The Ideologies of African American Literature: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Nationalist Revolt : a Sociology of Literature PerspectiveRowman & Littlefield, 2001 - 363 pages This book embarks on new intellectual terrain as the first systematic and theoretically grounded sociological study of African American literature. It examines the impact of race relations, as well as other social and political forces, on the development of the dominant ideological outlooks of African American literature. Spanning the fifty year period from 1920 to 1970, encompassing the mass northern movement, urbanization, and modernization of the African American community, and culminating in the civil rights revolution, it is the first sociological study that situates black literary discourse, and the major black American literary intellectuals (e.g. Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka), in the social and political developments of American race relations. By analyzing the formation, influence, and decline of each of the five dominant schools of black literary discourse over those five tumultuous decades, it explains how black literary production not only reacted to -- but also was shaped and constrained by -- the racial caste system. The book concludes with a theoretical chapter that links the dominant black literary outlooks to white American culture. Rejecting the simplistic notion that all cultural expression by black Americans reflects the community's social consciousness, this theoretical discussion sets forth a comparative analytical framework for understanding the social locations and functions of the different spheres of African American cultural production. |
Contents
The Era of the Primitivist School The Beginning of Black American Literatures Public Role | 13 |
The Demise of Paternalistic Cultural Hegemony | 15 |
The Black Communitys Transformation and Black American Literatures New Public Role | 21 |
The Sociohistorical Setting and the Origins of the Primitivist Ideology | 27 |
The Primitivist Ideology and the Black American Community | 36 |
Major Ideological Forces within the Black Community | 38 |
The Writers and Literary Works of the Dominant Primitivist School | 54 |
The Black Primitivist Writers Claude McKay Langston Hughes Jean Toomer Countee Cullen | 69 |
Major Writers and Literary Work | 203 |
Richard Wright and The Outsider | 224 |
The Last Phase of Richard Wrights Literary Career | 230 |
Political ReEngagement through Protest for Civil Rights | 233 |
Emerging Contradictions and Discontents of an Affluent Society | 234 |
Changing Social and Economic Conditions within the Black American Community | 237 |
The Changing Outlook on American Race Relations and the Emergence of the Civil Rights Movement | 241 |
The Emergence of James Baldwin and the Moral Suasion Ideology | 244 |
The Demise of the Dominant Black Primitivist Literary School | 116 |
The Era of the Naturalistic Protest School The Politicization of Black American Literature | 119 |
The Sociohistorical Setting | 120 |
Communist Party Initiatives in the Black Community | 122 |
Richard Wright and the Development of the Naturalistic Protest School | 127 |
The Early Years | 130 |
The Communist Influences in the White American Literary Community | 136 |
The Communist Partys Interest in Black Writers | 138 |
Richard Wrights Involvement with the Communist Party | 139 |
Richard Wrights New York Years and Literary Fame | 151 |
The Naturalistic Protest Literary Works | 159 |
Other Writers and Literary Works of the Naturalistic Protest School | 172 |
Sounding the Death Knell for a Literary School | 179 |
The Era of the Existentialist School Political Disillusionment and Retreat into Individualism | 183 |
The Beginning of the Cold War | 184 |
The Postwar Retreat of Liberal White Intellectual Culture | 187 |
The Ideological Reorientation of Black American Literature | 190 |
Restabilization and Moderate Reform | 191 |
Emergence of the New Black Bourgeoisie | 196 |
Ralph Ellison and Invisible Man | 199 |
The Emerging Crisis within the Civil Rights Movement | 256 |
The Erupting Storm of Racial Violence and the Culmination of the Moral Suasion Literary School | 261 |
A Failed Quest for Racial Amalgamation | 269 |
A Black Militant Assault on Baldwins Social Role | 272 |
Amiri Baraka and the Rise of the Counterhegemonic Black Cultural Nationalist School | 275 |
Racial Polarization and Growth of the Black Nationalist Movement | 276 |
Amiri Baraka and the Emergence of the Dominant Cultural Nationalist Literary School | 281 |
The Cultural Nationalist Literary School | 306 |
Black Nationalist Images of Reality | 308 |
The Demise of the Cultural Nationalist School | 312 |
A Theoretical Overview | 317 |
The Cultural Functions of Black American Literature Compared with Other Black American Cultural Institutions | 318 |
Historical Overview of Black Cultural Institutions | 323 |
Assimilation versus Hegemony | 326 |
The Ironic Role of the Liberal White American Intelligentsia | 330 |
The New Postpolitical Black Literary Culture | 335 |
| 339 | |
| 349 | |
About the Author | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
African alienated American race relations American society artistic Baldwin Baraka Bigger black American black American ethnic black American literary black American literature black bourgeoisie black community black community's black cultural black ethnic culture black ghetto black intellectuals black literary schools black middle class black nationalism black nationalist black primitivist Carl Van Vechten Chicago civil rights Claude McKay co-optive Communist Party consciousness Countee Cullen critical dominant black literary Ellison existentialist experiences Harlem Renaissance hegemony Hughes's ideological perspective images of black influence intelligentsia interracial Invisible James Baldwin Langston Hughes leftist liberal white literary career literature's lower-class blacks Marxist mass McKay's middle-class blacks movement NAACP nameless hero Native naturalistic protest school Negro Nigger Heaven novel outlook poems postwar primitivist ideology primitivist literary racial caste system racial integration racial reform racism radical Richard Wright role segregated social world sociological tion Toomer Vechten Walker white American white literary worldview York young black writers