SAVING CHALLENGE
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African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. Phillis Wheatley was an enslaved African woman who became the first African American to publish a book of poetry, which was published in 1773. Her collection, was titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–1797) was an African man who wrote The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, an autobiography published in 1789 that became one of the first influential works about the transatlantic slave trade and the experiences of enslaved Africans. His work was published sixteen years after Phillis Wheatley's work (c. 1753–1784).
Other prominent writers of the 18th century that helped shape the tone and direction of African American literature were David Walker (1796–1830), an abolitionist and writer best known for his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829); Frederick Douglass, who was a former enslaved person who became a prominent abolitionist, orator, and writer famous for his autobiographies, including Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845); and Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman who wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).
Like most writers, African American writers draw on their every day lived experiences for inspiration on material to write about, therefore African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives throughout much of the 19th century. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives.
The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.[1]
As African Americans' place in American society has changed over the centuries, so has the focus of African American literature. Before the American Civil War, the literature primarily consisted of memoirs by people who had escaped from enslavement—the genre of slave narratives included accounts of life in enslavement and the path of justice and redemption to freedom. There was an early distinction between the literature of freed slaves and the literature of free blacks born in the North. Free blacks expressed their oppression in a different narrative form. Free blacks in the North often spoke out against enslavement and racial injustices by using the spiritual narrative. The spiritual addressed many of the same themes of enslaved people narratives but has been largely ignored in current scholarly conversation.[2]
At the turn of the 20th century, non-fiction works by authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington debated how to confront racism in the United States. During the Civil Rights Movement, authors such as Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about issues of racial segregation and black nationalism. Today, African American literature has become accepted as an integral part of American literature, with books such as Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker, which won the Pulitzer Prize; and Beloved by Toni Morrison achieving both best-selling and award-winning status.
In broad terms, African American literature can be defined as writings by people of African descent living in the United States. It is highly varied.[3] African American literature has generally focused on the role of African Americans within the larger American society and what it means to be an American.[4] As Princeton University professor Albert J. Raboteau has said, all African American literary study "speaks to the deeper meaning of the African-American presence in this nation. This presence has always been a test case of the nation's claims to freedom, democracy, equality, the inclusiveness of all."[4] African American literature explores the issues of freedom and equality long denied to Blacks in the United States, along with further themes such as African American culture, racism, religion, enslavement, a sense of home,[5] segregation, migration, feminism, and more. African American literature presents experience from an African American point of view. In the early Republic, African American literature represented a way for free blacks to negotiate their identity in an individualized republic. They often tried to exercise their political and social autonomy in the face of resistance from the white public.[6] Thus, an early theme of African American literature was, like other American writings, what it meant to be a citizen in post-Revolutionary America.
Characteristics and themes
African American literature has both been influenced by the great African diasporic heritage[7] and shaped it in many countries. It has been created within the larger realm of post-colonial literature, although scholars distinguish between the two, saying that "African American literature differs from most post-colonial literature in that it is written by members of a minority community who reside within a nation of vast wealth and economic power."[8]
African American oral culture is rich in poetry, including spirituals, gospel music, blues, and rap. This oral poetry also appears in the African American tradition of Christian sermons, which make use of deliberate repetition, cadence, and alliteration. African American literature—especially written poetry, but also prose—has a strong tradition of incorporating all of these forms of oral poetry.[9] These characteristics do not occur in all works by African American writers.
Some scholars resist using Western literary theory to analyze African American literature. As the Harvard literary scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., said, "My desire has been to allow the black tradition to speak for itself about its nature and various functions, rather than to read it, or analyze it, in terms of literary theories borrowed whole from other traditions, appropriated from without."[10] One trope common to African American literature is "signifying". Gates claims that signifying "is a trope in which are subsumed several other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and also hyperbole and litotes, and metalepsis."[11] Signifying also refers to the way in which African American "authors read and critique other African-American texts in an act of rhetorical self-definition."[12]
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