Max Weber and the Black American (1985) (original) (raw)
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A Look at Creative Nonfiction Literature in Civil Rights and Rap
ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES 2.2, 2015
Persona is a narrative creation that paints a picture of a character composed of many elements, and those elements can be crafted by the author, or shaped by the personality of the character that was formed by the forces surrounding them during their development within the story. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley was careful not to go too far outside convention when writing the life story of the civil rights era icon. In and of itself, Malcolm X’s life in narration is an adventure and story worth reading. It gained meaning from the struggles he brought forth to the open, in a voice that resonated against the portrait painted of him in the media. People responded by wanting to know more about the man. In the same way the civil rights era frames Malcolm’s story and gives credence to his persona, the popularity of rap plays a similar role in shaping the autobiographical persona in the memoirs of two popular hip hop artists, Jay Z in Decoded and Questlove in Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove.
General Interest Nonfiction by African American Authors: A Thematically Unique Bibliography
1995
This bibliography was compiled to demonstrate the extent to which African Americans have written on a broad array of topics that do not have racial concerns as the major focus. Nonfiction books of more than 100 pages written by persons of African descent who were born in the United States or lived in the country for substantial periods of time are included, as well as those with African Americans as the sole autho: or, if the book was co-authored, the principal author. It is intended to be an extensive bibliography but not necessarily exhaustive. The bibliography has been divided into the following areas: (1) humanities; (2) social sciences; (3) science and technology; and (4) miscellaneous. (EH) * 'c*A
Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa
South Atlantic Review, 2000
From the earliest slave narratives and Phillis Wheatley's poetry to contemporary works such as Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Charles Johnson's The Middle Passage, Africa has been a prevalent theme for black American authors. In "The Negro in American Culture" (1929), Alain Locke describes "the conscious and deliberate threading back of the historic sense of group tradition to the cultural backgrounds of Africa" as "the most sophisticated of all race motives" and claims that Africa is "naturally romantic" for the African American writer. Because of important recent developments in a variety of scholarly disciplines, the time is right for an extended analysis of a largely unexplored but rich and vital topic: the depiction of Africa in twentieth-century African American writing. In the last two and a half decades, the field of African American Studies has undergone a remarkable transformation. A truly impressive number of lost or unknown primary texts has become available, and groundbreaking studies of slave narratives, the Harlem Renaissance, Black Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, the relationship between African and black American art, African American missionary work in Africa, and African American attitudes towards Africa, as well as important works of African American literary theory and intellectual history, have been published. Moreover, scholarship in the fields of cultural and literary criticism and African Studies has delineated both the distortions and the powerful influence of Africanist writing, that is, texts written about Africa by Western authors. This scholarship is highly significant because African American depictions of the continent have not only been influenced by but also responded directly or indirectly to white writing xii Preface about Africa. Although scholars have recently devoted attention to various aspects of the African American relationship with Africa, surprisingly little work has been done on black American literature written about the continent. Only one book that I am aware of, Marion Berghahn's The Image of Africa in Black American Literature (1977), has been published on this subject. This present study, Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa, addresses this fascinating topic in light of recent scholarly developments and rediscoveries. During the more than a dozen years that this book has been in the making, taking several twists and turns along the way, I have become indebted to many people and organizations without who se help this project would not have been completed. No doubt 1 am forgetting the assistance of several persons in following paragraphs, and for this I apologize. To all of you, I express my heartfelt thanks. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) generously awarded me a fellowship for the 1992-1993 academic year to work on Black on Black, making that most precious of commodities available to me, time. In addition, NEH Summer Seminars under the direction of Eric Sundquist at the University of California, Berkeley in 1990 and Earl Miner at Princeton University in 1994 enabled me to make significant progress on this book by providing me with thoughtful mentors, stimulating intellectual communities, and access to superior research facilities. Because many of the texts I analyze and refer to can be found only in the unpublished papers of specific writers, obscure black periodicals, special collections, and rare book rooms, I have greatly profited from the knowledge, suggestions, and, in some cases, legwork of librarians and curators at several institutions.
The Landscapes of African American Short Stories, 1887 – 2014
2015
Bibliography… P 141 1 Presently, James Nagel serves as a prominent figure examining the history of short stories and their significance to representing the pluralistic nature of American culture. He notes, "The short-story cycle in modern American fiction is patently multicultural, deriving, perhaps, both from the ethnic cross-fertilization within the literary community and from a shared legacy reaching back to ancient oral traditions in virtually every society through the world, uniting disparate peoples in a heritage of narrative tradition" (4-5). An interpretation of Nagel's quote may also suggest that his comment presupposes a relationship between location and narrative. 2 My dissertation utilizes quantitative data, surveying 86 anthologies in order to identify the most frequently anthologized short story writers and the subsequent stories that appear over an 80 year publication span. 3 Dana Nelson, along with Houston Baker co-edited the 2001 American Literature's special issue "Violence, the Body and The South," and coined the phrase "New Southern Studies" in the introduction of the collection. Baker also served on the University of Georgia Press advisory board for a series of books on "new southern studies" that published over 14 books such as Riché Richardson's Black Masculinity and the U.S. South and Erich Nunn's Sounding the Color Line. Similarly, the University of North Carolina Press released a similar series of books on New Southern Studies which includes Thadious M. Davis's Southscapes. 4 Leon Jackson's essay "The Talking Book and the Talking Book Historian" calls for more integration between book history and the thematic pillars of African American culture and literature to thoroughly account for the commercial relationship between writers, publishers, and book production. Kenneth Kinnamon's essay "Anthologies
Autobiographies by Americans of color, 1995-2000: an annotated bibliography
Choice Reviews Online, 2004
This second of two volumes bringing together as comprehensively as possible, all autobiographical works by Americans of Color covers the years 1995-2000. In this five year period there are nearly 200 more publications than in the previous volume (1980-1994), which spanned fifteen years. 435 of the 674 entries in this volume are by African Americans. The stories of leaving the south and participation in the Civil Rights Movement, which were present in the first volume, are joined by those of musicians, entertainers, entrepreneurs, and athletes, teachers, sharecroppers, politicians, and veterans. There is a greater representation of Japanese American authors in this period of time as those who were incarcerated in the internment camps began to tell their stories. In this five year period, we also begin to see the stories of those who grew up in multiethnic or multiracial families. The introduction to the book provides more details, as well as the methodology we used for identifying the publications included.
Abstract: The paper pinpoints the revelation, evolution and development of the Black Women under the impact of slavery and modern day United States. Words became the rudimentary factor of expression to the Black women and they found the genre of autobiography more powerful. They made this genre a conscious identity for their social, political and economical. Hence the AfroAmerican autobigraphy in this paper tries to reveal it as a constructed, constituted and formed of the specific practices and discourses of a specific people and their response to their time and place. Black women‟s autobiographies seem torn between exhibitionism and secrecy, between self-display and self-concealment. Key words: slave writing, autobiography, exploitation, oppression, search for identity and
WRITING WHILE BLACK – EXPLORING PERCEPTIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITING IN THE 21 ST CENTURY
Abstract Purpose was to explore perceptions and attitudes that may shape acceptance of African American writing among readers and writers in all areas of writing, including entertainment, academia and business. The study did not intend to solve any problems with regard to perceptions nor prove that problems existed because of perceptions, but to raise awareness of how important perceptions are to acceptance and efficacy of African American writing and to ignite more scholarly research into the subject of race and African American writing in the 21st century and beyond. The study used a mixed method of qualitative and quantitative analyses of measurable responses and authentic, reflective responses from survey participants and interviewees. Findings indicated that more scholarly research into the efficacy, relevance and the impact of racial stereotypes, biases and discrimination in academia, entertainment and business in America facing African Americans is necessary.