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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
Park Blues Langston Hughes, Racial Exclusion, And The Park Ballad, Margaret Konkol
Park Blues Langston Hughes, Racial Exclusion, And The Park Ballad, Margaret Konkol
English Faculty Publications
This chapter draws attention to the lack of parks and nature recreation amenities during the 1920s and 1930s in predominantly African American city neighborhoods through Langston Hughes’s political poetry, specifically his blues-inflected ballad “Park Bench,” as well as “Chicago’s Black Belt” “Restrictive Covenants,” and “One Way Ticket.” Through the figure of the tramp/vagrant/bum, “Park Bench” voices a protest against inequality mapped into city space. Asserting that access to nature should be a fundamental condition of a democratic society, the poem situates the park bench as a charged site for public dialogue. The chapter argues that this poem and other Hughes …
Tragic No More?: The Reappearance Of The Racially Mixed Character, Suzanne W. Jones
Tragic No More?: The Reappearance Of The Racially Mixed Character, Suzanne W. Jones
English Faculty Publications
During the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, the tragic mulatto/a figured prominently in American fiction, only to recede after the Harlem Renaissance when African-American writers called for "race pride" and racial solidarity and to disappear entirely in the late 1960s after the Black Power movement ushered in racially conscious concepts such as "Black Is Beautiful." Since 1990, however, the mixed black-white character has made a significant comeback in American fiction. Contemporary representations suggest that choosing one's racial identity is only slightly less difficult than it used to be because of American society's conflation of skin color and identity. …