What Was Latino Literature?

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
General Audience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Latino Literature ◽  
Ethnic Literatures

My substitution in the hoary formulation what was x? must seem perverse. isn't latino literature in the united states a newcomer among subfields—a recent entry on the roster of MLA book prizes, a fast-growing site of knowledge production, faculty lines, and institutional visibility? How could that field of the future—propelled by a demographic surge—be already a thing of the past? It is to worry this commonsensical temporality of Latino issues that I invoke the title of Kenneth Warren's What Was African American Literature?, published in early 2011. In a neat coincidence, Warren's book was published in the same season as the first-ever Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (NALL), a project spearheaded by Ilan Stavans with the collaboration of five editors. Both publishing events sparked discussion beyond the academy among the shrinking general audience interested in literary culture; taken together, they illustrate the peculiar exigencies of periodizing ethnic literatures.

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 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.

scholarly journals Becoming Me: Journey from the ‘South’

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Celia Ceby ◽  
Dr Cynthia Catherine Michael
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Population ◽  
The South ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
African American Population ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Document ◽  
The U.S

The rallying cry of “Black Lives Matter” that reverberated all through the U.S. after the George Floyd murder case brought to light the reality that racism is a living reality in the American soil. It is no legend of the past. It is not a bygone history. Therein lies the significance of the inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. Michelle Obama’s Becoming is more than a memoir. It is a social document that faithfully portrays the ground reality of ‘Being Black’ and ‘Becoming Black' in a “White Society”. In her memoir, while recounting her rise from modest origins to the closest this country has to nobility, Michelle is taking the readers on an intimate tour of everyday African-American life. Her book illustrates how all Americans must part with the idea of post-racial society, the quaint notion that race and racism are relics of the United States’ long-ago past. In the memoir, she establishes that prejudice is so woven into the fabric of America that it won’t be gone in her lifetime, or even longer. The article“Becoming Me: Journey from the ‘South” traces the early stages of her life as a “striver”, residing in the ‘South’ side of Chicago, identified with the city’s African American population

scholarly journals Excavating the Past: Rememories and Healing in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Em Tese ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 196
Author(s):  
Rosilene Cássia Freitas de Aquino
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Aesthetic

This essay discusses the possibility of the combination of the social with the aesthetic functions of African American literature. It analyses how the main characters of  Morrison’s Beloved are portrayed not just as individual and fictional types, but also as collective and historical ones, through which African American historical memory and culture are revealed in slavery time.

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

The Poetic Uses of Religion in The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis León
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Emile Durkheim ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mexican American Literature ◽  
John Rechy

It is surprising that so few historians of religions have ever tried to interpret a literary work from their own perspective.—Mircea EliadeThere are no gospels that are immortal, but neither is there any reason for believing that humanity is incapable of inventing new ones.—Emile DurkheimWas that what God expected, that ritual of more pain? She thought of Milagros. Add this to all her miseries? Milagros yearned for less pain… . Was the old woman in veils courting something more with her crawling on bloodied knees—a miracle—by displaying her endurance for greater misery?—John RechyThe past thirty years have been a watershed in Mexican American literature, witnessing the proliferation of texts with increasingly diverse themes. For the most part, this literary production has been motivated by the impulse to narrate the stories that typify Mexican cultural history in the United States.

Community Healing and Reconciliation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Kirven ◽  
George Jacinto
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Male ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gun Violence ◽  
Potential Models ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Community Healing

Community healing and reconciliation have been a focus of many nations in response to civil war, genocide, and other conflicts. There have been increasing numbers of high-profile murders of African-American youths in the United States over the past 10 years. This article provides an overview of gun violence and its effects on African-American youths. Sanford, Florida, and Cleveland, Ohio, experienced the murders of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice, and the responses of the cities will be highlighted. The two cities provide potential models by communities to address historical injustices in the aftermath of high-profile fatal black male tragedies.

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