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Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction

2006-05-18 Literary Criticism
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Release : 2006-05-18
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 78X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction by : Keith Byerman

Download or read book Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction written by Keith Byerman. This book was released on 2006-05-18. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historically. These writers earned widespread recognition for their writing in the 1980s, a period of African American commercial success, as well as the economic decline of the black working class and an increase in black-on-black crime. Byerman contends that a shared experience of suffering joins African American individuals in a group identity, and writing about the past serves as an act of resistance against essentialist ideas of black experience shaping the cultural discourse of the present. Byerman demonstrates that these novels disrupt the temptation in American society to engage history only to limit its significance or to crown successful individuals while forgetting the victims.

Remembering Generations

2003-01-14 Literary Criticism
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Release : 2003-01-14
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 589/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Remembering Generations by : Ashraf H. A. Rushdy

Download or read book Remembering Generations written by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy. This book was released on 2003-01-14. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavery is America's family secret, a partially hidden phantom that continues to haunt our national imagination. Remembering Generations explores how three contemporary African American writers artistically represent this notion in novels about the enduring effects of slavery on the descendants of slaves in the post-civil rights era. Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Ashraf Rushdy situates these works in their cultural moment of production, highlighting the ways in which they respond to contemporary debates about race and family. Tracing the evolution of this literary form, he considers such works as Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family (1998), in which descendants of slaveholders expose the family secrets of their ancestors. Remembering Generations examines how cultural works contribute to social debates, how a particular representational form emerges out of a specific historical epoch, and how some contemporary intellectuals meditate on the issue of historical responsibility--of recognizing that the slave past continues to exert an influence on contemporary American society.

Bridges to Memory

2015-12-04 Literary Criticism
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Release : 2015-12-04
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 973/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Bridges to Memory by : Maria Rice Bellamy

Download or read book Bridges to Memory written by Maria Rice Bellamy. This book was released on 2015-12-04. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the development of a new genre in contemporary American literature that was engendered in the civil rights, feminist, and ethnic empowerment struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Bridges to Memory shows how these movements authorized African American and ethnic American women writers to reimagine the traumatic histories that form their ancestral inheritance and define their contemporary identities. Drawing on the concept of postmemory—a paradigm developed to describe the relationship that children of Holocaust survivors have to their parents' traumatic experiences—Maria Bellamy examines narrative representations of this inherited form of trauma in the work of contemporary African American and ethnic American women writers. Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, and Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Bellamy shows how cultural context determines the ways in which traumatic history is remembered and transmitted to future generations. Taken together, these narratives of postmemory manifest the haunting presence of the past in the present and constitute an archive of textual witness and global relevance that builds cross-cultural understanding and ethical engagement with the suffering of others.

The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature, Volume 2

2014-01-28 Literary Criticism
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Release : 2014-01-28
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 939/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature, Volume 2 by : Gene Andrew Jarrett

Download or read book The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature, Volume 2 written by Gene Andrew Jarrett. This book was released on 2014-01-28. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature is a comprehensive collection of poems, short stories, novellas, novels, plays, autobiographies, and essays authored by African Americans from the eighteenth century until the present. Evenly divided into two volumes, it is also the first such anthology to be conceived and published for both classroom and online education in the new millennium. Reflects the current scholarly and pedagogic structure of African American literary studies Selects literary texts according to extensive research on classroom adoptions, scholarship, and the expert opinions of leading professors Organizes literary texts according to more appropriate periods of literary history, dividing them into seven sections that accurately depict intellectual, cultural, and political movements Includes more reprints of entire works and longer selections of major works than any other anthology of its kind This second volume contains a comprehensive collection of texts authored by African Americans from the 1920s to the present The two volumes of this landmark anthology can also be bought as a set, at over 20% savings.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

2010-02-25 Fiction
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Release : 2010-02-25
Genre : Fiction
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Book Rating : 973/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by : N. K. Jemisin

Download or read book The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms written by N. K. Jemisin. This book was released on 2010-02-25. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After her mother's mysterious death, a young woman is summoned to the floating city of Sky in order to claim a royal inheritance she never knew existed in the first book in this award-winning fantasy trilogy from the NYT bestselling author of The Fifth Season. Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history. With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate -- and gods and mortals -- are bound inseparably together.

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