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20 results

  • Chapter 6 - African American Literature’s One Long Memory

  • from Part II - Backgrounds
  • Edited by John Ernest, University of Delaware
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Race and American Literature
    Published online:
    02 November 2024
    Print publication:
    27 June 2024, pp 88-101

  • Summary

    This chapter explores how Black writers link the subjects of racial inequality and what it means to be human. This linking prompts a perennial question for critics and students alike: when it comes to examining African American literature’s long memory, do we examine the history of racial inequality to find out more about what it means to be human, or do we look to rich humanistic social relations in fiction to reimagine and/or resolve any remaining concepts of racial inequality? For this chapter, I examine the terms of the debates over how to represent Black humanity, and I claim that the debate has produced only ongoing and unanswered questions. Hence, I posit that it is in fact the irresolvable human conflict that asks and re-asks questions about Black humanity, and I claim that it is this ongoing instability or tension that defines race’s seminal role in African American literature.

  • 6 - Neo-Slave Imaginaries

  • from Part II - African American Genres
  • Edited by Yogita Goyal, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
    Published online:
    14 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023, pp 115-127

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the different aspects of enslaved Africans’ humanity that writers of neo-slave narratives felt was limiting, dehumanizing, or incomplete. To do this, this chapter also investigates the changing trends in the study of the sociology and history of enslaved Africans, speeches by Ossie Davis, and the writings of Octavia Butler, Angela Davis, and Toni Morrison – all of which contributed to ideas about black humanity. This chapter turns the kaleidoscope of neo-slave narrative by looking at a narrower, yet significant, angle of political life, form, and style of being Black and human, in the context of trends in mass consumption that gave shape to the landscape of this fiction about slavery.

Melville and the Idea of Blackness
  • Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America
  • Christopher Freeburg
  • Published online:
    05 September 2012
    Print publication:
    27 August 2012
  • By examining the unique problems that 'blackness' signifies in Moby-Dick, Pierre, 'Benito Cereno' and 'The Encantadas', Christopher Freeburg analyzes how Herman Melville grapples with the social realities of racial difference in nineteenth-century America. Where Melville's critics typically read blackness as either a metaphor for the haunting power of slavery or an allegory of moral evil, Freeburg asserts that blackness functions as the site where Melville correlates the sociopolitical challenges of transatlantic slavery and US colonial expansion with philosophical concerns about mastery. By focusing on Melville's iconic interracial encounters, Freeburg reveals the important role blackness plays in Melville's portrayal of characters' arduous attempts to seize their own destiny, amass scientific knowledge and perfect themselves. A valuable resource for scholars and graduate students in American literature, this text will also appeal to those working in American, African American and postcolonial studies.