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Articles 1 - 15 of 15
Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
Writing For The Humanities And Arts, Shamecca A. Harris
Writing For The Humanities And Arts, Shamecca A. Harris
Open Educational Resources
This dynamic English Composition course asks students to both create and engage with texts, in a variety of forms, that demonstrate how culture and personal experience inform a writer’s work. In this class, students will read and write voraciously about social, political, economic and cultural issues that influence their lived experiences and use the conventions of multiple genres to both reflect and respond to the times in which they live. Moreover, they will also consciously consider what it means to write academically at the college level through regular self-reflection and revision. In doing so, students will strengthen their rhetorical knowledge …
The Evidence Of Things Unseen: Experimental Form As Black Feminist Praxis, Shelly J. Eversley
The Evidence Of Things Unseen: Experimental Form As Black Feminist Praxis, Shelly J. Eversley
Publications and Research
This essay reads Carlene Hatcher Polite's little-known experimental novel Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play and situates it within Black Aesthetics and black feminist theory to argue that experimental forms is crucial to black feminist praxis. The form also exposes critical violences that not only diminish and obscure black feminist writing, but also black women writers.
Flipping The Coin: Towards A Double-Faced Approach To Teaching Black Literature In Secondary English Classrooms, Vincent Ray Price
Flipping The Coin: Towards A Double-Faced Approach To Teaching Black Literature In Secondary English Classrooms, Vincent Ray Price
Theory and Practice in Teacher Education Publications and Other Works
Critiquing two approaches that English teachers use to teach Black, or African-American, literature in the secondary classroom—one that centralizes races and the other that ignores it—this article proposes a hybrid approach that combines both. This double-faced approach recognizes the culturally specific themes that give the text and the Black author their unique voice while also recognizing commonalities that bridge the text to others—despite the race of the authors. To demonstrate the feasibility of the double-faced approach, the article concludes with an examination of three texts through the lens of this “race both matters and doesn’t matter” perspective.
“Strength Shed By A New And Terrible Vision:” The Organic Evolution Of The Blues And The Blues Aesthetic In Richard Wright’S 'Uncle Tom’S Children', Jeffrey J. Horvath
“Strength Shed By A New And Terrible Vision:” The Organic Evolution Of The Blues And The Blues Aesthetic In Richard Wright’S 'Uncle Tom’S Children', Jeffrey J. Horvath
Student Publications
An exploration into the development of the "blues aesthetic" in the African-American literary tradition.
Paintings And Biodomes, Cameron Osteen
Paintings And Biodomes, Cameron Osteen
Open Books -- Open Minds: All Submissions
The novel PYM by Mat Johnson seems on the surface to be a light-hearted, comedic, summer vacation easy read. It is parodic, but not in a cynical or harsh way, and it is relatively simple and often quite silly in its plot and structure. It would be easy to read PYM and not have any consideration of it as a piece of lasting or significant literature. There are, however, many elements in PYM that open it up to analysis, revealing an intricate and extremely well-constructed novel whose themes and implications carry a great deal of significance. Jean Baudrillard's theory of …
Melvillian Whiteness In Johnson's Pym, Jess Mandeville
Melvillian Whiteness In Johnson's Pym, Jess Mandeville
Open Books -- Open Minds: All Submissions
Henry Louis Gates write that "Afro-American literary history is characterized by ... formal revision," wherein "black writers read and critique other ... texts as an act of rhetorical self-definition" (992). This revision is accomplished by a unique process of signification, an "Afro-American rhetorical strategy... [that] turns on the play and chain of signifiers" (989) drawn from literary and cultural texts, utilizing techniques such as "figuration, troping, ... parody ... [and] pastiche" (992).
Tsalal, Patrick Pride
Tsalal, Patrick Pride
Open Books -- Open Minds: All Submissions
In “Tsalal: The 19th Century American Nightmare” I examine Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket through Toni Morrison’s theory that an African presence exist in 19th-century American literature. In “Black Matter(s)” Morrison argues that this African presence in 19th century literature expresses the fears of American society. Thus, I examine The Narrative of Gordon Arthur Pym in order to see how blackness symbolizes the fears of 19th-century America.
Towards Understanding: The Study Of Hughes' Poetry As The Epitome Of The Expressive, Cultural, And Political Elements Of African American Literature, Brianne Nicole Trudeau
Towards Understanding: The Study Of Hughes' Poetry As The Epitome Of The Expressive, Cultural, And Political Elements Of African American Literature, Brianne Nicole Trudeau
Masters Theses
Unfortunately, a disconnection currently exists between the academic world and the sweet, soulful study of African American literature (AA literature). Because there is limited exposure to AA literature in academics, except for specialized courses in which it serves as the intended focus, most people do not know how to approach it as serious academic study because of its stark differences from Western literature. In sum: African American writers often do not utilize Standard English (SE), so their work is misinterpreted as non-academic in comparison to other Western works of prominence; AA literature tells a different cultural story that most of …
Childhood Trauma And Its Reverberations In Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Suzanne W. Jones
Childhood Trauma And Its Reverberations In Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Suzanne W. Jones
English Faculty Publications
Novelist Bebe Moore Campbell was only five when Emmett Till was murdered on August 28, 1955. But in Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992) she seeks to answer the question that black teenagers in Mississippi, and indeed many people from all over the United States, asked after seeing the photograph of Till's mutilated and bloated body: "How could they do that to him? He's only a boy" (Dittmer 58). Campbell embraces the view that Lillian Smith expressed in Killers of the Dream (1949): "The warped, distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white …
Language Use And The Oral Tradition In Aaya (African American Young Adult) Literature, Kaavonia Hinton-Johnson
Language Use And The Oral Tradition In Aaya (African American Young Adult) Literature, Kaavonia Hinton-Johnson
Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications
(First paragraph) In elementary school my favorite teachers taught me that the language used in my home was incorrect, incoherent, and inappropriate. My second grade teacher Ms. Hull, a tall, thin, dark-skinned woman, stands out among the others. I can still see her hovering over us. “Was!” Ms. Hull shouted, “not wuz. Your tongue is lazy.” “You be what?” she’d ask in disgust with one hand on her hip. When this happened, I was sure to get yelled at and lectured. To avoid such humiliation, I quickly learned to, as we said in my neighborhood, “talk proper.” Shame nagged at …
Book Review: "Yet With A Steady Beat: Contemporary U.S. Afrocentric Biblical Interpretation" By Randall C. Bailey, Vincent L. Wimbush
Book Review: "Yet With A Steady Beat: Contemporary U.S. Afrocentric Biblical Interpretation" By Randall C. Bailey, Vincent L. Wimbush
CGU Faculty Publications and Research
Written at different times for different purposes and occasions, by African American scholars who are differently oriented and differently situated, eight essays have been collected and edited by biblical scholar Randall C. Bailey with a particular focus and purpose in mind. Such focus and purpose are not elaborated upon in the editor's slim introduction. Aside from the issue of the quality of the essays - of uneven quality, as is the case, as everyone knows, with almost all collected essays - what is at stake in this volume, and all volumes that are collections of essays by different authors, is …
Epic, The Oral Community, And The Memory Of Emancipation In Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, Patrice Rankine
Epic, The Oral Community, And The Memory Of Emancipation In Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, Patrice Rankine
Classical Studies Faculty Publications
As the recently published epistolary collection reveals, Ralph Ellison was an unabashed Americanist, for better and for worse. Ellison's faith in American identity and the democratic process, which is evident at the end of Invisible Man in the protagonist's determination to "affirm the principle on which the country was built [and not the men who did the violence]" (574), is again manifest in the posthumous novel, Juneteenth. According to John F. Callahan, Ellison's litearary executor, the novel celebrates "the indivisibility of the American experience" (Juneteeth xvi). James Alan McPherson (the African-American writer to whom Ellison showed a portion …
Interrogating Identity, Daniel M. Scott
Interrogating Identity, Daniel M. Scott
Faculty Publications
Discusses the structures of identity and the role writing plays in the reconfiguration of the self in Charles Johnson's novel `Middle Passage.' Fundamental assumptions about human and literary identity; Allusion and appropriation of textual authority; Novel's debt to preceding Western writing; Complications of Afro-American experience; Johnson's reconfiguration of writing..
The Jurisprudence Of Jane Eyre, Anita L. Allen
The Jurisprudence Of Jane Eyre, Anita L. Allen
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Tripled Plot And Center Of Sula, Maureen T. Reddy
The Tripled Plot And Center Of Sula, Maureen T. Reddy
Faculty Publications
Critics of Sula frequently comment on the pervasive presence of death, the uses of a particular cultural and historical background, the split or doubled protagonist (Sula/Nel), and the attention to chronology in the novel. However, as far as I am aware, no one has presented a reading of Sula that explores the interrelatedness of these elements; yet it is the connections among them that most usefully reveal the novel's overall thematic patterns. Sula can be, and has been, read as, among other things, a fable, a lesbian novel, a black female bildungsroman, a novel of heroic questing, and an historical …