Author: Paul Robert LehmanPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 362
Book Description
The Development of a Black Psyche in the Works of John Oliver Killens
Author: Paul Robert LehmanPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 362
Book Description
The Development of the Black Psyche in the Writings of John Oliver Killens, 1916-1987
Author: Paul Robert LehmanPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 156
Book Description
John Oliver Killens thought of himself as a black writer, not a writer who happened to be black. This study takes what Killens described as the Black Psyche and traces its genesis through his major novels, nonfiction, essays, and short stories.
John Oliver Killens
Author: Keith GilyardPublisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820340316
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 458
Book Description
John Oliver Killens's politically charged novels And Then We Heard the Thunder and The Cotillion; or One Good Bull Is Half the Herd, were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His works of fiction and nonfiction, the most famous of which is his novel Youngblood, have been translated into more than a dozen languages. An influential novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and teacher, he was the founding chair of the Harlem Writers Guild and mentored a generation of black writers at Fisk, Howard, Columbia, and elsewhere. Killens is recognized as the spiritual father of the Black Arts Movement. In this first major biography of Killens, Keith Gilyard examines the life and career of the man who was perhaps the premier African American writer-activist from the 1950s to the 1980s. Gilyard extends his focus to the broad boundaries of Killens's times and literary achievement—from the Old Left to the Black Arts Movement and beyond. Figuring prominently in these pages are the many important African American artists and political figures connected to the author from the 1930s to the 1980s—W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Alphaeus Hunton, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, and Maya Angelou, among others.
The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction
Author: Darryl Dickson-CarrPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231510691
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Book Description
From Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison to Colson Whitehead and Terry McMillan, Darryl Dickson-Carr offers a definitive guide to contemporary African American literature. This volume-the only reference work devoted exclusively to African American fiction of the last thirty-five years-presents a wealth of factual and interpretive information about the major authors, texts, movements, and ideas that have shaped contemporary African American fiction. In more than 160 concise entries, arranged alphabetically, Dickson-Carr discusses the careers, works, and critical receptions of Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Jamaica Kincaid, Charles Johnson, John Edgar Wideman, Leon Forrest, as well as other prominent and lesser-known authors. Each entry presents ways of reading the author's works, identifies key themes and influences, assesses the writer's overarching significance, and includes sources for further research. Dickson-Carr addresses the influence of a variety of literary movements, critical theories, and publishers of African American work. Topics discussed include the Black Arts Movement, African American postmodernism, feminism, and the influence of hip-hop, the blues, and jazz on African American novelists. In tracing these developments, Dickson-Carr examines the multitude of ways authors have portrayed the diverse experiences of African Americans. The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction situates African American fiction in the social, political, and cultural contexts of post-Civil Rights era America: the drug epidemics of the 1980s and 1990s and the concomitant "war on drugs," the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, the struggle for gay rights, feminism, the rise of HIV/AIDS, and racism's continuing effects on African American communities. Dickson-Carr also discusses the debates and controversies regarding the role of literature in African American life. The volume concludes with an extensive annotated bibliography of African American fiction and criticism.
African American History Day by Day
Author: Karen Juanita CarrilloPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1598843613
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432
Book Description
The proof of any group's importance to history is in the detail, a fact made plain by this informative book's day-by-day documentation of the impact of African Americans on life in the United States. One of the easiest ways to grasp any aspect of history is to look at it as a continuum. African American History Day by Day: A Reference Guide to Events provides just such an opportunity. Organized in the form of a calendar, this book allows readers to see the dates of famous births, deaths, and events that have affected the lives of African Americans and, by extension, of America as a whole. Each day features an entry with information about an important event that occurred on that date. Background on the highlighted event is provided, along with a link to at least one primary source document and references to books and websites that can provide more information. While there are other calendars of African American history, this one is set apart by its level of academic detail. It is not only a calendar, but also an easy-to-use reference and learning tool.
Demystifying Bigotry Ii
Author: Paul R. LehmanPublisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 198457423X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 155
Book Description
For many Americans, bigotry and white privilege are simply some things they read or hear about but never seem to experience on a personal level. Many have heard our society described as an ethnically diverse society but never really paid any attention to that diversity. Often when people hear about social injustices committed against American citizens, the sentiment “they probably deserved it” often comes to their minds without much thought. For all the people that fit into any of the aforementioned categories, this book serves as an introduction to ethnic bigotry as it exists in everyday life in America. The majority of the blog selections in this book are discussions, reactions, or analysis of occurrences in everyday America that lend themselves to an insight/interest into bigotry and the attitudes, ideas, and behavior that accompany it. Regardless of the conflicts in the selections, the conclusions are generally optimistic.
Liberation Memories
Author: Keith GilyardPublisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814330579
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
No serious history of the development of the African American novel from the 1950s onward can be written without reference to John Oliver Killens. A two-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize and founding chairman of the legendary Harlem Writers Guild, Killens was regarded by many as a spiritual father who inspired a generation of African American novelists with his politically charged works. And yet today he rarely receives proper critical attention. Seeking to strengthen our understanding of this important literary figure, Keith Gilyard departs from standard critical frameworks to reveal Killens's novels as artful renderings of rich African American rhetorical forms and verbal traditions. Gilyard finds that many critics, adhering to ideals of art for art's sake or narrative conciseness, are ill-equipped to appreciate the many ways in which Killens's fiction succeeds. Rejecting the "pure art" position, Killens sought to articulate Black heroism particularly within a family or community context, offering a set of values he deemed liberatory. He focused on rendering noble and polemical characters, and his work represents a distinguished fusion of sociopolitical persuasion (rhetoric) and literary artifact (poetics). To help illuminate such novels as Youngblood (1954), And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962), and The Cotillion (1971), Gilyard examines Killens's work as an essayist and cultural organizer, highlighting his activism. His life and literary production can be partly characterized, Gilyard suggests, by the African American jeremiad-a major rhetorical form in the Black intellectual tradition expressing faith that America's destiny is to become an authentic, pluralistic democracy.
A Freedom Bought with Blood
Author: Jennifer C. JamesPublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469606674
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Book Description
In the first comprehensive study of African American war literature, Jennifer James analyzes fiction, poetry, autobiography, and histories about the major wars waged before the desegregation of the U.S. military in 1948. Examining literature about the Civil War, the Spanish-American Wars, World War I, and World War II, James introduces a range of rare and understudied texts by writers such as Victor Daly, F. Grant Gilmore, William Gardner Smith, and Susie King Taylor. She argues that works by these as well as canonical writers such as William Wells Brown, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Gwendolyn Brooks mark a distinctive contribution to African American letters. In establishing African American war literature as a long-standing literary genre in its own right, James also considers the ways in which this writing, centered as it is on moments of national crisis, complicated debates about black identity and African Americans' claims to citizenship. In a provocative assessment, James argues that the very ambivalence over the use of violence as a political instrument defines African American war writing and creates a compelling, contradictory body of literature that defies easy summary.
Our Living Manhood
Author: Rolland MurrayPublisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 151280956X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 155
Book Description
When Eldridge Cleaver wrote in 1965 that black men "shall have our manhood or the earth will be leveled by our attempt to gain it," he voiced a central strain of Black Power movement rhetoric. In print, as well as on stage and screen, Black Power advocates equated masculinity with their political radicalism and potency. While many observers have criticized the misogyny in this preoccupation, few have noted the challenges to it within the period in the works of authors such as James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman, Clarence Major, and John Oliver Killens. These and other writers tested the link between masculinity and radical politics. By recovering their voices, Rolland Murray demonstrates that the movement's gender ideals were questioned more fully than scholars have acknowledged. He also examines how the Black Power era's contentious gender politics continue to play a role in contemporary African American culture and scholarship. Murray analyzes the ways in which notions of masculinity were interwoven with essential movement philosophies regarding revolutionary violence, charismatic leadership, radical rhetoric, and black sexuality. Striving to forge a more nuanced account of how masculinist discourse contributed to the movement's overall agenda, he frames masculinity both as a linchpin of the seductive politics of Black Power and as a focal point of dissent by black male authors.
The Contemporary Novel
Author: Irving AdelmanPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 712
Book Description
In this new edition, what was already an expansive work has been updated and further enlarged to include information not only on American and British novelists but also on writers in English from around the world.