African-American Literature and Culture – serie

The (Underground) Railroad in African American Literature offers a brief history of the African American experience of the railroad and the uses of railroad history by a wide assortment of twentieth-century African American poets, dramatists, and fiction writers. Moreover, this literary history examines the ways in which trains, train history, and legendary train figures such as Harriet Tubman and John Henry have served as literary symbols. This repeated use of the train symbol and associated train people in twentieth-century African American literature creates a sense of literary continuity and a well-established aesthetic tradition all too frequently overlooked in many traditional approaches to the study of African American writing. The metaphoric possibilities associated with the railroad and the persistence of the train as a literary symbol in African American writing demonstrates the symbol’s ongoing literary value for twentieth-century African American writers – writers who invite their readers to look back at the various points in history where America got off track, and who also dare to invite their readers to imagine an alternate route for the future.

This collection of essays critically interrogates Toni Morrison’s use of the Bible in her novels, examining the ways in which the author plays on the original text to raise issues of spirituality as it affects race, gender, and class. Ideal for courses on Morrison or on explorations of the intersection of religion and literature, this collection treats its topic with sophistication, considering «religion» in its broadest possible sense, and examining syncretic theologies as well as mainstream religions in its attempt to locate Morrison’s work in a spiritual-theological nexus.

As a poet, playwright, novelist, short-story writer, and critic, Gayl Jones has always resisted labels in her quest to find a liberating voice for black women and herself. With a poet’s lyricism and a musician’s ear for rhythm, she continually seeks new ways to confront the barriers, traumas, insecurities, and prejudices oppressing black women, and, by extension, all women. After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones is the first comprehensive collection of essays dedicated solely to the exploration of Jones’s work. Ranging from analyses of her use of language and music to reevaluations of her representation of sexuality and gender roles to examinations of the oft-overlooked connections between Latin America and African Americans, each of these essays investigates Jones’s desire to continually complicate the process of identity formation.

In this provocative and original exploration of racial subjugation and its aftermath, Carlyle Van Thompson illumines the racialized sexual desire that reduces Black people to commodities for consumption. Eating the Black Body examines the often-sadistic forms of sexual violence during the period of slavery and its aftermath. By looking at one poem and three novels – Richard Wright’s Between the World and Me, John Oliver Killens’ Youngblood, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred – that examine slavery and the Jim Crow period, Thompson investigates a wide variety of Black bodies as sites of miscegenation and sexual desire. Thompson also examines a horrific case of White male police brutality in New York City in which a Black man was sodomized. Bold and persuasively argued, Eating the Black Body will engage readers in a broad range of literary, historical, and cultural studies.

In this provocative and original exploration of Black males and the legal establishment, Carlyle Van Thompson illuminates the critical issues defining Black male subjectivity. Since the days of Black people’s enslavement and the days of Jim Crow segregation, Black males have been at odds with the legal and extra-legal restrictions that would maintain white supremacy and white male privilege. Grounded in the voices of Frederick Douglass and David Walker, who challenged hegemonic systems designed to socio-economically disenfranchise Black people, Black Outlaws examines legal aspects with regard to Black males during the period of segregation. By critically looking at Richard Wright’s The Outsider, Chester Bomar Himes’ The Third Generation, Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, and Ernest J. Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying – all of which examine Black males during the Jim Crow period – Thompson investigates the challenges that Black males confront and surmount in their journeys to establish their individual and collective agency. Black Outlaws helps decipher critical legal and racial issues in the works of four of the most important Black male writers, and is suitable for readers in literary studies, cultural studies, and history.

Contemporary African American dramatists such as Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, August Wilson, and Suzan-Lori Parks as well as Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, and Pearl Cleage find their creative inspiration in historical events from slavery to the civil rights movement. From the Emmett Till-inspired character in Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie to Parks’s recreation of Lincoln and Booth, these playwrights show that history is the mirror that shapes the identities of African American writers and characters.

Race Riots and Resistance uncovers a long-hidden, tragic chapter of American history. Focusing on the «Red Summer» of 1919 in which black communities were targeted by white mobs, the book examines the contexts out of which white racial violence arose. It shows how the riots transcended any particularity of cause, and in doing so calls into question many longstanding beliefs about racial violence. The book goes on to portray the riots as a phenomenon, documenting the number of incidents, describing the events in detail, and analyzing the patterns that emerge from looking at the riots collectively. Finally and significantly, Race Riots and Resistance argues that the response to the riots marked an early stage of what came to be known as the Civil Rights Movement.

Race Riots and Resistance uncovers a long-hidden, tragic chapter of American history. Focusing on the «Red Summer» of 1919 in which black communities were targeted by white mobs, the book examines the contexts out of which white racial violence arose. It shows how the riots transcended any particularity of cause, and in doing so calls into question many longstanding beliefs about racial violence. The book goes on to portray the riots as a phenomenon, documenting the number of incidents, describing the events in detail, and analyzing the patterns that emerge from looking at the riots collectively. Finally and significantly, Race Riots and Resistance argues that the response to the riots marked an early stage of what came to be known as the Civil Rights Movement.

Since her forced migration to the United States, the African American woman has consciously developed a literary tradition based on fundamental evolutionary principles of mind and body. She has consistently resisted attempts by patriarchs and matriarchs alike to romanticize and redefine that biologically-based literary heritage. This volume of ten classic texts, including such nineteenth-century writers as Jarena Lee, Harriet Jacobs, and Angelina Grimké, documents for teachers and general readers how African American female self-portraits gradually crystallized over some three centuries of brutality imposed by white men and their surrogates, who legally raped and then branded her immoral, precisely because she was black and female. This anthology also explores how her literary features were further defined during the postbellum era of Jim Crow segregation and civil rights abuses. Readers cannot adequately understand this woman’s unique story without learning how and, more importantly, why mental and physical atrocities so gruesome that most people cringe to think of them were inflicted upon her black female self in this land.

Since her forced migration to the United States, the African American woman has consciously developed a literary tradition based on fundamental evolutionary principles of mind and body. She has consistently resisted attempts by patriarchs and matriarchs alike to romanticize and redefine that biologically-based literary heritage. This volume of ten classic texts, including such nineteenth-century writers as Jarena Lee, Harriet Jacobs, and Angelina Grimké, documents for teachers and general readers how African American female self-portraits gradually crystallized over some three centuries of brutality imposed by white men and their surrogates, who legally raped and then branded her immoral, precisely because she was black and female. This anthology also explores how her literary features were further defined during the postbellum era of Jim Crow segregation and civil rights abuses. Readers cannot adequately understand this woman’s unique story without learning how and, more importantly, why mental and physical atrocities so gruesome that most people cringe to think of them were inflicted upon her black female self in this land.

When Black runway models began throwing phones and VH1’s «Divas Live» riveted viewers, a new paradigm for Black women had fully evolved in the form of the Black Diva. Tracing the trajectory of the Diva figure from the Italian castrati to Ntozake Shange’s Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter suggests a way around staid and fixed stereotypes about Black womanhood. The Black Diva performs her demands as a quintessential act of survival in a hostile and racist world; she is both a product of and a mark against the male gaze, Black and white. Ultimately, Tipping on a Tightrope: Divas in African American Literature uses present popular culture incarnations of the Diva to detail her long relationship with Black American literary culture.

The new edition of The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination offers a fresh perspective on this trail blazing scholarship, and the singular importance of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as a challenge to the racial hegemony of biological white supremacy. Fitzgerald convincinglyand boldly shows how racial passing by light-skinned Black individuals becomes the most fascinating literary trope associated with democracy and the enduring desire for the American Dream.

Zora Neale Hurston produced some of the most provocative literature of the twentieth century. This book examines the numerous scenes of violence against women in her fictional works and the development of her feminist ideals. This groundbreaking book is the first full-length discussion of Hurston’s repetitive rendering of violently controlled women. It gives significant insight into why Hurston’s themes often questioned the power dynamics of heterosexual relationships. It also explores the effect of death and loss on Hurston’s life and reveals intertwined relationships between writing and healing.

Black Women’s Activism is the first book-length study of African American women’s historical romances. This book examines romances written from 1989 to the present, and discusses their black heroines’ resistance at particular moments in history – from the colonization movement to the Texas oil boom. Socio-historical perspectives, a womanist agenda, and an African-centered outlook inform the readings of female characters in the narratives of Francine Craft, Gay G. Gunn, Shirley Hailstock, Beverly Jenkins, and Anita Richmond Bunkley. Broadening the scope of the historical romance genre, and expanding the canon of African American literature, this book provides a more comprehensive image of the black female character and addresses gender issues previously unexplored in black fiction. This text should be used by librarians, historians, literary critics, writers, college- and graduate-level students, teachers, and romance readers.

The Black community has historically suffered stasis on the political level. W.E.B. Du Bois originally identified the source of the stasis as a contradiction of political goals within individuals and Black culture. During the last century, the development of African American political organizations has institutionalized this «contradiction of double aims». That institutionalization is largely due to the energy and resources of two distinct and often contradicting political traditions – Black nationalism and the Black American Jeremiad. It is within a third tradition, Black cultural pluralism, that a possible discourse exists that can address the stasis within the Black community. This book attempts to reconstruct the development of this third tradition and posits it as the most viable source of Black political development.

The Songs Became the Stories: The Music in African-American Fiction, 1970–2005 is a sequel to The Music in African-American Fiction, which traced the representation of music in fiction from its mid-nineteenth-century roots in slave narratives through the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. The Songs Became the Stories continues the historical, critical and musicological analyses of the first book through an examination of many of the major figures in African-American fiction over the past thirty-five years, including Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Nathaniel Mackey, Alice Walker, Albert Murray and John Edgar Wideman. The volume also includes an extensive annotated discography and excerpts from first-hand interviews with major African-American musical artists.