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Books by Zora Neale
Hurston
Their Eyes Were
Watching God /
Mules and Men
/
Jonah’s Gourd Vine
/
Tell
My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
Zora Neale Hurston : Novels and Stories
/
Dust
Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography
Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond
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What White Publishers Won’t
Print
By Zora Neale
Hurston
I have been amazed by the
Anglo-Saxon’s lack of curiosity
about the internal lives and
emotions of the Negroes, and for
that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon
peoples within our borders,
above the class of unskilled
labor.
This lack of interest is much
more important than it seems at
first glance. It is even more
important at this time than it
was in the past. The internal
affairs of the nation have
bearings on the international
stress and strain, and this gap
in the national literature now
has tremendous weight in world
affairs. National coherence and
solidarity is implicit in a
thorough understanding of the
various groups within a nation,
and this lack of knowledge about
the internal emotions and
behavior of the minorities
cannot fail to bar out
understanding. Man, like all the
other animals, fears and is
repelled by that which he does
not understand, and mere
difference is apt to connote
something malign.
The fact that there is no demand
for incisive and full-dress
stories around Negroes above the
servant class is indicative of
something of vast importance to
this nation. This blank is NOT
filled by the fiction built
around upper-class Negroes
exploiting the race problem.
Rather, it tends to point it up.
A college-bred Negro still is
not a person like other folks,
but an interesting problem, more
or less. It calls to mind a
story of slavery time. In this
story, a master with more
intellectual curiosity than
usual sets out to see how much
he could teach a particularly
bright slave of his. When he had
gotten him up to higher
mathematics and to be a fluent
reader of Latin, he called in a
neighbor to show off his
brilliant slave, and to argue
that Negroes had brains just
like the slave-owners had, and
given the same opportunities,
would turn out the same.
The Visiting master of slaves
looked and listened, tried to
trap the literate slave in
Algebra and Latin, and “failing
to do so in both, fumed to his
neighbor and said:
“Yes, he certainly knows his
higher mathematics, and he can
read Latin better than many
white men I know, but I cannot
bring myself to believe that he
understands a thing that he is
doing. It is all an aping of our
culture. All on the outside. You
are crazy if you think that it
has changed him inside in the
least. Turn him loose, and he
will revert at once to the
jungle. He is still a savage,
and no amount of translating
Virgil and Ovid have done is
going to change him. In fact,
all you have done is to turn a
useful savage into a dangerous
beast.”
That was in slavery time, yes,
and we have come a long, long
way [since] then, but the
troubling thing is that there
are still too many who refuse to
believe in the ingestion and
digestion of western culture as
yet. Hence the lack of
literature about the higher
emotions and love life of
upper-class Negroes and the
minorities in general.
Publishers and producers are
cool to the idea. Now, do not
leap to the conclusion that
editors and producers constitute
a special class of un-believers.
That is far from true.
Publishing houses and theatrical
promoters are in business to
make money. They will sponsor
anything that they believe will
sell. They shy away from
romantic stories about Negroes
and Jews because they feel that
they know the public
indifference to such works,
unless the story or play
involves racial tension. It can
then be offered as a study in
Sociology, with the romantic
side subdued. They know the
skepticism in general about the
complicated emotions in the
minorities. The average American
just cannot conceive of it, and
would be apt to reject the
notion, and publishers and
producers take the stand that
they are not in business to
educate, but to make money.
Sympathetic as they might be,
they cannot afford to be
crusaders in proof of this, you
can note various publishers and
producers edging forward a
little, and ready to go even
further when the trial balloons
show that the public is ready
for it. This public lack of
interest is the nut of the
matter. The question naturally
arises as to the why of this
indifference, not to say
skepticism, to the internal life
of educated minorities.
The answer lies in what we may
call THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF
UNNATURAL HISTORY. This is an
intangible built on told belief.
It is assumed that all
non-Anglo-Saxons are
uncomplicated stereotypes.
Everybody knows all about them.
They are lay figures mounted in
the museum where all may take
them in at a glance. They are
made of bent wires without
insides at all. So how could
anybody write a book about the
non-existent?
The American Indian is a
contraption of copper wires,
eternal war-bonnet, with no
equipment for laughter,
expressionless face and that
says “How” when spoken to. His
only activity is treachery
leading to massacres. Who is so
dumb not to know all about
Indians, even if they have never
seen one, nor talked with anyone
who ever knew one?
The American Negro exhibit is a
group of two. Both of these
mechanical toys are built so
that their feet eternally
shuffle, and their eyes pop and
roll. Shuffling feet and those
popping, rolling eyes denote the
Negro, and no characterization
is genuine without this
monotony. One is seated on a
stump picking away on his banjo
and singing and laughing. The
other is a most amoral character
before a share-cropper’s shack
mumbling, about injustice. Doing
this makes him out to be a Negro
“intellectual.” It is as simple
as all that.
The whole museum is dedicated to
the convenient “typical.” In
there is the “typical” Oriental,
Jew, Yankee, Western,
Southerner, Latin, and even
out-of-favor Nordics like the
German. The Englishman say old
chappie, and the gesticulating
Frenchman. The least observant
American can know them all at a
glance. However, the public
willingly accepts the untypical
in Nordics, but feels cheated if
the untypical is portrayed in
others. The author of
Scarlet Sister Mary
complained to me that her
neighbors objected to her book
on the grounds that she had the
characters thinking, and
everybody know that Nigras don’t
think.”
But for the national welfare, it
is urgent to realize that
minorities do think, and think
about something other than the
race problem. That they are very
human and internally, according
to natural endowment, are just
like everybody else. So long as
this is not conceived, there
must remain that feeling of
insurmountable difference, and
difference to the average man
means something bad. If people
were made right, they would be
just like him. The trouble with
the purely problem arguments is
that they leave too much
unknown. Argue all you will or
may about injustice, but as long
as the majority cannot conceive
of a Negro or a Jew feeling and
reacting inside just as they do,
the majority will keep right on
believing that people who do not
look like them cannot possibly
feel as they do, and conform to
the established pattern. It is
well known that there must be a
body of waived matter, let us
say, things accepted and taken
for granted by all in a
community before there can be
that commonality of feeling.
The usual phrase is having
things in Common until this is
thoroughly established in
respect to Negroes in America,
as well as of other minorities,
it will remain impossible for
the majority to conceive of a
Negro experiencing a deep and
abiding love and not just the
passion of sex. That a great
mass of Negroes can be stirred
by the pageants of Spring and
Fall; the extravaganza of
summer, and the majesty of
winter. That they can and do
experience discovery of the
numerous subtle faces as a
foundation for a great and
selfless love, and the diverse
nuances that go to destroy that
love as with others. As it is
now, this capacity, this
evidence of high and complicated
emotions, is ruled out. Hence
the lack of interest in a
romance uncomplicated by the
race struggle has so little
appeal.
This insistence on defeat in a
story where upper-class Negroes
are portrayed, perhaps says
something from the subconscious
of the majority. Involved in
Western culture, the hero or the
heroine, or both, must appear
frustrated and go down to
defeat, somehow. Our literature
reeks with it. Is it the same as
saying, “You can translate
Virgil, and fumble with the
differential calculus, but can
you really comprehend it? Can
you cope with our subtleties?
That brings us to the folklore
of “reversion to type.” This
curious doctrine has such wide
acceptance that it is tragic.
One has only to examine the huge
literature on it to be
convinced. No matter how high we
may seem to climb, put us under
strain and we revert to type,
that is, to the bush. Under a
superficial layer of western
culture, the jungle drums throb
in our veins.
This ridiculous notion makes it
possible for that majority who
accept it to conceive of even a
man like the suave and scholarly
Dr. Charles S. Johnson to hide a
black cat’s bone on his person,
and indulge in a midnight voodoo
ceremony, complete with leopard
skin and drums if threatened
with the loss of the presidency
of Fisk University, or the love
of his wife. “Under the skin . .
. better to deal with them in
business, etc., but otherwise
keep them at a safe distance and
under control. I tell you, Carl
Van Vechten, think as you like,
but they are just not like us.”
The extent and extravagance of
this notion reaches the ultimate
in nonsense in the widespread
belief that the Chinese have
bizarre genitals, because of
that eye-fold that makes their
eyes seem to slant. In spite of
the fact that no biology has
ever mentioned any such
difference in reproductive
organs makes no matter. Millions
of people believe it. “Did you
know that a Chinese has . . .”
Consequently, their quiet
contemplative manner is
interpreted as a sign of slyness
and a treacherous inclination.
But the opening wedge for better
understanding has been thrust
into the crack. Though many
Negroes denounced Carl Van
Vechten’s
Nigger Heaven because
of the title, and without ever
reading it, the book, written in
the deepest sincerity, revealed
Negroes of wealth and culture to
the white public.
It created curiosity even when
it aroused skepticism. It made
folks want to know. Worth Tuttle
Hedden’s
The Other Room has
definitely widened the opening.
Neither of these well-written
works take a romance of
upper-class Negro life as the
central theme, but the
atmosphere and the background is
there. These works should be
followed up by some incisive and
intimate stories from the
inside.
The realistic story around a
Negro insurance official,
dentist, general practitioner,
undertaker and the like would be
most revealing. Thinly disguised
fiction around the well known
Negro names is not the answer,
either. The “exceptional” as
well as the Ol’ Man Rivers has
been exploited all out of
context already. Everybody is
already resigned to the
“exceptional” Negro, and willing
to be entertained by the
“quaint.” To grasp the
penetration of Western
civilization in a minority, it
is necessary to know how the
average behaves and lives. Books
that deal with people like in
Sinclair Lewis’
Main Street is the
necessary metier. For
various reasons, the average,
struggling, non-morbid Negro is
the best-kept secret in America.
His revelation to the public is
the thing needed to do away with
that feeling of difference which
inspires fear, and which ever
expresses itself in dislike.
It is inevitable that this
knowledge will destroy many
illusions and romantic
traditions which America
probably likes to have around.
But then, we have no record of
anybody sinking into a lingering
death on finding out that there
was no Santa Claus. The old
world will take it in its
stride. The realization that
Negroes are no better nor no
worse, and at times just as
bonny as everybody else, will
hardly kill off the population
of the nation.
Outside of racial attitudes,
there is still another reason
why this literature should
exist. Literature and other arts
are supposed to hold up the
mirror to nature. With only the
fractional “exceptional” and the
“quaint” portrayed, a true
picture of Negro life in America
cannot be. A great principle of
national art has been violated.
These are the things that
publishers and producers, as the
accredited representatives of
the American people, have not as
yet taken into consideration
sufficiently. Let there be
light!
Negro Digest,
April 1950
Source:
MahoganyBooks
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Zora Neale Hurston:
A Literary Biography
By Robert E.
Hemenway (Author) /
Foreword by Alice
Walker
Zora Neale
Hurston—novelist,
folklorist,
anthropologist, and
child of the rural
black
South—transformed
each hour of her
life into something
bubbling, exuberant,
and brimming with
her joy in just
being. Robert
Hemenway captures
the effervescence of
this daughter of the
Harlem Renaissance
in his brilliant and
original literary
biography. He
provides for the
first time a full
length study of
Hurston's life and
art, using
unpublished letters
and manuscripts and
personal interviews
with many who knew
her.
His sensitive
reconstruction of
Miss Hurston's life
details her two
marriages, her
relations with her
patron, Mrs. R.
Osgood Mason, her
mentor, Franz Boas,
and her friend
Langston Hughes; her
indictment on a
morals charge in
1948; and the sad,
final years leading
to her death as a
penniless occupant
of a Florida welfare
home. But most
important, his
interpretation of
her art and
scholarship,
including her
extraordinary
novels,
autobiography, and
popular treatment of
black folkways,
underscores her deep
and abiding
commitment to the
black folk
tradition.
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Zora
Neale Hurston, folklorist and writer, became a central
figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was born and educated
in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black city in the
United States. At the age of 16, she left her home to work with
a traveling theatrical company. The company ended up in New York
City , where Hurston studied anthropology at Columbia
University. She then attended Howard University as well as
Barnard College.
In
1931, Hurston collaborated with Langston Hughes to write the
play
Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts. She
wrote her most acclaimed work,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
in 1937. After writing her autobiography (Dust Tracks on a
Road) in 1942, she went on to teach at what is now North
Carolina Central University. Her work, revived by feminists in
the 1970s, has gained her considerable recognition as one of the
most important black writers in American history.
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Julia Peterkin
(1880-1961)
pioneered in
demonstrating the
literary potential
for serious
depictions of the
African American
experience.
Rejecting the
prevailing
sentimental
stereotypes of her
times, she portrayed
her black characters
with sympathy and
understanding,
endowing them with
the full dimensions
of human
consciousness. In
these novels and
stories, she tapped
the richness of
rural southern black
culture and oral
traditions to
capture the
conflicting
realities in an
African American
community and to
reveal a grace and
courage worthy of
black pride.
Peterkin is a
southern white
woman, but she has
the eye and the ear
to see beauty and
know truth.—W.
E. B. Du Bois
Peterkin's novel
Scarlet Sister Mary
won the Pulitzer
Prize in 1928 and
was made into a
Broadway play in
1930. Born in 1880
in Laurens County,
South Carolina,
Peterkin's work was
known for
sympathetic
portrayals of Blacks
in the South. |
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She [Julia Peterkin]
was one of very few
white authors to
specialize in the
Negro experience and
character. But her
work was not always
praised, and
Pulitzer Prize–winning
Scarlet Sister Mary
was called obscene
and banned at the
public library in
Gaffney, a South
Carolina town. The
Gaffney Ledger
newspaper, however,
serially published
the complete book. .
. . Julia Peterkin
used Gullah dialect
in many of her
novels and stories.
It is said that her
use encouraged Zora
Neale Hurston to use
Negro dialect in her
novels, contrary to
the practice of the
other writers in the
Harlem Renaissance,
some of whom
objected in print to
such usage. Hurston
wrote that she had
met Peterkin and
would begin a
correspondence, but
no letters from
either to the other
have ever been
found.Wikipedia |
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The Other Room
is a reprint of the
prize-winning novel
about a young woman
who unknowingly
signs up to teach
classes at an
all-black college in
New Orleans in 1920.
It is one of the
best—and
earliest—views of
breaking the color
line as well as a
touching love story
of a man and woman
of different races.
The new introduction
by Hedden scholar
and biographer P. V.
LeForge brings the
novel into
historical context
and gives a brief
sketch of this
wonderful, but
heretofore forgotten
writer.
Interracial love
story set at a
fictional black
college (Southern?)
in the early 1900s.
"Nina Latham was a
southern girl,
trained in a rigid
code of black and
white. She wanted to
get away from home,
but when she signed
for her new job she
didn't she would be
working with
Negroes, eating with
them, living among
them. An certainly
she didn't know that
she would meet
handsome young Leon
who could have
passed for white—but
wouldn't." |
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I haven't read a more satisfying
novel in 1947 than Worth Tuttle
Hedden's
The Other Room.—Lewis
Gannett, New York Herald Tribune
Worth Tuttle Hedden
(1896-1985)
was born in Raleigh, North
Carolina. She attended what is
now Duke University and the
Columbia School of Journalism.
In 1920 she spent a year
teaching at Straight College in
New Orleans. She is the author
of two other novels: Love Is
a Wound and Wives of High
Pasture
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No other
contemporary novel
received the volume
and intensity of
criticism and
curiosity that
greeted
Nigger Heaven
upon its publication
in 1926. Carl Van
Vechten's novel
generated a storm of
controversy because
of its scandalous
title and fed an
insatiable hunger on
the part of the
reading public for
material relating to
the black culture of
Harlem's jazz clubs,
cabarets, and social
events. 'The book
and not the title is
the thing', James
Weldon Johnson
insisted with regard
to
Nigger Heaven,
and the book is
indeed a nuanced and
vibrant portrait of
'the great black
walled city' of
Harlem.
Opening on a scene
of tawdry
sensationalism,
Nigger Heaven
shifts decisively to
a world of black
middle-class
respectability,
defined by
intellectual values,
professional
ambition, and an
acute consciousness
of class and racial
identity. Here is a
Harlem where
upper-class elites
discuss art in
well-appointed
drawing rooms; rowdy
and lascivious
drunks spend long
nights in jazz clubs
and speakeasies;
and, politically
conscious young
intellectuals drink
coffee and debate
'the race problem'
in walk-up
apartments. |
At the center of the story,
two young people - a quiet, serious librarian and a volatile
aspiring writer - struggle to love each other as their dreams
are slowly suffocated by racism. This reissue is based on the
seventh printing, which included poetry composed by Langston
Hughes especially for the book. Kathleen Pfeiffer's astute
introduction investigates the controversy surrounding the
shocking title and shows how the novel functioned in its time as
a site to contest racial violence. She also signals questions of
racial authenticity and racial identity raised by a novel about
black culture written by a white admirer of that culture.
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Black writers in a ghetto of the publishing industry's making—Kathryn Stockett and
Sue Monk Kidd are living the dream of thousands of
authors, myself included. But they are not the first white women to pen
stories of the black American South and be lauded for their efforts. In
1928, Julia Peterkin wrote a novel, "Scarlet Sister Mary," for which she
received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Stockett's and Kidd's novels tackle
racism and celebrate the power of friendship and acceptance. Both novels
were given beautiful covers that did not reveal the race of the characters.
Both books were marketed to black and white audiences.
. . . . Literature
about the oppressed written by the oppressor has a long tradition. The trend
can be traced all the way to colonialism -- a movement that was not only
physical but textual, the evidence of which can be found in the diaries,
letters and journals of colonists, settlers and plantation slave owners.
Representation of African Americans by white people in texts records a
history of "inferiority." Based on these perceptions, African Americans have
endured slavery, genocide, medical apartheid and segregation.
This "inferiority" is a tool
fundamental to ethnic distancing in society. Today, this tool is used with
great precision in the mainstream publishing industry. While, yes, the
distancing may not be total -- meaning a few select African American authors
have "crossed over" into the mainstream -- the work of many African
Americans authors, myself included, has been lumped into one heap known as
"African American literature." This suggests that our literature is singular
and anomalous, not universal. It is as if we American authors who happen to
be of African descent are not a people but a genre much like mystery,
romance or thriller. Walk through your local chain bookstore and you will
not see sections tagged British Literature, White American Literature,
Korean Literature, Pakistani Literature and so on. None of these ethnicities
are singled out or objectified the way African American writers are.
Washington Posty
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The
Help (Kathryn Stockett) /
The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
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Taking on the Jim Crow media—Hubert
Bauch, The Gazette—Landing the latest Reed oeuvre was an unexpected coup for
fledgling Montreal publishing house Baraka Books. “It came out of the blue
and I just jumped at the chance,” said publisher Robin Philpot, who had been
reading Reed for years and had struck up an acquaintance and a
correspondence. “It’s an honour for us to publish such an important writer.”
Reed says he thought of Baraka after
his New York agent, the high-powered Barbara Lowenstein, categorically told
him that no American publisher would touch the book. He casts the move to
publish in this country as his own flight to Canada, “a Black Rock ferry
crossing” of the border so he could make his case. “This one goes against
the grain of what is expected of African-Americans, not only in book
publishing, but in theatre, film, in television, that race is no longer an
issue in American society. The point of view that’s welcomed in the media is
that the problems confronting the black poor are a result of behaviour and
lifestyle, the self-destructive behaviour of people who live in Harlem.”
He sneers at the establishment line
being propagated by mainstream media that with Obama’s election America has
entered a “post-race” era. “This whole idea of racism, mortgage lending,
health-care problems, racial profiling, all these are sort of ignored in
order to present the country as a post-race paradise, like the peaceable
kingdom.” He notes assassination threats against the president are up 300
per cent since Obama took office. ”And the media has become the mob leader.
That’s why I call them the Jim Crow media”—
Montreal Gazette
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Barack Obama and the Jim Crow
Media
The Return of the Nigger
Breakers
By
Ishmael Reed
For Ishmael Reed,
Barack Obama, like
Michelangelo’s St.
Anthony, is a
tormented man,
haunted by modern
reincarnations of
the demonic spirits
used to break
slaves. These were
the Nigger Breakers
men like Edward
Covey, who was
handed the job of
breaking Frederick
Douglass. Isn’t it
ironic, writes Reed:
A media that scolded
the Jim Crow South
in the 1960s now
finds itself hosting
the bird. In this
collection, which
includes several
unpublished essays,
Ishmael Reed brings
to bear his grasp of
the
four-centuries-long
African-American
experience as he
turns his
penetrating gaze on
Barack Obama’s
election and first
year in power
establishing himself
as the conscience of
a country that was
once moved by Martin
Luther King’s
dream.—Baraka
Books
(April 15, 2010)
In the past 40 years, Reed has published more than 20
books and has also made his mark as an editor, publisher, critic,
journalist, songwriter, librettist and fearsome letter-to-the-editor
writer…. Reed is among the most American of American writers, if by
‘American’ we mean a quality defined by its indefinability and its perpetual
transformations as new ideas, influences and traditions enter our cultural
conversation.—The New York Times
With Ishmael Reed, the most persistent myths and
prejudice crumble under powerful unrelenting jabs and razor-sharp insight.—
Le Devoir, Montreal
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An Interview with Ishmael Reed
Jill Nelson:
Why were you unable to get this
book published in the United
States?
Ishmael Reed:
This is attributable to the
state of black letters. Serious
fiction and non fiction by
blacks are becoming extinct,
except for that which upholds
the current line coming from the
media owners and the
corporations that all of the
problems of Africans and African
Americans are due to their
behavior. This is true not only
for literature but for black
theater, film, art galleries and
opinion columns as well. I saw a
show of
Kara Walker’s work at the
Brooklyn Museum. I feel that
this young brilliant artist’s
growth is being stunted by
museum curators, and big money
capitalists. Even some white
intellectuals support her most
mediocre work and pit her
against the great
Betye Saar who uses a
variety of materials and subject
matter and whose work contains
more depth. Her supporters limit
her work just as
David Selznick limited the
range of
Hattie McDaniel. I’d love to
see her do color. The Brooklyn
museum used the neo-confederate
line when describing her work.
That her work presented a south
in which “there were no heroes
of villains. ” This is the way
the slave trade is being
described. . . . The
Return of the Nigger Breaker
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Ida Cox (February 25, 1896 –
November 10, 1967) was an
African American
singer and
vaudeville performer, best known for her
blues performances and
recordings. She was billed as "The
Uncrowned Queen of the Blues" Cox was born
in February, 1896 as Ida Prather in
Toccoa,
Habersham County, Georgia (Toccoa was in
Habersham County, not yet
Stephens County at the time), the
daughter of Lamax and Susie (Knight)
Prather, and grew up in
Cedartown, Georgia, singing in the local
African
Methodist Church
choir.
She
left home to tour with travelling
minstrel shows, often appearing in
blackface into the 1910s; she married
fellow minstrel performer Adler Cox. By
1920, she was appearing as a headline act at
the 81 Theatre in
Atlanta, Georgia; another headliner at
that time was
Jelly Roll Morton. . . .—Wikipedia
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Ida Cox—Wild Women Don’t Have
the Blues
Wild Women
Don’t Have the Blues
By
Ida Cox
I hear these women raving 'bout their monkey
men
About their trifling husbands and their no
good friends
These poor women sit around all day and moan
Wondering why their wandering papa's don't
come home
But wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have no blues
Now when you've got a man, don't never be on
the square
'Cause if you do he'll have a woman
everywhere
I never was known to treat no one man right
I keep 'em working hard both day and night
'Cause wild women don't worry, wild women
don't have their blues
I've got a disposition and a way of my own
When my man starts kicking I let him find
another home
I get full of good liquor, walk the streets
all night
Go home and put my man out if he don't act
right
Wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have their blues
You never get nothing by being an angel
child
You better change your ways and get real
wild
I wanna tell you something, I wouldn't tell
you a lie
Wild women are the only kind that ever get
by
wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have their blues. |
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The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's
wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in
1937, after her cousin was falsely accused
of stealing a white man's turkeys and was
almost beaten to death. In 1945, George
Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled
Florida for Harlem after learning of the
grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie
party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing
Foster made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for the
United States Army and couldn't operate in
his own home town." Anchored to these three
stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively
researched study of the "great migration,"
the exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates
sociological and historical studies into the
novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling,
and Pershing settling in new lands, building
anew, and often finding that they have not
left racism behind. The drama, poignancy,
and romance of a classic immigrant saga
pervade this book, hold the reader in its
grasp, and resonate long after the reading
is done. |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 9
July 2010
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