ENGL 2055: African American Literature

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

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. Distinguished scholars Houston Baker, Trudier Harris, Darryl Dickson-Carr, and Maryemma Graham join writers and younger scholars to explore the work of Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, Trey Ellis, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, Kyle Baker, Danzy Senna, Nikki Turner, and many others.

Challenging the conception of empowerment associated with the Black Power Movement and its political and intellectual legacies in the present, Darieck Scott contends that power can be found not only in martial resistance, but, surprisingly, where the black body has been inflicted with harm or humiliation.

How to Read African American Literature offers a series of provocations to unsettle the predominant assumptions readers make when encountering post-Civil Rights black fiction. Foregrounding the large body of literature and criticism that grapples with legacies of the slave past, Aida Levy-Hussen's argument develops on two levels: as a textual analysis of black historical fiction, and as a critical examination of the reading practices that characterize the scholarship of our time.

Taking up the perceived tensions between the LGBTQ community and religious African Americans, Marlon Rachquel Moore examines how strategies of antihomophobic resistance dovetail into broader literary and cultural concerns. In the Life and in the Spirit shows how creative writers integrate expressions of faith or the supernatural with sensuality, desire, and pleasure in a way that highlights a spectrum of black sexualities and gender expressions.

The political value of African American literature has long been a topic of great debate among American writers, both black and white, from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. In his compelling new book, Representing the Race, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the genealogy of this topic in order to develop an innovative political history of African American literature.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey is a groundbreaking work that illuminates the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature. It elaborates a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself. Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, Gates uncovers a unique system for interpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World.

In Revolutionary Poetics, Sarah RudeWalker details the specific ways that the Black Arts Movement (BAM) achieved its revolutionary goals through rhetorical poetics—in what forms, to what audiences, and to what effect. BAM has had far-reaching influence, particularly in developments in positive conceptions of Blackness, in the valorization of Black language practices and its subsequent effects on educational policy, in establishing a legacy of populist dissemination of African American vernacular culture, and in setting the groundwork for important considerations of the aesthetic intersections of race with gender and sexuality. These legacies stand as the movement's primary—and largely unacknowledged—successes, and they provide significant lessons for navigating our current political moment.

Home Girls, the pioneering anthology of Black feminist thought, features writing by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and contains work by many of feminism's foremost thinkers. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides Barbara Smith the opportunity to look back on forty years of the struggle, as well as the influence the work in this book has had on generations of feminists.