ENG 247: African American Literature II

The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

Online version of an exhibition held at the Library of Congress from February 9 to August 29, 1994. Covering nearly 500 years of the Black experience in the Western hemisphere, surveys the Library's collections, including books, periodicals, prints, photographs, music, film, and recorded sound.

Partial timeline created by Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II.

The purpose of this web site is to provide the reader with a comprehensive guide to African American Literature during the Twentieth Century. Here, you will find over 75 novels, poems, autobiographies, and essays along with summaries of the selected literature. Also, we have provided you with some significant events of each decade and the literary themes that African American authors were writing about during that decade. This web site is targeted towards high school students because we felt they would be at a level of maturity that would allow them to have a better grasp of what the authors were writing about during that time period. Also, we felt that high school students would be more in tuned to the issues that confront the African American community. However, this web site is in no way limited to this population. This web site can be used as research and educational tool for all those that have an interest in African American Literature.

Short guide from Poets.org on the Black Arts Movement.

Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress. The link provided includes information on resources from historic African American/Black newspapers.

Contains information, drawn from legal records, newspapers and other archival and published sources, about everyday life in New York City's Harlem neighborhood in the years 1915-1930.

Designed to empower discovery, access, and appreciation for the life and work of 20th-century American novelist Toni Morrison, this portal includes instructions on how anybody can access the Toni Morrison Papers held in the Special Collections department of Princeton University's Firestone Library; information on the spring 2023 exhibition Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory; instructions on visiting Princeton University, including with a group; a complete bibliography of Morrison's published works; content designed for young audiences; a list of Morrison-centered events taking place around Princeton; and more.

The Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection is a collaborative project to provide digital access to materials documenting the roles and experiences of Black Women in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and, more broadly, women’s rights, voting rights, and civic activism between the 1850s and 1960. The materials in this collection include photographs, correspondence, speeches, event programs, publications, oral histories, and other artifacts.

The best short articles and essays about race and racism in America.

From the New York Public Library's Digital Collection, The Green Book Collections provides information on safe travel for Black travelers during Jim Crow.

Candacy Taylor is an award-winning author, photographer and cultural documentarian working on a multidisciplinary project based on the Green Book. Taylor is the author of Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America (Abrams Books). She is also the curator and content specialist for an exhibition based on her book that will be toured by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) starting in June 2020. The exhibition will travel throughout the United States for three years. This project has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Hutchins Center at Harvard University (under the direction of Henry Louis Gates Jr.), The Library of Congress, National Geographic, The National Park Service, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Graham Foundation, The California Humanities, and The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The photographs in this exhibit were selected from the John Doar Papers, housed at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University Library Department of Special Collections. For more information about the collection and to see the folder of photographs, click the links below.

The Marian Anderson Collection includes Anderson's personal papers--including letters, music scores, programs, photographs, and sound recordings--and affiliated materials, along with additional donations to the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. All of these collections are housed in the Kislak Center.

Over 2.5 million African-American men registered for the draft, and black women volunteered in large numbers. While serving in the Army, Army Air Forces, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard, they experienced continuing discrimination and segregation. Despite these impediments, many African-American men and women met the challenge and persevered. They served with distinction, made valuable contributions to the war effort, and earned well-deserved praise and commendations for their struggles and sacrifices.

As a part of the collaboration between the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University, the SNCC Digital Gateway has been able to facilitate conversations and public events with visiting SNCC activists. Below, you will find footage of some of these conversations where the activists speak about their experiences and lessons learned working in the Movement, what they went on to do, and how their struggles are tied to those of today.

The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly established and the Great Migration of African Americans was well under way, was not the nadir for black culture, James Smethurst reveals, but instead a time of profound response from African American intellectuals. The African American Roots of Modernism explores how the Jim Crow system triggered significant artistic and intellectual responses from African American writers, deeply marking the beginnings of literary modernism and, ultimately, notions of American modernity.In identifying the Jim Crow period with the coming of modernity, Smethurst upsets the customary assessment of the Harlem Renaissance as the first nationally significant black arts movement, showing how artists reacted to Jim Crow with migration narratives, poetry about the black experience, black performance of popular culture forms, and more. Smethurst introduces a whole cast of characters, including understudied figures such as William Stanley Braithwaite and Fenton Johnson, and more familiar authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson. By considering the legacy of writers and artists active between the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, Smethurst illuminates their influence on the black and white U.S. modernists who followed.

Scholarly criticisms of works from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Aesthetic.

Comprising elements of the avant-garde, science fiction, cutting-edge hip-hop, black comix, and graphic novels, Afrofuturism spans both underground and mainstream pop culture. With a twofold aim to entertain and enlighten, Afrofuturists strive to break down racial, ethnic, and all social limitations to empower and free individuals to be themselves. This book introduces readers to the burgeoning artists creating Afrofuturist works, the history of innovators in the past, and the wide range of subjects they explore. From the sci-fi literature of Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and NK Jemisin to the musical cosmos of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and the Black Eyed Peas'will.i.am, to the visual and multimedia artists inspired by African Dogon myths and Egyptian deities, topics range from the alien experience of blacks in America to the wake up cry that peppers sci-fi literature, sermons, and activism. Interviews with rappers, composers, musicians, singers, authors, comic illustrators, painters, and DJs, as well as Afrofuturist professors, provide a firsthand look at this fascinating movement.

This timely special edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, features a new preface by the authors that places the Party in a contemporary political landscape, especially as it relates to Black Lives Matter and other struggles to fight police brutality against black communities. In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the United States, the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the U.S. government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism. In the face of intense repression, the Party flourished, becoming the center of a revolutionary movement with offices in sixty-eight U.S. cities and powerful allies around the world.Black against Empire is the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. The authors analyze key political questions, such as why so many young black people across the country risked their lives for the revolution, why the Party grew most rapidly during the height of repression, and why allies abandoned the Party at its peak of influence. Bold, engrossing, and richly detailed, this book cuts through the mythology and obfuscation, revealing the political dynamics that drove the explosive growth of this revolutionary movement and its disastrous unraveling. Informed by twelve years of meticulous archival research, as well as familiarity with most of the former Party leadership and many rank-and-file members, this book is the definitive history of one of the greatest challenges ever posed to American state power.

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 people of the diaspora to a bright future--to provide a framework for his study.

A 2008 cover of The New Yorker featured a much-discussed Black Power parody of Michelle and Barack Obama. The image put a spotlight on how easy it is to flatten the Black Power movement as we imagine new types of blackness. Margo Natalie Crawford argues that we have misread the Black Arts Movement's call for blackness. We have failed to see the movement's anticipation of the'new black'and'post-black.'Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics. Crawford zooms in on the 1970s second wave of the Black Arts Movement and shows the connections between this final wave of the Black Arts movement and the early years of twenty-first century black aesthetics. She uncovers the circle of black post-blackness that pivots on the power of anticipation, abstraction, mixed media, the global South, satire, public interiority, and the fantastic.

Ever since Bessie Smith's powerful voice conspired with the “race records” industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women's singing. In Black Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin.

The Harlem Renaissance is considered one of the most significant periods of creative and intellectual expression for African Americans. Beginning as early as 1914 and lasting into the 1940s, this era saw individuals reject the stereotypes of African Americans and confront the racist, social, political, and economic ideas that denied them citizenship and access to the American Dream. While the majority of recognized literary and artistic contributors to this period were black males, African American women were also key contributors.Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era profiles the most important figures of this cultural and intellectual movement. Highlighting the accomplishments of black women who sought to create positive change after the end of WWI, this reference work includes representatives not only from the literary scene but also: ActivistsActressesArtistsEducatorsEntrepreneursMusiciansPolitical leaders ScholarsBy acknowledging the women who played vital—if not always recognized—roles in this movement, this book shows how their participation helped set the stage for the continued transformation of the black community well into the 1960s. To fully realize the breadth of these contributions, editors Lean'tin L. Bracks and Jessie Carney Smith have assembled profiles written by a number of accomplished academics and historians from across the country. As such, Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era will be of interest to scholars of women's studies, African American studies, and cultural history, as well as students and anyone wishing to learn more about the women of this important era.

In this volume, Lovalerie King and Shirley Moody-Turner have compiled a collection of essays that offer access to some of the most innovative contemporary black fiction while addressing important issues in current African American literary studies.

Updated to include the Black Lives Matter movement, the presidency of Barack Obama, the rise of hate speech on the Internet, and moreSince the publication of the first edition of Critical Race Theory in 2001, the United States has lived through two economic downturns, an outbreak of terrorism, and the onset of an epidemic of hate directed against immigrants, especially undocumented Latinos and Middle Eastern people. On a more hopeful note, the country elected and re-elected its first black president and has witnessed the impressive advance of gay rights. As a field, critical race theory has taken note of all these developments, and this primer does so as well. It not only covers a range of emerging new topics and events, it also addresses the rise of a fierce wave of criticism from right-wing websites, think tanks, and foundations, some of which insist that America is now colorblind and has little use for racial analysis and study. Critical Race Theory is essential for understanding developments in this burgeoning field, which has spread to other disciplines and countries. The new edition also covers the ways in which other societies and disciplines adapt its teachings and, for readers wanting to advance a progressive race agenda, includes new questions for discussion, aimed at outlining practical steps to achieve this objective.

Dreaming Out Loud brings together essays by many of the most well-known and respected African American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, discussing various aspects of the vocation, craft, and art of writing fiction. Though many of the writers included here are also accomplished poets, essayists, and playwrights, this collection and the essays it contains remains focused on the novel as a genre and an art form. Some essays explore the challenges of being an African American writer in the United States, broadly addressing aesthetic and racial prejudice in American publishing and literature and its changing face over the decades. Others are more specific and personal, recounting how the authors came to be a reader and writer in a culture that did not always encourage them to do so. Some are more general and focus on practice and craft, while still other essays offer detailed behind-the-scenes accounts of how famous novels, such as Native Son, Invisible Man, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and The Color Purple, came to life. Ranging from the Harlem Renaissance, through the Civil Rights movement, and into the twenty-first century, this anthology explores what it has meant to be an African American novelist over the past hundred years. Found within are essays by twenty-one African American novelists, including Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, National Book Award-winners Ralph Ellison and Charles Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winners Alice Walker and James Alan McPherson, and well-known canonical writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Margaret Walker. Dreaming Out Loud seeks to inspire writers and readers alike, while offering a fascinating and important portrait of novelists at work in their own words. CONTRIBUTORS James Baldwin, Arna Bontemps, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Gaines, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Charles Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Gayl Jones, Terry McMillan, James Alan McPherson, Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, Ishmael Reed, Martha Southgate, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, John Edgar Wideman, and Richard Wright.

A hermeneutical study of metaphor in African American literature.In Habitations of the Veil, Rebecka Rutledge Fisher uses theory implicit in W. E. B. Du Bois's use of metaphor to draw out and analyze what she sees as a long tradition of philosophical metaphor in African American literature. She demonstrates how Olaudah Equiano, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison each use metaphors to develop a critical discourse capable of overcoming the limits of narrative language to convey their lived experiences. Fisher's philosophical investigations open these texts to consideration on ontological and epistemological levels, in addition to those concerned with literary craft and the politics of black identity.Rebecka Rutledge Fisher is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Annotated resource book (only one user can view at a time).

Many scholars have written about the white readers and patrons of the Harlem Renaissance, but during the period many black writers, publishers, and editors worked to foster a cadre of African American readers, or in the poet Sterling Brown's words, a'reading folk.'Black newspapers featured columns that reviewed the latest African American fiction. Magazines held writing contests to urge black readers to participate in the literary culture. Through newspapers, journals, and anthologies, writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Gwendolyn Bennett spoke directly to their fellow African Americans to cultivate interest in literature and the intellectual tools for reading it.In The Harlem Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader, Shawn Anthony Christian argues that print-based addresses to African Americans are a defining but understudied component of the Harlem Renaissance. Especially between 1919 and 1930, these writers promoted diverse racial representation as a characteristic of'good literature'both to exhibit black literacy and to foster black readership. Drawing on research from print culture studies, histories of racial uplift, and studies of modernism, Christian demonstrates the importance of this focus on the African American reader in influential periodicals such as The Crisis and celebrated anthologies such as The New Negro. Christian illustrates that the drive to develop and support black readers was central in the poetry, fiction, and drama of the era

Focusing on the years from 1922 to 1938, this book revisits an important moment in black cultural history to explore how visual elements were used in poems, novels, and photography to undermine existing stereotypes. Miriam Thaggert identifies and analyzes an early form of black American modernism characterized by a heightened level of experimentation with visual and verbal techniques for narrating and representing blackness

Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West led a charmed life in many respects. Born into a distinguished Boston family, she appeared in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, then lived in the Soviet Union with a group that included Langston Hughes, to whom she proposed marriage. She later became friends with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who encouraged her to finish her second novel, The Wedding, which became the octogenarian author's first bestseller.Literary Sisters reveals a different side of West's personal and professional lives—her struggles for recognition outside of the traditional literary establishment, and her collaborations with talented African American women writers, artists, and performers who faced these same problems. West and her “literary sisters”—women like Zora Neale Hurston and West's cousin, poet Helene Johnson—created an emotional support network that also aided in promoting, publishing, and performing their respective works. Integrating rare photos, letters, and archival materials from West's life, Literary Sisters is not only a groundbreaking biography of an increasingly important author but also a vivid portrait of a pivotal moment for African American women in the arts.

Geneva Cobb Moore deftly combines literature, history, criticism, and theory in Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature by offering insight into the historical black experience from slavery to freedom as depicted in the literature of nine female writers across several centuries.

This compelling book recounts the history of black gay men from the 1950s to the 1990s, tracing how the major movements of the times—from civil rights to black power to gay liberation to AIDS activism—helped shape the cultural stigmas that surrounded race and homosexuality. In locating the rise of black gay identities in historical context, Kevin Mumford explores how activists, performers, and writers rebutted negative stereotypes and refused sexual objectification. Examining the lives of both famous and little-known black gay activists—from James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin to Joseph Beam and Brother Grant-Michael Fitzgerald—Mumford analyzes the ways in which movements for social change both inspired and marginalized black gay men. Drawing on an extensive archive of newspapers, pornography, and film, as well as government documents, organizational records, and personal papers, Mumford sheds new light on four volatile decades in the protracted battle of black gay men for affirmation and empowerment in the face of pervasive racism and homophobia.

Index on topics related to African American Literature.

Carol E. Henderson focuses on racial trauma in history and prose.

The Harlem-born son of a storefront preacher, James Baldwin died almost thirty years ago, but his spirit lives on in the eloquent and still-relevant musings of his novels, short stories, essays, and poems. What concerned him most—as a black man, as a gay man, as an American—were notions of isolation and disconnection at both the individual and communal level and a conviction that only in the transformative power of love could humanity find any hope of healing its spiritual and social wounds. In Understanding James Baldwin, Marc K. Dudley shows that a proper grasp of Baldwin's work begins with a grasp of the times in which he wrote. During a career spanning the civil rights movement and beyond, Baldwin stood at the heart of intellectual and political debate, writing about race, sexual identity, and gendered politics, while traveling the world to promote dialogue on those issues. In surveying the writer's life, Dudley traces the shift in Baldwin's aspirations from occupying the pulpit like his stepfather to becoming a writer amid the turmoil of sexual self-discovery and the harsh realities of American racism and homophobia. The book's analyses of key works in the Baldwin canon—among them, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room,'Sonny's Blues,'Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Devil Finds Work—demonstrate the consistency, contrary to some critics'claims, of Baldwin's vision and thematic concerns. As police violence against people of color, a resurgence in white supremacist rhetoric, and pushback against LGBTQ rights fill today's headlines, James Baldwin's powerful and often-angry words find a new resonance. From early on, Baldwin decried the damning potential of alienation and the persistent bigotry that feeds it. Yet, even as it sometimes wavered, his hope for both the individual and the nation remained intact. In the present historical moment, James Baldwin matters more than ever.