A New Genre - Slave Narratives

A New Genre Slave Narratives

n     Abolitionists - a potent weapon in first-hand accounts of slavery by blacks who escaped from bondage or managed to buy their freedom.

n     White activists recommended the slave narratives as unaltered testimonies.

n     In fact they frequently re-wrote passages 11511g68l and fabricated events to excite the reader's interest and sympathy.

n     Frederick Douglass: his abolitionist publishers told him simply to "give us the facts," and they would "take care of the philosophy."

n     The collaboration between well-intentioned white editors and fugitive slaves usually resulted in hybrid works: mixture of verisimilitude (first-person narrative, professions of objectivity, documentary evidence - letters, bills of sale, newspaper clippings) with characteristics of sentimental fiction (garish asides, shrill polemics, melodramatic incidents).

n    a potent new genre (the slave narratives) in which blacks wrote themselves in the American consciousness. Whatever their degree of veracity, the slave narratives both fed and increased the public appetite for accurate information concerning life in the "real world."

SLAVE NARRATIVE

NOTES

1. The Slave's Narrative Contributors: Charles T. Davis - author, Henry Louis Gates Jr. - author. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: Oxford. Publication Year: 1985.

"I Was Born": Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature

JAMES OLNEY

Ex-slaves cannot talk about imagination, as other autobiographers / memoirists (151)

They cannot afford shedding doubts on their account;

it is assumed to be a clear, unfailing record of events sharp and distinct that need only be transformed into descriptive language to become the sequential narrative of a life in slavery. (151)

Fr fear that in so doing he will appear, from the present, to be reshaping and so distorting and falsifying the past (151)

the slave narrative is most often a non-memorial description fitted to a pre-formed mold [a mold with regular depressions here and equally regular prominences there] virtually obligatory figures, scenes, turns of phrase, observances, and authentications that carry over from narrative to narrative and give to them as a group the species character that we designate by the phrase "slave narrative." (151)

Species character: an extremely mixed production typically including any or all of the following:

o       an engraved portrait or photograph of the subject of the narrative

o       authenticating testimonials, prefixed or postfixed

o       poetic epigraphs, snatches of poetry in the text, poems appended

o       illustrations before, in the middle of, or after the narrative itself

o       interruptions of the narrative proper by way of declamatory addresses to the reader and passages that as to style might well come from an adventure story, a romance, or a novel of sentiment

o       bewildering variety of documents: letters to and from the narrator, bills of sale, newspaper clippings, notices of slave auctions and of escaped slaves, certificates of marriage, of manumission, of birth and death, wills, extracts from legal codes [that appear everywhere in the text, incl. footnotes & appendices]

o       sermons and anti-slavery speeches and essays tacked on at the end to demonstrate post-narrative activities of the narrator (151-2)

An imagined master outline:

An engraved portrait, signed by the narrator.

A title page that includes the claim, as an integral part of the title, "Written by Himself" (or some close variant: "Written from a statement of Facts Made by Himself"; or "Written by a Friend, as Related to Him by Brother Jones"; etc .

A handful of testimonials and/or one or more prefaces or introductions written either by a white abolitionist friend of the narrator ( William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips) or by a white amanuensis/ editor/author actually responsible for the text ( John Greenleaf Whittier, David Wilson, Louis Alexis Chamerovzow), in the course of which preface the reader is told that the narrative is a "plain, unvarnished tale" and that naught "has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from the imagination"-indeed, the tale, it is claimed, understates the horrors of slavery.

A poetic epigraph, by preference from William Cowper. [

The actual narrative:

o       first sentence beginning, "I was born . . . ," then specifying a place but not a date of birth sketchy account of parentage, often involving a white father

o       description of a cruel master, mistress, or overseer, details of first observed whipping and numerous subsequent whippings, with women very frequently the victims

o       account of one extraordinarily strong, hardworking slave often "pure African"-who, because there is no reason for it, refuses to be whipped

o       record of the barriers raised against slave literacy and the overwhelming difficulties encountered in learning to read and write

o       description of a "Christian" slaveholder (often of one such dying in terror) and the accompanying claim that "Christian" slave-holders are invariably worse than those professing no religion

o       description of the amounts and kinds of food and clothing given to slaves, the work required of them, the pattern of a day, a week, a year

o       account of a slave auction, of families being separated and destroyed, of distraught mothers clinging to their children as they are torn from them, of slave coffles being driven South

o       description of patrols, of failed attempt(s) to escape, of pursuit by men and dogs

o       description of successful attempt(s) to escape, lying by during the day, travelling by night guided by the North Star, reception in a free state by Quakers who offer a lavish breakfast and much genial thee/thou conversation

o       taking of a new last name (frequently one suggested by a white abolitionist) to accord with new social identity as a free man, but retention of first name as a mark of continuity of individual identity .

An appendix or appendices composed of documentary material: bills of sale, details of purchase from slavery, newspaper items-, further reflections on slavery, sermons, anti-slavery speeches, poems, appeals to the reader for funds and moral support in the battle against slavery. (152)

Example: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself

what is being recounted in the narratives is nearly always the realities of the institution of slavery, almost never the intellectual, emotional, moral growth of the narrator [Douglass is an exception] (..) The lives in the narratives are never, or almost never, there for themselves and for their own intrinsic, unique interest but nearly always in their capacity as illustrations of what slavery is really like. Thus in one sense the narrative lives of the ex-slaves were as much possessed and used by the abolitionists as their actual lives had been by slaveholders (154).

o       John Brown 's story is titled Slave Life in Georgia and only subtitled " A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, A Fugitive Slave,"

o       Charles Ball's story is called Slavery in the United States, with the somewhat extended subtitle "A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man, who lived forty years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia, as a slave, under various masters, and was one year in the navy with Commodore Barney, during the late war. Containing an account of the manners and usages of the planters and slaveholders of the South-a description of the condition and treatment of the slaves, with observations upon the state of morals amongst the cotton planters, and the perils and sufferings of a fugitive slave, who twice escaped from the cotton country."

o       The central focus of these two, as of nearly all the narratives, is slavery, an institution and an external reality, rather than a particular and individual life as it is known internally and subjectively. (154)

"I was born" - the need to attest to his/her existence as the primary reason, incl. the photos; Franklin did not need to certify that; he only had to explain his reasons for writing his autobiography (155)

behind every slave narrative that is in any way characteristic or representative there is the one same persistent and dominant motivation, which is determined by the interplay of narrator, sponsors, and audience and which itself determines the narrative in theme, content, and form.

o       The theme is the reality of slavery and the necessity of abolishing it

o       the content is a series of events and descriptions that will make the reader see and feel the realities of slavery

o       the form is a chronological, episodic narrative beginning with an assertion of existence and surrounded by various testimonial evidences for that assertion (156)

subthemes of literacy, identity, and freedom (156)

David Wilson, editor (+ intrudions in the text; fragments rewritten) of Narrative of Henry Box Brown; intrusions modeled on the sentimental novel (H.B. Stowe - on the dedication page)

John Brown's narrative: Louis Alexis Chamerovzow, the "Editor" (actually author) of Slave Life in Georgia

Sarah Bradford -- Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman

William Lloyd Garrison - reference to Othello (whereas F. Douglass identifies himself with Hamlet): The Moor, Shakespeare's or Garrison's, was noble, certainly, but he was also a creature of unreliable character and irrational passion-such, at least, seems to have been the logic of the abolitionists' attitude toward their ex-slave speakers and narrators-and it was just as well for the white sponsor to keep him, if possible, on a pretty short leash. (166)

the Afro-American literary tradition takes its start, in theme certainly but also often in content and form, from the slave narratives (e.g. R. Wright's Black Boy) (168)
HARLEM RENAISSANCE

• 1920s - early 1930s; centered in the Harlem neighbourhood of New York City
• Alternative names: the New Negro movement, the Negro renaissance, the New Negro renaissance
• Primarily a literary movement + music, theater, art and politics (Du Bois and N.A.A.C.P., Marcus Garvey's "Back to Africa" movement
• Examples: Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Bill Robinson, Florence Mills, Josephine Baker, Ethel Waters, Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, Aaron Douglass, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington
• Factors involved

1919 - return of highly decorated Black 369th Infantry, which marched from the docks, down Broadway, and through Harlem, led every step of the way by James Europe's jazz band

the "Red Summer" of 1919 - approx. 25 race riots in all sections of the country

poverty, particularly in the South

Emergence of a black middle class > increased education and job opportunities following the Civil War (Du Bois, for instance, was a Harvard graduate)

New political agenda advocating racial equality - Du Bois and N.A.A.C.P. (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1909) as opposed to Booker T. Washington's viewpoint with respect to the role & position of the African Americans in the U.S. (see "The Atlanta Exposition Address" v. The Souls of Black Folk); Marcus Garvey's "Back to Africa" movement

Jazz and blues /the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and fiction of Charles W. Chestnutt - national recognition; + Claude MacKay & James Weldon Johnson (The Autobigraphy of an [Ex-] Colored Man)

• Reference point for the mew movement: MacKay's Harlem Shadows (1922) [the first black writer to be published by a mainstream, national publisher - Harcourt, Brace & Company), Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) & Jessie Fauset's There is Confusion (1924).

• Three events:

March 1924 - the National Urban League - dinner meant to celebrate the new black literary talents & to introduce them to the white audience; special issue of the Survey Graphic dedicated to Harlem - edited by Alan Locke & featured black writers.

1926 - the publication of Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven [white novelist] - Harlem's exotic nightlife + a "return to the primitive" promise; exotic/jazzed abandon

Savages! Savages at heart! And she had lost or forfeited her birthright, this primitive birthright which was so valuable and important an asset, a birthright that all the civilized races were struggling to get back to-this fact explained the art of a Picasso or a Stravinsky. To be sure, she, too, felt this African beat--it completely aroused her emotionally--but she was conscious of feeling it. This love of drums, of exciting rhythms, this naive delight in glowing colour--the colour that exists only in cloudless, tropical climes--this warm, sexual emotion, all these were hers only through a mental understanding. With Olive these qualities were instinctive. . . . Why, Mary asked herself, is this denied me? (qtd. in Bell 113)

Autumn 1926 - a group of young black writers produced Fire!

James Weldon Johnson's description of reactions to Harlem:

It is known in Europe and the Orient, and it is talked about by natives in the interior of Africa. It is farthest known as being exotic, colourful, and sensuous; a place of laughing, singing, and dancing; a place where life wakes up at night. This phase of Harlem's fame is most widely known because, in addition to being spread by ordinary agencies, it has been proclaimed in story and song. And certainly this is Harlem's most striking and fascinating aspect. New Yorkers and people visiting New York from the world over go to the night-clubs of Harlem and dance to such jazz music as can be heard nowhere else; and they get an exhilaration impossible to duplicate. (.) A visit to Harlem at night-the principal streets never deserted, gay crowds skipping from one place of amusement to another, lines of taxicabs and limousines standing under the sparkling lights of the entrances to the famous night clubs, the subway kiosks swallowing and disgorging crowds all night long-gives the impression that Harlem never sleeps and that the inhabitants thereof jazz through existence. ⁽James W. Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Atheneum, 1968; originally published, 1930), pp. 160-161).

The exotic image comes from Blacks themselves and from white sympathizers:

Shuffle Along (1921) - popular musical, written and directed by four Blacks-Flournoy Miller, Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, and Aubrey Lyles

Put and Take (1921) - Irving C. Miller, who also produced Liza (1923)

chorus girls such as Florence Mills and Josephine Baker

Primitivism & dancing - Langston Hughes & Z.N. Hurston's How It Feels to Be Colored Me

Sherwood Anderson - Dark Laughter (1925) conjures the image of a joyful, untroubled people who, themselves freed from the need to read Freud, laugh gently at frustrated whites, who repress their own sexual desires

Home to Harlem (1928) Claude McKay, a Black West Indian, drowned social protest in his flood of night life-prostitutes, sweetmen, jazz, fights-as he told the story of a Black deserter from the armed services who searches through Harlem for the lost prostitute whom he loves.

Rudolph Fisher in The Walls of Jericho (1928) and Wallace Thurman in The Blacker the Berry (1929 seemed almost compelled to include irrelevant night club scenes as though they had become clichés of Black life.

W.E.B. DuBois, with great alarm, used the pages of The Crisis to question whether writers and publishers shared his fear that Black writers were being encouraged to create derogatory pictures of Blacks.

BACKGROUND:

• Factors contributing to the Harlem Renaissance decline:

The Great Depression NAACP & the Urban League focused on economic and social matters

The 1935 Harlem riot

• COMMON FEATURES to all the writers and artists involved: - the attempt to find an artistic expression for the African - American experience + some common themes as follows:

The Harlem Renaissance
One Facet of an Untwisted Kaleidoscope

In such ways as these, Black writers of the Renaissance explored serious issues involving Black people but not deriving primarily from the racial ancestry or from their relationship with whites.

+ a search for and affirmation of ancestral heritage, a feeling of alienation from the white Euro-American world; a presentation of and protest against oppression; and even militant defiance of oppression.

identity through identification with an ancestral past

Jean Toomer - Cane, "Natalie Mann"

Countée Cullen -"Heritage"

Langston Hughes - "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

The identification is not by all means problematic - There Is Confusion Jessie Fauset suggested the problems sometimes posed by the quest for European ancestry. Moreover, Blacks who wished to affirm a Black heritage were forced to identify with a continent rather than with a particular tribe or nation; L. Hughes - "Afro-American Fragment"

sense of alienation = impossibility to achieve a sense of belonging - difficulty in relating oneself at a personal level to the Black heritage + exclusion & marginalization from the European heritage:

McKay's "Outcast" and "The White House"

protests against oppression.

Walter White's novel The Fire in the Flint (1924)

Claude McKay's "The Lynching."

Toomer's "Blood-Burning Moon" and "Kabnis" (Cane).

Sometimes indirectly by showing how it causes Blacks to turn against themselves

Comedy : American Style (1933) Fauset gently censured a Negro mother who values her children according to the degree of their approximation to Caucasian appearance.

Walter White's Flight (1928) and Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) show the dilemmas of heroines who, repressed by the conditions of life as Blacks, attempt to improve their lot by passing for white.

Jean Toomer repeatedly stressed the necessity for middle-class Negroes to liberate themselves from conscious imitation of the restrictive morality of Anglo Saxons - "Natalie Mann."

militant reaction often was expressed as self-defense (Claude McKay's "If We Must Die") / prayers for destruction (McKay's "Enslaved")

Most often - a proud hostility towards whites - Flight.

• The result was a wide range of narrative forms and techniques: poetic realism, historical romance, genteel realism, folk romance, folk realism, and satire.

POETIC REALISM AND HISTORICAL ROMANCE

• Search for identity and usable past - two literary forms:

Poetic realism - Jean Toomer's Cane (psychological approach to the modern black artist; experimental in form; Freudian themes - preoccupied with the theme of the repressed self); "represents a synthesis of the concerns of writers of the Lost Generation and the Harlem Renaissance, and his work embodies the tensions of modern science and folk tradition, of psychoanalytic technique and Afro-American music, of mysticism and Afro-American spirituality" (96)

Historical romance - Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (retelling of a heroic legend in a traditional form)

Jean Toomer

"I am not a romanticist, I am not a classicist or a realist, in the usual sense of these terms. I am an essentialist. Or, to put it in other words, I am a spiritualizer, a poetic realist." (Toomer, early draft of his autobiography).

transcendency of the soul and the attainment of spiritual truth through intuition.

he tried "to lift facts, things, happenings to the planes of rhythm, feeling, and significance. . . . to clothe and give body to potentialities." (Toomer qtd. in Bell 97)

Cane

• three major parts - from a highly poetic to a heavily dramatic form.

Part 1 - focus on the Southern past and the libido /the rural thesis

Part 2 - emphasis on the centers of commerce and the superego/the urban antithesis

Part 3 - a synthesis of the earlier sections with Kabnis representing the black writer who finds it difficult to resolve the tension between the two.

• Images and symbols; shifting rhythm of syntax and diction
• Fragments of spirituals and work songs
• Aspiration to a higher level of consciousness that went beyond conditioning social circumstances
• In Part 1 - Gothic imagery of ten poems and six impressionistic sketches of Southern women (Georgian countryside). Each of the women is involved in a bizarre incident; each is dominated by a divine sexual impulse; and each sketch reveals a contrast between personal desires and social conventions unity of life and imminence of spiritual rebirth (see "Fern")
• Part - District of Columbia and Chicago; its seven sketches and five poems continue the poet-narrator's quest to reconcile himself to his heritage as a black American artist. Part 2 focuses on the perversion of the will and emotions when they are enslaved by the genteel mores of society. When freely and fully realized, the mind and body function as a spiritual unit. Spirituals, folk songs, jazz, poetry, and dance are Toomer's symbols for the attainment of this goal.
• Part 3 - third-person omniscient narrative voice; dramatic form; the inability of Ralph Kabnis to reconcile himself to the blood and soil that symbolize his ethnic and national identities.

99

• he confesses being strongly influenced by two approaches to literature. First, he was attracted to those Euro-American writers and works that used regional matter in a poetic manner, especially Robert Frost's poems and Sherwood Anderson 's Winesburg, Ohio. Second, he was impressed by the self-conscious art of the Imagists. "Their insistence on fresh vision and on the perfect clean economical line," Toomer writes, "was just what I had been looking for. I began feeling that I had in my hands, the tools for my own creation." (Toomer qtd. in Bell 101)

Arna Bontemps (1902-73)

• God Sends Sunday ), Black Thunder ( 1936), and Drums at Dusk ( 1939).
• makes use of history and folklore in a more traditional manner than Toomer
• a shift from urban folklore to revolutionary history
• Black Thunder - slave narratives and court records for the legendary efforts of blacks to liberate themselves; tragic story of the abortive Virginian revolt of Gabriel Prosser in 1800; narrative organized traditionally, in five books: plan of revolt, abortive execution and betrayal of plan, white retribution, Gabriel's surrender and resolution to die with dignity, and Gabriel's trial and hanging.

Court records, newspapers, journals, and letters - documentary sources of narrative authority

omniscient narrator + experiment with multiple points of view and interior monologue (third-person objective with first-and third-person subjective techniques). (101 -104)

GENTEEL REALISM: ASSIMILATIONISM, NATIONALISM, OR BICULTURALISM

• By family background and education, the New Negro novelists were mainly second-generation members of the middle-class black intelligentsia
• Walter White, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen - more emphasis on class than color
• By focusing on the morals and manners of well-educated members of black high society, they introduced the novel of manners and genteel realism into the tradition of the Afro-American novel. (106)

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961)

• published more novels during the Harlem Renaissance than any of her contemporaries: There Is Confusion ( 1924), Plum Bun ( 1929), The Chinaberry Tree ( 1931), and Comedy: American Style ( 1933).
• concerned with the commonplace details of domestic life, and at her best, as black critic Sterling A. Brown has observed, "succeeds in a realism of the sort sponsored by William Dean Howells." (qtd. in Bell 107)
• the foreword to The Chinaberry Tree Fauset reveals her social and artistic preference for depicting "something of the homelife of the colored American who is not being pressed too hard by the Furies of Prejudice, Ignorance, and Economic Injustice," and who as ". . . naturally as his white compatriots . . . speaks of his 'Old' Boston families, 'old Philadelphians,' 'old Charlestonians.' And he has a wholesome respect for family and education and labor and the fruits of labor. He is still sufficiently conservative to lay a slightly greater stress on the first two of these four." (qtd. in Bell 107)

stresses the genteel tradition and everyday rituals of the urban black elite

rather sentimental depiction of this class

moral of her novels: the respectable, genteel black American "is not so vastly different from any other American, just distinctive." (qtd. in Bell 107)

• the other novels - the theme of passing and self-determination; concern for the cultural dilemma of middle-class mulatto women (108-09)

Nella Larsen (1893-1963)

• Quicksand and Passing
• problems of identity for black middle-class women; obsession with fashion, decorum, marriage, and housekeeping
• the first black woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing in 1930

• Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset reject the romantic extremes of nationalism and assimilation in favor of cultural dualism
• the genteel world of their novels, racial pride, family background, and formal education are important, but they must be complemented by respect for individualism, economic security, and social advancement
• against the assimilationist assumption that blacks had to deny their color and culture (111)

FOLK ROMANCE: PASTORALISM, PRIMITIVISM, AND ANCESTRALISM

• the Afro-American pastoral focused on the near rather than remote past for paradigms of the good life, celebrated urban as well as rural settings, elevated social outcasts and plain folk to heroic stature, and attacked the repressive forces of Western civilization, especially social conformity and racism (114)
• primitivism - Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven:

Savages! Savages at heart! And she had lost or forfeited her birthright, this primitive birthright which was so valuable and important an asset, a birthright that all the civilized races were struggling to get back to-this fact explained the art of a Picasso or a Stravinsky. To be sure, she, too, felt this African beat--it completely aroused her emotionally--but she was conscious of feeling it. This love of drums, of exciting rhythms, this naive delight in glowing colour--the colour that exists only in cloudless, tropical climes--this warm, sexual emotion, all these were hers only through a mental understanding. With Olive these qualities were instinctive. . . . Why, Mary asked herself, is this denied me? (qtd. in Bell 113)

• ancestralism - romantic longing for a freer, more innocent time and place was born: a time and place where the rhythms of life were closely linked to nature and one's essential humanity was unquestioned; a time and place that fostered a feeling of harmony and peace with one's ancestors, one's self, and one's progeny (114)

the international scope of the concept of ancestralism is apparent in the Négritude movement of Caribbean and Francophone West African writers; coined in 1939 by Aimé Césaire in "Journal of a Return to My Native Country," a long narrative poem, and popularized in 1948 by Léopold Senghor in New Anthology of Black and Malagasian Poetry.

Festus Claudius Mc Kay (1899-1948)

transcended the primitivism of Van Vechten by drawing on his authentic racial past (Jamaica Ashanti) and intellectual independence

poetry, a collection of short stories, Gingertown ( 1932), and three novels, Home to Harlem ( 1928), Banjo ( 1929), and Banana Bottom ( 1933)

exploits the literary primitivism of his white peers. Relying more heavily on black idiom, slang, sex, animal imagery, gratuitous violence, and a noble-savage motif than its apparent model, "Home to Harlem," as a contemporary reviewer wrote, "is Nigger Heaven in a larger and more violent dose." (qtd. in Bell 116)

By focusing on the urban black worker and penetrating the surface vitality of his struggle to survive, Home to Harlem moves beyond the primitivism of Nigger Heaven

Banjo is as much a rejection of the black bourgeoisie and white civilization as it is a celebration of black folk values and cultural pluralism

The rural Jamaican setting, village characters, colorful dialogue, and tranquil mood of Banana Bottom make it the most conventional and successful of McKay's pastoral romances

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

folk romances are set in the Deep South

emphasize the pastoral aspects of rural black life with which the author was familiar

three romances, Jonah's Gourd Vine ( 1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God ( 1937), and Moses: Man of the Mountain ( 1939); and her novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (focus on whites; 1948).

metaphorical style; folksy language.

• the romances and novels of Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston were published after the Harlem Renaissance had peaked
• the crash of the stock market in 1929 and the beginning of economic depression in 1930, the Harlem vogue began its rapid decline. The immediate literary reaction of Hurston and several other novelists was a more intense personal search for modern forms of ancestralism, of continuity of the folk tradition.
• unaffected language, bold explorations of the economic, spiritual, and sexual drives behind the violence of black male-female relationships, and emphasis on the color and caste problems of black lovers reveal undercurrents of folk realism and the continuing search for a usable past (128).

FOLK REALISM: RELIGION, MUSIC, HUMOR, AND LANGUAGE

• the novels of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen focus on the everyday life of ordinary churchgoing black folk
• rendering of representative than marginal or allegorical types
• their characters are less idealized, their settings less exotic, and their plots less melodramatic
• strive for the truth of a particular environment and the social rituals of common folk rather than for the truth of the world at large and the life-style of street people and migrants

James Langston Hughes (1902-67)

• first volumes of verse The Weary Blues ( 1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)
• Hughes published seventeen volumes of verse, eleven plays, three collections of short stories, four collections of the folk wisdom of Jesse B. Semple, several anthologies, librettos, and radio scripts, numerous books for children, and articles, as well as two novels: Not Without Laughter ( 1930) and Tambourines to Glory ( 1958).

Not Without Laughter is the story of a black boy growing up in Stanton, a small Kansas town, in the 1920s; he chooses Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Frederick Douglass as his heroes

Tambourines to Glory is a comic novel about the attitude of simple black urban folk toward religion (131-33)

Countee Porter Cullen (1903-46)

The most highly educated and technically proficient traditional lyricist of the Harlem Renaissance (133)

In technique his verse is strongly influenced by Keats and Shelley, and in theme, by racial ambivalence that vacillates between African ancestralism and Western classicism (134)

A single novel--One Way to Heaven -- gullibility and superstition of unsophisticated lower-class urban blacks + sardonic treatment of the pretentious customs of the black bourgeoisie (134)

SATIRIC REALISM: THE VICES AND FOLLIES OF THE FOLK AND BLACK BOURGEOISIE

• the decline of the Harlem Renaissance coincided with the full emergence of satiric realism in the tradition of the Afro-American novel
• several black writers of the Harlem Renaissance turned to comedy and satire for models to depict the ordinary experience of blacks (137)

Rudolph Fisher (1897-1934)

• most representative story is "City of Refuge," a satirical treatment of the urbanization of a black Southern migrant. It first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1925. Additional stories appeared in such magazines as The Crisis, Opportunity, McClure's, American Mercury, and Story; two novels: The Walls of Jericho ( 1928) and The Conjure-Man Dies ( 1932)

George Samuel Schuyler (1895-1977)

• the key to survival for Afro-Americans was assimilation
• two novels: Black No More and Slaves Today (1931, both)
• Black No More is an outrageously irreverent satire of color prejudice in the United States, Slaves Today is a sober unmasking of the romance of black power in Africa (145)

Wallace Thurman (1902-34)

• two caustic satires: The Blacker the Berry and Infants of the Spring

Mihai Mindra's Course Notes on African American academic writing (to be included)

2. Neo-Slave Narratives. Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy - author. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1999

Neo-slave narrative: contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of the the antebellum slave narrative (3)

Ishmael Reed Flight to Canada ( 1976)

Sherley Anne Williams Dessa Rose ( 1986)

Charles Johnson Oxherding Tale ( 1982) and Middle Passage (1990)

o       its origins in the social, intellectual, and racial formations of the sixties

o       its cultural politics as these texts intervene in debates over the significance of race

o       its literary politics as these texts make statements on engagements between texts and between mainstream and minority traditions (3)

Black Power movement + the rise of the New Left changes at social & cultural level; incl. the understanding of history (New Left historians: analyzing history from the bottom up; importance attached to testimonies) (4)

William Styron - The Confessions of Nat Turner (+Daniel Panger in Ol' Prophet Nat); challenged by the Black Power movement intellectuals

Factors which generated the new genre:

historiographical representation of slavery

meaning of Black Power

significance of Styron's Confessions. (5)

• Williams - theorist of the Black Aesthetic (in her 1972 critical work, Give Birth to Brightness); wrote Dessa Rose in 1968 as a direct response to Styron Confessions of Nat Turner (5)
• Gaines The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman--the first Neo-slave narrative produced by a writer of African descent (slavery & the sixties: the heroine lives in both periods)
• The sixties: the formation of the political subjectivity of minorities, the reformation of the cultural sphere, and the transformation of the concept of the text within the project of intertextuality (7)
• slave narratives (and Neo-slave narratives) do not only "react" or "respond" to master texts, but actively engage both specific literary texts and the social conditions from which they emerge (16)
• A novel, especially a historical novel, is the product of several interrelated impulses: the historiography of the subject it purports to represent, the social and cultural conditions from which it emerges, and the literary form it adopts and the literary "tradition" into which it is potentially subscribed (17)
• The sixties: new discourse on slavery centered on violence, property & identity (23)

3. Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered. Contributors: Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu - author. Publisher: Greenwood Press. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 1999

• precursors of the neo-slave narrative:

Margaret Walker historical novel Jubilee ( 1966)

Ernest Gaines' novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971)

• writers considered here--Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison, J. California Cooper, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler