Three Negro Classics Up From Slavery By Booker Twashington The Souls Of Black Folk By Webdu Bois An Autobiography Of An Ex Colored Man By James Weldon Johnson

Download or read book W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought written by Adolph L. Reed Jr. and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-10-30 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this explosive book, Adolph Reed covers for the first time the full sweep and totality of W. E. B. Du Bois's political thought. Departing from existing scholarship, Reed locates the sources of Du Bois's thought in the cauldron of reform-minded intellectual life at the turn of the century, demonstrating that a commitment to liberal collectivism, an essentially Fabian socialism, remained pivotal in Du Bois's thought even as he embraced a range of political programs over time, including radical Marxism. He remaps the history of twentieth-century progressive thought and sharply criticizing recent trends in Afro-American, literary, and cultural studies.

Download or read book New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" written by Noelle Morrissette and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017-07-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) exemplified the ideal of the American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter, diplomat, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and first African American executive of the NAACP. Originally published anonymously in 1912, Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is considered one of the foundational works of twentieth-century African American literature, and its themes and forms have been taken up by other writers, from Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole. Johnson’s novel provocatively engages with political and cultural strains still prevalent in American discourse today, and it remains in print over a century after its initial publication. New Perspectives contains fresh essays that analyze the book’s reverberations, the contexts within which it was created and received, the aesthetic and intellectual developments of its author, and its continuing influence on American literature and global culture. Contributors: Bruce Barnhart, Lori Brooks, Ben Glaser, Jeff Karem, Daphne Lamothe, Noelle Morrissette, Michael Nowlin, Lawrence J. Oliver, Diana Paulin, Amritjit Singh, Robert B. Stepto

Download or read book Self-discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative written by Valerie Smith and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is by telling the stories of their lives that black writers--from the authors of nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary novelists--affirm and legitimize their psychological autonomy. So Valerie Smith argues in this perceptive exploration of the relationship between autobiography and fiction in Afro-American writing. Smith sees the processes of plot construction and characterization as providing these narrators with a measure of authority unknown in their lives. Focusing on autobiographies by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs and the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, she demonstrates the ways in which the act of narrating constitutes an act of self-fashioning that must be understood in the context of the Afro-American experience. Hers is a fertile investigation, attuned to the differences in male and female sensibilities, and attentive to the importance of oral traditions.

Download or read book Autobiography of an Ex-white Man written by Robert Paul Wolff and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2005 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autobiography of an Ex-White Man is an intensely personal meditation on the nature of America by a White Philosopher who joined a Black Studies Department and found his understanding of the world transformed by the experience. The book begins with an autobiographical narrative of the events leading up to Wolff's transfer from a Philosophy Department to the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, and his experiences in the Department with his new colleagues, all of whom had come to Academia from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Wolff discovered that the apparently simple act of moving across campus to a new Department in a new building worked a startling change in the way he saw himself, his university, and his country. Reading as widely as possible to bring himself up to speed in his new field of academic responsibility, Wolff realized after a bit that his picture of American history and culture was undergoing an irreversible metamorphosis. America, he realized, has from its inception been a land both of Freedom and of Bondage: Freedom for the few, and then for those who are White; Bondage at first for the many, and then for those who are not White. Slavery is thus not an aberration, an accident, a Peculiar Institution -- it is the essence and core of the American experience. Wolff's optimistic outlook leads him to express the hope that our acknowledging the realities of America's racial history and present will begin to tear down the formidable barrier to change. He sees this refashioning of the American story as a first step toward the crafting of a truly liberatory project. Robert Paul Wolff is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the author of numerous books, including Introductory Philosophy and In Defense of Anarchism.

Download or read book American Negro Folktales written by Richard M. Dorson and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rich anthology of African-American folklore offers scores of humorous and harrowing stories. Collected during the mid-20th century, the tales tell of talking animals, ghosts, devils, and saints.

Download or read book The New Negro Aesthetic written by Alain Locke and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer edits a collection of Alain Locke's influential essays on the importance of the Black artist and the Black imagination A Penguin Classic For months, the philosopher Alain Locke wrestled with the idea of the Negro as America's most vexing problem. He asked how shall Negroes think of themselves as he considered the new crop of poets, novelists, and short story writers who, in 1924, wrote about their experiences as Black people in America. He did not want to frame Harlem and Black writing as yet another protest against racism, nor did he want to focus on the sociological perspective on the "Negro problem" and Harlem as a site of crime, poverty, and dysfunction. He wanted to find new language and a new way for Black people to think of themselves. The essays and articles collected in this volume, by Locke's Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, are the result of that new attitude and the struggle to instill the New Negro aesthetics, as Stewart calls it here, into the mind of the twentieth century. To be a New Negro poet, novelist, actor, musician, dancer, or filmmaker was to commit oneself to an arc of self-discovery of what and who the Negro was—would be—without fear that one would disappoint the white or Black bystander. In committing to that path, Locke asserted, one would uncover a "being-in-the-world" that was rich and bountiful in its creative possibilities, if Black people could turn off the noise of racism and see themselves for who they really are: a world of creative people who have transformed, powerfully and perpetually, the culture of wherever history or social forces landed them.

Download or read book Black Theology as Mass Movement written by C. Howard and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-04-16 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Theology as Mass Movemen t is a call to current and future theologians to stretch the boundaries of Black Liberation Theology from what has become primarily an academic subfield into a full fledge liberation movement beyond the walls of the academy.