African- American Writers

Presented by- Urvi Dave

Class- M A

Semester- 2

Batch Year- 2014-16

Enrolment no.- 14101009

Paper no.- 8c (Cultural Studies)

Email id- dave.urvi71@gmail.com

Guidance- Dr. Dilip Barad

Submitted to- Smt. S B Gardi

Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

African- American writing often displays a folkloric conception of human kind; a “double consciousness”, as W E B Dubois called it, arising from bicultural identity, irony, parody, tragedy, and bitter comedy in negotiating this ambivalence; attacks upon presumed white cultural superiority; a naturalistic focus on survival; and inventing reframing of language itself, as in language games like “Jiving”, “Sounding”, “Signifying”, “Playing the Dozens” and “Rapping”.

Ellison urged black writers to trust their own experiences and definitions of reality. He also upheld folklore as a source of creativity; it was what “ Black people had before they knew, there was such a thing as art”.

Bell correctly stresses, no other ethnic or social group in America has shared anything like the experience of American Blacks: Kidnapping, the Middle Passage, Slavery, Southern plantation life, emancipation, Reconstruction and post- reconstruction, Northern migration, urbanisation and ongoing racism.

Harlem Renaissance (1918-1937) signalled a tremendous upsurge in black culture, with an especial interest in primitives art.

African American writing continued to enter the main stream with the protest novels of the 1940s.

The 1960s brought Black Power and the Black Arts Movement, proposing a separate identification and symbology.

Major Figures related to Arts

Amiri Baraka

Margaret Walker

Ernest Gaines

John Edgar Wideman

Ishmael Reed

Major Figures related to Music

Chuck Berry

B B King

Aretha Franklin

Stevie Wonder

Jimmy Hendroic

Oprah Gail Winfrey (29 January 1954) is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer and philanthropist.

Most influential women in the world. In 2013, she has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barrack Obama and an honorary Doctorate degree form Harvard.

Has co-authored five books. Publishes magazine ‘O, The Oprah Magazine’ from 2004-08.

Toni Morrison (18 February, 1931) is an American novelist, editor and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue and richly detailed characters.

Best novels- ‘The Bluest Eye’, ‘Sula’, ‘Song of Solomon’, and ‘Beloved’.

Won Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved and the Nobel Prize.

In 1975, her novel Sula was nominated for the National Book Award.

Third novel, Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention. The book was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940.

James Mercer Langston Hughes (01 February 1902- 22 May 1967), was an American poet, Social activist, Novelist, Playwright and Columnist.

Best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that “The Negro was in Vogue” which was later paraphrased as “When Harlem was in Vogue”.

First published in The Crisis in 1921, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, which became Hughes's signature poem, was collected in his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926).

Identified as unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé. He stressed the theme of “Black is Beautiful” as he explored the black human condition in variety of depths.

Fist novel- Not Without Laughter (1930)

First collection of short stories-Ways of White Folks (1934).

Zora Neale Hurston (07 January 1891) is an anthropologist and novelist and was an fixture of the Harlem Renaissance before writing her masterwork “Their Eyes Were Watching God”.

Published a collection of stories entitled Mules and Men in 1935. Also contributed articles to magazines, including the Journal of American Folklore.

First novel- Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934).

In 1942, Hurston published her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road.

Countee Cullen (30 May 1903- 09 January 1946) was an African American poet who was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Worked as assistant editor for Opportunity magazine. His column “The Dark Tower” increased his literary reputation.

First novel “One Way to Heaven” (1932), a social comedy of lower class blacks and the Bomgeoisie in New York city.

Other works- “The Lost Zoo” (1940), “My Lives and How I Lost Them” (1942), “St. Louis Woman” (1946).

Richard Nathaniel Wright (04 September 1908- 28 November 1960) was an American author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems and non-fiction.

His literature concerns racial themes, especially those including the plight of African Americans during the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries.

He wrote many short stories.

Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) is a collection of four short stories.

Was appointed to the editorial board of New Masses and Granville Hicks, prominent literary critic and Communist sympathizer.

Native Son (1940)

Ernest James Gaines (15 January 1933) is an African American author.

A Lesson Before Dying (1933), a novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

Works- Catherine Cornier (1964)

Of Love and Dust (1967)BloodlineThe Autobiography of

Ms. Jane Pitman (1971)A Long Day in November

(1971)The Turtles (1956)The Sky is Gray (1963)

Margaret Walker (07 July 1915-30 November 1998) was an American poet and writer.

She was part of the African-American literary Movement in Chicago.

Notable works include the award winning poem For my People(1942) and the novel Jubilee(1966), set in the south during the American Civil War.