AUDIENCE, DOUBLE-CONSCIOUSNESS, AND AFRICAN TEACHERS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: THE CHALLENGING DEBATE (original) (raw)

The Past, Present, and Future of African American Literary History

2019

At a time when the project of literary history is eyed with increasing suspicion, two recent publications expand and complicate discussions of what constitutes the canon of African American literature: With their Cambridge History of African American Literature, Maryemma Graham and Jerry Ward have edited an impressive, comprehensive survey that will no doubt impact further discussions on the development of African American literature in the early 21st century. While its chapters offer a multiperspective view that defies any single narrative to explain 'AfAm Lit', Kenneth Warren, by asking the polemical question of What Was African American Literature?, tells quite a revisionary story: African American literature, Warren claims, was first and foremost a "representational and rhetorical strategy" (p. 9) in response to the social reality of the Jim Crow era, and therefore no longer exists. Particularly in conjunction with each other, these two publications might repre...

Art for whose Sake?: Defining African American Literature

2012

This exploratory qualitative study describes the criteria that African American Literature professors use in defining what is African American Literature. Maulana Karenga’s black arts framework shaped the debates in the literature review and the interview protocol; furthermore, the presence or absence of the framework’s characteristics were discussed in the data analysis. The population sampled was African American Literature professors in the United States who have no less than five years experience. The primary source of data collection was in-depth interviewing. Data analysis involved open coding and axial coding. General conclusions include: (1) The core of the African American Literature definition is the black writer representing the black experience but the canon is expanding and becoming more inclusive. (2) While African American Literature is often a tool for empowerment, a wide scope is used in defining methods of empowerment. (3) Black writers should balance aesthetic and...

Black studies : pedagogy and revolution, a study of Afro-American studies and the liberal arts tradition through the discipline of Afro-American literature

1979

Black Studies: Pedagogy and Revolution A Study of Afro-American Studies and the Liberal Arts Tradition Through the Discipline of Afro-American Literature May 1979 Johnnella E. Butler, B.A., College of Our Lady of the Elms M.A.T., Johns Hopkins University, Ed.D., University of Massachusetts Directed by: Professor Rudine Sims The Afro-American operates within the context of an Eastern/Western, African/Euro-American, Black/White sensibility that is simultaneously in concert with and diametrically opposed to the dominant Anglo-oriented American sensibility. The Western aspect of the warring sensibilities within the Afro-American experience maintains an oppression of the African sensibility by virtue of inherent contradictions between the sensibilities, and by virtue of colonial oppression. The duality, operating within the context of the dominant either/or sensibility, is exacerbated thereby maintaining a colonized state for the

THEORY AT WORK: AFRICAN-AMERICAN /AFRICAN TEXT, HISTORY AND CULTURE

The proposed theme attempts to cover The Best African American Essays: 2009 edited by Gerald Early and Debraj. J. Dickerson and Doris Lessings’ ‘The Sun between Their Feet’- Collected African Stories. Both the texts create opportunity for change. A voluminous literature describes the diffusion, employment and efficacy of movement repertoire” (Armstrong, Elizabeth A. 2002). These texts emphasized blacks consciousness, their struggle, their nationalism, their power in multicultural lives, their efforts of self-determination regarding their sustenance, their shift and their conflict as regards their preservation of culture. The theory of how black studies played in the dark images of blackness in not only the literature written by whites but also by African-Americans or by Africans has become a matter of problem framing discourse. The above mentioned texts leave immense scope to expostulate the historical shift in race relations; for understanding of cultural fusion; highlighting immigrant adaptation, multiculturalism and identity management in different immigrant groups in America or in Africa itself. The study becomes interesting from the point of self-conceptions, individual challenges, their renegotiation with the prevelant socio-political, legal environment that portrays their self-valorisation, validation of their memory, space and image, their vehemence against racial discrimination, their disillusionment to imitate whites’ standards and last but the least their fight against segregation within themselves and with whites. These books reveal contrast between homogenization of ethnic group and mobilization of cultural hegemony in context of perception and attitude of whites and blacks respectively. Hence these texts pose a challenge to the previous ethnic canons that romance with cultural relativity and historiography of the text that “has conveyed a picture of Black people as being docile and imitative, stupid and parasitic children, primitives and buffoons” (Wright, Bobby. 1969)

Pitch Black, Black Pitch: Theorizing African American Literature

Abstract: This essay proffers that African American literature, especially that of the contemporary moment, seeks a non-canonical canon, that is, unlawful laws, unruly rules, reading lists that morph and shake serial listedness. Furthermore, African American literature as theorized here is concerned with three constitutive nodes: first, a certain kind of memory, one that is not simply revisionist or a Morrisonian “rememory” but what I call “memoricity,” that which carries the historicity of moments, the very subjectivity of things not past but deeply contemporary. It denotes the historicity of the contemporary, and simultaneously the contemporaneity of history. Second, the underground, snugly fitting within familiar notions of the underground in African American literature, but here proffered as more than a site of secrecy or dormancy; it is, rather, a liminal, mezzanine space of generative disruption and, too, vibrant, volatile epistemic radicality. Thirdly, seeing: not to be reduced to ocular perception, it is a seeing that encapsulates a more capaciously embodied practice that engages more than simply the eyes, a seeing that is a matter of full corporeality. These three nodes are, in African American literature, characterized under the helm of a Black synesthetic practice—seeing-without-light, knowledges “muzzled to those shores,” a lexicon in the dark, unintelligible to the logic of the light, underground epistemologies. To be examined are six texts: Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn (2016), Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), Ben H. Winters’ Underground Airlines (2016), Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall (2012), Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval (2009), and Joshua Bennett’s The Sobbing School (2016). Copyright: This work originally appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review 18.1, winter 2018, published by Michigan State University Press.