Literature, African American

Although black Americans responded to their enslavement and the denial of their humanity in a number of ways, the emergence of African American literature reflects the centrality of writing to the project of seeking freedom and equality in the United States. At first, because of the European Enlightenment's stress on writing as the most visible sign of the ability to reason, literature presented a way for Africans in America to prove their humanity and demonstrate a capacity for artistic creation and imaginative thought. Later, literature developed into a vehicle through which African Americans could voice not only their rejection of slavery and institutionalized racism, but also their desire for freedom and recognition as full citizens of the United States. In the twenty-first century African American literature continues to be a means through which to right the historical record and counter the absence or distortion of black people in historical representation.

Reading, Writing, and Black Humanity: Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book and the first to achieve international recognition as a writer. Her significance to the history of African American literature, however, extends beyond these milestones. Wheatley was born in Africa and transported to the United States as a young child in 1761. With the instruction and encouragement of her master and his family, Phillis learned English quickly and began to study the Bible as well as scholarly works in Latin and Greek; within four years of her arrival in Boston, Massachusetts she was writing verse. Her first published poem, which appeared in 1767, was quickly followed by others, and her fame—not simply as a poet, but as an African poet—grew.

In the eyes of colonial Boston society the very idea of an African poet was something of a contradiction in terms. Poetry was considered the highest form of human expression, and black Africans were not considered capable of the depth of feeling necessary for such artistic achievement. Before Wheatley's work was accepted by a publisher both she and her manuscript were subjected to examination by 18 of Boston's most prominent gentlemen. The men's attestation that “the POEMS specified in the following Page were … written by PHILLIS, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, and has ever since been, and now is, under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a Family in this Town” was reprinted as part of the prefatory material to Wheatley's collection. When Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, by Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, in New England was published in the fall of 1773, the letters that preceded Wheatley's poetry were meant to assure readers of the authenticity of her work. These documents speak to the tremendous impact Wheatley's supporters knew her poetry would have on its white audience, most of which would not be prepared to believe a black person capable of producing such verse.

Indeed, the impact of the collection was tremendous, not only for Phillis Wheatley herself but for the history of African American letters. Reviewers argued that the publication of her poems illustrated the humanity of the young poet and insisted that if she was, as her poetry demonstrated, capable of improvement and artistic expression, she should not be enslaved. The fact that Wheatley was given her freedom soon after the publication of Poems on Various Subjects suggests the extent to which her writing was not simply an intellectual pursuit: The author used writing to gain access to her humanity and to free herself from the dehumanizing institution of slavery. Although Wheatley's poems have been criticized because their subject matter is not explicitly political, the very fact that Wheatley was writing made a political statement: The poetry provided her gateway to recognition as a human being. Along with other early African writers, such as Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography, The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, was published in 1789, Wheatley proved that blacks could command written language and represent themselves effectively through writing.

Antebellum Writers in the Urban North and the Tradition of Protest

As the American Revolution reinforced Enlightenment ideas about the importance of written communication, reading, writing, and print were increasingly seen as technologies of power. Colonists turned to written texts in the form of pamphlets and broadsides as a medium of public expression. The fact that the country had formed itself through one written document, the Declaration of Independence, and negotiated the terms of its existence through another, the Constitution, caused writing and publication to become associated with legitimacy in the new nation. In this environment the ability to read and write took on special significance: It became a marker for citizenship.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, free blacks living in urban areas of the North used writing to highlight the disparity between the condition of people of African descent in the U.S. and the republican principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence. The writers used literature not only to call for the abolition of slavery in the United States, but to point to the particular needs of the free black population and to voice their demands for full citizenship and equal participation in the life of the republic. The most outspoken and militant of these voices belonged to David Walker. Published privately in Boston by its author, Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America delivered a furious indictment of American slavery and racism. The content of Walker's Appeal, which called for a series of violent black uprisings, shocked white readers. Equally disturbing was Walker's ability to get his pamphlet into the hands of its intended audience, the “colored citizens” of the South.

Appeal is representative of an important moment in the history of African American letters. In the late 1820s and throughout the 1830s free blacks crafted and distributed literature that was intended to combat charges of racial inferiority, validate their calls for social justice, and alert their audience to the disparity between American ideals and racial inequality. Much of this writing emerged from literary societies formed by free blacks to support reading, writing, and literary discussion in their communities. This surge in literary activity coincided with the publication of the first African American newspaper, Freedom's Journal. The paper quickly became a primary publishing venue for “Original Communications,” including poetry and occasional pieces, editorials and letters to the editors, testimonials, and appeals and addresses, all of which were considered literature in the early nineteenth century.

In part because late twentieth-century definitions of literature differ so radically from those of the early previous century, the rich store of writings that free blacks contributed to newspapers has seldom found its way into anthologies of the antebellum African American literary work. Yet newspapers provide a remarkable record of the early literary efforts of African Americans and the beginnings of a tradition. One impediment to studying the poetry and prose that appears in the earliest black newspapers and the abolitionist press is that much of it was published anonymously. As the unsigned broadsides and pamphlets of the Revolutionary era illustrate, recognition of individual authorship was not a priority in the early U.S. Furthermore, anonymity and the use of pen names often provided a degree of protection that allowed black writers to speak their minds more freely. This was especially true for black women. Socially imposed constraints of both race and gender would have prohibited black women from engaging in public and political discussion. But the abundance of publications by “A Young Lady of Color” or “A Colored Lady” attest not only to the wide variety of writing submitted by African Americans but also to the ability of black women to circumvent socially imposed norms through publication.

The Slave's Story

In the 1830s growing unrest among the slave population of the South combined with the proliferation of abolitionist forces in the North to produce a new direction in African American literature: the fugitive Slave Narrative. Written by former slaves who recorded the transition from the slave South to the free North, slave narratives documented the physical and spiritual horrors of their authors' lives in slavery. The narratives were often the result of collaborative work between the former slave and a white abolitionist, whose job it was to shape the story into a narrative that would promote the abolitionist mission. Narratives were advertised in the abolitionist press and sold at antislavery meetings; their popularity was not limited to the United States but extended throughout the English-speaking world.

Of the numerous accounts of slavery written by former slaves, the best known was written by Frederick Douglass. By the time the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself was published in 1845, Douglass was an abolitionist speaker well known for his rhetorical skill. As evidenced by the narrative's subtitle, Douglass broke with the tradition of having a white abolitionist coauthor or transcribe his narrative: The book was indeed “Written By Himself.” This announcement of intellectual independence and literary authority became increasingly common as black authors, such as William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, and James W. C. Pennington, self-consciously chose to take control of their own stories.

Douglass's Narrative is best known for the association it makes between literacy and freedom. Selected as a boy to go to Baltimore, Maryland, as a servant, Douglass was taught the rudiments of literacy by his mistress. For Douglass, learning to read was a decisively political act; literacy was, in his words, “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” Although the slave narratives have been mined for their adherence to this “literacy equals freedom” paradigm, black feminist scholars have recently questioned its failure to distinguish between the conditions and results of literacy for men and women. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by Harriet Jacobs and published in 1861, underscores different uses of literacy by male and female slaves. Through the pseudonym and character of Linda Brent, Jacobs's narrative outlines the particular injustices faced by enslaved black women as well as their strategies of resistance. Jacobs's account of the sexual violation of black women by white men was a daring literary effort. By speaking out about her sexual exploitation in slavery and revealing her use of her own sexuality as a weapon against such exploitation, Jacobs risked offending her white audience and reinforcing stereotypes that associated black women with unbridled sexuality.

First African American Literary Renaissance

The strategies Jacobs develops to facilitate the telling of her story—such as her use of the name Linda Brent and her masking of important persons and places—illustrate the complexity of her position as an author and the techniques African American writers were incorporating into their work in the 1850s and 1860s. In 1853 Frederick Douglass published his historical novel The Heroic Slave in his newspaper, Frederick Douglass' Paper. The same year saw the publication of William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter, a story of the light-skinned woman reputed to be Thomas Jefferson's daughter by his slave mistress. Five years later Brown published The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), the first drama written by an African American. In 1859 Martin R. Delany, a black journalist whose Pittsburgh newspaper the Mystery was rich in literary content, wrote Blake; or, the Huts of America. The novel's hero, who leads a slave revolt in the South, is the first black nationalist hero in African American literature. To this literary outpouring Harriet E. Wilson contributed the autobiographical Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859), the first novel published in the United States by a black woman.

On the eve of the Civil War the first African American literary magazines were published. The Anglo-African Magazine included literature by some of the most prominent black intellectuals of the time. To this magazine Frances Ellen Watkins Harper contributed two important pieces in 1859: “Our Greatest Want” and the short story “Two Offers.” Another important literary magazine of the time, the Repository of Religion and Literature and of Science and Art (1858), appeared under the auspices of the African Episcopal Methodist Church. That magazine's rich literary content serves as a reminder that the distinction between secular and religious interests was not so clearly drawn in the mid-nineteenth century as it is today.

Literature of the “New Negro”

Although African Americans were officially free in the period just after the Civil War known as Reconstruction, the times were not conducive to their literary efforts. Slavery had been abolished, but the place and position of the newly freed slaves and those African Americans who had been free before the Civil War had not been determined. Paradoxically, the dissolution of the promises of Reconstruction marked a significant revival in the production of black literature and literary activity in the black community. At the end of the nineteenth century personal testimonies continued to be powerful tools through which to share the trials and triumphs of black life. Especially popular were the autobiographies of former slaves, whose determination to succeed in the face of obstacles facilitated their rise from the material poverty of their youth. Up from Slavery (1901) by Booker T. Washington is the classic example of this type of narrative. Although Washington's belief in industrial education and his acceptance of the political status quo in the South are troublesome from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, his text must be seen in its historical context. At the turn of the century black authors sought to revise the stereotypes that filled the white imagination and dominated plantation fiction, blackface Minstrelsy, and vaudeville acts. Advances in educational opportunities for black children brought the need for literature that accurately portrayed the history and aspirations of African Americans. Biographies of nineteenth-century black leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany and histories such as The History of the African American Episcopal Church (1891) by Daniel Payne and History of the Negro Race in America from 1619–1880 (1893) by George Washington Williams, as well as the collection A New Negro for a New Century (1900), to which Booker T. Washington and Fannie Barrier Williams contributed essays, sought to present a “New Negro” to the world. These texts inspired pride in African American communities while communicating to white readers the contributions black Americans had made to the nation.

Although black historian Rayford Logan identified the two decades between 1890 and 1910 as “The Nadir of Black Experience,” a characterization justified by a historical record of widespread Lynching and segregation, the literary outpouring by black women writers at the turn of the century underscores the reasons why the same period was labeled the “Woman's Era.” Motivated by the desire to alter their public image and bolstered by the sense of community and achievement that membership in women's clubs offered, black women's literary contributions during this time ranged from fiction and poetry to autobiography and investigative reporting. A sampling of titles published in 1892 alone gives some sense of the variety of literature black women were writing at the end of the nineteenth century: Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted by Frances E. W. Harper, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South by Anna Julia Cooper, From Darkness Cometh the Light; or, Struggles for Freedom by Lucy Delaney, and Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases by Ida B. Wells. Other important contributions include the essay “The Importance of Race Literature” (1895) by Victoria Earle Matthews, The Work of Afro-American Women (1894) by Gertrude Mossell, and Contending Forces (1900) by Pauline Hopkins.

The most influential voice of the early twentieth century belonged to W. E. B. Du Bois, whose The Souls of Black Folk (1903) stands as the preeminent text of modern African American cultural consciousness. In Souls Du Bois employed various modes of writing and challenged the formal boundaries of several disciplines to define black experience and the place of black culture in America. Calling Negro spirituals the only “true American music” and locating the creation of African American art as central to the future status of black people in the United States, Du Bois issued a challenge to black writers to create literature that would celebrate the vital and significant world in which they lived. In addition to advancing education and suffrage causes, Du Bois argued, African Americans needed to make artistic contributions to American culture. The problematic exploration of racial identity and the conflicted relationship of “the Negro” to “the American” are identified by Du Bois with the term double consciousness, and this term has remained a significant subject of African American literature throughout the twentieth century. Two important texts that highlight the influence of Du Bois's formulations are The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) by James Weldon Johnson and Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison.

Harlem Renaissance

Recent critical work by literary historians has revealed the extent to which the term Harlem Renaissance inaccurately describes the literary and cultural phenomenon that took place not only in the area of New York City called Harlem, but nationwide and, to some extent, worldwide in the decade between 1919 and 1929. But New York and particularly Harlem were central to the movement. In part on the strength of newcomers who took part during the Great Migration of black people from the rural South to the urban North, Harlem in the 1920s fostered a sense of racial unity and pride. This environment inspired a new sense of confidence among African American artists and gave rise to a boldly creative period in the history of African American letters.

The parameters of the movement were put forth in two pivotal anthologies. In 1922 James Weldon Johnson edited The Book of Negro Verse, a collection that highlighted the poetry of younger poets. In his preface to the volume Johnson urged new black artists to reject dialect verse in favor of “a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos” of black Americans. He pushed the artists to create literature that explored “the widest range of subjects and the widest scope of treatment” so as to give voice to “the deepest emotions and aspirations” of African Americans. In 1925 Howard University professor Alain Locke combined the essays, stories, and artwork of older and younger artists, both black and white, to create The New Negro, a volume that announced a fresh vision and new sense of independence in African American art. Most influential was Locke's own essay entitled “The New Negro,” which proclaimed the “new self-respect and self-dependence” of the black community. Arguing that the “Old Negro had long become more of a myth than a man,” Locke challenged young artists to create new and diverse portraits of black life.

The New Negro marked the height rather than the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1923 Cane by Jean Toomer captured through innovative poetry and prose the many and varied attributes of black life in the United States. Toomer's work depicted the lyrical language and mystical setting of rural Georgia along with the beauty and ugliness of black folk life there. The book also identified the isolation and dislocation of urban blacks in Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Filled with racial self-awareness but also racial self-consciousness, Cane illustrated the literary excellence and experimentation that would distinguish the Harlem Renaissance. Other important writers of the period included Langston Hughes, whose poetry drew heavily from jazz and the blues, musical forms that he considered the most authentic and insistent expressions of art to come from the black community; Countee Cullen, for whom the Harlem Renaissance meant the freedom to experiment with forms of poetry that merged racial awareness with the traditional poetic formats of English Romantic authors Keats and Shelley; Georgia Douglas Johnson, who published two volumes of poetry during the 1920s; and Claude McKay, whose collection of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922), contained the militant sonnet “If We Must Die.” Written in 1919 in response to the racial violence and urban unrest of that year, this poem sounded a note of defiance against racism that was repeated throughout the Renaissance.

While the focus of many black writers at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance was on poetry, they increasingly turned their attention to fiction in the second half of the decade. In 1928 and 1929 respectively, Quicksand and Passing by Nella Larsen were published; both novels address the limitations imposed by sexuality and class as well as race for their female protagonists. Other well-received novels of the Harlem Renaissance include Home to Harlem (1928) by Claude McKay, There Is Confusion (1924) by Jessie Fauset, The Blacker the Berry (1929) and Infants of the Spring (1932) by Wallace Thurman, Not Without Laughter (1930) by Langston Hughes, and Black No More (1931) by George Schyler. Although Zora Neale Hurston's most widely acclaimed novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was not published until 1937, she was an important part of the Harlem Renaissance. She published several short stories in the 1920s and collaborated with other Harlem Renaissance figures to launch the literary magazine Fire!! Like that of other female novelists of the time, Hurston's daring exploration of black female selfhood opened the way for black female writers of the 1970s and 1980s to explore the tangled web of race, sex, and class in which black women struggled to know themselves.

Modernism, Naturalism, and Urban Realism: 1940–1960

The stock market crash of 1929 brought an abrupt end to the reckless fun associated with the Jazz Age, drying up the financial resources of white patrons and the prosperity of the publishing industry that had been so crucial to buttressing black authors. In the wake of the crash came the Great Depression of the early 1930s, which fueled the less celebrated aspects of urban living that were captured in African American literature of the 1940s and 1950s. In 1940 Native Son by Richard Wright burst onto the scene to wide critical acclaim. As a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, Wright's story of Bigger Thomas and the alienating environmental forces that shaped him and determined the course of his life was a commercial success. Drawing from Marxism and social protest theories as well as traditions of naturalism and realism, this direct, powerful novel deeply impacted the course of African American literature. Wright's gritty portrayal of urban living and victimization by negative social forces asserted his conviction that black art and so-called social protest were synonymous. Native Son issued a new challenge to black writers to document the living conditions of urban blacks and make protest the narrative mode of their writing.

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) made a radical departure from the tradition of social protest embodied by Richard Wright's fictional work, signifying Ellison's fundamental disagreement with Wright's portrayal of Bigger Thomas as a powerless victim of his bleak surroundings. Ellison found the inspiration for his story in African American musical forms like Jazz and the Blues as well as black folklore; bringing these together with African American cultural values and his knowledge of the Western literary tradition, Ellison created a portrait of the paradoxical status of African Americans in the United States. The unnamed narrator of Invisible Man moves from the South to the North through a series of episodes that illustrate his naïveté when faced with racial issues as well as the alienation that results from that naïveté. Another prolific writer from this period, James Baldwin, shared Ellison's conviction about the limitations of ideological fiction and his interest in the paradox between the failed promises of American democracy and those aspects of the African American psyche that position black Americans as an integral part of American life. An essayist as well as a novelist, Baldwin wrote the semiautobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a novel that tells the story of a young black man's coming of age and explores the effects of fear, hatred, love, and sexuality on the psyches of African Americans.

Although critical perspectives of the period have tended to focus on the work of Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin, other significant black authors emerged in the 1940s and 1950s. Many rejected the militant edge associated with social protest writing or the bleakness of naturalism and realism while striving to create powerful portraits of black urban life in poetry, prose, and drama. The 1946 novel The Street by Ann Petry is often compared to Wright's Native Son, but Petry's presentation of a female protagonist and her interest in the ways that gender marks the black experience make The Street a very different work. The first collection of poetry published by Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville, as well as the author's later novella Maud Martha (1953) captured the sounds and rhythms that defined the lives of poor blacks in the ghettos of Chicago. According to Brooks material for poetry was everywhere in the urban landscape: “If you wanted a poem,” she once said, “you had only to look out a window.” Inspired by African American experience but influenced by white modernist poets like Carl Sandburg, Hart Crane, and W. H. Auden, poet Robert Hayden used black history to create his poem “Middle Passage” (1945), which imaginatively re-creates the rebellion aboard the slave ship Amistad. In 1959 A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry opened on Broadway to critical acclaim and won the New York Drama Critics Award. Anticipating the concerns and interests of writers of the Black Arts Movement, the play explores the African roots of African American identity and culture.

Black Arts Movement

The social and political upheaval of the 1960s was accompanied by a change in the black literary and cultural movement. Seeking equal treatment in the U.S., the black freedom movement of the 1960s looked to redefine how black people were seen and how they saw themselves. The writers of the Black Arts Movement wished to create politically engaging expression that would match the charged atmosphere of the period. They turned to the black community for inspiration and defined their goals in broadly collective political and social terms: Rather than a movement focused on intellectual exchange between the black elite, the writers of the Black Arts Movement sought to communicate with the masses. According to Addison Gayle, Jr., whose introduction to The Black Aesthetic (1971) serves as a critical and theoretical guide to the Black Arts Movement, the role of the black artist was to “provide us with images based on our own lives.”

This new generation, represented by writers such as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Sonia Sanchez, and Larry Neal, welcomed the fact that their work was not accepted by the mainstream. Larry Neal's “The Black Arts Movement,” published in 1968, the year of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., served as a manifesto for these young writers. They were to look to their African ancestors as a source of inspiration, eschew white, middle-class values, create new themes, and shape new forms. Through their writing they were to distance themselves from what Neal and others referred to as the white aesthetic, the “Euro-American cultural sensibility” that the movement's leaders felt had too heavily influenced black writers who came before them. The members of this new generation aesthetically aligned themselves in opposition to those European-American concepts of art that influenced the work of Ernest Gaines, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and John Oliver Killens and, in their opinion, had strangled black cultural and literary creativity.

African American Literature after the 1970s

Criticism of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s has centered on its tendency to ascribe to all blacks the same backgrounds, desires, and goals; feminist scholars also challenged the movement's articulation of blackness almost purely in male terms. The questions that arose in response to these challenges have been addressed through the writing of African Americans since the 1970s. The authors of this period have celebrated the multiplicity and complexity of African American identities. Crucial to this effort has been the recovery work being done by historians and social scientists as well as creative and critical writers. Of particular interest to today's black writers has been the experience of slavery, which has been used as a means of better understanding the present. Notable examples of literature that draw on the slave's experience include the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) by Ernest Gaines, Corregidora (1975) by Gayl Jones, Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage by Charles R. Johnson, Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison, Dessa Rose (1986) by Sherley Anne Williams, and Mama Day (1988) by Gloria Naylor. Other authors have traveled even further into the past to forge connections between African Americans and the continent of Africa. While Alice Walker chose Africa as the setting for parts of her three most recent novels, other writers, such as Ntozake Shange and Ishmael Reed have used fiction to illustrate the ways that African rituals and myths remain central to African American life.

The veritable explosion of writing by African American women is the most significant development in African American literature since the 1970s. The relative success of three novels published in 1970—I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker, and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison—identified the existence of a market for black women writers. Mining their own experience and the experiences of their ancestors, these and other black women writers changed the direction of African American literature by introducing new themes. The authors' primary focus on the black community rather than on the relationship between blacks and whites allows them to make inquiries into the parameters of motherhood, the dynamics of class difference among blacks, and the ambiguous expectations of sexuality and love.

Critical acclaim for the literature of both male and female black writers has been second only to the authors' appeal to a diverse reading public. Recent Pulitzer Prize winners include Walker (1983), playwright August Wilson (1987, 1990), poet Rita Dove (1987), Toni Morrison (1988), poet Yusef Komunyakaa (1994), and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (2002). Morrison was also the first African American to be honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature (1993), and in 1994 Dove was named the United States Poet Laureate. In 1992 books by Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker appeared on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time, signaling the centrality of black writers to mainstream American culture.

processed xml | source xml

Sign up to recieve email alerts from African American Studies Center