Title: Black cultural mythology /
Authors: Temple, Christel N.; Lamousé-Smith, W. Bediako
Year: 2020
Subjects: American literature African American authors History and criticism; African Americans Intellectual life; African Americans Intellectual life; American literature African American authors
Abstract: "Black Cultural Mythology retrieves the concept of 'mythology' from its Black Arts Movement origins and broadens its scope to illuminate the relationship between legacies of heroic survival, cultural memory, and creative production in the African Diaspora. Temple comprehensively surveys over two hundred years of figures, moments, texts, and ideas to map an expansive yet broadly overlooked intellectual tradition of Black cultural mythology and to provide a new conceptual framework for analyzing this tradition, including canonical works by writers such as Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison. Black Cultural Mythology at once reorients and stabilizes the emergent field of Africana Cultural Memory Studies while also staging a much broader intervention, challenging scholars across disciplines--from literary and cultural studies history, sociology, and beyond--to embrace a more organic vocabulary to articulate the vitality of Africana survival and achievement"--
Contents: Intellectual foundations of black cultural mythology -- Commemoration intervention -- Harriet Tubman and aesthetic memorialization -- Haiti as diaspora-wide mythology -- Richard Wright's navigation of the antihero -- Mythical Malcolm in an age of marable -- Imaginative rights -- Conclusion. Introducing Africana cultural memory studies.