This essay focuses on James Weldon Johnson's overlapping literary and diplomatic careers. Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, written while he worked as a US consul in Latin America, draws upon tropes of international representation to weigh in upon questions of aesthetic and racial representation. Tracing Johnson's transition from a US representative abroad to a race representative within the US, the essay argues that Johnson's case illustrates the importance of permitting the significant tradition of black work in the US's diplomatic program to inform the ways we approach African America's expressive and geopolitical engagements with the international world.
Hutchinson,George (Editor) and Young,John K. (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2013
Published:
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
236 p., Always haunted by the commodification of blackness, African American literary production interfaces with the processes of publication and distribution in particularly charged ways. This collection ranges across the history of African American literature, and the authors have much to contribute on such issues as editorial and archival preservation, canonization, and the "packaging" and repackaging of black-authored texts. Includes "More than McKay and Guillén: The Caribbean in Hughes and Bontemps's The Poetry of the Negro (1949)."
233 p., Analyzes three contemporary novels by Black women authors to argue that their daughter-protagonists gain a sense of their own subjectivities as women of African descent through their imaginative and creative responses to their respective muted paternal histories and legacies. These responses motivate the creation of ritualistic art forms rooted in communal practices such as storytelling, sculpting, music, dance-drama, folk medicine, and traditional cuisine. Maps the centrality of family, community, rituals, and art to the development of female subjectivity as represented in Marilene Felinto's As mulheres de Tijucopapo / The Women of Tijucopapo , Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker , and Gayl Jones's Corregidora.
New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers The State University of New Jersey
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
319 p., Argues that despite the inherent racist implications of classical and modern formulations of the heroic, the hero remains a site of struggle and resistance for writers of and in the African Diaspora. This project considers a genealogy of writers beginning with Ralph Ellison whose novel, Invisible Man and short story, "Flying Home," engage with classic and then contemporary forms of the heroic and seek to carve out a space for the African American heroic. Considers novels and short stories produced by the next generation of writers, specifically the work of Charles Johnson and Toni Cade Bambara, who inherit Ellison's legacy of engagement with aesthetic and political implications of social and popular cultural movements and history. Argues that these writers come to very different conclusions as to the efficacy of the "hero." Concludes the dissertation with the work of Michelle Cliff and Patricia Powell, whose work take us to the Anglo Caribbean and enables me to think through the movement of this figure through conduits of colonial and global capital and the resiliency of contemporary struggles, political and aesthetic, with this figure as a site of resistance and revolution.
The examination of Leonora Miano's work offers a great example of how, through literature, a new form of Negritude could be identified. This paper intends to highlight her American (including Caribbean) literary inspirations and how the rising Franco-Cameronese novelist has compounded them with her African upbringing and family ties which allows her to reflect on what she calls "Afropeaness".
203 p., Examines the presence of slave vocality in Black Atlantic literature, placing the North American tradition of slave narrative against works from authors throughout the United States and the Caribbean. Challenges existing approaches to slave narrative by viewing the genre as one based on the fundamental impossibility of expressing black subjectivity under the political, ethical, and psychic conditions of slavery. The slave narrative thus ceases to represent an attempt by former slaves to access freedom and agency through writing, along with its promises of reason and autonomy, but rather signals (or sounds) a process of expression built not upon meaning, but upon signification. In other words, rather than crafting themselves into legible objects for the sake of narration and perception, slave narrators performed their roles as exchangeable units, both discursive and political, in ways that exposed the underlying lacunae of being a slave-narrator, a significative protocol that persists in contemporary black fiction throughout the Atlantic, even in areas in which the slave narrative did not historically emerge.
