The following is for a Modern African American Literature class I am in. There was a lot of work and research into this so I hope all of you enjoy reading this and it is my hope that now i have inspired you to go boy a book or two or more by African American Authors!
African American literature locates
its beginnings to the latter half of the 18th century when the African American
population was sadly still an enslaved one. Slaves were viewed, by the vast
majority of society, as subhuman and incapable of mastering “the arts and
sciences.” Their inferiority was even emphasized by prominent white
philosophers of the time. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay note in
their introduction to The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Hume
suspected “‘negroes . . . to be naturally inferior to the whites’” with no
“ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences” (Gates).
However, as Gates and McKay further note, “African American slaves, remarkably,
sought to write themselves out of slavery by mastering the Anglo-American
belletristic tradition” (Gates) and it is this
thought that permeates early African American Literature. The main intention of
early African American writing was to exhibit that they could create literature
that matched or surpassed that of the white community, proving African
Americans to be “full and equal members” of society (Gates).
Even after African Americans began creating
a body of creative literature, they still faced disparagement from prominent
members of white society. Thomas Jefferson, for example, in his Notes on the
State of Virginia made disparaging remarks about the poems of the first
published African American female poet, Phillis Wheatley:
"Misery is often
the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery
enough, God knows, but not poetry. … Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis
Wheatley; but it could not produce a poet’" (Delpit).
Moreover, African American writers strived
for recognition as authors. Wheatley, for example, had to go to court in Boston
in 1761 to prove that she was the author of her poems (Delpit).
Unfortunately, having the court verify her authorship did not help because
Boston printers continued to be dubious. Therefore, she had to get her work
published in London first.
Since Wheatley’s arrival on the
literary scene, African American writers have continuously struggled to define
themselves, their craft, and their culture, and to face resistance from a
predominantly white reading public. Even as late as 1970, at our own Kent State
University, a well-known, respected scholar
and member of a thesis committee resigned when Ralph Ellison became an approved
dissertation topic. The nonconformist member stated that Ellison was not a
literary heavyweight and that to focus an entire dissertation on him would be
like addressing the “‘wings of a gnat’” (Delpit).
Only in recent years have we met mainstream acceptance of African American
authors, such as poet Maya Angelou, who spoke at President Bill Clinton’s
inauguration in 1993, or Toni Morrison, who won a Nobel Prize for literature in
1993 (Delpit).
Despite the rising significance of African American
literature, black authors have shared a common responsibility over time that of
representing not only themselves but the African American race as well.
Maintaining the position of what it means to be black in America permitted authors
to establish an African American identity that transcended the individual. By
cultivating what Carter G. Woodson referred to as “‘the public Negro mind’” (Gates), authors were able
to prove the intellectual potential of blacks.
In sum, African American history and literature are fundamentally
connected. African American literature, as a genre, “testified against [African
slaves’] captors,” “bore witness to the urge to be free and literate, [and] …
embraced the European Enlightenment’s dream of reason and the American
Enlightenment’s dream of civil liberty” (Smith).
This growing body of work meant that the African was indeed human and should
not be enslaved. African Americans today continue to write in an effort to
honor and acknowledge that legacy. The “black voice” that Wheatley aimed to
unearth is the same voice that is present in the works of artists like Ralph
Ellison, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison (Smith). Regardless of changes
in American culture and the passage of time, the themes that were present in
the 18th century slave writings continue to be explored and discussed in
contemporary works.
Within the he Vernacular Tradition
reside oral traditions that exert a strong influence on African American
culture and literature in particular. The Norton Anthology of African American
Literature defines the vernacular as that which:
“Refers
to the church songs, blues, ballads, sermons, stories, and … hip hop songs that are part of the oral,
not primarily the literate (or written-down) tradition of black expression”
(Gates).
Describing the scope of African American vernacular as
well as its detailed aspects has generated much discussion and debate over the
years. One main quality of the vernacular is its disregard for the rules of
grammar and “high style” that was a key element to the Harlem Renaissance. Authoress
Zora Neale Hurston, in her “Characteristics
of Negro Expression”, which was written in 1934, describes African American
vernacular as “angular” and “asymmetrical” (Delpit). Other traits of
vernacular expression include a call-response pattern and meter that sound like
a percussive dance-beat. Subject matter often involves facing the troubles and
hardships of life and the possibility of overcoming them (Smith).
Gates points out the competitive and subversive nature of the vernacular, using
the term “signifying.” In his argument, writers like Toni Morrison signify by
drawing on past traditions while reinventing them for their own purpose (Gates)itself the art of the
vernacular.
African American vernacular dates
back to the oral and musical traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries (Wikipedia). Early anthologies
of black literature, such as “The New
Negro,” written in 1925, and “The
Book of American Negro Poetry”, written in 1931, discuss the significance of
black songs and stories to many black authors, especially poets (Gates). In the late 1930s,
there was an attempt not only to imitate vernacular, but also to improve upon it.
Authors such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison invited authors to do for
black literature what T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein did for white
culture—that is, to portray the essence of vernacular, enhance it, and turn it
into something new (Gates).
The Black Arts Movement reflected this interest in the vernacular in its re-discovery
of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Previously, the
vernacular was viewed as superficially valuable only to the working class, but
it now emerged as central to the creation of a self-contained African American
nation.
Keeping this history in mind,
several questions remain to be answered. In an increasingly globalized world,
is black vernacular any longer authentically, strictly African American? For
example, hip-hop, vernacular that is African American in origin, now crosses
racial lines easily. Thus, is it still a discourse shared only by African
Americans? To what extent can an understanding of the black vernacular occur
outside of the African American community? For some, answering these questions
in the affirmative risks hampering new understandings of the cultural hybridity
of the form.
The Literature of Slavery and
Freedom, written and produced between 1746-1865
in which early African American authors such as Phillis Wheatley,
Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, and James M. Whitfield “challenged the dominant
culture’s attempt to segregate the religious from the political, and the spirit
from the flesh” (Finn).
Their literature was a mechanism used to voice the inequalities they
experienced and observed, and written language, especially the slave
narratives, was a valuable tool for black authors who struggled to end slavery
through the dissemination of antislavery propaganda throughout the North and
South. Ideals from the Bible along with America’s most sacred, prized documents
and songs, the U.S. Constitution and “America
the Beautiful,” to name two—were used by African American writers to prove
the duplicitous standards, behaviors, and beliefs white Americans exhibited to
African Americans (Finn).
With regard to spirituality, writers like Wheatley and Equiano petitioned their
readers to heed the Christian message of brotherhood regardless of race or
ethnicity (Gates).
Authors such as Walker and Whitfield pointed out the irony that white
Americans, who fought and struggled against tyranny, subsequently imposed a
tyrannical hold on African Americans (Finn).
The rationalizations that white Americans used to impose slavery, that blacks
were subhuman, unintelligent, pagan, and immoral, were difficulties that early
African American writers sought to contradict. The writings of early African
American writers proved that blacks were capable of “literary expression” and
thus possessed “civilized minds” (Gates).
Arising out of these conditions,
beginning in the 1830s the fugitive slave narrative emerged as a popular
literary form even amongst white audiences who were the primary target audience
in the first place. “The Confessions of
Nat Turner” was published after Nat Turner was hanged for leading a bloody
uprising against white slave owners in Southampton, Virginia, in 1831, and was
the most widely read African American personal narrative of its day (Gates). Although Turner’s
revolt and Confessions led to even more repressive conditions for slaves, slave
narratives continued to dominate the black literary landscape and counted among
its leading figures Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, and William Wells
Brown in the primarily male dominated
genre. In 1845, Douglass’s “Narrative of
the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave”, was written by himself and
offered a significant break from tradition by not allowing his story to be
written, transcribed, or edited by a white supporter as was often the practice
during the time (Gates).
This marked the beginning of a show of independence and self-reliance that had
not been evident in the black literary community before and it would be this
writer independence that would be decades away for African American women
authors (Gates).
The act showed that a black person could produce eloquent prose and could take
part in the abolitionist press on his or her own terms. The era also saw the
emergence of black women slave narrators such as Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner
Truth and Harriet Tubman. These authors gave new dimension to African American
literature, bringing a black woman’s insight and perspective to the forefront
in a way that male authors had previously failed to do as they were not women
and unaware of how to capture that experience in a uniquely feminine voice and
style (Smith).
While the slave narrative was by far
the most common form of African American literature of its day, fiction was and
is also important, with the period between 1850 and 1860 being known as “the
first African American literary renaissance” (Gates).
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin” was published in 1852, and William Wells Brown is credited with
publishing the first full-length African American novel, “Clotel”; or, “The President’s
Daughter” in 1853. What’s more, Samuel Delaney offered readers “the first
black nationalist culture hero in African American literature” in his novel “Blake”; or, “The Huts of America” written in 1859. While Frances E.W. Harper
gave readers the first short story in African American literature, “The Two Offers” also written in 1859 (Gates). Hannah Crafts’s “The Bondwoman’s Narrative “ written
between 1853-1861), Julia C. Collins’s “The
Curse of Caste”; or “The Slave Bride” written in 1856, and Harriet E. Wilson’s “Our Nig”; or, “Sketches from the Life of a Free Black” written in 1859 all vied
for the honor of being the first novel published by an African American woman. Literature, whether autobiography, fiction,
or journalism, was a key weapon in combating slavery during America’s
antebellum era and it was literature that spoke for millions of African
Americans who did not have a voice. Without the contributions of black authors
such as Douglass, Brown, Jacobs, and others, the unjust realities of slavery
might well have been kept in silence.
Following the Civil War, many Americans grappled to acclimate
to the aftermath of slavery and the influx of immigrants to the United States.
Americans were trying to decide how best to achieve a greater and better United
States of America that included equal rights for freed slaves, women, Native
Americans, and recent immigrants (Delpit).
Despite the unrelenting demand to make the nation whole, and notwithstanding the
passage of important laws to protect African Americans, black people faced new
oppressions and discriminations, problems that made the nourishment of an
African American literary presence particularly difficult.
After the abolition of slavery, the Republicans passed
the Reconstruction Act in 1867 to protect freed slaves from the white
supremacist ideologies and policies being enacted in the former Confederacy (Gates). The act also
established the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency that, in addition to other
efforts, opened 4,000 schools which include Fisk, Morehouse, Howard, Atlanta,
Talladega, and Hampton between 1865 and 1870 to help educate the newly freed
slaves (Gates).
From 1865 to 1870, the Reconstruction Congress also passed the 13th, 14th, and
15th amendments. Unfortunately the newly passed legislation making slavery
illegal, establishing equal protection under the law for African Americans, and
enfranchising black men was not imposed throughout all parts of the states, and
the lives of many freed slaves differed little from when they were enslaved.
In 1877, the Democrats regained
power, and they did very little to protect the rights of the freed slaves.
African Americans were then assaulted by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (Wikipedia). These violent acts
and forms of oppressions were supported by the Jim Crow laws, which legalized
segregation and racism. The decrease in rights for African Americans was also
impacted by the fact that many abolitionists, though they condemned slavery,
did not believe in equal rights for blacks (Finn).
Furthermore, the deaths and illnesses of influential African American leaders
such as Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Frances E.W. Harper cost blacks
important national voices, losses that hampered the fight for equality (Gates).
Although African Americans maintained
to participate in the progress of the United States during this time, it was a
time of dissatisfaction, prejudice, and jeopardy. For example, historian John
Hope Franklin notes that more than 2,500 lynching’s occurred in the South in
the last two decades of the 19th century (Gates).
Despite this calamitous period in African American history, many black authors
were still able to publish their work in magazines, newspapers, and
occasionally through an established press (Gates).
African American literature was marked by tales of overcoming trials and
hardships while demonstrating the capabilities of African Americans as authors
despite difficulties being published. Because African American authors had more
difficulty getting their work published, many turned to the African American
press, an institution heavily reliant on African American church leaders.
Through these presses many writers published songs, poems, fiction, and autobiographies
(Delpit).
In slavery, African Americans
overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to survive. During Reconstruction,
former slaves drew on their past as motivation to overcome the current
injustices which they suffered as free men and women and to inspire others to
do the same. Whites could put up a wall, but blacks would climb over it again
and again. They demonstrated perseverance in their lives and in their writing.
By the 1920s in Harlem, New York, as
well as in other northern metropolises, was blooming with African American creativeness.
This era contrasted the poverty and racism African Americans faced with
avant-garde advances in music, dance, art, and literature (Smith).
Although the precise beginning of this artistic renaissance is unknown, many
believe that New York City seduced frustrated African Americans who were
fleeing from the segregation and violence of the South. In search of a better
life that included superior housing and honest wages in the industrial
factories, African Americans migrated in droves. The “Great Migration”
exponentially enlarged black communities across the North, creating a bigger
market for black culture. Jazz and blues, the black music of the South, came to
the North with the migrants and were played in Harlem’s nightclubs and
hotspots. At the same time, whites were becoming increasingly spellbound by
black culture. As all Americans grew more interested in African American
culture, Harlem was dubbed “the Negro capital of the world” (Smith).
Alongside newly established cultural and political
organizations African Americans worked hard for cultural awakening. Writers did
their part to uplift black Americans and develop literary and artistic
traditions in which African Americans could take pride. The author of the
avant-garde “Autobiography of an
Ex-Coloured Man “ written in 1912 encouraged black writers to extricate
themselves from the stereotypes that had imprisoned African American literature (Gates). In Johnson’s
anthology, “Book of American Negro Poetry” written in 1922, writers like
Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, who later would lead the movement that
became the Harlem Renaissance, were showcased (Gates).
In their work, African American
writers challenged problematic struggles regarding black identity, black art,
and the political role of culture. For example, writers taking part in the
renaissance held conflicting views as to how important African heritage should
be to African American writers. Langston Hughes, for example, suggested that
“racial commitment on the part of the black artist” was an idea that black
artists should not soon forget, whereas Cullen suggested “that Africa was a
source of confusion and ambivalence” for black artists (Gates).
Regardless of their opinions on the matter, both Hughes and Cullen believed
that black writers should stay away from too much focus on “the political
constraints that an older generation” (Smith)
had emphasized.
Although the Harlem Renaissance
ended with the advent of the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance was a
remarkable time when African American artists created positive and memorable
standards in all the arts (Smith).
Challenging white paternalism and racism, African-American artists and
intellectuals disregarded mere replication of the styles of Europeans and white
Americans and instead celebrated black pride and creativity. Declaring their
freedom to express themselves as artists and intellectuals, they explored their
identities as black Americans, celebrating the black culture that had emerged
out of slavery and their cultural ties to Africa. The images created during the
Harlem Renaissance and represented African American culture served as
inspiration and comfort to the black artists that succeeded the movement.
Many literary historians use the terms realism,
naturalism and modernism to categorize the various writings produced during
this time. “Realism” is defined as the “faithful reproduction” of reality while
naturalism refers to the “franker, harsher treatment of that reality” (Finn). Modernism, at its
most basic level, denotes “a break with purely representational aesthetics,
with the familiar functions of language and conventions of form” (Finn). Before this time
period, particularly during the 1930s, many black writers focused on the rural
South still imprisoned by Jim Crow and racist violence. Now authors took a
different approach with their writing, and it was clearly very northern and
urban; cities like Chicago, Boston, and New York served as settings for much of
this new writing (Smith).
This period of writing generated a division
in the African American literary circle. While the Harlem Renaissance had
celebrated blackness in an age of debilitating segregation, mid-century writers
wrestled with the production of art in an era moving toward desegregation; an
era when black writing, many believed, could not disengage itself from
politics. Many literary historians and critics credit Richard Wright’s “Native
Son” written in 1940 with setting the tone of this period (Gates).
They emphasize that Wright’s book transformed American culture and African
American writing. Wright himself was judgmental of the African American writing
of the past, especially the Harlem Renaissance. He believed that some black
writers were more concerned with acceptance and doing what white America wanted
them to do instead of social protest. Other writers of the time also voiced
protest. William Attaway’s “Blood on the
Forge” written in 1941, examined the Great Migration from the South to the
North after World War I (Gates). The novel was deemed
one of the most intricate looks at the exploitation of black American workers
in northern steel mills. Chester Himes, in” If
He Hollers Let Him Go “ written in 1945, illuminated the animosity an
educated, northern-born black man faces from lower-class, southern-born whites
as they struggle to work together in a Los Angeles shipyard at the height of
World War II (Gates).
Even though much of the writing of
this time was popular in nature and wanted to increase social consciousness,
many writers who grew up and lived during the Depression had an
“integrationist” attitude and started writing on nonracial subjects. Zora Neale
Hurston’s final novel, “Seraph on the
Suwanee” written in 1948, was labeled as “non-Negro” simply because its
characters are white and its setting is rural. Others, like James Baldwin,
wrote essays attacking the protest form of writing. It was not until Ralph
Ellison’s “Invisible Man” written in
1952 that many critics believed African American writers were able to
“liberate” themselves from naturalism and the protest narrative” (Gates). In writing “Invisible Man”, Ellison argued that his
literary style was not simply influenced by other notable African American
writers such as Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, but also by prominent white
authors such as T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway (Gates).
Because of his acknowledged inspiration by the “Western modernist tradition,”
Ellison received severe disapproval from other African American writers for
“failing to understand that ‘plight and protest’ … ‘are inseparable from Negro
experience’” (Gates). Ellison combated
these attacks by stating, “‘I am a human being, not just the black successor to
Richard Wright’” (Gates).
In a parallel vein, the poetry of
the time sensationalizes the tensions. Many African American writers such as
Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden combined technical skills formed in the
modernist tradition with the themes of protest (Gates).
As the 1960s began, more African American writers answered a resounding “No!”
to his question, whether:
“It shall continue begging the question of
the Negroes’ humanity and a resounding ‘Yes!’ to Wright’s question
whether Negro writing shall be for the Negro
masses, moulding the lives and consciousness of those masses toward new goals’” (Gates).
The literary struggle that resulted during this period of
history was provoked by the oppressive relationship between African Americans
and European Americans, a relationship whose histories and realities emerge in
today’s multiracial classrooms. The controversy highlights the hostility that
some feel toward anything, literature included, that identifies or affiliates
with the white majority. Educational researcher Patrick Finn echoes this idea
in “Literacy with an Attitude: Educating
Working-Class Children in Their Own Self-Interest”. Finn states that many
African Americans associate developing traits of the white majority as
“adopting a characteristic of the enemy” (Finn). Therefore, well-known
African American writers who execute traits of prominent white writers into
their poems and prose get labeled as deserters. Some see this integration as a denial
of their own culture and disapprove of those who veer too far into the already
paved road of literary tradition. Likewise, some teachers believe that teaching
African American students the literature and speech of the white majority would
oppress them further. However, educational researcher Lisa Delpit argues that:
“Minority
students must be exposed to the language of the majority in order to compete with them and
have access to the same economic opportunities” (Delpit).
This is exactly what writers such as
Ellison and Brooks , both winners of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize
respectively, have demonstrated in their
works, a marriage of culture and convention. Their writings encompass the
strength and pride of African Americans while embracing the style and technique
of the distinguished literary figures of their time.
The
Black Arts Movement came out of the tempestuous 1960s when social commotion endured
both at home and abroad. On the one hand were the Civil Rights Movement, Black
Power agitation, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., President
John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X; on the other hand, the Vietnam
War and problems with Cuba. The Black Arts Movement generated writers who stimulated
social revolution, even by violent means. There is perhaps no better example of
this violent tone in black literature than these lines from Amiri Baraka’s
signature poem, “Black Art” written in 1969:
“We
want ‘poems that kill.’
Assassin poems, Poems
that shoot” (Gates).
The Black Arts Movement set the atmosphere
for a new era in the lives of many African Americans. The main aim for African
American writers was to write literature that enthroned blackness (Gates). Writers turned
their pens into swords to depict the inequalities against the African American
race and called for African Americans to unite as a strong force against white
supremacy.
In the Black Arts movement, it is vital
to note several important figures. Fannie Lou Hamer, co-founder of the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, was an “unschooled” leader in the Black
Arts Movement (Delpit). Prominent and
powerful poets Amiri Baraka aka LeRoi Jones, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez,
and Quincy Troupe found expressive poetry as the best way to communicate a
political message to an African American audience (Gates).
While these key figures helped ignite the poetic flame, average, everyday
Americans spread the message, as:
“Black poetry … was adopted by elementary
school students, university professors, working wives and mothers, community
activists, prison inmates, barber shop aficionados,
[and] athletes” (Gates).
The poet Baraka also turned to drama
while Henry Dumas used fiction to spread the message for a newly invigorated
identity, placing major emphasis on retaining African cultural roots within the
black American community (Gates).
One way to differentiate the Black Arts Movement from
African American artistic and literary production before 1960 is in the
different emphasis works have toward both Africa and America (Gates).
Before 1960, black artists were not focused on Africa as a place of origin.
Many black authors, such as Ralph Ellison, wanted to impersonate and surpass
white artistic models that already existed. After 1960, black artists wanted a unique
aesthetic that emphasized black personhood as different from that of white
personhood. Africa often served as the foundation of inspiration for these
artists. African Americans celebrated “Afrocentricity” by showing African pride
through poetry, drama, and fiction, as well as through traditional African
clothing and hairstyles (Smith).
During the Black Arts Movement, writers improved the
vernacular of the black community (Gates). Affirming Langston
Hughes and Richard Wright, who, like their artistic ancestors, wrote using
black vernacular and created themes of spiritual and political liberation, the
leading voices of the Black Arts Movement were interested in building a black
audience, not in pandering to a white audience. They found sustenance in the explosion
of new publishing companies and periodicals that focused on the black
experience. Established publishing companies began pulling from their archives
out-of-print works by African American authors (Gates).
The Black Arts Movement also was strengthened by the advent of black studies in
American universities. There were now university-trained scholars reading,
interpreting, and teaching works by African American artists (Smith)
In February 1948 the black writer James Baldwin
acknowledged how widespread anti-Semitism was in his community, writing:
“Georgia has the Negro and Harlem has the Jew.” Baldwin later succumbed to such
views himself when he wrote that while Christians made up America's true power
structure, the Jew “is doing their dirty work.” He went on to denigrate Jewish
financial support of civil rights organizations as mere “conscience money.” To be sure, the Black Arts Movement was not
exempt from controversy, for it suffered from the expression of anti-Semitism,
misogyny, and homophobia. The negative dynamic between blacks and Jews is
accredited to the unfriendly relationship that developed between working-class
blacks and Jewish landlords; the term “Jew” became “a word marking a material
and ideological manifestation of American whiteness” (Gates).
Anti-Semitism has had a long history among African
Americans. In the 1920s, for instance, the “buy-black” campaign of the
black-nationalist leader Marcus Garvey was explicitly targeted against Jews,
and Garvey later spoke admiringly of Adolf Hitler (Muravchik). In February 1948 the black writer James
Baldwin recognized how extensive anti-Semitism was in his community,
writing: “Georgia has the Negro and
Harlem has the Jew.” Baldwin later surrendered to such views himself when he
wrote that while Christians made up America's true power structure, the Jew “is
doing their dirty work” (Muravchik). He
went on to denigrate Jewish financial support of civil rights organizations as
mere “conscience money.”
Malcolm X, too, was a vociferous anti-Semite both
publicly and privately. According to author Murray Friedman, when Malcolm met
with representatives of the Ku Klux Klan to solicit their support for his
project of black separatism, he "assured them" that "it was Jews
who were behind the integration movement" (Muravchik).
The prominent role that Jews played in the American civil
rights movement did little to diminish black anti-Semitism. When the movement
first began to gain power in the late 1950s and early 60s, the front-line
troops in the Montgomery bus boycott and then in the lunch-counter sit-ins were
all blacks; but among the whites who soon rallied to the cause, a
disproportionately large share were Jews. The Freedom Riders rode in integrated
detachments, and two-thirds of the whites, Murray Friedman reports, were Jews (Muravchik). A few years later, in 1964, came the
“Mississippi Summer,” a black-voter-registration project conceived and
organized by a Jew, Allard Lowenstein. According to Friedman, Jews made up from
one-third to one-half of the white volunteers who took part. Of the three
volunteers who lost their lives in the project, two -- Michael Schwerner and
Andrew Goodman -- were Jews.
In his book “Blacks
and Jews”, Paul Berman reports that Jews contributed one-half to
three-quarters of the financial support received by civil rights groups in the
1960s. The organizational support they provided was equally pronounced. All
over the United States, Jewish organizations assigned staffers to work on civil
rights initiatives. In those days, writes Berman, “It was almost as if to be
Jewish and liberal were, by definition, to fly a flag for black America” (Muravchik).
What’s more within the Black Arts
Movement, negative attitudes toward women and homosexuals stemmed from the
“paramilitary, social-realist bravado of male leaders in the Black Arts” (Gates). In comparison to the voices of African
American men involved with the Black Arts Movement and their work being “more
political”, if you will, women and in particular Bulelwa Madekurozwa was at the
forefront of being black, a woman and an out lesbian.
One such artist is the painter
Bulelwa Madekurozwa who was born in 1972, who lives and works in Harare,
Zimbabwe. While studying in Harare in the early 1990s, Madekurozwa realized that
most of the artists in her school were men who painted portraits of
stereotypically shy but proud African women tilling fields and toting babies.
To oppose this representation, Madekurozwa painted portraits of strong black
women with direct gazes (GLBTQ Inc.) . Early in her career, Madekurozwa grappled
with ways to express her thoughts and experiences as an African lesbian through
her art. To put it mildly, lesbianism is not accepted in Zimbabwe. Although the
country has an active women's rights movement, females are both socially and
legally disadvantaged much like those of gay orientation in the United States.
Since women traditionally were
denied individual sexual identities, lesbians face horrifyingly violent
anti-gay sentiments. As the country's gay community slowly takes shape,
therefore, women are being left behind. While men who come out in Zimbabwe at
least know that male homosexual relationships exist, the inability even to
conceive of a lesbian relationship hinders the coming-out process for women (GLBTQ Inc.).
It
is therefore not surprising that Madekurozwa makes only veiled references to
lesbianism in her paintings. In one early work, two figures--one clothed and
androgynous, the other with the nude body of a black woman—embracing.
Notwithstanding these problems of
sexuality, anti-Semitism, however, African Americans through the Black Arts
Movement triumphed through relentless efforts to prove that they were not ,and
would never be, “merely white Americans in blackface” (Gates).
Indeed, the Black Arts Movement
would develop to be the provocative starting point for a new way of being
considered an African American. The year 1975 is an arbitrary endpoint for the
Black Arts Movement whose aesthetic and accompanying themes continue beyond
1975. Any black artist who, through the “construction of hybrid genres, mythic
landscapes, vernacular styles, and revised genealogies of the Americas” (Gates), is finding ground-breaking
ways to explore issues within the African American community follows in the
footsteps of the Black Arts Movement.
By the close of the 20th century,
African American culture was represented in literature, theater, television,
and film. In the 1990s, Toni Morrison became a Nobel Prize Laureate and August
Wilson won a second Pulitzer Prize in drama for “The Piano Lesson” (Gates). Writers of this
period produced work that was “determined to cure what Morrison deemed the
‘national amnesia’ around the history of slavery” (Gates),
and slave narratives finally became a part of the American canon. Other African
American authors reshaping the canon included Pulitzer Prize winners such as
Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa in poetry, Charles Johnson and John Edgar
Wideman in fiction, Ntozake Shange and George Wolfe in theater, and Alice
Walker in fiction and nonfiction. These writers produced work distinguished by:
(1) The
acknowledgement of the multiplicity of African American identities.
(2) A renewed interest in history, as
writers imagine the psychological and spiritual lives of African Americans
during slavery and segregation.
(3) The
emergence of a community of black women writing;
(4) A continuing exploration of music
and other forms of vernacular culture as springboards for literary innovation
and theoretical analysis.
(5)
And showcase the influence of African American literary scholarship.” (Gates)
Ultimately, the African American
renaissance of the late 20th century grapples with the diversity of the African
American experience and is motivated by their literary forefathers and
foremothers, contemporary African American authors, while pioneering in their
own respective ways, echo the conflict and painful emotion expressed by their
predecessors. Alice Walker, for instance, comments that “The Color Purple” written in 1982 is her “‘love letter to Zora
Neale Hurston’” (Gates). Gathering
inspiration from those who came before them, African American authors of the
contemporary generation frequently participate in scholarship, studying the
past in their writings while simultaneously enriching it for future
generations.
Thus, present-day authors produce penetrating
questions about African American identity. Their work reassesses racism and
allows readers to view its social, economic, spiritual, psychological,
emotional and political ramifications. Slavery, though abolished in the
nineteenth century, is not an ideological construct barred from the American
consciousness. Additionally, issues as recently as today leave many “divided
substantially along racial lines.” African American society, as a whole, has evolved
fruitfully over the past few decades, and the voices of African Americans are
finally beginning to thankfully be heard. Many years have passed since the confirmations
of Boston’s elite confirming Phillis Wheatley’s literary ingenuity, yet African
American literature today still struggles with some of the very same anxieties and
yearnings present in the 18th century. African American literature produced
during this period thankfully rewrites the American narrative, creating a more
complex and diverse view of what we call America.
Works
Cited
Delpit, Lisa. The Politics of Teaching Literary
Discourse. Boston, Mass.: St. Martins, 2001. Hardback.
Finn, Patrick J. Literacy with an Attitude: Educating
Working-Class Children In Their Own Self-Interest. Albany, New York:
University of New York, 1999. Hardback.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Norton Anthologyof African
American Literature. New York City, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.
Hardback.
GLBTQ Inc. African American Art Contemporary. 2012.
www.glbtq.com/arts/af_art_contemporary.html. 20 April 2013.
Muravchik, Joshua. Discover the Networks. December
1995. www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=9. 20 April 2013.
Smith, Smith Dr. Brenda. Modern African American
Literature Class Spring 2013 January- May 2013. Lecture.
Wikipedia. African American Vernacular English. 18
April 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English.
20 April 2013.
—. Ku Klux Klan. 19 April 2013.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan. 20 April 2013.
The other thing, and the year element is Gay Pride, Cleveland, Ohio this year. I was walking beside a friend who was in drag, in a convertible and I have known for nearly twenty-five years (see picture to the side) and working that flag to a frenzy waving it all around my body. Girl, I was spinning around in circles dancing to the music and, well, just having a big gay ole time.
