Racial Discourse and Cosmopolitanism in Twentieth-Century African American Writing - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Racial Discourse and Cosmopolitanism in Twentieth-Century African American Writing write by Tania Friedel. This book was released on 2010-06-21. Racial Discourse and Cosmopolitanism in Twentieth-Century African American Writing available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book engages cosmopolitanism—a critical mode which moves beyond cultural pluralism by simultaneously privileging difference and commonality—in order to examine its particular deployment in the work of several African American writers. Deeply influenced and inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois, the writers closely examined in this study—Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes and Albert Murray—have advanced cosmopolitanism to meet its own theoretical principals in the contested arena of racial discourse while remaining integral figures in a larger tradition of cosmopolitan thought. Rather than become mired in fixed categorical distinctions, their cosmopolitan perspective values the pluralist belief in the distinctiveness of different cultural groups while allowing for the possibility of inter-ethnic subjectivities, intercultural affiliations and change in any given mode of identification. This study advances cosmopolitanism as a useful model for like-minded critics and intellectuals today who struggle with contemporary debates regarding multiculturalism and universalism in a rapidly, yet unevenly, globalizing world.
The Story of Americans
The Story of Americans - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Story of Americans write by Tania Friedel. This book was released on 2006. The Story of Americans available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
Crossing the Line
Crossing the Line - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Crossing the Line write by Gayle Wald. This book was released on 2000-07-24. Crossing the Line available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial “order.” Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial “passing,” a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race’s authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fails to represent identity. She thus uses cultural narratives of passing to illuminate both the contradictions of race and the deployment of such contradictions for a variety of needs, interests, and desires. Wald begins her reading of twentieth-century passing narratives by analyzing works by African American writers James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen, showing how they use the “passing plot” to explore the negotiation of identity, agency, and freedom within the context of their protagonists' restricted choices. She then examines the 1946 autobiography Really the Blues, which details the transformation of Milton Mesirow, middle-class son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, into Mezz Mezzrow, jazz musician and self-described “voluntary Negro.” Turning to the 1949 films Pinky and Lost Boundaries, which imagine African American citizenship within class-specific protocols of race and gender, she interrogates the complicated representation of racial passing in a visual medium. Her investigation of “post-passing” testimonials in postwar African American magazines, which strove to foster black consumerism while constructing “positive” images of black achievement and affluence in the postwar years, focuses on neglected texts within the archives of black popular culture. Finally, after a look at liberal contradictions of John Howard Griffin’s 1961 auto-ethnography Black Like Me, Wald concludes with an epilogue that considers the idea of passing in the context of the recent discourse of “color blindness.” Wald’s analysis of the moral, political, and theoretical dimensions of racial passing makes Crossing the Line important reading as we approach the twenty-first century. Her engaging and dynamic book will be of particular interest to scholars of American studies, African American studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.
Black on Black
Black on Black - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Black on Black write by John Cullen Gruesser. This book was released on 2021-05-11. Black on Black available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Black on Black provides the first comprehensive analysis of the modern African American literary response to Africa, from W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk to Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Combining cutting-edge theory, extensive historical and archival research, and close readings of individual texts, Gruesser reveals the diversity of the African American response to Countee Cullen's question, "What is Africa to Me?" John Gruesser uses the concept of Ethiopianism—the biblically inspired belief that black Americans would someday lead Africans and people of the diaspora to a bright future—to provide a framework for his study. Originating in the eighteenth century and inspiring religious and political movements throughout the 1800s, Ethiopianism dominated African American depictions of Africa in the first two decades of the twentieth century, particularly in the writings of Du Bois, Sutton Griggs, and Pauline Hopkins. Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance and continuing through the Italian invasion and occupation of Ethiopia, however, its influence on the portrayal of the continent slowly diminished. Ethiopianism's decline can first be seen in the work of writers closely associated with the New Negro Movement, including Alain Locke and Langston Hughes, and continued in the dramatic work of Shirley Graham, the novels of George Schuyler, and the poetry and prose of Melvin Tolson. The final rejection of Ethiopianism came after the dawning of the Cold War and roughly coincided with the advent of postcolonial Africa in works by authors such as Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and Alice Walker.
Worldly Experiments: Cosmopolitanism as Style in Twentieth-century African American Literature
Worldly Experiments: Cosmopolitanism as Style in Twentieth-century African American Literature - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Worldly Experiments: Cosmopolitanism as Style in Twentieth-century African American Literature write by Justin Christopher Coyne. This book was released on 2015. Worldly Experiments: Cosmopolitanism as Style in Twentieth-century African American Literature available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. "At once obscene and incisive, Diogenes' provocations of Alexander's Athenian court established cosmopolitanism in the 3rd Century BCE as an intellectual tradition premised on social and aesthetic risk. My project uncovers this often overlooked aspect of cosmopolitanism in a 20th Century African American literary tradition in which radical forms of geopolitical speculation required radical forms of stylistic experimentation. I argue that for black writers like W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel Delany, an experimental literary aesthetic was not merely incidental to their geopolitics, but that it was responsible for bringing those politics into being. I claim that the ways in which these writers resisted discourses of racial authenticity, critiqued Western imperialism, and imagined transnational forms of non-white solidarity was inseparable from their similarly transgressive experiments in literary form--experiments that range from anachronistic excursions into outmoded genres to postmodern forms of pastiche and typographical manipulation. These aesthetic and political experiments, however, were not always successful, and my project's attention to both the virtues and the hazards of cosmopolitan experimentation suggests a way to intervene in contemporary conversations about the critical potential of cosmopolitanism as a whole. Rather than treat the term as unitary concept--that is, as either entirely progressive or entirely reactionary--I argue that cosmopolitanism needs to be understood as discourse constituted by an internal dialectic between symptoms of imperialism and their critique. This definition allows us to understand how multiple versions of cosmopolitanism might exist in any one historical moment, and how some versions of cosmopolitanism might be both progressive and reactionary at the same time."--Page v.
