Intro


Black Aesthetic: AA written literature began with the desires to achieve freedom and to define the racial self. Pauline E. Hopkins in Contending Forces (1900) argues that fiction is an excellent medium for preserving the religious, political, and social customs of the African American and that nobody is better suited to faithfully portray the inmost thought and fellings of black people than black people themselves. This first ethnic aesthetic posited that is was essential for African American speak for themselves. At this point there is no desire to find an authentic black voice in the folk. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois explores black expression in the spirituals, finding them a unique African American expression and the only original American art form.

Poetry:
w 19th century poets voiced the slaves' complaint in the abolitionist struggle and rallied the troops in the cause of emancipation and freedom.
w First poem written by an African in America - Lucy Terry's 'Bars Fight' (1746). She set in motion a poetic tradition characterised by the furious pursuit of liberation in all of its dimensions as well as the cultivation of a cultural voice authenticated by its own distinctive oral forms and remembered, communal values.
w First published African American poem, 'An Evening Thought' (1761) by Jupiter Hammon.
w Phillis Wheatly - chose subjects that reflected her comfortable and privileged position and her absorption of a New England education, which emphasised the reading of the Bible and other classics. First volume of poems - Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Themes: religious devotedness, patriotism, and liberation, which were not generally clouded by the unsettling moral issues of slavery and universal equality.
w Paul Laurence Dunbar - Oak and Ivy (1893), Majors and Minors (1895), Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896). Use of dialect.

Drama:
w First recorded dramatist Mr. Brown, a native of the West Indies. The Drama of King Shotaway (1823).
w First truly native dramatist (and first African American novelist) - William Wells Brown. Experience, or How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone (1856), The Esape, or A Leap for Freedom (1857)
w Also: Pauline E. Hopkins, Jhohn Patterson Sampson, Wiliam Edgar Easton, Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Women writers & feminism:
w The interrelated and interdependent themes that advance female agency are apparent in 19th century literature, when female personas become speaking subjects, thereby challenging the objectification of women and rejecting an imposed victim status. Objectification and victimization are central, for example, in the autobiographical works of former slaves Harriet A. Jacobs, Harriet E. Wilson, and Sojourner Truth. We see a more direct example of the significance of voice in Maria W. Stewart's speeches, perhaps the first examples of African American female public oration in support of women's rights.
w Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice from the South (1892) - an eloquent narrative about the unmined potential of African women as contributors to American progress. Poetry and prose - Frances E. Harper's 'Double Standards' and Ann Plato's 'Advice to Young Ladies.'

Stereotypes:
Mammy:
§ They may be defined as older black women who have been shaped by a heritage of slavery; from working close to whites in their homes and taking care of their childre, they believe that white people are intrinsically superior to black people and that blacks should therefore be subservient to whites. Their loyalties are to their white families, especially the children; many are guilty of neglecting their biological families. They were relatively powerless black women whose nurturing skills were perhaps values more than their humanity.
§ e.g. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1900), Kristin Hunter's God Bless the Child (1964).

Aunt Jemima: trademark, stereotype, cultural icon to many whites, and racist caricature to mani African Americans.
§ For Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood, Aunt Jemima was the perfect symbol for their experiment with the first packaged pancake ix. These white enterpreneurs attended a vaudeville show in 1889, featuring black-faced comedians in a New Orleans-style cakewalk tune entitled 'Aunt Jemima.' On posters -the familiar image of mammy; Rutt appropriated the name and image.
§ Jemima, the offshoot of irascible mamy, was sweet, jolly, even-tempered, and polite; the name (Hebrew for 'dove') symbolizes innocence, gentleness, and peace. The caricature connotes not naivete but stupidity, not peace but docility. Jemima was an obese, darkly pigmented, broad-bosomed, handkerchief-headed, gingham-dressed, elderly servant content in her subjugation.

Buck: one of various fictious props evoking the mythic traditional southern plantation.
The buck is typically a field worker whose body is most often describes in animalistic terms; his strength is usually compared to thta of a horse and his reliability to that of a mule. These animalistic traits are used to justify his lack of humanity (?). The emphasis on his body make shim sexually threatening; he is typically knowns as a breeder on slave plantations. Intermediary type - literary descendant of the 'noble savage' and the forerunner of the 'black brute.' The positive qualities of the noble savage - size, strength, and agility - are exaggerated until they become grotesque and reveal the slave's subhuman nature. The buch is a transitional character; a slave more likely to become a militant rebel than remain a contented retainer.




Slavery


'Freeing the voice, creating the self: the novel and slavery' by Christopher Mulvey

Works include:
▪ The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) by Olaudah Equiano
▪ The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) by Frederick Douglass
▪ The Garies and Their Friends (1857) by Frank J. Webb
▪ The Bondwoman's Narrative (1857?) by Hannah Crafts
▪ Our Nig or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) by Harriet E. Wilson
▪ Blake, Or the Huts of America (1859-62) by Martin R. Delany
▪ "The Two Offers" (1859) by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
▪ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet A. Jacobs

The list of early African American fictions is being constantly revised: many works that have been identified as African Americna in the 20-21th century, were previously attributed to white people. Also, there's the question of the border between fact and fiction: some stories were published in anti-slave newspapers and magazines as true stories, but were actually fictions. ("Patrick Brown's Love Story" that may be the first African American short story; "A True Story of Slave Life" (1852) by William Wells Brown).

The black slave narrative and the white popular novel are both the roots of African American fiction, but the distinctiveness comes from the slave narrative. The classic American slave narrative is democratic, bussiness-like, plainspolen, and self-assertive.

The earliest African American fiction is a literature of fusion: slave narrative, Gothic mystery, satire, pastoral, novel of manners, document, and polemic. It fused black and white character, speech, and behaviour; the African and the American in religion and belief.

William Wells Brown:
▪ believed that the human race was a single entity and that it was only in their own time that men begun to argue otherswise; that the men who needed to deny the unity of human race were slaveholders who whished to maintain a belief in the Declaration of Independence.
▪ Religion - since the Christianity was one shared with slaveholders - a bond and a barrier - writers often contrasted true religion with deformed religion. Brown makes the hypocricy of the slave-owning Christianity of the United States a theme parallel to the hypocrisy of the slave-owning democracy of the Constitution. Also, for Brown religion function as a cultural as well as a spiritual resource - one that worked best in the absence of white clergy and white people.
▪ Clotel, or the President's Daughter (1853) - first known full-length African American novel. Provocative because it pointed out the lie on which the American Republic was founded. The novel focuses on five mulatto heroines: daughters and granddaughters of Jefferson, four of whom die unhappily. The focus is upon the difficulty of nurturing family connections in a slave system that allowed, as a matter of course, uncommitted fathering by the white men on the one hand and hampered mothering by the whimsical sale of the mother and her children on the other.
▪ Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847) - a pattern of relaization, resistance, flight survival, and deliverance focusing on actions and themes that were not the commonplaces of the Victorian novel.

Types of characters:
▪ The (tragic) mulatto - often the women characters of the early novels were mullatos. Themes discussed: the search for identity and place in American society by mixed race people and slaves.
▪ Noble African - the hero, reluctantly violent, uneasily Christian, magnificently male, and very black (darkskinned)
▪ Black-skinned women, however, were infriquently developed as characteres - shadism/colourism mixed with misogyny (?). Generally if they featured in the novels, often represented as mean, making cruel remarks, as objects of amusement or distress.




After slavery


Reconstructing the race: the novel after slavery by M. Giulia Fabi

Works Include:
· Frances Ellen Watkins Harper - Minnie's Sacrifice (1869), Sowing and Reaping (1876-66), Trial and Triumph (1888-89), Iola Leroy (1892).
· Pauline E. Hopkins - Hagar's Daughter (1901-02), Wiona (1902), Of One Blood (1902-03).

Postbellum decades:
· freedom for millions of ex-slaves came without any structural improvement in their condition of economic dispossession and subordination; instead, the exonomic neo-slavery of tenancy and sharecropping.
· Rapid reorganisation of the old racialized power structure in the South and an increase of discrimination in the North. KKK and racial violence were some factors that led to major anti-black riots and a major rise in the number of lynchings.
· Jim Crow laws - segregation. Social inequalities and discrimination were rationalized by pseudo-biological theories on the inferiority of blacks.
· In response - flowering of African American literature, stimulated by the growth of black readership, journals and publishing houses. Literature was seen as a powerful tool to combant racial stereotypes, to reinforce the cultural pride and self-awareness of blacks. Writers proposed complex and literarily innovative representations of the rich cultural heritage, the complex humanity, and the history of resistance of African Americans.

Actively opposing the stereotypes and prejudices prevalent in contemporary mainstream American literature and determined to intervene as writers in the culture wars raging at the time, they forcefully opened a new literary space for the representation of blacks in fiction. They challenged restrictive definitions of American literature, and of American culture as a whole, through a radical revision of prevalent literary modes, as well as through the elaboration of innovative strategies of representation, including the transgressive blending of different genres. In many works realism is cross-fertilized by romance and the oral folk tradition, as well as by intricate family sagas and utopian longings that bring the weight of the past or the politically charged hopes for a better future to bear upon the representation and interpretation of the present.

Themes, tropes, etc:
· virulent racism of the times, racial violence, lynchings,
· violence directed against black prison inmates in labor camps in the South,
· Pressing contemporary realities of urban poverty, alcoholism, and family disruption (Amelia E. Johnson).
· passing for white - functions as an aggressive strategy to reinterpret race as a sociocultural construct; a literary device to cross the color line, to bridge fictionally the social separation between blacks and whites that was systematically enforced by segregation, to undermine pseudo-biological arguments on the naturalness of racial hierarchies, to show, through the increased social mobility and success of the white-looking passer, the systematic discriminatory practices that enforced separate social destinies for blacks and whites.

Genres and movements:
· historical (deconstructive approach to past, re-telling and reinterpreting the past, emphasis on the continued impact of the slave past on the social and cultural hierarchies of the present)
· Utopian (writers focused less on the description of a perfect future social order than on the process of personal and social change that could make such a perfect society possible by preparing individuals worthy of inhabiting it. E.g. Sutton E. Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899); Pauline E. Hopkins Of One Blood.
· political and religious novels, the romance and family sagas, juvenile and detective fiction, and Bildungsroman.
· Writers were actively engaged with contemporary literary movements such as local color fiction, realism, naturalism, and in the early twentieth century, modernism.

Writers often used racially indeterminate (characters who are not explicitly described as black) or white characters to address problematic issues without presenting them as specifically racialized problems linked with the supposed social pathology of blacks.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) - novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, orator, and activist.
· Born free in the slave state of Maryland. In 1853 moved to Philadelphia where she lived at an Underground Railroad station and devoted her life and literature to abolition and other social reform movement.
· In 1854 accepted a position with the Maine Anti-Slavery Society thereby becoming one of the first professional woman orators in the US. She travelled through the States, lecturing on topics such as 'The Claims of the Negro' and 'The Work beefore Us'; also taught former slaves reading, writing, home management, and politics.
· Iola Leroy (1892) - a tale of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction in opposition to the inaccurate but increasingly popular plantation school novelists such as Thomas Nelson Page and in answer to the need for more books that would inspire and instruct African American students. Its characters represent the diversity of African American culture and heroic expression; many are, in part, based upon actual people and many of their experiences are reincarnations and version of those who appeared in earlier Harper poems, essays, and stories.

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) - most widely nationally acclaimed African American prose writer of the pre-Harlem Renaissance period. In his works passing is central both as theme and as narrative device, a dual use that enables the author to articualte a sharp and literarily sophisticated critique of traditional narrative representations of blackness.
· The House Behind the Cedars (1900) - a story of miscegenation; seems to evoke the traditional white script of the tragic mulatto, while instead evolves the reader in a complex metanarrative and intertextual questioning of traditional modes of representation and reception of blackness. Ridicules the chivalric pretenses of the unregenerate post-Reconstruction South; parodies traditional tragic mulatto fictions.
· The Marrow of Tradition (1901) - a historical novel that focuses on the racist terrorism that led to the 1898 anti-black riot in Wilmington, North Carolina. Critiques the romanticized portrayals of the segregated South.

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) - songwriter, poet, novelist, journalist, critic, and autobiographer.
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
· Johnson engages in an innovative and experimental play with the limited POV and white parodic intertexuatily to construct a fictional first-person narator who is profoundly unreliable.
· The portagonist is a white-appearing black man, a doubled double consciousness. Mixed race person - questions of identity; distance from white and black people both. Egotistic self-pity, superificial evaluations that bespeak his alienatoin from African American Culture, and deep-seated materialism that leads him to admire uncritically the white American world he will eventually join permanently by passing. He
· The selfishness and racial alienation of the Ex-Colored Man emerge by contrast to the heroic models (Du Bois, Douglass) he misinterprets. The Ex-Colored Man becomes a ridiculing parody of the racial prejudices of the white society he so deeply admires; the same parody celebrates the calues of race solidarity, loyalty and pride the protagonist cannot live up to.
· The book announces the awakening of the New Negro. The book foreground tropes and environments that will become characteristic of New Negro fiction: the migration from the rural South to the urban North, the expatriation to Europe, the return to the South.