|
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. Voices Within the Circle: A Historical Overview of African American Literary Criticism -- I The Harlem Renaissance -- The New Negro -- The Negro in American Literature -- The Gift of Laughter -- The Negro-Art Hokum -- The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain -- Criteria of Negro Art -- Our Literary Audience -- Characteristics of Negro Expression -- II Humanistic/Ethical Criticism and the Protest Tradition -- Blueprint for Negro Writing -- American Negro Literature -- What White Publishers Won't Print -- New Poets -- Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity -- Everybody's Protest Novel -- Integration and Race Literature -- III The Black Arts Movement -- The Myth of a "Negro Literature" -- Ethnic Impact in American Literature: Reflections on a Course -- The Black Arts Movement -- Towards A Black Aesthetic -- Cultural Strangulation: Black Literature and the White Aesthetic -- Toward a Definition: Black Poetry of the Sixties (After LeRoi Jones) -- Tripping with Black Writing -- IV Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and the African American Critic -- Preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext -- I Rose and Found My Voice: Narration, Authentication, and Authorial Control in Four Slave Narratives -- Generational Shifts and the Recent Criticism of Afro-American Literature -- Literary Production: A Silence in Afro-American Critical Practice -- The Race for Theory -- Appropriative Gestures: Theory and Afro-American Literary Criticism -- Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature -- V Gender, Theory, and African American Feminist Criticism -- In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens -- Toward a Black Feminist Criticism -- New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism -- "The Darkened Eye Restored:" Notes Toward a Literary History of Black Women -- Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar Book -- Gender and Afro-Americanist Literary Theory and Criticism -- But What Do We Think We're Doing Anyway: The State of Black Feminist Criticism(s) or My Version of a Little Bit of History -- Some Implications of Womanist Theory -- Useful Sources for Related Reading -- Acknowledgment of Copyrights -- About the Critics -- Index of Selected Names Within the Circle is the first anthology to present the entire spectrum of twentieth-century African American literary and cultural criticism. It begins with the Harlem Renaissance, continues through civil rights, the Black Arts Movement, and on into contemporary debates of poststructuralist and black feminist theory. Drawing on a "e from Frederick Douglass for the title of this book, Angelyn Mitchell explains in her introduction the importance for those "within the circle" of African American literature to examine their own works and to engage this critical canon.The essays in this collection—many of which are not widely available today—either initiated or gave critical definition to specific periods or movements of African American literature. They address issues such as integration, separatism, political action, black nationalism, Afrocentricity, black feminism, as well as the role of art, the artist, the critic, and the audience. With selections from Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Barbara Smith, Alice Walker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and many others, this definitive collection provides a dynamic model of the cultural, ideological, historical, and aesthetic considerations in African American literature and literary criticism.A major contribution to the study of African American literature, this volume will serve as a foundation for future work by students and scholars. Its importance will be recognized by all those interested in modern literary theory as well as general readers concerned with the African American experience.Selections by (partial list): Houston A. Baker, Jr., James Baldwin, Sterling Brown, Barbara Christian, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones, Sarah Webster Fabio, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W. Lawrence Hogue, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Deborah E. McDowell, Toni Morrison, J. Saunders Redding, George Schuyler, Barbara Smith, Valerie Smith, Hortense J. Spillers, Robert B. Stepto, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, Mary Helen Washington, Richard Wright
|
