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The cambridge history of american literature
The cambridge history of american literature
History of English American Literature
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Sutton Griggs was a complicated and conflicted intellectual who engaged on multiple fronts to combat white supremacy around the turn of the twentieth-century. As a social activist, educator, minister, publisher, and novelist, his work moved between forms of pragmatism and political realism, as well as deliberations on militant separatism. His published work spanned across thirty years, and contributed to what historian Kidada Williams’ has called the development of black counterpublic sphere that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth-century. Carrying forward the antebellum activist legacy, this sphere created a discourse in opposition to the consolidation of white supremacy—which had become concentrated in forms of legal disenfranchisement, …show more content…
The purpose of this paper will be to bring into focus a particularly imaginative moment in Griggs’ 1899 novel, Imperium in Imperio, that uniquely participates in the shaping of this oppositional consciousness and discourse by way of a utopian …show more content…
These limitations were expressed in in Griggs’ era by insufficiently critical utopian fiction that rendered invisible anti-black violence. Edward Bellamy’s bestselling utopia Looking Backward (1888) is paradigmatic of this imaginary. By contrast, Imperium centers the endurance and struggle of African Americans surviving the severe conditions of the late-nineteenth-century. It also maintains an emphasis on the human and the social, contrary to the traditional utopian accent on the purely social dimension—recognizing, as Avery Gordon writes, that “a new society requires new people.” Accordingly, his novel predates and anticipates the transformations of the utopian genre in the later twentieth-century, but also even earlier transformations found in works like Edward Augustus Johnson’s Light Ahead for the Negro (1904). A century later, the canon-building of Afrofuturism by Alondra Nelson, Mark Dery, and Ytasha Womack among others has opened the potential to provide for a more suitable canonical home for
“Black Awakening in Capitalist America”, Robert Allen’s critical analysis of the structure of the U.S.’s capitalist system, and his views of the manner in which it exploits and feeds on the cultures, societies, and economies of less influential peoples to satiate its ever growing series of needs and base desires. From a rhetorical analysis perspective, Allen describes and supports the evidence he sees for the theory of neocolonialism, and what he sees as the black people’s place within an imperial society where the power of white influence reigns supreme. Placing the gains and losses of the black people under his magnifying glass, Allen describes how he sees the ongoing condition of black people as an inevitable occurrence in the spinning cogs of the capitalist machine.
However, with two subsequent editions of the book, one in August 1965 and another in October 1973—each adding new chapters as the Civil Rights movement progressed—one wonders if Dr. King’s assessment still holds up, if indeed The Strange Career of Jim Crow is still the historical bible of the civil rights movement. In addition, one questions the objectivity of the book considering that it gained endorsements from figures who were promoting a cause and because Woodward had also promoted that same cause. The original edition of The Strange Career of Jim Crow had as its thesis that segregation and Jim Crow Laws were a relative late comer in race relations in the South only dating to the late 1880s and early 1890s. Also part of that thesis is that race relations in the South were not static, that a great deal of change has occurred in the dynamics of race relations. Woodward presents a clear argument that segregation in the South did not really start forming until the 1890s.
Imagine a historian, author of an award-winning dissertation and several books. He is an experienced lecturer and respected scholar; he is at the forefront of his field. His research methodology sets the bar for other academicians. He is so highly esteemed, in fact, that an article he has prepared is to be presented to and discussed by the United States’ oldest and largest society of professional historians. These are precisely the circumstances in which Ulrich B. Phillips wrote his 1928 essay, “The Central Theme of Southern History.” In this treatise he set forth a thesis which on its face is not revolutionary: that the cause behind which the South stood unified was not slavery, as such, but white supremacy. Over the course of fourteen elegantly written pages, Phillips advances his thesis with evidence from a variety of primary sources gleaned from his years of research. All of his reasoning and experience add weight to his distillation of Southern history into this one fairly simple idea, an idea so deceptively simple that it invites further study.
People attending schools before 1960’s were learning about certain “unscrupulous carpetbaggers”, “traitorous scalawags”, and the “Radical Republicans”(223). According to the historians before the event of 1960’s revision, these people are the reason that the “white community of South banded together to overthrow these “black” governments and restore home rule”(223). While this might have been true if it was not for the fact that the “carpetbaggers were former Union soldiers”, “Scalawags… emerged as “Old Line” Whig Unionists”(227). Eric Foner wrote the lines in his thesis “The New View of Reconstruction” to show us how completely of target the historians before the 1960’s revision were in their beliefs.
During the late 19th and early 20th century, racial injustice was very prominent and even wildly accepted in the South. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois were two of the most renowned “pioneers in the [search] for African-American equality in America” (Washington, DuBois, and the Black Future). Washington was “born a slave” who highly believed in the concept of “separate but equal,” meaning that “we can be as [distant] as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress” (Washington 1042). DuBois was a victim of many “racial problems before his years as a student” and disagreed with Washington’s point of view, which led
C. Vann Woodward’s book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, has been hailed as a book which shaped our views of the history of the Civil Rights Movement and of the American South. Martin Luther King, Jr. described the book as “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.” The argument presented in The Strange Career of Jim Crow is that the Jim Crow laws were relatively new introductions to the South that occurred towards the turn of the century rather than immediately after the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Woodward examines personal accounts, opinions, and editorials from the eras as well as the laws in place at the times. He examines the political history behind the emergence of the Jim Crow laws. The Strange Career of Jim Crow gives a new insight into the history of the American South and the Civil Rights Movement.
Since 1945, in what is defined by literary scholars as the Contemporary Period, it appears that the "refracted public image"(xx) whites hold of blacks continues to necessitate ...
Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945-2006. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Stein, Judith. The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1986.
The Strange Career of Jim Crow, by C. Van Woodward, traces the history of race relations in the United States from the mid and late nineteenth century through the twentieth century. In doing so Woodward brings to light significant aspects of Reconstruction that remain unknown to many today. He argues that the races were not as separate many people believe until the Jim Crow laws. To set up such an argument, Woodward first outlines the relationship between Southern and Northern whites, and African Americans during the nineteenth century. He then breaks down the details of the injustice brought about by the Jim Crow laws, and outlines the transformation in American society from discrimination to Civil Rights. Woodward’s argument is very persuasive because he uses specific evidence to support his opinions and to connect his ideas. Considering the time period in which the book and its editions were written, it should be praised for its insight into and analysis of the most important social issue in American history.
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B Dubois is a influential work in African American literature and is an American classic. In this book Dubois proposes that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." His concepts of life behind the veil of race and the resulting "double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," have become touchstones for thinking about race in America. In addition to these lasting concepts, Souls offers an evaluation of the progress of the races and the possibilities for future progress as the nation entered the twentieth century.
The African-American Years: Chronologies of American History and Experience. Ed. Gabriel Burns Stepto. New York: Charles Scribner 's Sons, 2003.
The United States after the Civil War was still not an entirely safe place for African-Americans, especially in the South. Many of the freedoms other Americans got to enjoy were still largely limited to African-Americans at the time. At the beginning of the 20th Century, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois emerged as black leaders. Their respective visions for African-American society were different however. This paper will argue that Du Bois’s vision for American, although more radical at the time, was essential in the rise of the African-American society and a precursor to the Civil Rights Movement.
The above-mentioned essays are: Nihilism in Black America, The Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning, The Crisis of Black Leadership, Demystifying the Black Conservatism, Beyond Affirmative Action: Equality and Identity, On Black-Jewish Relations, Black Sexuality: T...
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.