Pan-African American Literature: Signifyin(g) Immigrants in the Twenty-First Century. Stephanie Li

MELUS ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 210-212
Author(s):  
Uchechi Okereke-Beshel
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Pan African ◽  
Twenty First Century

scholarly journals Review of Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man by Joshua Bennett (Harvard University Press)

Lateral ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sohum Pal
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
First Century ◽  
Twenty First Century

Reading a robust archive of twentieth and twenty-first century African-American literature, Joshua Bennett's Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man lays the foundations for rethinking kinship and relation between humans and animals.

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Wall
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
First Century ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The Status ◽  
June Jordan

Although they have written in various genres, African American writers as notable and diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker have done their most influential work in the essay form. The Souls of Black Folk, The Fire Next Time, and In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens are landmarks in African American literary history. Many other writers, such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Richard Wright, are acclaimed essayists but achieved greater fame for their work in other genres; their essay work is often overlooked or studied only in the contexts of their better-known works. Here Cheryl A. Wall offers the first sustained study of the African American essay as a distinct literary genre. Beginning with the sermons, orations, and writing of nineteenth-century men and women like Frederick Douglass who laid the foundation for the African American essay, Wall examines the genre's evolution through the Harlem Renaissance. She then turns her attention to four writers she regards as among the most influential essayists of the twentieth century: Baldwin, Ellison, June Jordan, and Alice Walker. She closes the book with a discussion of the status of the essay in the twenty-first century as it shifts its medium from print to digital in the hands of writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brittney Cooper. Wall's beautifully written and insightful book is nothing less than a redefinition of how we understand the genres of African American literature.

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.

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