Bearing witness to African American literature : validating and valorizing its authority, authenticity, and agency /
Bell, Bernard W.
Detroit, Mich. : Wayne State University Press,
c2012.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 309-321) and index.
Preface Every tongue got to confess -- Introduction. Memoir: On becoming an African American scholar activist -- Double consciousness as the sign of African American difference. The African American Jeremiad and Frederick Douglass's Fourth of July 1852 speech ; Genealogical shifts in Du Bois's discourse on double consciousness as the sign of African American difference ; Booker T. and W.E.B.: the authority, authenticity, and agency of African American double consciousness -- The roots and branches of the African American literary tradition. The African American literary tradition ; African American writers ; The image of Africa in the Afro-American novel ; Jean Toomer's "Blue Meridian": the poet as prophet of a new order of man ; The legacy of James Baldwin: the artist as redemptive lover and righteous witness -- Modern and contemporary African American vernacular and literary voices. The blues voices in John Edgar Wideman's Two cities ; Clarence Major's homecoming voice in Such was the season ; Charles Johnson's philosophical fiction: slave revolt in the quest for unity of being in Middle passage ; Trey Ellis's voice of the new Black aesthetic in Platitudes -- Womanist African American vernacular and literary voices. Ann Petry's Demythologizing of American culture and Afro-American character ; Nails, snails, and puppy-dog tails: Black male stereotypes in the fiction of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Terry McMillan ; The liberating literary and African American vernacular voices of Gayl Jones ; Toni Morrison's blues people in a jazz world ; Beloved: a womanist neo-slave narrative; or, multivocal remembrances of things past -- Bearing witness to the changing same: representations of Black American identity in American and African American literature. Three vernacular theories for teaching African American literature for the twenty-first century ; Mark Twain's "Nigger" Jim: the tragic face behind the minstrel mask ; "The Negro" as metonym, metaphor, and marginal man in William Faulkner's Go down, Moses ; William Styron's Nat Turner: a white southerner's meditation on a legendary slave revolt ; Deconstructing the American melting pot and literary mainstream: validating and valorizing African American literature in the college curriculum.
American literature
African Americans
African Americans in literature.