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BLACK (AND WHITE)

Dan P. McAdams

in The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By

Bringing together psychological research on life stories and generativity in African-American men and women with a reading of African-American autobiographies, folk tales, and 19th century slave ... More

Bringing together psychological research on life stories and generativity in African-American men and women with a reading of African-American autobiographies, folk tales, and 19th century slave narratives, this chapter examines the relationships between race, generativity, and narrative identity in American life. Like their Euro-American counterparts, highly generative African-American adults, such as Martin Luther King Jr, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, tend to construct highly redemptive life narratives. Their life stories, however, tend to draw from a rich storehouse of images and tropes favored in African-American psycho-literary traditions, stories about life that privilege the discourse of personal (and societal) liberation and underscore such themes as “early danger” and the role of a moral “opponent”.Less

Black Literary Criticism and Narrative Hermeneutics

Donald H. Matthews

in Honoring the Ancestors: An African Cultural Interpretation of Black Religion and Literature

This chapter examines black literary criticism in relation to narrative hermeneutics. It first looks at the factors that contributed to the rise of black literary criticism, including African ... More

This chapter examines black literary criticism in relation to narrative hermeneutics. It first looks at the factors that contributed to the rise of black literary criticism, including African American culture and the historical forces that drove the development of black theology - namely, the civil rights and black power movements. It then considers Stephen Henderson's suggestion that the interpretive process for black literary criticism proceeds according to the requirements of three critical categories: the themes present in black literature; structural analysis as an aspect of black narration; and saturation, or the communication of blackness in a given situation and a sense of fidelity to the observed and intuited truth of the black experience. It also explores the difficulties in the development of a black narrative theory by focusing on the ideas of Houston Baker Jr. and Henry Louis Gates Jr. More specifically, it analyzes Baker's “vernacular” theory of black literary criticism and his interpretation of the slave narratives in comparison with Gates's hermeneutic of African American literature and his recognition of the importance of religion in the interpretation of African American culture.Less

Conversation Stoppers: Apologies All Around

in What Can You Say?: America's National Conversation on Race

This chapter centers on the role of the apology, which is considered as one of the problems with the way national conversation is played out that is most prone to change. It shows that the apology ... More

This chapter centers on the role of the apology, which is considered as one of the problems with the way national conversation is played out that is most prone to change. It shows that the apology may possibly be something that people can change (i.e. through responses and expectations of people). It cites two instances that show the apparent drawbacks and dangers when people try to do something more than apologize. The first case shows the difficulty of expecting anything other than an expression of regret, while the second case studies a case when a commentator tried talking about white racism, which resulted in him being criticized for being a white racist. After looking at these two cases, the discussion then turns to the mechanics of the two apologies that were made and the grilling that resulted from these apologies. It also studies Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s model that shows how people can connect to the racial aspects of public discourse in such a way that makes it easier to understand racial thinking.Less

The Conjunctural Field of New Negro Studies

Michelle Ann Stephens

in Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem

This chapter argues that the discourse of the New Negro and the experiences of New Negro men and women form a global ensemble of relations linked under the tropological sign of the New Negro and ... More

This chapter argues that the discourse of the New Negro and the experiences of New Negro men and women form a global ensemble of relations linked under the tropological sign of the New Negro and played out on the conjunctural field of the New Negro movement as a historical formation. In his 1988 essay “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. explains his notion of the trope of a New Negro. Gates argues that the New Negro was engaged primarily in a politics of visual re-presentation, and that the New Negro movement began in 1895, well before the peak of the Harlem Renaissance in the mid-1920s, and entailing a shift from politics to aesthetics. This book describes a period of organic, historical development and crisis, occurring within the context of a U.S. empire rather than nation, that has two intrawar dynamics or waves. The first begins with the Spanish-American War in 1898 and culminates with the end of World War I. The second picks up in the years leading to World War II, the intrawar years of the Jazz Age and the Depression.Less

Advancement in Numbers, Knowledge, and Power: African American History in Post-Reconstruction America, 1883–1915

Stephen G. Hall

in A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America

This chapter views historical representations of African Americans during the 1880s as something more substantial than celebratory and contributionist texts. Here they are the pretext for the rise of ... More

This chapter views historical representations of African Americans during the 1880s as something more substantial than celebratory and contributionist texts. Here they are the pretext for the rise of a critical African American historical voice. Representation, an idea embodied in what Henry Louis Gates has described as a “reconstruction of the image of the black,” is of seminal importance in understanding the historical constructions of African Americans in this era. According to Gates, the intention of black intellectuals was to “restructure the race's image of itself.” This reconstructed self, which presented the race in middle- and upper-class terms, was at sharp variance with, and sought to subvert, the social and intellectual stereotypes found in plantation fictions, blackface minstrelsy, vaudeville, pseudoscience, and social Darwinism.Less

Silent Books, Talking Leaves

Andrew Newman

in Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities

The watershed for the scholarship on A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (1785), is Henry Louis Gates’s influential essay on “The Trope of the Talking Book.” But ... More

The watershed for the scholarship on A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (1785), is Henry Louis Gates’s influential essay on “The Trope of the Talking Book.” But the widespread classification of the episode in which John Marrant presents his Bible to a Cherokee “king” and his eldest daughter as an instance of an Anglo-African “trope” ignores the narrative’s Cherokee ethnohistorical context. This chapter reads Marrant’s account, despite questions about its reliability, as a reflection of the encounter between evangelical literacy practices and Cherokee beliefs about witchcraft and European literacy.Less

Conclusion: Prophecy Now

Christopher Z. Hobson

in The Mount of Vision: African American Prophetic Tradition, 1800-1950

African American prophecy has provided a means of flaying an unjust society, altered the meaning of Christianity, and shown that religion need not respect the status quo. But is it more than a proud ... More

African American prophecy has provided a means of flaying an unjust society, altered the meaning of Christianity, and shown that religion need not respect the status quo. But is it more than a proud legacy? Today’s conditions challenge African American prophecy’s achievements and test its ideas as never before.Less

Slave Narratives and White Lies

Christopher L. Miller

in Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity

The American slave narrative and its fake versions establish a background and a pattern for the long history of American literary imposture. The example of Mattie Griffith, a white woman who wrote a ... More

The American slave narrative and its fake versions establish a background and a pattern for the long history of American literary imposture. The example of Mattie Griffith, a white woman who wrote a fake Autobiography of a Female Slave, is discussed.Less

Troublesome Recordings: Jazz Styles, Masks, and Race

George Burrows

in The Recordings of Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy

This chapter introduces Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy and establishes how their recordings represent a usefully troublesome body of work for illuminating prevailing conceptions of jazz that ... More

This chapter introduces Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy and establishes how their recordings represent a usefully troublesome body of work for illuminating prevailing conceptions of jazz that articulate notions of race with those of musical style. A survey of the extant literature which has previously considered the band’s records, together with that which has broached the entwined topics of race and jazz, suggests the value of the study in reflecting the vital role of the recordings of such interwar black jazz musicians in shaping jazz as a practice and conception. The notion of manipulating stylistic masks, which are donned by the musicians to Signify on racialized styles and identities in creative and often subversive ways, is introduced as the central means for illuminating the records and their musical-racial discourse. That approach is contextualized with reference to Andy Kirk’s upbringing and musical background before the materials, method, and structure for the study are outlined.Less