Radwa Ashour, African American Criticism, and the Production of Modern Arabic Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Ira Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Arab World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Egyptian Woman ◽  
University Of Massachusetts ◽  
The University ◽  
Modern Arabic

In 1973, at the suggestion of her mentor Shirley Graham Du Bois, the Egyptian scholar, activist, teacher, and novelist Radwa Ashour enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to study African American literature and culture. Ashour’s 1975 dissertation “The Search for a Black Poetics: A Study of Afro-American Critical Writings,” along with her 1983 autobiography,Al-Rihla: Ayyam taliba misriyya fi amrika[The Journey: An Egyptian Woman Student’s Memoirs in America], specifically engage with debates that emerged at the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in September 1956 between African Americans and others from the African diaspora (most notably Aimé Césaire) regarding the applicability of the “colonial thesis” to the United States. This article argues that Ashour’s early engagement with African American cultural politics are formative of her fiction, particularly her 1991 novel,Siraaj: An Arab Tale,which examines overlapping questions of slavery, empire, and colonialism in the Arab world.

Abdul R. JanMohamed

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Negative Dialectic ◽  
Archaeology Of Death ◽  
The University

Abdul R. JanMohamed (b. 1945) has made a seminal contribution to postcolonial and black studies since the early 1980s. JanMohamed was born and raised in Kenya and educated in Britain and the United States, receiving his PhD from Brandeis University. Since 1982 he has taught in the English Department of the University of California, Berkeley, and has also been Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University. He developed a body of Marxian-psychoanalytical criticism based on Marx, Foucault, Fanon, and Freud. Most of his important publications came out in the 1980s and 1990s, although he is continuing to write and diversify into other areas of postcolonial criticism like Subaltern and Dalit literature. In the 1980s JanMohamed started with analysis of the psychopolitical structures of colonial and African English novels written by Joyce Cary, Isak Dinesen, Nadine Gordimer, Chinua Achebe, Alex La Guma, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. In the next phase of his writings, he critiqued the African American slave autobiography of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the novels of Richard Wright, which now constitute an ideological reference for all future criticism on the literature of colonized and marginalized peoples. His most important single-author publications include Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (1983) for which he was awarded the Choice book of the year award in 1984. The other crucial read is The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (2005) about which Rolland Murray insightfully commented in the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction (Murray 2006, cited under Book Reviews) that “Should African American studies continue in its pursuit of rendering the vagaries of death intellectually legible, the field should turn to this book as one of its signal events” (Exquisite Corpus, p. 302). JanMohamed considers racial lynching as the most fundamental mode of coercion. In his work on African American Literature, he develops a reflexive Marxian-phenomenological approach through which he deconstructs the feelings of marginalized protagonists who, faced with the threat of death by lynching, begin to contemplate the effects of that threat on their subjectivities. He suggests that the threat of death activates the death drive like a negative dialectic in subjects irremediably trapped between two cultures. In 1985, along with Donna Przybylowicz, he founded and edited the journal Cultural Critique, which at the time offered one of the very few venues for the theorization of postcolonial and American minority discourses. His recent works involve psychoanalytical studies of Dalit narratives of the Indian subcontinent. JanMohamed’s critical oeuvre has been acclaimed and translated into other Asian languages.

When Pushkin's Blackness Was in Vogue: Rediscovering the Racialization of Russia's Preeminent Poet and His Descendants

Slavic Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-257
Author(s):  
Korey Garibaldi ◽  
Emily Wang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Henry James ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Queen Of Spades ◽  
Racially Ambiguous

This essay investigates interconnections between the novelist, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Aleksandr Pushkin and identifies the racial subtext of these associations. Several scholars have connected Pushkin and James. But none of this scholarship has speculated on whether it was the poet's African heritage that was at the root of hidden connections between these authors. Moreover, though most scholarship on Pushkin's reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, his African heritage was publicized much earlier. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic frequently discussed Pushkin's racial heritage as a canonical European writer of African descent. This essay recovers how Henry James used Pushkin's daughter, the morganatic Countess Merenberg, as a model for the racially ambiguous “morganatic” Baroness Münster in The Europeans (1878). A decade later, James seems to have invoked the Countess Merenberg once more in his rewriting of Pushkin's “The Queen of Spades” (1833) in The Aspern Papers (1888). While James publicly attributed Byron and Shelley as inspirations, the discourse surrounding the African heritage of Pushkin and his heirs helps explain why the novelist minimized and erased the racial lineage at the center of The Europeans and The Aspern Papers.

scholarly journals Radical Togetherness: African-American Literature and Abolition Pedagogy at Parchman and Beyond

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Patrick Elliot Alexander
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Student Centered ◽  
Student Centered Learning ◽  
Conception Of Teaching ◽  
Prison Studies ◽  
The University ◽  
Educational Deprivation

This article makes the case that the student-centered learning paradigm that I have aimed to establish at Parchman/Mississippi State Penitentiary as a member of a college-in-prison program represents a prison abolition pedagogy that builds on Martin Luther King and Angela Y. Davis’s coalitional models of abolition work. Drawing from Davis’s abolition-framed conception of teaching in jails and prisons as expressed in her autobiography and her critical prison studies text Are Prisons Obsolete?, I argue that the learning environments that I create collaboratively with students at Parchman similarly respond to incarcerated students’ institution-specific concerns and African-American literary interests in ways that lessen, if only temporarily, the social isolation and educational deprivation that they routinely experience in Mississippi’s plantation-style state penitentiary. Moreover, I am interested in the far-reaching implications of what I have theorized elsewhere as “abolition pedagogy”—a way of teaching that exposes and opposes the educational deprivation, under-resourced and understaffed learning environments, and overtly militarized classrooms that precede and accompany too many incarcerations. As such, this article also focuses on my experience of teaching about imprisonment in African-American literature courses at the University of Mississippi at the same time that I have taught classes at Parchman that honor the African-American literary interests of imprisoned students there.

Between Europe and America

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-285
Author(s):  
Arvind Rajagopal
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
University Of Berlin ◽  
Guggenheim Fellowship ◽  
The University ◽  
Intellectual Formation

Werner Sollors is one of the first scholars of American literature to focus on African American literature before it was thought to constitute a canon in the academy. Unlike many other scholars who shared his focus, he completed his education in postwar Germany. The title of his doctoral dissertation on LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), completed at the Free University of Berlin in 1975, has a still-contemporary ring: “The Quest for a ‘Populist Modernism.’” He taught at Columbia University, received a Guggenheim fellowship, and spent the bulk of his career in the United States. In this interview he discusses his intellectual formation and offers reflections on the development of his field, the evolving institutional culture of the university, and 1970s-era multiculturalism.

scholarly journals The Portraiture of Stockholm Syndrome: Cultural Dislocation in Phillis Wheatley’s Poetry Collection and Selected African American Texts

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Adeniyi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Defence Mechanism ◽  
Hurt Feelings ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Stockholm Syndrome

One of the tropes that have often been glossed over in African American literature is the concept of Stockholm Syndrome. The syndrome emphasises irrationality and abnormal psychological or mental disposition of Stockholm Syndrome sufferers towards individuals responsible for their pitiable conditions. This article examines the conception and its nexus with slavery and the use of religion (Christianity) as an ideological tool for the indoctrination or brainwashing of African slaves and their descendants in the United States of America. I argue that the syndrome, though conceived as a correlate of Freudian ego-defence mechanism, operates like a psychedelic or hallucinogenic drug which, according to Karl Marx, dulls the reasoning capacity and cerebration of the sufferers and prevents them from thinking rationally. Besides, it alters their perception of reality forcing them to accept abnormality as normality in a bid to create an escapist route for their fears, hurt feelings and pent-up wounds.

James Weldon Johnson

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nowlin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
New York University ◽  
Daily Newspaper ◽  
Fisk University

James Weldon Johnson (b. 1871–d. 1938) was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. After graduating with a BA from Atlanta University, he became principal of his former grammar school, established the first daily newspaper for Jacksonville’s African American population, and gained admission to the Florida bar. With his brother, the musician J. Rosamond Johnson, he also wrote the song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” for a commencement ceremony (in 1900), and it eventually became known as the “Negro National Anthem.” He joined his brother in New York in 1902 to launch a successful songwriting team with Bob Cole. Johnson gave up show business in 1906 to become US Consulate, first in Venezuela, then Nicaragua, where he completed his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which was published anonymously in 1912. In 1914 he moved to Harlem with his wife Grace Nail Johnson (whom he married in 1910). He began writing editorials on a range of subjects for the New York Age, a nationally circulating African American newspaper, and in 1915 he joined the recently established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He became secretary of the organization in 1920 and remained so until 1930. Fifty Years and Other Poems, his first collection, was published in 1917. In 1922 he edited The Book of American Negro Poetry, the first anthology of its kind, and established himself as a pioneering theorist of African American poetics and a guiding light of the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson modeled his poetic ideas in the 1927 volume God’s Trombones, which appeared in the same year he reissued The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man under his name. In 1929, a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship enabled him to devote a year to writing, which resulted in Black Manhattan, a history of African Americans in New York. From 1930 onward, Johnson taught creative writing and African American literature at Fisk University as well as New York University. His 1933 autobiography Along This Way was widely acclaimed, and he collected both new and old poems in the 1935 volume St. Peter Relates an Incident. When he died in a car accident in 1938, Johnson was one of the most honored and respected African Americans in the United States, recognized at once as a man of letters, an advocate of black America’s cultural achievements, and a tireless political opponent of America’s Jim Crow system.

“Race,” Writing, and Difference: A Meditation

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1516-1521
Author(s):  
Farah Jasmine Griffin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
Literary History ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Literature

“Race,” Writing, and Difference first appeared in 1986. That Fall, I entered graduate school at Yale University; I still associate the book with those intellectually heady times. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., left the university before my arrival, but his influence was still felt, and we graduate students followed his every move. We also read and debated the essays of his volume with great excitement. The collection legitimated our intellectual concerns and delineated a set of questions that we would pursue throughout our graduate school careers. The volume set the bar high and helped prepare us for the task ahead. These were the days when we anticipated and greeted the appearance of works by Gates, Houston Baker, Jr., Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, and Cornel West with almost as much excitement that years earlier accompanied the release of recordings by Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind, and Fire. Many of us came to Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man through these brilliant theorists of African American literature and culture. Those were intellectually exciting times: the period also produced Black Literature and Literary Theory; the painful exchange between Gates, Baker, and Joyce Ann Joyce on the pages of New Literary History; Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood, and Spillers's “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Furthermore, through his books Black Literature and Literary Theory, Figures in Black, and The Signifying Monkey, Gates not only provided a theoretical framework for the study of African American literature, he also set forth an intellectual agenda that he would institutionalize in a number of projects, especially The Norton Anthology of African American Literature and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard. In fact, Gates's PBS series African American Lives might be seen as part of this larger project as well in that it demonstrates the fiction of race through scientific evidence without denying its power to determine the lived experience of those identified as black in the United States. Despite the appearance of texts such as Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve (and other arguments for the biological basis of race that rear their heads every so often), few people would disagree with the fundamental premise of “Race,” Writing, and Difference: that race was not fixed or naturalized but instead socially and historically constructed and institutionalized.

Black empowerment and Afro-American values in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

IIUC Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 111-121
Author(s):  
Sajjadul Karim ◽  
Mohd Muzhafar Bin Idrus
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
American People ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Bluest Eye ◽  
American Values ◽  
White Culture ◽  
History Of

The Bluest Eye of Toni Morrison is extraordinarily significant, as it addresses the different sides of American literature, and the lives of the Afro-American people. Although the conventional theological aspects of white culture can negatively influence other characters of Morrison, it is Pecola whose life appears to be increasingly defenseless against the impulses of the individuals who have accepted the Western custom. In a democratic country, people generally have the same value, but there are still prejudices in the concepts of beauty and worthiness. The search for freedom, black identity, the nature of evil and the robust voices of African-Americans have become themes for African-American literature. Folklore covers the history of black and white interaction in the United States and also summarizes the feelings expressed in protest literature1. Morrison argues that the survival of the dark ladies in a white dominated society depends on loving their own way of life and dark race and rejecting the models of white culture or white excellence. This article attempts to examine The Bluest Eye from the perspective of empowerment of blacks and African American and their value system. IIUC Studies Vol.16, December 2019: 111-121

Introduction

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Allen ◽  
Robin Ostle
Keyword(s):  
English Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Modern Arabic ◽  
The City

This book is about the life and academic legacy of Mustafa Badawi, who may be regarded as the father of the study of modern Arabic literature in the United Kingdom and the United States based on the impact of his career and his publications. Badawi's arrival at Oxford University in 1964 as lecturer in modern Arabic literature transformed the teaching of and research into this subject in western academia. Trained in the University of Alexandria and in the UK in English literature, Badawi applied his passion for teaching, researching and translating English literature and criticism to the modern literature of his native language. This book begins with Alexandria, the city that exerted a key formative influence on the cosmopolitan culture characteristic of Badawi as individual and scholar. It goes on to document Badawi's intellectual and literary journey through his life as scholar, critic and translator and ends with a discussion of Badawi's academic legacy.

After Du Bois

2019 ◽  
pp. 205-212
Author(s):  
Daniel Hack
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Internationalism ◽  
Racial Authenticity ◽  
Special Space

This concluding chapter explores African American literature and print culture in the following century. Here, the prestige and popularity of most Victorian literature—and of Victorian literature as a category—diminished rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century, thanks in good part to the rise of modernism. Moreover, when twentieth-century African American writers looked abroad for cultures that seemed freer from racial prejudice or even the pressures of racialized identity than the United States, their gaze shifted from Britain elsewhere. France in particular took on this role, while also becoming the privileged site of black internationalism, with Paris viewed as “a special space for black transnational interaction, exchange, and dialogue.” Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance, notions of racial authenticity also reinforced this turn away from Victorian literature, not only for its whiteness but also for its association with gentility and middle-class values. Indeed, these same attitudes have shaped the dominant critical reception of the Victorian presence in African American literature and print culture until quite recently.

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