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

The horrific 1955 slaying of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till marks a significant turning point in the history of American race relations. An African American boy from Chicago, Till was visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta when he was accused of "wolf-whistling" at a young white woman. His murderers abducted him from his great-uncle's home, beat him, then shot him in the head. Three days later, searchers discovered his body in the Tallahatchie River. The two white men charged with his murder received a swift acquittal from an all-white jury. The eleven essays in Emmett Till in Literary...

Introduction by Arnold Rampersad.

Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet--at the center of the "Harlem Renaissance."

Arnold Rampersad writes in his incisive new introduction to The Big Sea, an American classic: "This is American writing at its best--simpler than Hemingway; as simple...

"By linking Hurston s work to her Florida experiences, the authors explicate her love of black culture and her attitude toward the lot of women in a man s world. An important contribution to the Hurston revival."--Booklist

Following years of neglect, Zora Neale Hurston s status in American letters is restored: she is now recognized as one of the foremost African-American writers of the twentieth century an artist of the Harlem Renaissance and a native Florida writer. Zora in Florida focuses on the place that nurtured and inspired her work, the frontier wilderness of...

From the foreword:
"A sensitive recuperation of a past cultural moment and a contribution to our current one, Mishkin s study both participates in our present national conversation and prepares the way for future ones."

"Looks at literary movements on two different continents and from two different periods . . . and finds significant parallels and interrelations between them. The effect is to illuminate both. There is no other study like it, on this scale."--Richard Bizot, University of North Florida

Drawing fascinating comparisons between two literary movements for...

The half-blood -- half Indian, half white -- is a frequent figure in the popular fiction of nineteenth-century America, for he (or sometimes she) served to symbolize many of the conflicting cultural values with which American society was then wrestling. In literature, as in real life the half-blood was a product of the frontier, embodying the conflict between wilderness and civilization that haunted and stirred the American imagination. What was his identity? Was he indeed "half Indian, half white, and half devil" -- or a bright link between the races from which would emerge a new American...

For Black writers, what is tradition? What does it mean to them that Western humanism has excluded Black culture? Seven noted Black writers and critics take up these and other questions in this collection of original essays, attempting to redefine humanism from a Black perspective, to free it from ethnocentrism, and to enlarge its cultural base.

Contributors: Richard K. Barksdale, Alice Childress, Chester J. Fontenot, Michael S. Harper, Trudier Harris, George E. Kent, R. Baxter Miller

Black on Black provides the first comprehensive analysis of the modern African American literary response to Africa, from W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk to Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Combining cutting-edge theory, extensive historical and archival research, and close readings of individual texts, Gruesser reveals the diversity of the African American response to Countee Cullen's question, "What is Africa to Me?"

John Gruesser uses the concept of Ethiopianism--the biblically inspired belief that black Americans would someday lead Africans and...