Beginning Perspectives on the Black Experience

1974 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-109
Author(s):  
FLOYD WYLIE
Keyword(s):  
Black Experience

Psychological Themes in the Black Experience

1985 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-19
Author(s):  
Anderson J. Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Black Experience

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

Not as It Is Written

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
International Exhibition ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Made In

This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.

For My People

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 173-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Luckett
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
State College ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
Margaret Walker

When Margaret Walker founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People in 1968, she stood at the forefront of a nascent Black studies movement. At the time, she had served on the faculty at Jackson State College since 1949. In both a racist and a sexist society, she used her scholarship and art as vehicles for activism. Today, the Margaret Walker Center, named for its founder, continues to lift up her legacy as a museum and special collections archive dedicated to Black experience in America.

Disturbing Boundaries: Temperance, Black Elevation, and Violence in Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends

Prospects ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 349-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Levine
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Program ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Universal Love

At the inaugural 1837 meeting of the American Moral Reform Society, one of Philadelphia's many African American reform groups, William Whipper called for blacks to commit themselves to total abstinence and “temperance in all things.” The group itself offered a resolution that subsumed a number of social desires and reforms under the rubric of temperance: “Resolved, That the successful promotion of all the principles of the Moral Reform Society, viz.: Education, Temperance, Economy, and Universal Love, depends greatly upon the practical prosecution of the Temperance Reform.” But of course temperance could only go so far, and at times those blacks most committed to temperance — whether conceived narrowly in terms of drinking, or more broadly in terms of a Franklinian commitment to economy and industry — seemed to lose sight of the limits of the black temperance movement in a racist culture. At the same 1837 meeting of the American Moral Reform Society, James Forten, Jr., addressed this issue head on. While endorsing temperance as a worthy social program of black elevation, he pointed to the central reality of the black experience in America: “that the arm of oppression is laid bare to crush us; that prejudice, like the never satiated tiger, selects us as its prey; that we have felt the withering blight of tyranny sweeping from before us, in its destructive course, our homes and our property.” But despite these obstacles, Forten advised, blacks should not give up the struggle to improve their lot and, as temperate and productive citizens, “to set an example to the rising generation.” As he rhetorically put it in his concluding remarks: “What … would the cause of learning and our country have lost, if a Franklin, a Rittenhouse, a Rush, could have been made to quail before the frowning brow of persecution?”

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