African American literature

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As African-American Literature is oral tradition and the written literature of African Americans to understand, mostly in the United States or Canada live.

Slavery Literature (17th to 19th Centuries)

In 1619 the first twenty black slaves arrived on a Dutch pirate ship in what would later become the United States, followed by hundreds of thousands. The social and historical conditions under which African American literature develops can be derived from slavery.

People are forcibly abducted, friends and family members are murdered, and their homeland and culture are lost. They are constantly re-traumatized by their masters through imprisonment, forced labor, humiliation, physical sanctions and depersonalization measures. Partly one denies their gift of reason, partly one denies them to be people with a soul. The slave owners forbid teaching slaves to read and write and then use illiteracy as an argument for the inferiority of the race. Even Thomas Jefferson says in Notes on the State of Virginia that there is a lot of misfortune among slaves, but no poetry. African Americans, especially writers, struggle to this day to be recognized as intelligent people who have the same rights as other US citizens. African-American literature, even where it is spoken orally, is often shaped by the defense of human rights .

The enslaved people belong to the most diverse West African peoples or tribes and speak different languages ​​or dialects. One of the methods of the Masters is to mix the slave population so that the enslaved belong to different tribes so that communication cannot take place in an African language. You teach them as much English, or initially French, as necessary. The language of the victims of slavery is dominated by the English or French of the owners, but takes up many African expressions, so that a separate idiom emerges, Black English . African American literature often differs from white literature in terms of language. In the 20th century, authors such as Toni Morrison consciously resorted to this idiom; a modern variant of slang is cultivated in protest movements such as the Black Panthers or in hip-hop .

In spite of everything, the literature of the enslaved retains many elements of African tradition: songs , myths , folk tales , puns and puzzles .

In addition, situation-related new songs are created, which thematize work, life in the New World , the new Christian religion. The very own share of African-Americans in world literature is based on them: the blues , the spiritual and the gospel , which reflect the misery of blacks, but often also the hope of redemption. Moses and the exodus of Israel from Egypt are subjects that are frequently treated, for example in Go Down Moses .

Some Africans are ransomed by white philanthropists . Phillis Wheatley, born around 1753 in Gambia , appears here as an example . She was bought by the wealthy Wheatleys in Boston in 1761 and was raised by a daughter from a good English family . In 1773 her poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared , which made her internationally famous. They have long been dismissed by Euro-American literary scholars as mere imitations of white culture. She achieved her greatest successes with elegies such as To his Excellency General Washington .

Slave narratives are a genuine genre of texts, several hundred of which have been handed down. These are life stories that a slave either dictates or writes himself. They are often commissioned by abolitionists and describe in a formulaic on the one hand slavery as a contradiction to Christianity and democracy, on the other hand the personal successes of the author. Slave narratives belong to the popular genre of success stories in America. Examples of slave narratives are the memories of Briton Hammon (1760), John Marrant (1785), Olaudah Equiano (1789), Jarena Lee (1836), Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Jacobs (1861). Works by white authors like Uncle Tom's Cabin are influenced by them.

Williams Wells Brown , Frederick Douglass , Martin R. Delany and Harriet E. Wilson were already publishing novels and stories in the mid-19th century that revolved around the relationship between black and white.

From Civil War to Civil Rights Movement (19th to 20th Century)

When the northern states prevailed against the southern states in the civil war (1861–65), slavery was formally ended, but black-and-white thinking towards African Americans was not. In 1877 there was the so-called Hayes Compromise, in the following decades the development of the Ku Klux Klan, the Jim Crow legislation and the legally regulated apartheid.

Authors such as the poet, narrator and journalist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper , Charles Waddell Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar deal with white literature and prejudice.

The Souls of Black Folk , a mixture of biography, fiction and science published by William Edward Burghardt DuBois in 1903, is seen as the intellectual declaration of independence of Afro America .

After mass emigration from the south to the north set in during the First World War , the Harlem renaissance followed in 1920 , when literature and jazz music flourished in the clubs of the New York district. Your theorist is Alain Locke with The New Negro (1925). While colored authors like Countee Cullen were still emulating European poetry, other authors developed a greater degree of independence. The communists Claude McKay and Langston Hughes are prominent representatives with poems and novels . Stage works such as Rachel by Angelina Grimké , Mule Bone by Hughes, Appearances by Garland Anderson and Harlem by Wallace Thurman are created . Jean Toomer represents the experimental side of the Harlem Renaissance with Cane (1923). He mixes poetry, prose and drama.

In the 1930s, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston appeared in public with short stories and novels depicting black folklore and culture. In her, politically conservative, travelogue from Haiti she shows the intertwining of Christianity and the voodoo religion. With Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) she became the model for African-American women's literature, to which Dorothy West , Alice Walker , Gloria Naylor , Paule Marshall and Toni Morrison have contributed since the 1980s .

African American writers are conforming to the white mainstream, leading others to satirize assimilation. Wallace Thurman ( The Blacker the Berry , 1929) and George S. Schuyler ( Black No More , 1931) criticize the longing to be white as a variant of racism.

The Harlem Renaissance is considered the climax of black literature, but ends with the ghettoization. Harlem becomes a slum during the global economic crisis . In the 1930s and 1940s, ideas from the left found their way into African American circles. Whites promote this culture, for example with the Federal Writers Project (FWP), a government program. There are texts of social realism on American misery, accusations against exploitation and racism , such as Richard Wright's Lawd Today (1935–37) and Uncle Tom's Children (1938). The Wright School includes authors such as William Attaway, Blood on the Forge (1941), Chester Himes , If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), Ann Petry , The Street (1946). Wright, Himes and Baldwin live in Paris in the 1950s. The most important novel of the post-war period, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), a reverse development novel that leads from oppression in the southern states to the ghetto in the north and finally to an invisible existence underground. James Baldwin, with his extensive work of novels, essays and dramas, is one of Wright's successors. Baldwin tries, however, to overcome a pure protest attitude. He doesn't want to remain fixated on refuting white prejudices. As poets are Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks to name celebrating black America and complain about the ghetto.

Integration efforts show up in the drama at Lorraine Hansberry ( A Raisin in the Sun , 1959).

After 1960 the civil rights movement became more noticeable. Martin Luther King's speeches have since been one of the most outstanding contributions to rhetoric and preaching.

The murders of King, Malcolm X and the Kennedy brothers depress some, radicalize others and strengthen e.g. B. the Black Muslims. An emphatically black attitude, including a turn to the ghetto idiom, is evident in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. (1964), Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver or Revolutionary Petunias by Alice Walker (1973). In 1972 Addison Gayle published the anthology The Black Aesthetic as the Sum of Movement. Amiri Baraka alias LeRoi Jones explains in Black Fire (1968) that the poet and the politician are one as warrior, priest, lover and destroyer. Baraka advocates radical hateful poetry in which lyric poetry is a firearm, and this position is also represented in his dramas. In 1965, Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater School , which influenced militant theater around 1970.

Modern African American Literature (Mid-20th Century / 21st Century)

Since the 1960s, African-American literature has emancipated itself from its fixation on a white readership and has sought out audiences in its own culture. The multidimensionality of identity is discussed, the question of origin is discussed and a black history is established.

Toni Morrison specifically speaks of a literature for My Village . She becomes the representative of modern Afro-American literature and receives the Nobel Prize in 1993 for her complete works, which include novels Like Jazz or Human Child.

Numerous authors are working on US history from a black perspective. Robert E. Hayden publishes A Ballad of Remembrance 1962, a poetic and experimental representation of the slave trade, Margaret Walker's novel Jubelee depicts the civil war from the perspective of the slave Vyry in 1968. Ernest Gaines ' novels shape US history from the perspective of an uneducated, but emancipated old woman in their idiom. Alex Haley becomes a classic with Roots (1976), a novel about the African Kunta Kinte and his descendants, which suggests that there never was a cultural vacuum among slaves. It later turned out that the novel is based in large parts on the novel The African by the writer Harold Courlander and modified and expanded by Haley. Haley therefore had to pay Courlander $ 650,000. The relevance of this classic as a fiction that depicts reality in the sense of “This is how it could have been” remains unaffected. The relevance of the material also led to the production and worldwide broadcast of the television series of the same name . Ishmael Reed's novel Flight to Canada (1976) shows the unity of African-Americans on the continent of North America. Reed already parodies the all too African orientation of US blacks. In Meditations on History (1980), Sherley Anne Williams confronts the memories of a slave with the texts of a white historian and expands the subject to the novel Dessa Rose (1986).

Alice Walker , known for The Color Purple , criticized in Everyday Use 1973 the enthusiasm of young black nationalists for a folk culture to which they no longer have any relation. In 2002 Stephen L. Carter became known, who in his thriller Checkmate portrayed the black upper class of the US capital Washington with its neuroses and dark sides.

Austin C. Clarke is one of the best-known contemporary Canadian authors . a. was awarded the Commonwealth Prize.

See also

American literature ; Soul fiction ; Black History Month ; Slavery in the United States

literature

Anthologies
  • Africa sings: a selection of new Afro-American poetry . Published by Anna Nussbaum. FG Speidel, Vienna, Leipzig 1929.
  • America I sing too. American Negro seals . Bilingual. Edited and transmitted by Hanna Meuter , Paul Therstappen . Wolfgang Jess, Dresden 1932. With short biographies. 1st row: The new negro. The voice of the awakening Afro-America. Volume 1, 1932. 108 pp .; New edition ibid. 1959.
    • Authors: Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Redmond Fauset, Countée Cullen, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Jupiter Hammon (1711–1806), Angelina Grimké and others. a.
  • I am America too. Seals of American negroes Transferred from Stephan Hermlin . Volk und Welt, Berlin 1948. 144 pp. Bilingual.
    • Authors: Sterling A. Brown, Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr., Countée Cullen, Waring Cuney, Frank Marshall Davis, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frances EW Harper, Robert E. Hayden, Frank Horne, George Moses Horton, Langston Hughes, Fenton Johnson, Claude McKay, Melvin B. Tolson, Jean Toomer, Margaret Walker, James M. Whitfield, Richard Wright.
  • My dark hands . Modern negro poetry in the original and adaptations. Edited and transmitted by Eva Hesse and Paridam von dem Knesebeck. Nymphenburger, Munich 1953. 92 pp.
  • Black Orpheus. Modern poetry of African peoples of both hemispheres . Selected and transferred by Janheinz Jahn . Hanser, Munich 1954. Modified new edition 1964.
    • From North America (1954): Russell Atkins, Samuel W. Allen (Paul Vessey), Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling A. Brown, Frank Marshall Davis, Countee Cullen, Frank Horne, Langston Hughes, Fenton Johnson, Mason Jordan Mason (a pseudonym?) , Oliver Pitcher, Margaret Walker; In 1964, Charles Louis Anderson, Tom Dent, Mari Evans, James Lamont Johnson, LeRoi Jones, Gloria C. Oden and Conrad Kent Rivers were added.
American anthologies
  • James Weldon Johnson (Ed.): The Book of American Negro Poetry. Chosen and Edited with an Essay on the Negro's Creative Genius . Harcourt, Brace, New York 1922.
  • Alain Locke: The New Negro . 1925
  • VF Calverton: An Anthology of American Negro Literature . The Modern Library, New York 1929.
  • Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis, Ulysses Lee (Eds.): Negro Caravan. Writings by American Negroes . The Citadel Press, New York 1941
  • LeRoi Jones , Larry Neal (Eds.): Black Fire. An Anthology of Afro-American Writing . William Morrow, New York 1968. Over 180 articles by 75 authors.
  • Henry Louis Gates , Nellie V. McKay (Eds.): Norton Anthology of African American Literature . WW Norton & Co., 1996, 118 authors on 2665 pages. ISBN 0-393-04001-1
Literary history
  • Reginald A. Wilburn: Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature. Pennsylvania State University, University Park 2014.
  • Hubert Zapf: American literary history . Metzler 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3
  • Walter Göbel: The African American Novel in the 20th Century. An introduction , Erich Schmidt, Berlin 2001.

Books of poetry and novels by Samuel W. Allen (Paul Vessey), James Baldwin, Melba Joyce Boyd, Octavia E. Butler , Wanda Coleman, Samuel R. Delany , Rita Dove , Ralph W. Ellison, Donald Goines, Chester Himes , Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston , Ted Joans , Charles Richard Johnson , Edward P. Jones , LeRoi Jones , Audre Lorde , Terry McMillan , Toni Morrison , Walter Mosley , Ann Petry , Iceberg Slim , Lorenzo Thomas, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman , Richard Wright are has been translated. Novels by Lloyd L. Brown, Alice Childress, Shirley Graham, John Oliver Killens were published in the GDR.

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