The political value of African American literature has long been a topic of great debate among American writers, both black and white, from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. In his compelling new ...book, Representing the Race, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the genealogy of this topic in order to develop an innovative political history of African American literature. Jarrett examines texts of every sort - pamphlets, autobiographies, cultural criticism, poems, short stories, and novels - to parse the myths of authenticity, popular culture, nationalism, and militancy that have come to define African American political activism in recent decades. He argues that unless we show the diverse and complex ways that African American literature has transformed society, political myths will continue to limit our understanding of this intellectual tradition.Cultural forums ranging from the printing press, schools, and conventions, to parlors, railroad cars, and courtrooms provide the backdrop to this African American literary history, while the foreground is replete with compelling stories, from the debate over racial genius in early American history and the intellectual culture of racial politics after slavery, to the tension between copyright law and free speech in contemporary African American culture, to the political audacity of Barack Obama's creative writing. Erudite yet accessible, Representing the Race is a bold explanation of what's at stake in continuing to politicize African American literature in the new millennium.
The New Negro Henry Louis Gates, Gene Andrew Jarrett / Henry Louis Gates, Gene Andrew Jarrett
2021, 2007, 2021-06-08
eBook
When African American intellectuals announced the birth of the "New Negro" around the turn of the twentieth century, they were attempting through a bold act of renaming to change the way blacks were ...depicted and perceived in America. By challenging stereotypes of the Old Negro, and declaring that the New Negro was capable of high achievement, black writers tried to revolutionize how whites viewed blacks--and how blacks viewed themselves. Nothing less than a strategy to re-create the public face of "the race, " the New Negro became a dominant figure of racial uplift between Reconstruction and World War II, as well as a central idea of the Harlem, or New Negro, Renaissance. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett, The New Negro collects more than one hundred canonical and lesser-known essays published between 1892 and 1938 that examine the issues of race and representation in African American culture. These readings--by writers including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alain Locke, Carl Van Vechten, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright--discuss the trope of the New Negro, and the milieu in which this figure existed, from almost every conceivable angle. Political essays are joined by essays on African American fiction, poetry, drama, music, painting, and sculpture. More than fascinating historical documents, these essays remain essential to the way African American identity and history are still understood today.
Through a series of essays that explore the forms, themes, genres, historical contexts, major authors, and latest critical approaches, A Companion to African American Literature presents a ...comprehensive chronological overview of African American literature from the eighteenth century to the modern day * Examines African American literature from its earliest origins, through the rise of antislavery literature in the decades leading into the Civil War, to the modern development of contemporary African American cultural media, literary aesthetics, and political ideologies * Addresses the latest critical and scholarly approaches to African American literature * Features essays by leading established literary scholars as well as newer voices
For a work to be considered African American literature, does it need to focus on black characters or political themes? Must it represent these within a specific stylistic range? Or is it enough for ...the author to be identified as African American? InDeans and Truants, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the shifting definitions of African American literature and the authors who wrote beyond those boundaries at the cost of critical dismissal and, at times, obscurity. From the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, de facto deans-critics and authors as different as William Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka-prescribed the shifting parameters of realism and racial subject matter appropriate to authentic African American literature, while truant authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, George S. Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison-perhaps the most celebrated African American author of the twentieth century-wrote literature anomalous to those standards. Jarrett explores the issues at stake when Howells, the "Dean of American Letters," argues in 1896 that only Dunbar's "entirely black verse," written in dialect, "would succeed." Three decades later, Locke, the cultural arbiter of the Harlem Renaissance, stands in contrast to Schuyler, a journalist and novelist who questions the existence of a peculiarly black or "New Negro" art. Next, Wright's 1937 blueprint for African American writing sets the terms of the Chicago Renaissance, but Yerby's version of historical romance approaches race and realism in alternative literary ways. Finally,Deans and Truantsmeasures the gravitational pull of the late 1960s Black Aesthetic in Baraka's editorial silence on Toni Morrison's first and only short story, "Recitatif." Drawing from a wealth of biographical, historical, and literary sources,Deans and Truantsdescribes the changing notions of race, politics, and gender that framed and were framed by the authors and critics of African American culture for more than a century.
When African American intellectuals announced the birth of the
"New Negro" around the turn of the twentieth century, they were
attempting through a bold act of renaming to change the way blacks
were ...depicted and perceived in America. By challenging stereotypes
of the Old Negro, and declaring that the New Negro was capable of
high achievement, black writers tried to revolutionize how whites
viewed blacks--and how blacks viewed themselves. Nothing less than
a strategy to re-create the public face of "the race," the New
Negro became a dominant figure of racial uplift between
Reconstruction and World War II, as well as a central idea of the
Harlem, or New Negro, Renaissance. Edited by Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett, The New Negro collects more
than one hundred canonical and lesser-known essays published
between 1892 and 1938 that examine the issues of race and
representation in African American culture. These readings--by
writers including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alain
Locke, Carl Van Vechten, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard
Wright--discuss the trope of the New Negro, and the milieu in which
this figure existed, from almost every conceivable angle. Political
essays are joined by essays on African American fiction, poetry,
drama, music, painting, and sculpture. More than fascinating
historical documents, these essays remain essential to the way
African American identity and history are still understood
today.
The university is the prophetic school out of which come the teachers who are to lead democracy in the true path. It is the university that must guide democracy into the new ields of arts and ...literature and science. It is the university that ights the battles of democracy, its warcry being: “Come, let us reason together.” (Harper 223) For our era, the ability to search and research—sorting, evaluating, verifying, analyzing, and synthesizing abundant information—is an incredibly valuable skill. With the advent of Twitter and fake news, as well as the digitization of vast archives made accessible for the irst time, these active learning skills should have a far larger role in higher education today. (Davidson 88) STUDENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION SHOULD MASTER RESEARCH TO SOLVE THE GREAT SOCIETAL PROBLEMS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Research—as Cathy N. Davidson succinctly defines it above—is one of many crucial topics in her compelling new book The New Education. Looking at the literature and data on American universities Davidson describes in her study, I venture that new research could contribute to the public good as long as research universities continue to advance democracy. Theoretical and practical notions of democracy, of course, have evolved remarkably since America's founding, oscillating between the ideological poles of “liberalism” and “illiberalism,” as some pundits have recently put it (Deneen 155–59). For the sense of American democracy anchoring my essay, I have in mind a “deliberative form of politics” that calls on “the demos to reflect upon itself and judge the efforts of laws, institutions, and leaders” to maintain the equality of social rights and privileges (Urbinati 16). The democratic prosperity of American society requires an increasingly diverse range of students to conduct new research on behalf of the intellectual and scholarly contributions of universities to the public good.
Claude McKay (18891948) was one of the most prolific and sophisticated African American writers of the early twentieth century. A Jamaican-born author of poetry, short stories, novels, and ...nonfiction, McKay has often been associated with the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance, a movement of African American art, culture, and intellectualism between World War I and the Great Depression. But his relationship to the movement was complex. Literally absent from Harlem during that period, he devoted most of his time to traveling through Europe, Russia, and Africa during the 1920s and 1930s. His active participation in Communist groups and the radical Left also encouraged certain opinions on race and class that strained his relationship to the Harlem Renaissance and its black intelligentsia. In his 1937 autobiography, A Long Way from Home, McKay explains what it means to be a black rebel sojourner and presents one of the first unflattering, yet informative, exposés of the Harlem Renaissance. Reprinted here with a critical introduction by Gene Andrew Jarrett, this book will challenge readers to rethink McKays articulation of identity, art, race, and politics and situate these topics in terms of his oeuvre and his literary contemporaries between the world wars.
What Is Jim Crow? JARRETT, GENE ANDREW
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
03/2013, Letnik:
128, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Jarrett comments on the historiographical premise of Jim Crow in What Was African American Literature? For Warren, Jim Crow means the "system of Jim Crow segregation" that once defined a social ...world: "This social order, created by local and statewide laws, statutes, and policies, received constitutional sanction in 1896 with the US Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson," and "it was finally dismantled, at least judicially and legally, in the 1950s and 1960s, specifically with the 1954 ruling by this court in Brown v. Board of Education, overturning Plessy (1-2).
PDF
