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Black writers male american 2oth century
The relevance of black people in literature
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The text is a poem called “Remembering Nat Turner”, written by Sterling Allen Brown. The poem is about an African American who walks the route of the slave rebellion of 1831, where he is given impressions about the rebellion from black and white people. The poem is a part of his first collection called Southern Road, which was first published in 1932. The original reader of Sterling Brown’s Southern Road. The author was born in Washington D.C. on May 1, 1901. Later, he received a bachelor’s degree from Williams College where he studied traditional literature and explored music like Jazz and the Blues; then had gotten his masters at Harvard. The author is a professor of African American English at Harvard University. The author’s writing
The Fires of Jubilee, is a well written recollection of the slave insurrection led by Nathaniel Turner. It portrays the events leading towards the civil war and the shattered myth of contented slaves in the South. The book is divided into four parts: This Infernal Spirit of Slavery, Go Sound the Jubilee, Judgment Day, and Legacy.
After careful consideration, I have decided to use the books dedicated to David Walker’s Appeal and The Confessions of Nat Turner and compare their similarities and differences. It is interesting to see how writings which has the same purpose of liberating enslaved Black people can be interpreted so differently, especially in the matter of who was reading them. Akin to how White people reacted to Turner’s Rebellion, which actually had promising results while most would see the immediate backlashes and to which I intend to explain more. As most would put emphasis on the Confession itself, I assume, I decided to focus more on the reactions and related documents regarding the Rebellion.
3. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 51: Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Trudier Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Gale Group, 1987. pp. 133-145.
Paul Laurence Dunbar is one of the most influential African American poets to gain a nationwide reputation. Dunbar the son of two former slaves; was born in 1872 in Dayton, Ohio. His work is truly one of a kind, known for its rich, colorful language, encompassed by the use of dialect, a conversational tune, and a brilliant rhetorical structure. The style of Dunbar’s poetry includes two distinct voices; the standard English of the classical poet and the evocative dialect of the turn of the century black community in America. His works include a large body of dialect poems, standard English poems, essays, novels, and short stories. The hardships encountered by members of is race along with the efforts of African Americans to achieve equality in America were often the focus of his writings. http://www.dunbarsite.org/
Both Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were great writers but their attitudes towards their personal experience as an African American differed in many ways. These differences can be attributed to various reasons that range from gender to life experience but even though they had different perceptions regarding the African American experience, they both shared one common goal, racial equality through art. To accurately delve into the minds of the writers’ one must first consider authors background such as their childhood experience, education, as well their early adulthood to truly understand how it affected their writing in terms the similarities and differences of the voice and themes used with the works “How it Feels to be Colored Me” by Hurston and Hughes’ “The Negro Mother”. The importance of these factors directly correlate to how each author came to find their literary inspiration and voice that attributed to their works.
The Confessions of Nat Turner Throughout history people have published articles and books in order to sway the public to their side. Rulers such as Stalin and Mao used propaganda to keep themselves in power; people such as Thomas Paine used articles in order to start revolution. Thomas R. Gray, author of The Confessions of Nat Turner, had that power when he interviewed Turner.
A pivotal moment in American, but more importantly black history was the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831. Thomas Gray’s Confessions of Nat Turner is a publication of the rebellion including an explanation of the incident from Nat Turner himself. His confessions inspired black activists including Sherley A. Williams who penned Dessa Rose in 1986. Williams’ novel adds to Turner’s confessions by bringing to light the impact of historical fiction and non-fiction storytelling, gender roles, and an understanding of human compassion in the face of bigotry. Together these novels grant slaves and blacks cultural significance by re-defining the ideology of freedom.
James, Johson Weldon. Comp. Henry Louis. Gates and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. 832. Print.
Monk begins to realize that the publishing of novels is predominately about the selling and profit of the books than it is the work itself. Writing is a means of artistic expression and all authors, regardless of race or culture, should be able to write about his/her individual experiences. Unfortunately, an African-American author who chooses to write about his/her experience, that is not the “black” experience, will not thrive as much as the authors who choose to do so. The notion African-American author’s novels must compose of the stereotypical black life shows that the truth or authenticity of a work isn’t significant, as long as it makes a profit. Juanita Mae Jenkins’ novel, We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, is a prime example of how a novel can lack authenticity, but because it validates the stereotypes society believes are true, it results in wealth and a prosperous career for the author. Juanita Mae Jenkins is an African-American author originally from Akron, Ohio. Jenkins, like Monk, is educated and was not brought up in the rural (Everett 53). Jenkins mentions that the idea for We’s Lives In Da Ghetto was brought on by her trip to Harlem at the age of twelve (Everett 53). Jenkins’ novel is praised for its “authentic” black voice, but ironically there is nothing authentic about We’s Lives In Da Ghetto (Yost 1329). Kenya Dunston even goes as far as saying ‘“The language is so real and the characters are so true to life”’ (Everett 53). Kenya Dunston represents society’s idea on what it means to be “authentically” black. Monk expresses the black stereotypes in Jenkins’ novels to his lover, Marilyn, by asking her ‘“Have you ever known anybody who talks like they do in that book?”’ (Everett 188). Although Marilyn may not agree with the stereotypes in We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, she is an accessory to Jenkin’s fame and wealth. Jenkins’
Have you discovered what your purpose in life is? Have you ever felt as if you were the chosen one? Like you were predestined to be someone great and fulfil a meaningful purpose in life? Well, Nat turner did. On October 2, 1800, Nat Turner was born into slavery on the Travis plantation in Southampton County, Virginia. From a young age many knew and believed he was a special boy. For Nat Turner taught himself how to read and write. Nat Turner’s master, Joseph Travis believed that young Nat would be nothing but trouble due to his “uncommon intelligences.” His master was right. Once the plantation got a new overseer, Turner ran away and hid in the woods for 30 days. He later comes back because he feels as if the spirit told him to
Margolies, Edward. “History as Blues: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors. J.B. Lippincott Company, 1968. 127-148. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Daniel G. Marowski and Roger Matuz. Vol. 54. Detroit: Gale, 1989. 115-119. Print.
Kenneth S. Greenberg et al., Nat Turner: A slave Rebellion in History and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 46.
Langston Hughes, born in February 1st, 1902, grew up in segregated America. His own ancestry was as mixed as that described in the poem. Both his great-grandmothers were enslaved African Americans and both his grandparents were white slave owners. Both of Hughes’ parents were of mixed race descent. Many of his family members were key figures in the elevation of blacks in society, and they impressed upon him the nobility of black people. Hughes had a rootless and often lonely upbringing, moving back and forth between family members’ homes. Hughes was a prominent leader of the Harlem Renaissance and referred to it as the period when “the negro was in vogue”.
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.
African American literature since 1975 offers a variety of different subjects, styles, and themes. This literature is characterized by five distinct trends: “the acknowledgement of the multiplicity of African-American identities, a renewed interest in history as writers imagine the psychological and spiritual lives of African Americans during slavery and segregation, the emergence of a community of black women writing, a continuing exploration of music and other forms of vernacular culture as springboards for literary innovation and theoretical analysis, and the influence of African American literary scholarship.” (Gates 2127)