Is There a (Black) Literature?

Plantation agriculture created a culture in which commanding a slave became a mark of distinction. Large owners left a slave to each of their children as one of the accoutrements of a respectable lady or gentleman. White children of necessity had to learn to be masters and their black companions to be slaves. Much of this learning occurred through the stories of black-white relationships which slaves told each other. The stories formed a body of black literature which was passed along with other skills like singing and playing. White masters had to learn to provide supplies for their workforce—food, clothing, housing. Management of a large plantation called for the skills of a quartermaster. Whites, furthermore, even white women, had to learn to demand and to punish. As they grew, black children had to decide if they were to seek to be trusted by their masters or take a chance on resistance. Resistance could involve little more than slacking off work when not under the master’s gaze. Or it could mean running away. During the Revolution, black families that were seemingly quiescent took the chance on joining the British forces and ran away. Blacks concealed their true feelings in hiding places in their minds.

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"I's Natural Homicidal": Violence and Silence in Execution Poems

Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought ◽

10.25071/2369-7326.36108 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Eshe Mercer-James

Keyword(s):

Western Society ◽

Taxi Driver ◽

Black Literature ◽

Titus Andronicus ◽

State Punishment ◽

Slave Rebellion ◽

Self Actualization ◽

History Of ◽

Black Man ◽

Black Equality

The inescapable presence of violence throughout George Elliott Clarke's oeuvre proposes that the silence imposed on the black community is only overcome through violence. The inevitability of violence is particularly evident in his collection Execution Poems. This collection recounts the “Tragedy of George and Rue,” cousins of his mother who killed and robbed a white taxi driver and were then the last people hanged as state punishment in New Brunswick. Through protagonists’ rationalizations for the crime and with their familial connection to him, Clarke collapses time and justice to place the black man outside of history and within violence. Silence then becomes a visceral experience for black males. Clarke suggests that Western society enacts its silencing of the black male through violence, thus combating this enforced voicelessness becomes a matter of violent vengeance: the only expression impossible to ignore. In a reflection of a peculiar position of blackness in Canada, the inescapability of violence for the black man who wishes to express his subjective being is grounded in a Western history of violence as retribution, which culminates in the diasporic struggle for black equality as enacted by black Americans. Clarke uses intertextual references to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and the iconic slave rebellion leader Nat Turner to locate his characters in a greater mythology of the battle for self-actualization, for a voice. Clarke himself is implicated in this violence, despite his recuperative ability to write poetry. The violence which drives the aptly titled Execution Poems reflects his belief that black literature still functions as a transgression for the wider community. Clarke posits the escape from this silence as an inherent act of violence.

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Black Literature and Literacy Theory

Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies ◽

10.5070/f7142017051 ◽

1985 ◽

Vol 14 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Charles Nama

Keyword(s):

Black Literature ◽

Literacy Theory

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The Documentary Mode in Black Literature - Reply

PMLA ◽

10.1632/s003081290016938x ◽

1981 ◽

Vol 96 (1) ◽

pp. 106-107

Author(s):

Barbara Foley

Keyword(s):

Black Literature

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Chicago’s Letters Group and the Emergence of the Black Chicago Renaissance

Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance ◽

10.5622/illinois/9780252043055.003.0012 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 222-244

Author(s):

Richard A. Courage

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

University Students ◽

Cultural History ◽

Richard Wright ◽

Literary Tradition ◽

Black Literature ◽

New Negro ◽

New Negro Movement ◽

Chicago Renaissance ◽

History Of

This chapter unearths the history of a literary circle formed in 1927 to publish a journal called Letters and foster appreciation of black literature. Its leader was Chicago Defender city editor Dewey Roscoe Jones, whose reviews in his weekly “Bookshelf” column established him as black Chicago’s premier literary critic and commentator on the Harlem Renaissance. Most participants in Letters were university students, but they were joined by several older writers, including poets Fenton Johnson and W. H. A. Moore. Future Black Chicago Renaissance luminaries Richard Wright and Frank Marshall Davis visited occasionally but felt unwelcome. Recovering this missing link in cultural history deepens scholarly understanding of the New Negro movement beyond 1920s Harlem and of early evolution of an African American literary tradition in Chicago.

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