The Ideologies of African American Literature: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Nationalist Revolt : a Sociology of Literature PerspectiveRowman & Littlefield Publishers, 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 Beginning of Black | 13 |
The Politicization | 119 |
13 | 160 |
Copyright | |
10 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
The Ideologies of African American Literature: From the Harlem Renaissance ... Robert E. Washington No preview available - 2001 |
Common terms and phrases
African alienated American race relations American society 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 Claude McKay co-optive Communist Party consciousness critical cultural institutions dominant black literary Ellison evidenced existentialist Harlem Harlem Renaissance hegemony ideological perspective images of black influence intelligentsia interracial Invisible James Baldwin Langston Hughes leftist liberal white literary career living lower-class blacks major Marxist mass McKay middle-class blacks moral suasion NAACP nameless hero Native naturalistic protest school Negro Nigger Heaven novel outlook postwar primitivist racial caste system racial integration racial reform racism radical Ralph Ellison Richard Wright role segregated social world sociological struggle tion Toomer Vechten Walker white American worldview York young black writers