LITR 160/362 African American Literature

Offers a new conceptual framework rooted in mythological analysis to ground the field of Africana cultural memory studies.

Focuses on feeling as form in order to show that African American literature is an archive of feelings, a tradition of the tension between uncontainable black affect and rigid historical structure. Crawford foregrounds the "idea" of African American literature and uncovers the "black feeling world" co-created by writers and readers.

Combines philosophy, literary theory, and jazz studies with Africana studies to develop a theory of the black male literary imagination. Challenges the reader to visit and revisit relevant novels with a new perspective about the social, political, historical, and psychic realities of black men.

Chronicles the lives of literary black Africans in colonial America from 1643 to 1760 and offers new strategies for identifying and interpreting the presence of black Africans in this early period. Included here are transcriptions from manuscript sources and colonial newspapers as well as forgotten texts.

Explodes narrow definitions of African American poetry by examining experimental poems often excluded from previous scholarship. Covers the period from the mid-1970s to the present day, bringing into focus the elastic frontiers and multifaceted expressions of contemporary black poetry.

Showcases the poetic interpretations of superheroes, Black comic characters, and Afrofuturistic images of the African diaspora.

Focuses on the role of African American folk music in the Renaissance aesthetic and in political debates about racial performance, social memory, and national identity.

Analyzes seven of Walker's novels to offer a fresh reading situated at the complex intersection of critical race studies and critical animal studies.

Brings to the fore an engagement between race and nature -- the interrelationships and interactions between individuals and community, and between organisms and the biosphere, are central to this analysis.

Assesses the legacy and imprint of the writer, activist, and cultural worker who reshaped and redefined what is means to be a black public intellectual and poet. Illuminates Baraka's multilayered creative output--whether through critical analyses, literary historiographies, or biographical reassessments of his work.

An intimate portrait of the life and work of a writer who held to the principle that "the unexamined life is not worth living."

Contends that Wheatley was not only a brilliant writer but one whose work made a significant impression on renowned European writers of the Romantic age.

Includes thirty-three new essays by leading scholars relating Wright's writings to biographical, regional, social, literary, and intellectual contexts essential to understanding them.