Joanna Brooks
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195332919
- eISBN:
- 9780199851263
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332919.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, “the spirit of ...
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The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, “the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust.” This book explores the means by which the very first black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as early black and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions. While shedding light on the pioneering figures of African American and Native American cultural history—including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant—this work also explores a set of little-known black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals, and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how 18th-century black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion.Less
The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, “the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust.” This book explores the means by which the very first black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as early black and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions. While shedding light on the pioneering figures of African American and Native American cultural history—including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant—this work also explores a set of little-known black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals, and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how 18th-century black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion.
Joanna Brooks
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195332919
- eISBN:
- 9780199851263
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332919.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This chapter provides essential background on the evangelical movements most attractive to pioneering black and Indian authors, and examines their respective racial policies and theologies. It argues ...
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This chapter provides essential background on the evangelical movements most attractive to pioneering black and Indian authors, and examines their respective racial policies and theologies. It argues that most 18th-century American evangelists, beginning with the eminent and influential Jonathan Edwards, marked the spectacular value of black and Indian conversions but failed to develop a clear theological outlook on race or to enlarge on the potentially progressive energies of revivalism. This cognitive lapse was especially egregious given the rapid advancement of racialist thinking in natural science and the legal institution of racial identities in the new nation. It fell, then, to a powerful group of black and Indian evangelist-authors to marshal religion against the degradations of racialist science and racist politics, producing in their efforts toward community regeneration new identities, religious traditions, and literatures. The chapter shows how 18th-century American evangelicalism, national politics, and natural science constructed race as a significant category of human experience. It also shows how people of color rose up to answer these constructions, telling their own stories and thus transforming the course of American literary history.Less
This chapter provides essential background on the evangelical movements most attractive to pioneering black and Indian authors, and examines their respective racial policies and theologies. It argues that most 18th-century American evangelists, beginning with the eminent and influential Jonathan Edwards, marked the spectacular value of black and Indian conversions but failed to develop a clear theological outlook on race or to enlarge on the potentially progressive energies of revivalism. This cognitive lapse was especially egregious given the rapid advancement of racialist thinking in natural science and the legal institution of racial identities in the new nation. It fell, then, to a powerful group of black and Indian evangelist-authors to marshal religion against the degradations of racialist science and racist politics, producing in their efforts toward community regeneration new identities, religious traditions, and literatures. The chapter shows how 18th-century American evangelicalism, national politics, and natural science constructed race as a significant category of human experience. It also shows how people of color rose up to answer these constructions, telling their own stories and thus transforming the course of American literary history.
Koritha Mitchell
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036491
- eISBN:
- 9780252093524
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036491.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This chapter demonstrates that the first black-authored lynching play, Rachel, by Angelina Weld Grimké, emerged in 1914 partly because the mainstream stage accepted black actors but limited them to ...
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This chapter demonstrates that the first black-authored lynching play, Rachel, by Angelina Weld Grimké, emerged in 1914 partly because the mainstream stage accepted black actors but limited them to comedy or white-authored material. Grimké and others thus began privileging playwriting over acting in order to control the race's representation. Nevertheless, African American intellectuals and artists came to value black dramatists because of the success of performers—even minstrels and musical comedians. Moreover, Grimké's Rachel proved influential enough to initiate the genre of lynching drama because other poets and fiction writers also began writing plays. As Grimké's successors offered generic revisions, their efforts helped to redefine black theater again. The chapter therefore identifies the differences and commonalities between their work and Grimké's.Less
This chapter demonstrates that the first black-authored lynching play, Rachel, by Angelina Weld Grimké, emerged in 1914 partly because the mainstream stage accepted black actors but limited them to comedy or white-authored material. Grimké and others thus began privileging playwriting over acting in order to control the race's representation. Nevertheless, African American intellectuals and artists came to value black dramatists because of the success of performers—even minstrels and musical comedians. Moreover, Grimké's Rachel proved influential enough to initiate the genre of lynching drama because other poets and fiction writers also began writing plays. As Grimké's successors offered generic revisions, their efforts helped to redefine black theater again. The chapter therefore identifies the differences and commonalities between their work and Grimké's.
Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807833124
- eISBN:
- 9781469604619
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807899243_sklaroff.7
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter discusses a speech delivered to the National Negro Congress by renowned writer and poet Sterling Brown, in which he relayed the many obstacles facing black authors: “The Negro writer is ...
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This chapter discusses a speech delivered to the National Negro Congress by renowned writer and poet Sterling Brown, in which he relayed the many obstacles facing black authors: “The Negro writer is faced by a limited audience: his own group, for various reasons, reads few books and buys less; and white America, in the main, is hardly an audience ready for truthful representation of Negro life. The Negro writer has the job revising certain stereotypes of Negro life and character, whose growth extends from the beginning of the American novel in Cooper to the latest best seller, ‘Gone With the Wind’.” While this outlook reflects Brown's own pessimism, it was shaped, at least in part, by his experience with the Federal Writers' Project's Negro Affairs.Less
This chapter discusses a speech delivered to the National Negro Congress by renowned writer and poet Sterling Brown, in which he relayed the many obstacles facing black authors: “The Negro writer is faced by a limited audience: his own group, for various reasons, reads few books and buys less; and white America, in the main, is hardly an audience ready for truthful representation of Negro life. The Negro writer has the job revising certain stereotypes of Negro life and character, whose growth extends from the beginning of the American novel in Cooper to the latest best seller, ‘Gone With the Wind’.” While this outlook reflects Brown's own pessimism, it was shaped, at least in part, by his experience with the Federal Writers' Project's Negro Affairs.
Kimberly Chabot Davis
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252038433
- eISBN:
- 9780252096310
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252038433.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter draws distinctions among the reading strategies of white readers in order to shed light on the failures and the political promise of cross-racial empathy. It focuses largely on ...
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This chapter draws distinctions among the reading strategies of white readers in order to shed light on the failures and the political promise of cross-racial empathy. It focuses largely on middle-class white women as they encounter black-authored fiction within book-club settings. In contrast to much of the scholarship on cross-racial sympathy that replicates a monolithic view of whiteness, the chapter emphasizes how multiple identities of gender, class, age, ethnicity, education, and political affiliation work to complicate “white” modes of reading. Given the larger argument that empathy is a key ingredient in the development of anti-racist white identities, this chapter is structured to distinguish among different deployments of empathy and their political consequences.Less
This chapter draws distinctions among the reading strategies of white readers in order to shed light on the failures and the political promise of cross-racial empathy. It focuses largely on middle-class white women as they encounter black-authored fiction within book-club settings. In contrast to much of the scholarship on cross-racial sympathy that replicates a monolithic view of whiteness, the chapter emphasizes how multiple identities of gender, class, age, ethnicity, education, and political affiliation work to complicate “white” modes of reading. Given the larger argument that empathy is a key ingredient in the development of anti-racist white identities, this chapter is structured to distinguish among different deployments of empathy and their political consequences.
Mae G. Henderson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780195116595
- eISBN:
- 9780199375219
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195116595.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature, Women's Literature
Citing historical examples of the “nasty review” and its sometimes tragic consequences, the chapter argues that while a reviewer can rescue a book from obscurity with a favorable review, a harsh ...
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Citing historical examples of the “nasty review” and its sometimes tragic consequences, the chapter argues that while a reviewer can rescue a book from obscurity with a favorable review, a harsh review or simple inattentiveness can provide lubrication to the conveyor belt into oblivion. Addressing, in particular, the responsibility of the academic book reviewer, it focuses on the fate of black and women authors whose works have been subject to criticisms of exceptionalism, inauthenticity, trivialization—or, worse, subject to neglect or suppression. Proposing that the reviewer attend to issues of power, positionality, and process (the power of the review, the positionality of the reviewer, and the process of reading), the chapter explores the viability of alternative models for reviewing, especially as these address the politics and ethics of women reviewing women. The protocol it recommends entails what can be described fundamentally as a dialogic process of “critical conversation” between reviewer and author.Less
Citing historical examples of the “nasty review” and its sometimes tragic consequences, the chapter argues that while a reviewer can rescue a book from obscurity with a favorable review, a harsh review or simple inattentiveness can provide lubrication to the conveyor belt into oblivion. Addressing, in particular, the responsibility of the academic book reviewer, it focuses on the fate of black and women authors whose works have been subject to criticisms of exceptionalism, inauthenticity, trivialization—or, worse, subject to neglect or suppression. Proposing that the reviewer attend to issues of power, positionality, and process (the power of the review, the positionality of the reviewer, and the process of reading), the chapter explores the viability of alternative models for reviewing, especially as these address the politics and ethics of women reviewing women. The protocol it recommends entails what can be described fundamentally as a dialogic process of “critical conversation” between reviewer and author.
Stephanie Brown
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604739732
- eISBN:
- 9781604739749
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604739732.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. However, the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the ...
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Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. However, the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the now-familiar Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and J. Saunders Redding. This book recovers the work of these innovative novelists, overturning conventional wisdom about the writers of the period and the trajectory of African American literary history. The book also questions the assumptions about the relations between race and genre that have obscured the importance of these once-influential creators. Wright’s Native Son is typically considered to have inaugurated an era of social realism in African American literature. Ellison’s Invisible Man has been cast as both a high mark of American modernism and the only worthy stopover on the way to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. However, readers in the late 1940s purchased enough copies of Yerby’s historical romances to make him the best-selling African American author of all time. Critics, meanwhile, were taking note of the generic experiments of Redding, Himes, and Smith, while the authors themselves questioned the obligation of black authors to write protest, instead penning campus novels, war novels, and, in Yerby’s case, “costume dramas.” Their status as “lesser lights” is the product of retrospective bias, the book demonstrates.Less
Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. However, the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the now-familiar Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and J. Saunders Redding. This book recovers the work of these innovative novelists, overturning conventional wisdom about the writers of the period and the trajectory of African American literary history. The book also questions the assumptions about the relations between race and genre that have obscured the importance of these once-influential creators. Wright’s Native Son is typically considered to have inaugurated an era of social realism in African American literature. Ellison’s Invisible Man has been cast as both a high mark of American modernism and the only worthy stopover on the way to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. However, readers in the late 1940s purchased enough copies of Yerby’s historical romances to make him the best-selling African American author of all time. Critics, meanwhile, were taking note of the generic experiments of Redding, Himes, and Smith, while the authors themselves questioned the obligation of black authors to write protest, instead penning campus novels, war novels, and, in Yerby’s case, “costume dramas.” Their status as “lesser lights” is the product of retrospective bias, the book demonstrates.
Paul Schor
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- July 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780199917853
- eISBN:
- 9780190670856
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199917853.003.0019
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century, American History: 20th Century
This chapter focuses on the relationship between the Census Bureau and African Americans. In the first half of the twentieth century, the history of the agency’s relations with the black population ...
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This chapter focuses on the relationship between the Census Bureau and African Americans. In the first half of the twentieth century, the history of the agency’s relations with the black population was one of an incomplete transformation. For the census, blacks were the most objectified inhabitants, to the point that slaves were deprived of names to become numbers in the population statistics, and the ones least likely to be viewed as subjects. At the same time, blacks as a category were always the object of particular attention in census reports. The chapter also describes the growing involvement of black authors and statisticians in publications for the black population; the career of Charles E. Hall with respect to the census, who became the first African American to be given supervisory responsibilities over black employees; and the Census Bureau’s relations with the African American business community.Less
This chapter focuses on the relationship between the Census Bureau and African Americans. In the first half of the twentieth century, the history of the agency’s relations with the black population was one of an incomplete transformation. For the census, blacks were the most objectified inhabitants, to the point that slaves were deprived of names to become numbers in the population statistics, and the ones least likely to be viewed as subjects. At the same time, blacks as a category were always the object of particular attention in census reports. The chapter also describes the growing involvement of black authors and statisticians in publications for the black population; the career of Charles E. Hall with respect to the census, who became the first African American to be given supervisory responsibilities over black employees; and the Census Bureau’s relations with the African American business community.
Alice Walker
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036453
- eISBN:
- 9780252093487
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036453.003.0009
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
This chapter presents Alice Walker's reflections on the America of her youth compared to the promise of the campaign, which reflects the view of many older African Americans who never expected to see ...
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This chapter presents Alice Walker's reflections on the America of her youth compared to the promise of the campaign, which reflects the view of many older African Americans who never expected to see the day a Black man would occupy the White House. She says that she is a supporter of Obama because she believes that he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. She expresses deep sadness that many of her feminist white women friends cannot see him and what he stands for. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans—black, white, yellow, red, and brown—choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to her.Less
This chapter presents Alice Walker's reflections on the America of her youth compared to the promise of the campaign, which reflects the view of many older African Americans who never expected to see the day a Black man would occupy the White House. She says that she is a supporter of Obama because she believes that he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. She expresses deep sadness that many of her feminist white women friends cannot see him and what he stands for. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans—black, white, yellow, red, and brown—choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to her.