Themes of African American Literature

            

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.

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Claude McKay: "Home To Harlem"

     Another great " gay" author Claude McKay wrote "Home to Harlem" .With sensual, often brutal accuracy, Claude McKay traces the parallel paths of two very different young men struggling to find their way through the suspicion and prejudice of American society. At the same time, this stark but moving story touches on the central themes of the Harlem Renaissance, including the urgent need for unity and identity among blacks. This was also part of the same African American Literature class that I am in right now and I think should be consider a must read for anyone who is wanting to experience "unknown gay authors" or to grow their "gay library".

     Often cited as the first African-American best-seller, “Home to Harlem” is the first work of writer Claude McKay's. Perhaps most widely recognized for his sonnet "If We Must Die" (1919), which was written in response to the widespread black lynchings, McKay originally wrote “Home to Harlem” as a short story illustrating the "so-called semi-underworld" of the urban American black in the 1920s, "leaving no subject, however degraded, untouched".              

     McKay's novel, which depicts the seamier sides of life for Harlem's working-class blacks, was published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, at a time when other black writers, such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen had begun to expand the boundaries of African-American literature, and black music and writing were becoming exotically appealing to the literate white public in New York and beyond. While McKay's earlier poetic works vividly portrayed blacks as an alienated, besieged, and tormented minority, “Home to Harlem” adds greater depth and texture to that image through both its characters' struggles for individual and racial identity and the relationships and sense of community that arose from them and gave life to Harlem.

            The novel opens with a journey and a metaphor. Jake, the hero, is a veteran traveling from post-World War I Europe, headed "Home to Harlem" on a freighter, with Harlem serving as both a geographically specific place and an embodiment of racial consciousness. Jake, who had been a longshoreman in Harlem, had enlisted in the army for a good manly fight in World War I. He was quickly disillusioned by the military's racial policies, which didn't allow blacks on the front lines, so he deserted and took refuge in the sociability of London's East End. But as postwar tensions grew, the racial divide in the East End felt tangible and suffocating to Jake--his life in this predominantly white world felt like a fraud--and McKay's readers first encounter him desperately voyaging back to ground himself in Harlem. Working the freighter with a crew of Arabs that he despises, Jake responds to their customs with disdain and more closely aligns himself with the white members of the crew, whose culture he shares. But when one of the sailors flatters Jake by saying, "You're the same like us chaps. You ain't like them dirty jabbering coolies”, Jake reminds himself that the divide still exists and yearns for home and sameness. McKay uses these powerful early moments of social and cultural difference to establish a focus on racial hierarchy that will shape the characters' lives and experiences throughout the novel.

            Jake arrives back in Harlem and is greeted by a vibrant sense of energy and exuberance, music, dance, laughter, including all the sounds, textures, and odors of authentic, passionate life: "The deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness of it. The sugared laughter . . . Oh, the contagious fever of Harlem. Burning everywhere". Jake falls in with a loosely interwoven group of friends, rivals, and lovers: Zeddy, Strawberry Lips, Gin-head Susy, and Miss Curdy--all hell-bent to enjoy the fruits of life in the face of poverty, loneliness, and misfortune. As Jake drifts through the clubs, cabarets, and house parties, his journey continues. He weaves in and out of a world of sweetmen and hussies, where layers of brown--"high yaller," low brown, redbrown, maroon, "chocolate-to-the-bone"--are every bit as divisive as black and white. McKay's focus stays centered on his male characters, as Jake and his compatriots explore various facets of what it means to be a black man in Harlem in the 1920s, perhaps in search of what Marcellus Blount has referred to as an "ideal racial self."

            Jake serves as a symbol of primitive African-American vitality--spontaneous, direct, easygoing, likable--while those around him represent McKay's interpretation of the black male experience in other ways. While working on the Pennsylvania Railroad as a cook, Jake meets Ray, a waiter and intellectual Haitian expatriate. In contrast to Jake's easygoing affability, Ray worries constantly and feels isolated from the African-American community because of his European education. His sensitivity and political passion set him apart from what he perceives as Harlem's "roughness" and abandon. Ultimately, both Ray and Jake flee the grasp of Harlem's rough-and-tumble life. “Home to Harlem” mirrors McKay's own experiences, Ray signs on to a freighter in hopes of working his way to Europe, while Jake finds a different kind of escape--on the train to Chicago with the woman he loves.

            “Home to Harlem” as you can imagine drew both praise and criticism for its frank depiction of African Americans and use of strong, vernacular dialect. Some, such as Langston Hughes, applauded McKay's realism and integrity, while others deemed it exploitation. Black leaders W. E. B. DuBois and Dewey Jones condemned McKay's explicit portrayals as damaging to the social and political struggles of African Americans: "white people think we are buffoons, thugs, and rotters anyway. Why should we waste so much time trying to prove it? That's what Claude McKay has done". McKay concluded that "it will take the Negro in America another thirty or forty years to see “Home to Harlem” in its true light--to appreciate it in the spirit in which I wrote it".