Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - African American & Black

My Dear Boy brings a largely unexplored dimension of Langston Hughes to light. Carmaletta Williams and John Edgar Tidwell explain that scholars have neglected the vital role that correspondence between Carrie Hughes and her son Langston--Harlem Renaissance icon, renowned poet, playwright, fiction writer, autobiographer, and essayist--played in his work.

The more than 120 heretofore unexamined letters presented here are a veritable treasure trove of insights into the relationship between mother Carrie and her renowned son Langston. Until now, a scholarly consensus had begun to...

Here, reprinted without change, is Gossett's classic study, making available to a new generation of scholars a lucid, accessibly written volume...

Percival Everett (b. 1956) writes novels, short stories, poetry, and essays and is one of the most prolific, acclaimed, yet under-examined African American writers working today. Although to date Everett has published eighteen novels, three collections of short fiction, three poetry collections, and one children's book, his work has not garnered the critical attention that it deserves. Perhaps one of the most vexing problems scholars have had in trying to situate Everett's work is that they have found it difficult to place him and his work within a prescribed African American literary...

Slavery is a central feature of American history, one with which the nation still has not come fully to terms. In this book, that seminal topic is examined in a fresh way--through literature. Organized chronologically to show evolving attitudes toward American slavery in the 19th century, the work focuses on four key 19th-century texts that are frequently taught, using them as a gateway for understanding this critical period and why slavery had to be destroyed if the Union was to be maintained.

In addition to examining the four works--Frederick Douglass's "Narrative of the Life of...

The Mississippi River flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history, reshaping the social and cultural landscape as well as the physical environment. Often remembered as an event that altered flood control policy and elevated the stature of powerful politicians, Richard M. Mizelle Jr. examines the place of the flood within African American cultural memory and the profound ways it influenced migration patterns in the United States.

In Backwater Blues, Mizelle analyzes the disaster through the lenses of race and charity, blues music, and mobility and...

Using the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass, as well as the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Walter Mosley, and Barack Obama, Ronda C. Henry Anthony examines how women's bodies are used in African American literature to fund the production of black masculine ideality and power. In tracing representations of ideal black masculinities and femininities, Henry Anthony shows how black men's struggles for gendered agency are inextricably bound up with their complicated relation to white men and normative masculinity. The historical context in which Henry Anthony...

Standard literary criticism tends to either ignore or downplay the unorthodox tradition of black experimental writing that emerged in the wake of protests against colonization and Jim Crow-era segregation. Histories of African American literature likewise have a hard time accounting for the distinctiveness of experimental writing, which is part of a general shift in emphasis among black writers away from appeals for social recognition or raising consciousness. In Freedom Time, Anthony Reed offers a theoretical reading of -black experimental writing- that presents the term both as a...

Oshun's Daughters examines representations of African diasporic religions from novels and poems written by women in the United States, the Spanish Caribbean, and Brazil. In spite of differences in age, language, and nationality, these women writers all turn to variations of traditional Yoruba religion (Santeria/Regla de Ocha and Candomble) as a source of inspiration for creating portraits of womanhood. Within these religious...

East Meets Black examines the making and remaking of race and masculinity through the racialization of Asian and black men, confronting this important white stratagem to secure class and racial privilege, wealth, and status in the post-civil rights era. Indeed Asian and black men in neoliberal America are cast by white supremacy as oppositional. Through this opposition in the US racial hierarchy, Chong Chon-Smith argues that Asian and black men are positioned along binaries brain/body, diligent/lazy, nerd/criminal, culture/ genetics, student/convict, and technocrat/athlete--in what...

What does it mean to be Black? If Blackness is not biological in origin but socially and discursively constructed, does the meaning of Blackness change over time and space? In Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, Michelle M. Wright argues that although we often explicitly define Blackness as a "what," it in fact always operates as a "when" and a "where."

By putting lay discourses on spacetime from physics into conversation with works on identity from the African Diaspora, Physics of Blackness explores how Middle Passage epistemology subverts...