Go There To Know There

As we have discussed so far in African American Literature, one of the chief concerns of African American writers of the Renaissance was the positioning of the folk within the literary heritage. That is, whether one should consider dialect poetry and the acknowledgment of the folk aesthetic as part of an evolving African American art form. Gates points out that during the Harlem Renaissance, that critics relegated dialect poetry to the "expression of humor and pathos" . Poets like Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar, to relative effect, insisted dialect verse as a vital art form, and elevated the spoken word of African American 'folk' as a recognized and legitimate artistic expression. Perhaps to even greater extent, poet Sterling A. Brown, has been heralded as the master of dialect poetry--particularly in the estimation of James Weldon Johnson(1248). Howard University's website informs us that "Professor Brown devoted his life to the development of...

Ida B. Wells Symposium @ Rhodes Posted on September 24, 2012 by midsouthstudies To celebrate the 150th Anniversary of Ida B. Wells’ birth, Rhodes College is holding a symposium to celebrate her activism in Memphis. Wells (1862-1931) came of age in Memphis, moving to the city in 1880. She was forced to flee Memphis for her anti-lynching journalism in 1892. Monday, October 29 ■Memphis Center Public Christening 5:00 pm Memphis Center ■Paula Giddings, keynote lecture, “A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching,” BCLC 6:30 pm Tuesday, October 30 ■Amy Wood, “Lynching and Spectacle: Ida B. Wells, Anti-Lynching Activism, and the Use of Photography as Testimony” 4:00 pm in Blount Auditorium ■Reception in Buckman Hall Lobby ■Theatrical Performance of Iola: A One-act Reflection on Wells’ Memphis Years, 6:00 pm in Hardie Auditorium. Co-written by Dave Mason and Rychetta Watkins

"The Old Negro, we must remember, was a creature of moral debate and historical controversy. He has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism. The Negro himself has contributed his share to this through a sort of protective social mimicry forced upon him by the adverse circumstances of dependence" (Locke 985). "Through having had to appeal from the unjust stereotypes of his oppressors and traducers to those of his liberators, friends and benefactors he has had to subscribe to the traditional positions from which his case has been viewed. Little true social or self-understanding has or could come from such a situation" (985). "Similarly the mind of the Negro seems suddenly to have slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority. By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving so...

Some Background on Slavery's Abolition in the North The official ban on importing slaves into the United States came in 1808; however this edict did not control the trafficking of slaves within the U.S. borders. At the end of the eighteenth century following the Revolutionary War, many individual instances of manumission took place. Slave-holders freed slaves by dint of the growing philosophies of freedom and independence; however, others freed their bondsmen due to changing economic climates, in which many farmers moved from single-crop (tobacco) farming to variegated crops and therefore needed fewer hands to work the fields. The mass reformation movements that eventually ended slavery in the nation did not come until the Second Great Awakening, which occurred during the 1820's and 1830's. Religious groups such as the Quakers, Moravians, and Methodists argued that the holding of slaves was sinful in the eyes of God, thus turning the tide on the long-standing biblical...

Below are some of the terms, historical periods, and figures we will be referring to in the first portion of our semester. We will refer to these terms and figures regularly as we consider some of the key literary works in African American Literature: The Vernacular Tradition Eye Dialect: Literary text written to mimic the language of the folk. Vernacular : “belongin g to, developed in, and spoken or used by the people of a particular place, region, or country: native; indigenous” (qtd. in Gates 6 ) The Folk : Demographic characterized by rural living and conventional values. Performativity : Used to describe a method of communication: performative as opposed to literary. Oral Tradition : Tradition among folk cultures of transmitting narrative orally as opposed to writing. Conjure : Folk magic and healing practices that have evolved from West African religious traditions. So called in the Delta, Carolinas, and Middle South. Hoodoo : Conjure as evolved in Ne...

"Negro spirituals are the religious songs sung by African Americans since the earliest days of slavery and first gathered in a book in 1801 by the black church leader Richard Allen. As scholars have observed, this term, whether abbreviated as spirituals or not, is somewhat misleading: for many black slaves, and for their offspring, the divisions between secular and sacred were not as definite as the designation spirituals would suggest. Certainly these religious songs were not sung only in churches or in religious ritual settings. Travelers in the Old South and slaves themselves reported that music about God and the Bible was sung during work time, play time, and rest time as well as on Sundays at praise meetings. As historian Lawrence Levine observed, for slaves, the concept of the sacred signified a strong will to incorporate 'within this world all the elements of the divine'" (Gates 8). Gates' depiction of the relationship between slaves and religiosity and b...

This week we will be reading about and discussing the "Vernacular Tradition" in the U.S. The 'vernacular' refers to all forms of creative expression that include songs, games, 'dozens,' storytelling, sermons, blues and jazz traditions, and other modes of primarily oral artistic creation. Our text points out that the vernacular tradition arose in part as a mode of self- and group- preservation: a type codification in which members of the group could communicate secretly, beyond the prying ears of an oppressor (Gates 3). What occurred among African slaves in the New World was a complex and dynamic system of communicating experience. This system, is called 'signifying' by author Henry Louis Gates, and can be found in the strains of 'sorrow songs,' 'field hollers,' folktales, and other modes of oral expression, in which African American experience is encoded and passed on. The record of early expressions in the vernacular tradition has be...

Welcome to English 2650, African American Literature. This website is designed as a teaching aid for me, and as a rich resource for you to have access to information concerning the authors, eras, and movements we will be discussing this semester. Over the course of our weeks together, I will be posting lessons, links to information, and online resources to class materials such as the syllabus, essay specifications, and notices to this website. I hope you will check in regularly, as you have open access to this blog, and it is your resource to learning.  This fall, I have exciting plans for us that I hope will be enriching and rewarding for all of us. We will explore the nature of self-revelation in African American literature from the earliest slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass, to the 1970s return to folk culture initiated by Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Our coverage of the 20th century Civil Rights Movement will be complemented by a guided tour o...

My name is Julie L. Lester. I am an Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Composition at Southwest Tennessee Community College in Memphis, Tennessee. My dissertation engaged the work of Zora Neale Hurston and its influence on Caribbean writers of Speculative and Science Fiction, the inimitable Nalo Hopkinson, and Erna Brodber. I graduated with my Ph.D. in African American Literature from the University of Memphis in 2011 under the sage guidance of Dr. Reginald Martin, Ph.D. Being very evidently Caucasian, one of the first, and (obviously) unavoidable questions my students ask me is why I chose African American Literature as my specialty. My response is that I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. My parents, John and Willene Lester, both educators in their own rights, grew up in Neshoba County, Mississippi. As a young person, I grew up relishing the aroma of fresh cornbread and turnip greens, fried chicken, pole beans, boiled peanuts, collards, fresh corn, molasses,...

On April 25th, 2012, I had the distinct pleasure of accompanying my English 2650 (African American Literature) class from Southwest Tennessee Community College, on a field trip to the National Civil Rights Museum located at the historic Lorraine Motel. We were able to tour the museum, which included the hotel room shared by Dr. Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy shortly before King's assassination on April 4, 1968. Below are a few photographs I took of the event.  One of the most iconic signs of African American--and American History. My students, Yram Sikes and Holly Melcalf. Lauren and Holly meeting me at the Museum. Stacy Scott, Terrika Finnie, Holly Metcalf, Tamarly Eatmon, Patricia Tia, Van Taylor, Lauren Rose, Nakisha Vaxter, Yram Sikes, Whitney Phipps, and Marvin Mcneal.  Lauren Rose. A perfect, candid moment. Wreath that marks the site where Dr. King was murdered. Jaqueline Smith continues her protest against the b...

Wait till I light up my coal-pot and I'll tell you about this Zigaboo called Jelly. Well, all right now. He was a sealskin brown and papa-tree-top-tall. Skinny in the hips and solid built for speed. He was born with this rough-dried hair, but when he laid on the grease and pressed it down overnight with his stocking-cap, it looked just like that righteous moss, and had so many waves you got seasick from looking. Solid, man, solid! His mama named him Marvel, but after a month on Lenox Avenue, he changed all that to Jelly. How come? Well, he put it in the street that when it came to filling that long-felt need, sugarcuring the ladies' feelings, he was in a class by himself and nobody knew his name, so he had to tell 'em. "It must be Jelly, 'cause jam don't shake." Therefore, his name was Jelly. That was what...

English 2650 Section 201 Spring 2012 African American Literature Essay I So far this semester, we have read and discussed some of the key literary and creative productions of African Americans in the New World. We have encountered the trickster figure and the ‘signifying’ functions of the African American folktales and songs; the spiritual and gospel forms that provided solace and masking functions for the slave and his descendants; and we have looked at examples of early African American biography’s antecedents in the Slave Narrative, beginning with Olaudah Equiano. These texts convey to us many of the prevailing themes and preoccupations that attended the African American struggle for freedom, recognition, and civil rights in the years leading up to the turn of the twentieth century. For this first formal essay, you are to choose at least one text that we have covered so far, and analyze that text in accordance with one (or two) of the themes we have covered. Your essay should be ...

Clotel, Or The President's Daughter by William Wells Brown is the author's fictionalized account of Sally Hemings, the woman alleged to have borne children to President Thomas Jefferson. The novel imagines the plight of Hemings whose fictional counterpart is Currer and her daughter Clotel. While the novel exposes many of the systemic hypocrisies and injustices of slavery, as well as the plague of prejudice that infested the northern, free states at the time, Clotel examines many of the social conventions and practices that attended the Peculiar Institution. Among these and most apparent is the dramatic scene of the Slave Auction, where many a family was torn apart. Older slaves were transformed in appearance to give the impression of youth and vitality to a potential buyer; mothers were separated from children; and young "Quadroon" women were in high demand by white males to become 'seamstresses,' 'laundresses,' and 'governesses,' while suf...

Students: If you are interested, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has an excellent website called Documenting the American South . At this site, you can access full-text of Frederick Douglass's narrative, My Bondage and My Freedom . Here, I have excerpted a portion from the Covey episode, pages 223-232. Thanks! CHAPTER XVI. ANOTHER PRESSURE OF THE TYRANT'S VICE. EXPERIENCE AT COVEY'S SUMMED UP--FIRST SIX MONTHS SEVERER THAN THE SECOND--PRELIMINARIES TO THE CHANGE--REASONS FOR NARRATING THE CIRCUMSTANCES--SCENE IN THE TREADING YARD--AUTHOR TAKEN ILL--UNUSUAL BRUTALITY OF COVEY--AUTHOR ESCAPES TO ST. MICHAEL'S--THE PURSUIT--SUFFERING IN THE WOODS--DRIVEN BACK AGAIN TO COVEY'S--BEARING OF "MASTER THOMAS"--THE SLAVE IS NEVER SICK--NATURAL TO EXPECT SLAVES TO FEIGN SICKNESS--LAZINESS OF SLAVEHOLDERS. THE foregoing chapter, with all its horrid incidents and shocking features, may be taken as a fair representation of the first six months o...

Remember that if you are interested in earning extra credit, you may earn up to ten additional points on your First formal essay if you elect to speak. If you would like to read a short poem or excerpt from a larger work, let me know and I will pass that on to the coordinator. THE TWENTY-THIRD NATIONAL AFRICAN AMERICAN READ-IN SOUTHWEST TENNESSEE COMMUNITY COLLEGE FEBRUARY 20, 2012 Southwest Tennessee Community College will host the African American Read- In at 12:00 noon on every campus. Please contact the campus coordinators if you wish to volunteer to do a reading! Let’s make this a great success! Please encourage your students to participate. This is a come-and-go or drop-in event so join us as we listen to students and faculty read excerpts from the works of their favorite African-American writers and speakers. Thank you! ***COME TO THE LIBRARY FOR RESOURCES***  Ron Claxton: Gill Center, Library-X5970 rclaxton@southwest.tn.edu  MaLinda F. Wade: Union, Parri...