The city in African-American literature
By: edited, and with an introduction by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Butler.
Contributors: Hakutani, Yoshinobu, 1935-; Butler, Robert, 1942-
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Madison; London; Cranbury, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 265
Subjects: American literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism.; African Americans -- Intellectual life.; City and town life in literature.; African Americans in literature.; Cities and towns in literature.
Description: More recent African-American literature has also been noteworthy for its largely affirmative vision of urban life. Amiri Baraka's 1981 essay "Black Literature and the Afro-American Nation: The Urban Voice" argues that, from the Harlem Renaissance onward, African-American literature has been "urban shaped," producing a uniquely "black urban consciousness." And Toni Morrison, although stressing that the American city in general has often induced a sense of alienation in many African-American writers, nevertheless adds that modern African-American literature is suffused with an "affection" for "the village within" the city.

While one of the central drives in classic American letters has been a reflexive desire to move away from the complexity and supposed corruption of cities toward such idealized nonurban settings as Cooper's prairies, Thoreau's woods, Melville's seas, Whitman's open road, and Twain's river, nearly the opposite has been true in African-American letters. Indeed the main tradition of African-American literature has been, for the most part, strikingly positive in its vision of the city.

Although never hesitant to criticize the negative aspects of city life, classic African-American writers have only rarely suggested that pastoral alternatives exist for African-Americans and have therefore celebrated in a great variety of ways the possibilities of urban living. For Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, the city, despite its many problems, has been a place of deliverance and renewal.

In the words of Alain Locke, the city provided "a new vision of opportunity" for African-Americans that could enable them to move from an enslaving "medieval" world to a modern world containing the possibility of liberation.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.