African American Writers Research Articles

The African-American Poets' Struggle for the Rights of People: A Study in Claude McKay's Selected Poems

This study scrutinizes selected protest poems written by the prominent black poet of the Harlem Renaissance Claude McKay (1889-1948). McKay is considered as a key literary figure of the Negro movement who played a significant role in struggling for and awakening his own people to demand their rights. His major aspiration was to end all forms of prejudice and oppression against blacks portrayed in his poems during the most effective movement in African American literary history comprising the times between 1920 to almost the mid-1930s. McKay established himself as a powerful literary voice for social justice during the Harlem Renaissance constantly struggling for people's identity and rights against the widespread prejudice, segregation, and racism against blacks in America and worldwide along with his pride in his black race and culture. These central issues had different impacts on the Harlem Renaissance and on the lives and works of those who participated in that movement; depicting how both race and racism could define the African American experience in the early twentieth century, as well. McKay, skillfully combined traditional forms and political protest in many of his sonnets. He took the old poetic genre and made it new and relevant to his own project by examining within its bounds unconventional and contemporary subjects. Along with his poetic diction and imagery, he juxtaposes contrasting images to show the hypocritic nature of America, showing his inevitable faith in the country. McKay's enthusiasm for and belief in the authority of intellectuals was strengthened by his understanding of America's deep-rooted racism. He closes many of his sonnets with gloomy observations of blacks' sufferings. The clear conclusion of his struggle was the fact that negro writers succeeded in showcasing the sufferings of people, incited blacks to demand their legal rights, and proved they are capable of everything and as genius as whites. Keywords: McKay, Struggles, Racism, identity, prejudice, rights.

Maya Angelou: biografia e crônica social em Eu sei por que o pássaro canta na gaiola

Neste estudo pretendemos analisar a autobiografia Eu sei por que o pássaro canta na gaiola, da escritora afro-estadunidense Maya Angelou, sob a perspectiva da filosofia da linguagem de Mikhail Bakhtin e seu Círculo, utilizando-nos, sobretudo, de conceitos-chave como exotopia e dialogismo. Além disso, tencionamos destacar o caráter social do gênero discursivo em questão, que, neste caso, permite à autora narrar sobre o vivido de modo subjetivo ao mesmo tempo que conta a história do sujeito afro-estadunidense e suas lutas e resistências, entrelaçando o discurso pessoal da biografia ao social. Enfatizar as vozes femininas no romance e seu protagonismo também é ponto relevante de nosso estudo, visto que a escritora conta a sua história com o objetivo claro de demonstrar que, embora haja especificidade subjetiva, há também uma espécie de destino comum das mulheres afro-estadunidenses. Por meio de uma prosa positiva e otimista, pode-se observar que as vicissitudes da vida não enfraquecem a resistência negra nos EUA.

Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name as an Autoethnography

Audre Lorde’s Zami (1982) is an autobiographical novel in which the author draws extensively on her life experiences as an African American lesbian writer. Due to the autobiographical dimensions within the work, scholars have previously critiqued Zami as a genre text, reading the book specifically as a female memoir, a lesbian novel, a queer coming- out Bildungsroman, a slave narrative or, broadly, a novel of black feminism. Beyond these conventional approaches, this essay instead focuses on some of the ways in which Lorde’s personal experiences and memories are comprehensively shifted into larger rubrics (cultural, political) in both realistic and abstract styles. Taking a poststructuralist approach to language and the world on one side, while identifying ancestral, cultural, and mythic strata on the other, Lorde violates any so-called conventional form of autobiography. Read in these critical contexts, Zami can be critiqued as a counter-narrative actively transgressing a suite of oppressions. This is no simple autobiography, and at the intersection of conflicting forces, there appears her relationship with her mother, a connection which serves as a symbolic nexus wherein the personal and the collective are combined. When read through an autoethnographic lens, ostensibly contradictory impulses are reconciled: Zami stages and codifies narratives of both oppression and liberation.

A Comparative Study on the Chauvinism of Nationalist Discourse in Selected Poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Maya Angelou and Rudyard Kipling

Poststructuralists, such as Foucault, conceived discourse as "a form of power that circulates in the social field and can attach to strategies of domination as well as those of resistance" (Diamond & Quinby, 1988, p. 185). Discourse denotes a system of thought through which knowledge is produced, truth is constructed and maintained, and power relations are redefined. The current article examines the nationalist discourse disseminated and adopted in selected poems by the Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish, African American writer Maya Angelou and British writer Rudyard Kipling. Nationalist discourse, the article argues, usually revives the sense of resistance, self-esteem and pride in the subaltern groups of the colonized and the oppressed but breeds a quest for expansion and domination in the colonizer. It holds overt and covert chauvinistic implications that necessarily deepen interracial conflicts. The chauvinistic aspects associated with the poems include an emphasis on the hierarchy of races, race-based division of the world's continents, and homogeneity of races and cultures. The comparisons the article makes proceed from the essential representation of self and other and the subsequent feelings of disrespect, distrust and fear that characterize the attitudes and perspectives of people identifying with different cultures and homelands. The article questions the dominant narratives underlying national identity in colonial and anti-colonial contexts. It further questions the monolithic concept of home, which nationalists advance to fuel colonial expansion or anti-colonial resistance. The article finds that racial and cultural chauvinism lies at the core of the nationalist discourse the selected poems reproduce.

XVI American Literature: The Twentieth Century

AbstractThis 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; section 2 will resume next year; section 3 is by Mary Foltz; section 4 is by Sophie Maruéjouls-Koch; section 5 is by Orion Ussner Kidder and Anna F. Peppard; section 6 will resume next year; section 7 is by James Gifford and Lindsay Parker; section 8 will resume next year.

The Civil War Dead and American ModernityBattle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil WarI Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War LettersThe Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White

The Civil War Dead and American ModernityBattle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil WarI Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War LettersThe Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White

Harlem Renaissance Literary Productions: Context, Role, Philosophy and Objective In “The Negro’s Tragedy”

This paper aims to show and analyze how through “an outstanding poetic creation”, Claude McKay describes clearly the context, role, philosophy and objective of the Harlem Renaissance literary productions while describing his own role and vocation as an African American writer. Indeed by describing his own role as a pioneer of the Harlem Renaissance Movement, “this assertive poem” is actually a précis and paradigm of the motives and chart gathering all those black pioneer writers engaged in this literary movement. This paper provides, through the hermeneutic study of this symptomatic sonnet about the Negro’s tragedy; an analysis of the context in which the Harlem Renaissance literary productions had been produced, the role of those literary productions, the main philosophy surrounding the literary productions of this Black Movement and finally the objective targeted by those literary productions. The hermeneutic approach is sustained by the socio-criticism, African American criticisms and stylistics theories to better characterize the semantic and social scope of this poem.

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

Christianity’s Last Stand: Visions of Spirituality in Post-1970 African American Women’s Literature

Christianity appealed to writers of African descent from the moment they set foot on New World soil. That attraction, perhaps as a result of the professed mission of slaveholders to “Christianize the heathen African,” held sway in African American letters well into the twentieth century. While African American male writers joined their female counterparts in expressing an attraction to Christianity, black women writers, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, consistently began to express doubts about the assumed altruistic nature of a religion that had been used as justification for enslaving their ancestors. Lorraine Hansberry’s Beneatha Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959) initiated a questioning mode in relation to Christianity that continues into the present day. It was especially after 1970 that black women writers turned their attention to other ways of knowing, other kinds of spirituality, other ways of being in the world. Consequently, they enable their characters to find divinity within themselves or within communities of extra-natural individuals of which they are a part, such as vampires. As this questioning and re-conceptualization of spirituality and divinity continue into the twenty-first century, African American women writers make it clear that their characters, in pushing against traditional renderings of religion and spirituality, envision worlds that their contemporary historical counterparts cannot begin to imagine.

African American Literature and the Politics of the Archive

ABSTRACT Jean-Christophe Cloutier's book combines close readings of literary texts by African American writers with rigorous attention to the practices and politics of the archive. He identifies a particular “archival sensibility” developed by Black artists at a time (roughly between the end of the Harlem Renaissance and the advent of the Black Arts Movement) when institutional interest in their work was often negligible. In doing so, Cloutier invites the reader to reflect upon how archives continue to shape (and often reshape) the legacies of Black writers today.

Brotherman, Family, and Legacies: Recognizing the Contributions of African American Independent Comic Book Writers and Artists

African Americans produced many comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels during the twentieth century but their works were rarely recognized in reviews of mainstream and independently published comics until recently. These efforts to acknowledge Black comics creatives and their contributions to the industry must continue. This article participates in the ongoing effort to capture and share the experiences of African American creatives in the independent comic book publishing industry by placing a spotlight on the author and co-creator of the Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline (1990–1996) comic book series, Guy A. Sims. The Brotherman brand is part of a long legacy of inspirational media from independent Black producers. Guy’s early experiences provided him with tangible examples of successful Black-owned media companies that were creating content for Black audiences. His most important influence was his father, Dr. Edward Sims, Jr. Edward introduced young Guy to the works of Richard Wright for inspiration. He also engaged his son in questions that further inspired his creativity. Brotherman now serves as a source of inspiration to multiple generations of new comic book artists and writers.

Listening to Silence: Approaching a Discursive Void Addressed in Alice Walker's Novels

This study attempts to discern the meaning of unspoken works related to both African and African American women as presented in the novels of the leading African American writer, Alice Walker. Therefore, the discourse of the silence is central to the study. It deploys different concepts from linguistic and critical theories and offers a close reading of relevant parts of the texts to grab the discursive void, evaporating the very generic experience of African originated women in America or elsewhere. Correspondingly, it contributes to Black Feminist discourse by registering into academia the systematic discussion of ignored, collateral experience of Black women. The study concedes that in mainstream academia the absence of discussion regarding Black women’s suppression, oppression, and commodification is, in fact, multi-patterned primarily caused by the intersectional systems of racism, sexism, and classism which Walker delineate with. Exploring and naming out that silence generating factors, this paper gives words to the traumatic wound conserved deep in the collective unconscious of Black women as a whole. While exploring those reasons, it argues that pulling those women’s issues off the discussion is more a politicised venture than anything else of western academia.

A History of the African American NovelAfrican American Writing: A Literary Approach

A History of the African American NovelAfrican American Writing: A Literary Approach

Jazz as the Narrative Mode in Toni Morrison’s <i>Jazz</i>

Toni Morrison is the first black American woman writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, for her novel Jazz . In this novel, Morrison ventures a unique narrative mode, the mode of Jazz music. The very name Jazz takes one’s imagination to the world of music and entertainment. Music and Fiction are two entirely different genres. The first one depends on oral quality and the second on print. In Jazz , Morrison skillfully relates these two different genres by blending her language into that music harmoniously. Her versatility lies in the unique combination of the vital Jazz music and the untold tragedy of the black community which is uprooted and relegated to the secondary status. Morrison, in Jazz , by using the complexity and various key elements of Jazz like Polyphony, Improvisation etc., depicts the experiences of the black community in the city of New York during the 1920s, known as the Jazz Age.

“A History We Can Neither Accept nor Deny: Feeding and Purging the Spirits in Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes”

This essay examines Maya Angelou’s 1980 memoir All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes. From 1962 to 1965, Angelou was part of a community of African American writers, artists, intellectuals, and activists who settled in Ghana as its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, seemed poised to usher in a new era of pan-African unity. Hoping to situate her identity within this dream of global pan-Africanism, Angelou narrates her relationship to Africa through the trope of diaspora-as-family. Her use of this metaphor, however, is complicated by her growing awareness of the involvement of Africans in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as both victims and participants. While other scholarship on All God’s Children focuses on Angelou’s supposed inability to achieve a diasporan identity, I argue that Angelou is successfully able to come to terms with the trauma of the middle passage by listening to the “voices” of her enslaved ancestors (as they emerge within her own consciousness), and participating in an indigenous Ewe mourning ritual that she inadvertently precipitates. As a result of these experiences, Angelou comes to realize that while narration is important to the formation of both identity and community, African-descended people living in the Americas must first grapple with a historical trauma that exceeds the limits of narration. It is only when Angelou realizes this that she allows herself to be receptive to the spectral voices of her enslaved ancestors and the power of mourning to forge community across divides of time and place.

Color around the Globe: Langston Hughes and Black Internationalism in China

AbstractLangston Hughes was the first African American writer to set foot on Chinese soil. Having visited Mexico, Europe, and West Africa before he turned twenty-two, Hughes eventually also made his way to the Soviet Union, Japan, and China in 1933. At the age of thirty-one, he accomplished what none of his contemporaries or predecessors had been able to achieve—to rewrite the public image of African Americans in the Chinese cultural and intellectual imagination. Crucially, his visit to China pushed beyond the limits of black internationalism as he responded to American and European global hegemony through using China as an experimental ground. At a time when the Soviet Union held center stage in communist revolutionary thought, Hughes's Chinese encounters challenged the assumption within the American and African American communities that China was largely irrelevant in the discourse of proletarianism. The internationalist perspectives that he obtained from the sojourn offered him a powerful tool to communicate the struggles of black citizenship at home in a global context. It stimulated a racial consciousness that defied national, geographical, and political boundaries of the US color line.

THE USE OF ZOONYMS AS EMOTIONALLY-ATTITUDINAL UNITS
 FOR THE PEOPLE’S DESCRIPTION IN AFRO-AMERICAN CULTURE
 (based on the novel «Sula» by T. Morrison)

The amount of linguistic research, dedicated to the study of lexical units based on the names of animal world’s representatives, grows every year. One of the reasons for this particular interest lies in the lack of sufficient theoretical base
 which could enable scientists to systematize the necessary cultural and sociolinguistic data.
 Researchers consider animals’ names in searching for the cultural code of a definite ethnic group, as well as pointing out specifics of the figurative component of thematic groups included in zoonyms. This approach allows them to examine
 those additional meanings that a certain lexical unit acquires within the stated national culture. The consideration of the corresponding units in the context of African-American writers’ works is of great interest within the originality of the plots
 themselves, as well as the folkloristic and mythological background found in the majority of the constructions with the zoonym element. The novel «Sula» by an outstanding
 writer Tony Morrison is one of these works. The writer’s texts are based on unique cultural and historical experience of African-Americans, specifics of their self-knowledge with an inherent belief in magic and myth. This article examines the termbase used for the analysis of zoonymocontaining
 lexical units. The most frequent nominations used for the evaluation of human characteristics and actions are demonstrated and described on the basis of the selected examples. Three categories of nomination (age, behavior, appearance) are considered in greater detail. The author of the article makes a conclusion about the frequency of the constructions with negative, neutral and positive connotations within the stated groups, as well as their usage for the description of a person's preferred and criticized qualities.

Editors’ Letter

Editors’ Letter

Zora's Legacy: Black Love as Critical and Creative Inquiry

Zora's Legacy: Black Love as Critical and Creative Inquiry

George S. Schuyler's “Shafts and Darts”: The Messenger Years, 1923-1924

George S. Schuyler's “Shafts and Darts”: The <i>Messenger</i> Years, 1923-1924