I return they are easy in their placessettled for the journey, joined by Samuel DuBowho shares the back seat with Renisha.The left side of his head is missingfrom the police shot. He bears his injury onwarCarriers of my fear, they offer me their presencand the company of their witness. Even in Dark Times The yellow trees let their leaves downaround three brown girls.Grass, still green, receives their high heels.Beneath sky and above groundthey sport themselvesin head-to-toe redshort off-the-shoulder blueand flowers that burst from a small waistover nature's bounty.The rim of the lake perfects their poses andsun limns haloes of hair they fluff and flipas they prance for each smartphonerecording what joy fall weather can bein the spirit bodyof unmurdered girlsso black and lit. [End Page 78] Mary Moore Easter Mary Moore Easter's manuscript was a finalist for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, and her work appears in Poetry, Seattle Review, Water Stone, Calyx, and Fjord's Review, among others, and in the anthology Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota. Her chapbook Walking from Origins was published by Heywood Press. A Virginia transplant, Easter re-rooted at Carleton College in Minnesota, where she was founder and director of the Dance Program. Now emerita professor of dance, veteran dancer/ choreographer, she is a member of Penchant, aka the Northfield Women Poets, and is represented in the group's four anthologies: Absorb the Colours, A Rich Salt Place, Tremors, Vibrations Enough to Shake the World, and Penchant (Heywood Press). Her honors include a Bush Artist Fellowship, multiple McKnights, the Loft Creative Non-Fiction Award, and Ragdale and Anderson Center residencies. She co-mentored in the Givens Black Writers Program. Copyright © 2018 University of Nebraska Press

Interview with Umm Zakiyyaih

Umm Zakiyyah is one of the most prominent African-American Muslim writers writing about Muslims and Islam in the post-9/11 period. Her novels touch on the interfaith struggles of Muslims and Christians in a post-modern world and on the moral, spiritual and intercultural struggles of Muslims as minorities in a country where Muslims have been systematically marginalised after twin-tower attacks in 2001 and the subsequent American invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). She also writes about racism, women’s issues, the practice of Muslim women wearing headscarfs, and polygamy. In this interview, Umm Zakiyyah talks about her favourite writers, about the function of the writer in general, about the critical reception of her novels and about the influence of Islam on her imagination. She also addresses the issues of Islamophobia in the West, the future of Islamic fiction and questions pertaining to If I Should Speak and other novels.

African American Literary Reconstructions and the “Propaganda of History”

The first story of African American literature in Reconstruction that many students and scholars still hear is a story of absence. That story is wrong in both broad conception and specific details, but it is worth quickly retelling for context. Key scholarly reference works of the 1970s and 1980s—decades that featured a notable broadening of the canon and US literary history—offered little revision to earlier assertions that there essentially wasn’t an African American literature of Reconstruction. The landmark History of Southern Literature (1985), compiled under editor Louis D. Rubin, Jr., for example, gave its first in-depth treatment of African American writers in a chapter called “Black Novelists and Novels, 1930–1950”; a laudatory New York Times review claimed that the book “highlighted the chief currents and the crucial changes in Southern imaginative expression over three and a half centuries” and offered the “most encyclopedic . . . history of Southern black writing yet compiled” (Lewis BR18). Similarly, the immense Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), prepared under editor Emory Elliott, generally ignored African American literature in and of Reconstruction even as it offered interesting bits on Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt—the latter contribution prompting a Times review to grumpily assert that the volume made “earnest, ungainly efforts to represent ‘minority’ voices” (Adams BR6).

“The Education of Mingo,” or the education of Moses: reading Charles Johnson’s novella through the lens of whiteness studies

The rise of whiteness studies has been a very remarkable phenomenon in the past three decades. Many of its key arguments are very productive in criticism concerning racial issues in ethnic literature. This article reads “The Education of Mingo,” a novella by the contemporary African American writer Charles Johnson, through the perspective of whiteness studies. Mostly adopted in this article are theories about the racial contract and white ignorance proposed by such critics as Charles Mills, Barbara Applebaum, George Yancy, Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tunna. Their theories, I argue, prove to be very helpful for the reader to understand the moral paradox in the story, that is, why Moses, seemingly a well-intended white who hates slavery, could actually be a complicit in racism, and hence in the two murders committed by Mingo.

Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

Art as a Vehicle for Social Change: The Harlem Renaissance

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SITUATING THE SELF: OVERCOMING SUBJECTION AND SUBJECTIVITY IN TONI MORRISON’S SULA

Abstract : Individual Autonomy is a prominent feature of women writers. It plans to advance a dream of self-governing self as basically autonomous and independent, a dream that precludes the inevitable connectedness from securing selves and the way that their inundation in systems of connections frames their wants, yearnings, to be sure their extremely personalities. As such, what is denied is that the self is basically social. Toni Morrison, an Afro-American woman writer, works strenuously to get autonomous self to her female protagonist. In her novels, she clearly describes the life of African-American women in white dominated in American society. Combining the aims of African-American Freedom Movement and Woman’s Liberation, she produces literature which is indisputably black. In this research article, Toni Morrison’s famous novel Sula has been discussed through two chief characters, Nel and Sula. The novelist tries to overcome racial boundaries in order to gain animated self with striking balance. To be specific, the chief protagonists of Toni Morrison tend to find expression amidst their sullen, irritable, and dangerously regressive existence, to find dependence of their own, complaisant and reliant beings. permalink/DOI: dx.doi.org/10.17977/um015v46i12018p001

Analisis terhadap Dua Puisi Penyair Amerika Claude McKay: Penelusuran SelukBeluk Kekuasaan Ras

This article discusses two representative poems by a famous African-American writer, Claude Mckay. It seeks to interpretthe poems, “If We Must Die” and “Enslaved”, which both explore the issues racism and mental slavery, in the light of politicalapproaches such as Marxist criticism and postcolonialism. The main findings of this article are: 1) that racism and violence that itentails are rooted in class conflict and 2) that McKay’s poems can be seen as a counter-hegemony of the ethnocentricity of whiteculture. Generally, it is hoped that this writing can promote historical and political readings of minority poets like Claude McKay.

Richard Wright, Bandung, and the Poetics of the Third World

“Do you think that whenever I'm talking to someone I'm conscious of whether or not he is ‘white’ or ‘colored’? … I was born a ‘native,’ and I've lived with racial discrimination. But we are free now. I'm no longer a ‘native’ but an Indonesian…. I don't feel inferior to whites, and I don't hate them either,” Sitor Situmorang, a preeminent Indonesian poet and essayist, told African American writer Richard Wright at an April 1955 social gathering in Wright's honor. Growing more agitated, Situmorang raised his voice and continued, “We are against colonialism, but we are not against whites. We struggled for racial equality, not for the belief in another superrace, a colored superrace.”

Struggle and Survival in Cultural Clash: A Case Study of Pecola in The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison is not only one of the Afro-American writers who focus on the clash between black culture and the white mainstream culture in the United States as well as the marginalized existence of the blacks, but more importantly a unique Afro-American woman writer who goes beyond the simplistic dichotomies of the black male literary tradition and explores the root of the tragedy of the blacks in the mainstream society. Based on textual analysis of her first novel The Bluest Eye and a case study of Pecola, a main character in this novel and actually a victim and scapegoat, this paper, with the painful truth that Pecola’s tragedy results not just from the denial and rejection of the mainstream society, but more significantly, from the blind identification of some blacks in the mainstream culture, and their incompetence to cherish their own culture and identity, aims at exploring hope in the tragic story, and suggesting how blacks can struggle to survive so as to extend their heritage and values.

Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature by Daniel Hack

Reviewed by: Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature by Daniel Hack Hollis Robbins Daniel Hack, Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. 304 pp. $35.00. Anyone who works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American literature knows how necessary it is to keep a bookshelf nearby of all of the works of classical, biblical, and British literature that African American authors have cited, critiqued, reworked, or simply alluded to since Phillis Wheatley began the practice in 1773, referencing Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and a host of others. Some writers provide a handy list of authors, as Frederick Douglass did in 1845, directing readers to The Columbian Orator (over two dozen, from Cicero to Franklin!), or as Charles Chesnutt did in 1900, in listing the Great Books on John Warwick’s bookshelf in The House behind the Cedars (a dozen more, including Milton, Cervantes, and Scott). The canon of African American literature is so very rich and was for so very long ignored by literature scholars outside of historically black colleges and universities (who have always read works by black writers now tagged as “little known”), that the work of excavating, uncovering, and republishing literature by African American writers—along with the work of reading these texts in conversation with other African American texts—has been the primary aim of African American literature scholars for the past several decades. As the bookshelves filled with African American literature have expanded, so too has that other bookshelf, the one holding Ovid, Burns, Scott, and other texts black authors have alluded to. The ongoing task of analyzing the ways that these bookshelves are in conversation with each other is increasingly daunting. Accordingly, Daniel Hack’s Reaping Something New is warmly welcome, with its detailed readings of African American literary engagement with Charles Dickens, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, [End Page 62] and others. Reaping Something New details so many of the myriad ways that African American authors throughout the nineteenth century read, drew upon, deliberately misread, toyed with, signified upon, contended with, dismissed, and admired Victorian works of literature that, perhaps unintentionally, Hack quickly ends up contradicting his own central argument that these engagements were “unlikely” (1). From Wheatley onward, African American literature has been in deep, playful, and abiding conversation with the broader literary canon as key scholars on the category of African American literature from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to Kenneth Warren have argued. One of Hack’s tremendous contributions, in fact, is to gather together the many strands of scholarship on African American literary engagement with (primarily) British texts and present them meticulously, systematically, and thoroughly, arguing for a process he calls the “African Americanization” of these texts. “African Americanizations,” Hack argues, “make newly salient the specific ways and ends to which Victorian novels and poems do or do not represent individuals of African descent (and members of nonwhite races more generally) . . . [and] can also call into question the importance of race in texts in which it has always seemed central” (3). Hack sees African American writers’ engagement with Victorian texts as “close reading at a distance” (3). He offers new ways to look at Victorian texts and new ways to understand African American literature from specific, granular examples. Hack’s chapters reflect his training as a Victorianist and his emphasis on the two-way street of African American and Victorian textual engagement. In his Introduction, he begins to demonstrate his method by looking at the first paragraph of Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892), in which Cooper inserts three lines from Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), without attribution but with a provocative italicization: “An infant crying in the night, / An infant crying for the light; / And with no language—but a cry.” Closely reading this fruitful engagement yields a richer understanding of Cooper, of Tennyson, and of the various scholars and critics over the years who have seen, not seen, or misunderstood the allusion (though surely not “suppressed” [6]). Next, chapter one, “Close Reading Bleak House at a Distance,” offers an updated version of Hack’s 2008...

Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2013 ed. by Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr.

Reviewed by: Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2013 ed. by Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr. Lorie Watkins Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr., eds. Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2013. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. Each year the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference collects selected papers presented at the conference into a single volume published by the University Press of Mississippi. The recently published 2013 collection features [End Page 74] papers from the fortieth annual conference examining the role of William Faulkner’s work in connection with the literature of the black Americas. In a somewhat unusual move for the series, this volume includes both critical and creative interpretations of the conference theme. Seventeen essays and poetic selections examine issues of Faulkner’s influence on writing in black literatures of the Americas, influences on and reinterpretations of his own work, and the connections between Faulkner’s work and the literature and writers of the region. In his introduction to the volume, Jay Watson quotes a key line from Édouard Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi: “Faulkner’s oeuvre will be made complete when it is revisited and made vital by African Americans.” This goal, Glissant suggests, “will be achieved by a radically ‘other’ reading” (xxi). The artists and critics from the Caribbean and America contributing to the 2013 volume, as Watson notes, “reveal that the revisionary work Glissant describes has been long underway in the Americas. They return us to Faulkner with new insight not only into the magnitude and impact of his achievement but also—just as meaningfully—into its limits” (xxi–xxii). Following the Introduction and “Note on the Conference,” the volume opens with “African American Poetic Responses to Faulkner” by Chiyuma Elliott, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Derrick Harriell, Randall Horton, and Jamaal May. At turns playful and poignant, these poetic interpretations of Faulkner’s life, texts, and characters invite readers to reimagine Faulkner’s life and his apocryphal world in exciting and enlightening ways. The critical essays that follow put Faulkner’s work in conversation with a variety of literary and cultural topics. James Smethurst examines the early African American migration narrative in Faulkner’s fiction, Thadious M. Davis evaluates Faulkner’s use of the black voice, George Hutchinson connects Faulkner’s career with the evolution of black modernism, and Tim A. Ryan outlines connections between Faulkner’s writings and the work of Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton. In the first of several thematic pairings, Joe Fruscione examines Faulkner’s and Ralph Ellison’s reactions to intellectual celebrity and their shared experiences in President Eisenhower’s People-to-People program, while Ben Robbins examines transgressive sexualities in Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms” and James Baldwin’s Another Country. Lisa Hinrichsen examines how African American writers like Randall Kenan have dealt with the gothic nature pervading of much of Faulkner’s work, and Matthew Dischinger explores the importance of the narratives told by the plantation ledgers in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. Doreen Fowler uses Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! to illustrate the power of language with respect to race and the social construction of identity, and Ted Atkinson shows how Natasha Trethewey creatively reimagines Light in August in her powerful poem, “Miscegenation.” The remaining essays largely connect Faulkner’s work to that of other writers. Andrew B. Leiter speaks to Jean Toomer’s influence on Faulkner, John Wharton Lowe examines Faulkner’s influence on Ernest J. Gaines, Dotty Dye reads Faulkner’s A Fable alongside Claude McKay’s Banjo, and T. Austin Graham juxtaposes Faulkner’s The Unvanquished with W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction with an eye toward their depictions of the Civil War. Jenna Sciuto and and Sharron Eve Sarthou read Faulkner comparatively against two writers of the black Caribbean; Sciuto reads Faulkner alongside Haitian writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Love, and Sarthou shows how Haitian American Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker critiques Faulkner’s depictions of Haiti in Absalom, Absalom! I had the pleasure of attending the 2013 conference, so I heard many of these works read in...

Freedom's Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West ed. by Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack

Reviewed by: Freedom's Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West ed. by Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack Albert S. Broussard Freedom's Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West. Edited by Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack. ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Pp. 424. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Two decades have passed since Quintard Taylor published In Search of the Racial Frontier (1998), the most comprehensive history yet written of African Americans in the western states and territories from the Spanish era to the 1990s. Taylor's meticulous scholarship stimulated a wave of new studies in western black history, including biographies, community studies, institutional histories, and anthologies. Freedom's Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West, edited by Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack, continues this resurgence of scholarship by offering thirteen essays and two oral interviews that examine the varied people, places, and institutions of the black West and the ceaseless quest for equality that black westerners waged to achieve full citizenship. Although the essays in this ambitious anthology lack a strong unifying thesis, almost every contributor views the West as a land of promise, where African Americans had the potential to improve their lives and to shape their futures. Students of Texas and western history will find rich material on African American community building and racial activism in such diverse areas as Spokane, Washington, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Boley, Oklahoma, and Fort Hood and Houston, Texas, although on occasion they may have already encountered the material. The strongest essay in the collection, Bernadette Pruitt's "'Beautiful People': Community Formation in Houston, 1900–1941," is drawn from Pruitt's excellent book, The Other Great Migration: The Movement of Rural African Americans to Houston, 1900–1941 (Texas A&M University Press, 2013). Similarly, Emily Lutenski's fine essay, "The New Negro Frontier: Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, and African American Modernism in the West," was published previously in West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands (University Press of Kansas, 2015). Still, readers will discover fresh material regarding how African Americans throughout the twentieth century confronted the American West, including in New Mexico and the territories of Alaska and Hawaii, where relatively small African American populations also demanded racial equality. Some of the most original contributions in this volume pertain to entertainment and the arts. Jeanelle Hope, for example, explores the relationship between African American and Asian women through poetry in the San Francisco Bay Area, an alliance that few scholars have examined, and one that we know virtually nothing about in other western cities. Gabriela Jiménez's essay, "'Something 2 Dance 2': Electro-hop in 1980s Los Angeles and Its Afrofuturist Link," examines the creative nature of African [End Page 219] American dance in Los Angeles by focusing on a genre of electronic music and dance that appeared there between 1983 and 1988. Like hip hop, which appeared on the East Coast and gradually entered the mainstream of both African American and American music generally, electro-hop also appealed largely to young, marginalized African American, Afro Latino, and Latino youth. It was also wildly popular in Europe, particularly Germany. Although many of the essays in this collection have appeared in print previously, readers will still find much to celebrate. Ruffin and Mack, for example, have given ample attention to the role of gender and sexuality in the twentieth-century West. In his excellent essay, "Black Women in Spokane: Emerging from the Shadows of Jim and Jane Crow," Mack traces the activism of African American middle-class women in Spokane, Washington, such as Bertha Cravens, who used local community organizations and the local branch of the NAACP to fight racial discrimination and to gain important concessions for Spokane's small black population. Similarly, Kevin Leonard's essay, "Containing 'Pervasion': African-Americans and Same-Sex Desire in Cold War Los Angeles," provides a compelling view of how black editors in post-World War II Los Angeles perceived homosexuality in the black community. Readers will also benefit from the extensive bibliographic essay as well as the brief biographical sketches and vignettes of significant events in western history...

Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler

The Emergence, Renaissance, and Transformation of Multicultural American Literature from the 1960s to the Early 2000s

The Emergence, Renaissance, and Transformation of Multicultural American Literature from the 1960s to the Early 2000s W. Lawrence Hogue (bio) Writers of color in the U.S. have been producing novels, poetry, and essays in American letters since the eighteenth century, particularly African American writers.1 But before the social, cultural, and political movements and forces of the 1960s, very little literature by writers of color was institutionalized and/or in print. For example, before the 1970s, Three Negro Classics, comprising of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man, was the most visible text by African Americans readily available. Although Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1953) remained in print, the bulk of African American literature was out of print until the 1970s. Although American Indians had been writing fiction, which was also consistently out of print, since the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was the publication of N. Scott Momaday's (Kiowa) House Made of Dawn in 1968, which garnered the Pulitzer Prize for literature, Vine Deloria, Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins in 1969, and Dee Brown's best-selling revisionist historical account Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) that initiated a renaissance in Native American history and literature in the 1970s. And although there were scattered out-of-print literary and autobiographical texts by Asian American writers from the early and middle parts of the twentieth century such as Korean-American Younghill Kang's The Grass Roof (1931) and East Goes West (1937), Japanese-American John Okada's No-No Boy (1957), Chinese-American Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), and some autobiographies (Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, 1945, and Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter, 1953), Asian American literature becomes visible and begins to emerge as a legitimate field of inquiry with the publication of some ground-breaking anthologies and of Maxine Hong [End Page 173] Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976). The situation with Latino/a literature in print was equally as dismal. As the Hispanic Recovery Project informs us, there were unpublished and/or out-of-print Mexican/Mexican American testimonials at the turn of the twentieth century. But before the 1960s there were only a scattering of Latino/a texts in print such as Pocho (1959) by the Mexican American writer Jose Antonio Villareal. But with the transformative Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and early 1970s—including the Chicano movement and the groundbreaking work of the Chicano/a Arts movement, the Puerto Rican labor activist movement and the Nuyorican Arts movement, American Indian Movement (AIM) and the American Indian literary renaissance, the nationalist/Black Power and Black Arts movements, the Asian American movement, and the Women's movement, the 1970s and 1980s were renaissance periods for the literatures of American Indians, Latinos/as, African Americans, and Asian Americans. Thus, by the late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s the literature of writers of color in the U.S. had grown and matured, successfully challenging and transforming American literature, which continues until today. The literatures that emerged from this period were further developed and institutionalized with the re-printing of pre-1960s literary texts, the establishment of ethnic studies programs and departments on the campuses of American colleges and universities, and the inclusion of ethnic literature in mainstream American literature courses, allowing the literatures to be taught, studied, assessed, written about, and therefore to remain in print. Although some of the literatures written by people of color in the 1960s and 1970s overtly protested institutional, legal, and de facto racism, and captured the experiences of oppression/victimization, of colonization, and of the pain and confusion of being caught between two cultures, by the 1980s and 1990s many writers of color had come to assume the centrality of their race or ethnicity in their literature. This shift allowed them to move beyond protest, the white gaze, and the various binaries that positioned them as lower halves of binary oppositions, to take on the literary styles and issues of modernity/post-modernity, to...

«Хижина дяди Тома» Гарриет Бичер-Стоу в восприятии афроамериканцев

The paper gives a survey of the main stages in African American interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. After the publication of the novel, African American periodicals in the USA and Canada were publishing a wide range of reviews, essays, poems, and sketches reacting to Stowe’s book. Frederick Douglass was praising the book in his newspaper; there appeared, however, some aggressively critical responses, such as three letters by Martin Delany, a Black radial activist, written to the Frederick Douglass’ Newspaper in 1853. The argument of Delany and Douglass became a matrix for the further polemic based on the opposition of integrationist and afrocentrist approaches to the novel. This binary opposition remains practically unchanged until the Harlem renaissance, when African American writers and scholars (J. Weldon Johnson, W. S. Braithwaite, W. Thurman) become more critical, describing the novel as full of humiliating stereotypes, and its author as totally unable to properly understand and depict the Black race. The turning point in the assessment of the novel in the 20 th century was Richard Wright’s collection of short stories Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and James A. Baldwin’s essay Everybody’s Protest Novel (1949) – a criticism of “protest fiction” from Beecher Stowe to Richard Wright. Baldwin’s essay heralded the shift towards the Sixties hostile crusade against “uncle Tomism”, when Stowe’s protagonist was referred to as a symbol of servility and race betrayal, which was a complete inversion of the cultural myth of a Black Messiah that underlies the character. The final part of the paper analyzes the situation in current African American studies and in particular H. L. Gates’s subversive “double-voiced” interpretation of the novel which is in full agreement with the tendency to revise the role of white Abolitionists in the antislavery movement and in the African American history in the 1990–2000s.

African American Haiku: Cultural Visions by John Zheng

238 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews Zheng, John, ed. African American Haiku: Cultural Visions. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. 192pp. ISBN: 978-1496803030. $65.00 Hardcover. In the canon of African American literature, perhaps no form other than the novel is more studied and revered than African American poetry. The dynamic and varied poetry of Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Lucille Clifton are frequently anthologized, however, the haiku is one particular poetic form that is relatively understudied. African American Haiku: Cultural Visions, edited by John Zheng, brings together a diverse collection of previously-published essays on several African American writers who were most prolific and enamored with this form: Richard Wright, James Emanuel, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, and Lenard D. Moore. In his introduction, Zheng acknowledges that this collection is not comprehensive in its scope, but is one of the first volumes devoted to an exploration of the unique contributions these poets have made to reimagining the Japanese poetic form. African American Haiku: Cultural Visions organizes each article in groups based on the author, and Zheng smartly places the more historical articles on each author first, allowing a reader who is unfamiliar with the authors to gain important cultural and literary context. Though the organization aims to introduce the reader to each author’s larger literary legacies and their reasons for embracing and reinventing the haiku form, some of the articles tread similar ground, especially in terms of biographical information.However,the efficacy of the authors’arguments and explorations is not diminished by these redundancies. For example, in the opening section on Richard Wright, both John Zheng’s “The Japanese Influence on Richard Wright’s Haiku” and Sachi Nakachi’s “Richard Wright’s Haiku, or the Poetry of Double Voice” spend the first several pages noting similar biographical information. While Zheng argues for an understanding of Wright’s haikus as “a universal search for an expression of oneness with nature,” Nakachi takes an entirely different approach, instead arguing that Wright’s fascination with haiku is “steeped in emotion and thought” and that Wright “encod[es] his social criticism between the lines,” providing a particularly illuminative discussion of the imagery of lynching in Wright’s haikus (18, 25, 33). As the collection progresses, the articles move from an exploration of each individual author’s fascination with haiku to an understanding of how all of these authors have created their own unique forms inspired by and borrowing from Japanese literature and Eastern philosophy. Yoshinobu Hakutani’s “James Emanuel’s Jazz Haiku and African American Individualism” lays the groundwork for a discussion of the confluence of haiku with African American jazz and blues—a theme revisited throughout the collection—arguing that James Emanuel, as a foundational figure in the creation of the jazz haiku form, translates both the haiku’s and jazz’s emphasis on the “effac[ing] of identity” into an exploration CLA JOURNAL 239 Book Reviews of human desire, a nontraditional subject for haiku (36). Following Hakutani’s article is Virginia Whatley Smith’s “Afro-Asian Syncretism in James Emanuel’s Postmodernist Jazz Haiku”; and, though her article in its opening paragraphs seems to be a reiteration of Hakutani’s, in her recognition of Emanuel as creator of the jazz haiku, she broadens her argument, asking her readers to understand Emanuel’s influence in a larger context of “Afro-Orientalism,” a confluence of cultural literary influences that create an elevated, cross-cultural art form (85). A particularly compelling argument presented in the volume is Claude Wilkinson’s “‘No Square Poet’s Job’: Improvisation in Etheridge Knight’s Haiku,” in which he continues the thematic exploration of jazz and blues influences in Etheridge Knight’s prison haikus and argues that Knight, through a reimagining of his incarcerated environment with natural imagery and metaphors, reinvents the haiku form’s emphasis on an understanding of oneness with nature and thus develops a“populist aesthetic”that made the haiku accessible to a broader audience (92). Wilkinson’s discussion of Knight’s work is so engaging that it does leave the reader questioning why Knight is the only author included in the volume who has only one article examining his work, especially considering the...

The black community portrayal in toni morrison: the bluest eye (1970), sula (1973) and song of solomon (1977)

This paper aims at investigating Toni Morrison’s endeavor to locate the black community’s actions in three of her novels: The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), and Song of Solomon (1977). Toni Morrison’s novels have particularly depicted the black community from a specific perspective, the one that is largely defined and shared by the dominant white society and its standards. The Bluest Eye sets in Morrison’s hometown, Lorain, Ohio. In this novel, the black community in Lorain is separated from the upper-class white community, also known as Lake Shore Park, a place where blacks are not permitted. As for Sula the setting is a small town in Ohio, located on a hillside known as “Bottom”. Song of Solomon plunges the reader into the absorbing black community, a standalone entity, but yet never far removed from the white world. The first pages of the novel describe “Not Doctor Street” and “No Mercy Hospital”. These names are used within the African-American community but are unofficial and not recognized by the white city rulers who instead identify them as Mains Avenue and Mercy Hospital. In short, the setting for Song of Solomon is an anonymous city in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The study has revealed that there always exists a white community bordering the black community as its standard and a machine to repress and exploit its people. This parallel which is actually a quest for identity is omnipresent in Morrison’s novels surely because she is an African American writer.