African-American Literature

This study of atheist African American writers poses a substantive challenge to those who see atheism in despairing and nihilistic terms. The author argues that while most white atheists mourn the loss of faith, many black atheists — believing the “God-concept” spawns racism and oppression — consider the death of God a cause for personal and political hope. Focusing on a little-discussed aspect of African American literature, this analysis of African American atheists' treatment of God fills a huge gap in studies that consistently ignore their contributions. Examining how a belief in God and His “chosen people” necessitates a politics of superiority and inferiority, the author considers the degree to which religious faith is responsible for justifying oppression, even acts of physical and psychological violence. In their secular vision of social and political justice, black atheists argue that only when the culture adopts and internalizes a truly atheist politics — one based on pluralism, tolerance, and freedom — will radical democracy be achieved.

Toni Morrison herself has long urged for organic critical readings of her works. This book delves into African spiritual traditions, explaining the meanings of African cosmology and epistemology as manifest in Morrison's novels. The result is a critical investigation of such works as The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Paradise, Love, Beloved, and Jazz. While others have studied the African spiritual ideas and values encoded in Morrison's work, the author of this study explores a wide range of complex concepts, including African deities, ancestral ideas, spiritual archetypes, mythic trope, and lyrical prose representing African spiritual continuities. She writes this book, not only as a literary critic but also as a practicing Obatala priest in the Yoruba spiritual tradition and a Mama Nganga in the Kongo spiritual system. She analyzes tensions between communal and individual values and moral codes as represented in Morrison's novels. She also uses interviews with and non-fiction written by Morrison to further build her critical paradigm.

Alain L. Locke (1886–1954), in his famous 1925 anthology The New Negro, declared that “the pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.” Often called the father of the Harlem Renaissance, he had his finger directly on that pulse, promoting, influencing, and sparring with such figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey. This biography of an extraordinarily gifted philosopher and writer narrates the story of Locke's impact on twentieth-century America's cultural and intellectual life. It traces this story through Locke's Philadelphia upbringing, his undergraduate years at Harvard University—where William James helped spark his influential engagement with pragmatism—and his tenure as the first African American Rhodes Scholar. The heart of the narrative illuminates Locke's heady years in 1920s New York City and his forty-year career at Howard University, where he helped spearhead the adult education movement of the 1930s and wrote on topics ranging from the philosophy of value to the theory of democracy. The book shows that throughout this illustrious career—despite a formal manner that many observers interpreted as elitist or distant—Locke remained a warm and effective teacher and mentor, as well as a fierce champion of literature and art as means of breaking down barriers between communities. The multifaceted portrait that emerges from this account effectively reclaims Locke's place in the pantheon of America's most important minds.

This book investigates the shaping influence of the American slave narrative on the Victorian novel in the years between the British Abolition Act and the American Emancipation Proclamation. In a period when few books sold more than five hundred copies, slave narratives sold in the tens of thousands, providing British readers vivid accounts of the violence and privation experienced by American slaves. The book argues that Charlotte Brontë, W. M. Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson integrated into their works generic elements of the slave narrative, from the emphasis on literacy as a tool of liberation, to the teleological journey from slavery to freedom, to the ethics of resistance over submission. It contends that Victorian novelists were attempting to access the slave narrative's paradigm of resistance, illuminate the transnational dimension of slavery, and articulate Britain's role in the global community. The slave narrative becomes part of the textual network of the English novel, making visible how black literary, as well as economic, production contributed to English culture.

“Sasha” was the code name adopted by Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay (1889–1948) to foil investigations of his life and work. Over a period of two decades, the FBI, U.S. State Department, British police and intelligence, and French law enforcement and colonial authorities took turns harassing McKay, an openly gay, Marxist, Jamaican expatriate who had left the United States and was living in Europe. This study of four of McKay's texts—a literary, cultural, and historical analysis to address the multilayered “queer black anarchism” in McKay's writings—argues that McKay's “fringe” perspective not only targeted him for investigation but also contributed to a declining literary reputation. Perceived as mystifying and unacceptable because of his dedication to communism, McKay is perplexing and difficult to classify within the traditional constructs of the Harlem Renaissance. This book analyzes three of the most important works in McKay's career—the Jazz Age bestseller Home to Harlem, the négritude manifesto Banjo, and the unpublished Romance in Marseille. The book uncovers ways in which Home to Harlem assembles a home-front queer black anarchism, and treats Banjo as a novel that portrays Marxist internationalist sexual dissidence. It assesses the consequence of McKay's landmark Romance in Marseille, a text that is, despite its absence from broad public access for nearly 80 years, conceivably the most significant early black Diaspora text. Finally, it examines McKay's extensive FBI file and his late-1930s autobiography,A Long Way from Home, in which McKay disguises his past as a means of eluding his harassers.

Why did African American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the 19th century, during a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like apolitical fantasies to contemporary readers. This is the question at the centre of this book’s examination of the novels of Pauline Hopkins, Emma Kelley, Amelia Johnson, Katherine Tillman, and Frances Harper. The book is a literary study, but also a social and intellectual history—a cultural critique of a period that historian Rayford W. Logan has called “the Dark Ages of recent American history.” Against a rich contextual framework, extending from abolitionist protest to the Black Aesthetic, the book argues that the idealized marriage plot in these novels does not merely depict the heroine’s happiness and economic prosperity. More importantly, that plot encodes a resonant cultural narrative—a domestic allegory—about the political ambitions of an emancipated people. Once this domestic allegory of political desire is unmasked in these novels, it can be seen as a significant discourse of the post-Reconstruction era for representing African Americans’ collective dreams about freedom and for reconstructing those contested dreams into consummations of civil liberty.

Western European mythology and history tend to view spirituality and sexuality as opposite extremes. But sex can be more than a function of the body and religion more than a function of the mind, as exemplified in the works and characters of such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Opal Palmer Adisa, and Edwidge Danticat. This book builds on the work of previous scholars who have identified the ways that black women's narratives often contain a form of spirituality rooted in African cosmology, which consistently grounds their characters' self-empowerment and quest for autonomy. What the author adds to the discussion is an emphasis on the importance of sexuality in the development of black female subjectivity, beginning with Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and continuing into contemporary black women's writings. She supports her thesis with close readings of various texts, including Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Morrison's Beloved. She reveals how these writers highlight the interplay between the spiritual and the sexual through religious symbols found in Vodoun, Santería, Candomblé, Kumina, and Hoodoo.

From Phillis Wheatley to Alice Walker, the figural readings of Psalm 68:31—”Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God”—have been instrumental in the articulation of black American historical subjectivity, imagination, knowledge, agency, and figurations of Ethiopia. This book maps the various allusions to and interpretations and citations of Psalm 68:31—a largely Protestant and Anglophone phenomenon—in black American letters, to show how it was read and to trace the readings it produced. Its method is twofold. First, the book demonstrates how black readers emerged as historical subjects through reading, arguing that reading is a material, eventful, performative, and transformative practice. Second, it shows how black readers read Psalm 68:31, also known as the Ethiopian Prophecy. For some readers, the psalm pointed to the Christianization and modernization of black peoples in both America and Africa, engendering, for instance, romantic ideas of race and the development of racial narratives such as the Afro-Asiatic myth. For other readers, Psalm 68:31 signified the emancipation of black slaves in America and their full inclusion as American citizens, or the end of colonialism and the rise of African independence. Another collection of black exegetes read the verse as one fragment in a vast textual storehouse that could be re-woven to create new poetic figures, narratives, and possibilities for black people and humanity. What the book demonstrates is the plasticity of Ethiopia as a figure of black imagination and thinking.

Writing in 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois suggested that the goal for the African American was ‘to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture’. He was evoking ‘culture’ as a solution to the divisions within society, thereby adopting, in a very different context, an idea that had been influentially expressed by Matthew Arnold in the 1860s. Du Bois questioned the assumed universality of this concept by asking who, ultimately, is allowed into the ‘kingdom of culture’? How does one come to speak from a position of cultural authority? This book adopts a transatlantic approach to explore these questions. It centres on four Victorian ‘men of letters’ – Matthew Arnold, William Dean Howells, W. B. Yeats and W. E. B. Du Bois – who drew on notions of ethnicity as a basis from which to assert their cultural authority. In comparative close readings of these figures, the author addresses several key areas of contemporary literary and cultural debate. The book questions the notion of ‘the West’ as it appears and re-appears in the formulations of postcolonial theory, challenges the widespread tendency to divide nationalism into ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ forms, and forces its readers to reconsider what they mean when they talk about ‘culture’, ‘identity’ and ‘national literature’.