Early African American Print Culture

2012-09-06 Literary Criticism

Author : Lara Langer Cohen
Release : 2012-09-06
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 290/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Early African American Print Culture by : Lara Langer Cohen

Download or read book Early African American Print Culture written by Lara Langer Cohen. This book was released on 2012-09-06. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw both the consolidation of American print culture and the establishment of an African American literary tradition, yet the two are too rarely considered in tandem. In this landmark volume, a stellar group of established and emerging scholars ranges over periods, locations, and media to explore African Americans' diverse contributions to early American print culture, both on the page and off. The book's chapters consider domestic novels and gallows narratives, Francophone poetry and engravings of Liberia, transatlantic lyrics and San Francisco newspapers. Together, they consider how close attention to the archive can expand the study of African American literature well beyond matters of authorship to include issues of editing, illustration, circulation, and reading—and how this expansion can enrich and transform the study of print culture more generally.

Against a Sharp White Background

2019-05-14 Literary Criticism

Author : Brigitte Fielder
Release : 2019-05-14
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 509/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Against a Sharp White Background by : Brigitte Fielder

Download or read book Against a Sharp White Background written by Brigitte Fielder. This book was released on 2019-05-14. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of black writers, editors, publishers, and librarians is deeply embedded in the history of American print culture, from slave narratives to digital databases. While the printed word can seem democratizing, it remains that the infrastructures of print and digital culture can be as limiting as they are enabling. Contributors to this volume explore the relationship between expression and such frameworks, analyzing how different mediums, library catalogs, and search engines shape the production and reception of written and visual culture. Topics include antebellum literature, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement; “post-Black” art, the role of black librarians, and how present-day technologies aid or hinder the discoverability of work by African Americans. Against a Sharp White Background covers elements of production, circulation, and reception of African American writing across a range of genres and contexts. This collection challenges mainstream book history and print culture to understand that race and racialization are inseparable from the study of texts and their technologies.

The Earliest African American Literatures

2021-12-16 Literary Criticism

Author : Zachary McLeod Hutchins
Release : 2021-12-16
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 611/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Earliest African American Literatures by : Zachary McLeod Hutchins

Download or read book The Earliest African American Literatures written by Zachary McLeod Hutchins. This book was released on 2021-12-16. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the publication of the 1619 Project by The New York Times in 2019, a growing number of Americans have become aware that Africans arrived in North America before the Pilgrims. Yet the stories of these Africans and their first descendants remain ephemeral and inaccessible for both the general public and educators. This groundbreaking collection of thirty-eight biographical and autobiographical texts chronicles the lives of literary black Africans in British colonial America from 1643 to 1760 and offers new strategies for identifying and interpreting the presence of black Africans in this early period. Brief introductions preceding each text provide historical context and genre-specific interpretive prompts to foreground their significance. Included here are transcriptions from manuscript sources and colonial newspapers as well as forgotten texts. The Earliest African American Literatures will change the way that students and scholars conceive of early American literature and the role of black Africans in the formation of that literature.

The Practice of Citizenship

2019-02-08 Literary Criticism

Author : Derrick R. Spires
Release : 2019-02-08
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 773/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Practice of Citizenship by : Derrick R. Spires

Download or read book The Practice of Citizenship written by Derrick R. Spires. This book was released on 2019-02-08. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does. In The Practice of Citizenship, Derrick R. Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. Between these two points he recovers understudied figures such as William J. Wilson, whose 1859 "Afric-American Picture Gallery" appeared in seven installments in The Anglo-African Magazine, and the physician, abolitionist, and essayist James McCune Smith. He places texts such as the proceedings of black state conventions alongside considerations of canonical figures such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Frederick Douglass. Reading black print culture as a space where citizenship was both theorized and practiced, Spires reveals the degree to which concepts of black citizenship emerged through a highly creative and diverse community of letters, not easily reducible to representative figures or genres. From petitions to Congress to Frances Harper's parlor fiction, black writers framed citizenship both explicitly and implicitly, the book demonstrates, not simply as a response to white supremacy but as a matter of course in the shaping of their own communities and in meeting their own political, social, and cultural needs.

History and Memory in African-American Culture

1994-12-08 Literary Criticism

Author : Genevieve Fabre
Release : 1994-12-08
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 55X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis History and Memory in African-American Culture by : Genevieve Fabre

Download or read book History and Memory in African-American Culture written by Genevieve Fabre. This book was released on 1994-12-08. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Nathan Huggins once stated, altering American history to account fully for the nation's black voices would change the tone and meaning--the frame and the substance--of the entire story. Rather than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress tale of bold ascent and triumph, American history with the black parts told in full would be transmuted into an existential tragedy, closer, Huggins said, to Sartre's No Exit than to the vision of life in Bunyan. The relation between memory and history has received increasing attention both from historians and from literary critics. In this volume, a group of leading scholars has come together to examine the role of historical consciousness and imagination in African-American culture. The result is a complex picture of the dynamic ways in which African-American historical identity constantly invents and transmits itself in literature, art, oral documents, and performances. Each of the scholars represented has chosen a different "site of memory"--from a variety of historical and geographical points, and from different ideological, theoretical, and artistic perspectives. Yet the book is unified by a common concern with the construction of an emerging African-American cultural memory. The renowned group of contributors, including Hazel Carby, Werner Sollors, Vèvè Clark, Catherine Clinton, and Nellie McKay, among others, consists of participants of the five-year series of conferences at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, from which this collection originated. Conducted under the leadership of Geneviève Fabre, Melvin Dixon, and the late Nathan Huggins, the conferences--and as a result, this book--represent something of a cultural moment themselves, and scholars and students of American and African-American literature and history will be richer as a result.

Popular eBooks

Early African American Print Culture

Against a Sharp White Background

The Earliest African American Literatures

The Practice of Citizenship

History and Memory in African-American Culture

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