Vocabulary

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: “belonging 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 New Orleans in the 19th Century. Distinguished from "Voodoo."
Voodoo: Erroneous translation of "Vodu": system of magic and religious practice that evolved from the Yoruba tradition to the Caribbean.
Marie Leveau (Laveau): Legendary 'voodoo' priestess from New Orleans. (19th Century)
Hush Arbor: Natural clearings where 19th-century slaves gathered for religious purposes.
Ring Shout: Formation of worshipers in a circle, or 'ring' where participants engaged in call-and-response religious worship.
Field Holler: Songs sung by slaves in the field; characterized by call-and-response pattern.
Lining Song: Songs sung by linemen working on railroad track.
Playing the Dozens: Oral practice of swapping insults.
Signifying: Subtle, covert references to something, or someone else.
Diaspora: The dispersion of peoples from their original homeland: the African diaspora; the Jewish diaspora, etc.

Slave Narratives

Middle Passage: the sea journey undertaken by slave ships from West Africa to the West Indies.
Triangle Trade: refers to the trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that involved shipping goods from Britain to West Africa to be exchanged for slaves, these slaves being shipped to the West Indies and exchanged for sugar, rum, and other commodities, which were in turn shipped back to Britain.
Amanuensis: A third party who writes from the perspective of another, as in the Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Effectively, a 'ghost writer.'
Authenticating Letter: A letter that appears in the preceding pages of a slave narrative, written by a third party to assert the authenticity of the narrative.
Abolition: 19th Century movement among Northerners to abolish slavery. Key figures include William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, John Brown, Denmark Vesey, and Olaudah Equiano
Conversion Narrative: Episode of a slave narrative in which the protagonist describes his or her conversion to Christianity.
Episodic: A literary work divided into sections, or "episodes," such as Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom.
Miscegenation: the interbreeding of people considered to be of different racial types.
Mulatto: a person of mixed white and black ancestry, esp. a person with one white and one black parent.
Quadroon: a person whose parents are a mulatto and a white person and who is therefore one-quarter black by descent.
Octoroon: a person whose parents are a quadroon and a white person and who is therefore one-eighth black by descent.
Reconstruction: The period following the American Civil War that lasted approximately from 1863-1877.

Vernacular Forms: The Spiritual

"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 between slaves and their sorrow songs touches on an important ethnographic aspect of African--and African American cosmologies. Despite the virulence of the European slave trader and the North American plantation owner, West African religious traditions survived through reiterative and performative aspects of slave Christianity. The "Ring Shout" of Gullah communities in the South Carolina coastal region carries elements of Vodu ceremony, as does the "call-and-response" tradition of the early days of the black church. Moreover, like the West African follower of Vodun, the slaves whose sorrow songs spoke of 'flying away home' and of Moses, the messianic representation of deliverance, visualized a spiritual world that regularly interceded upon the real, the actual. Therefore, the spiritual and redemptive were not distant notions: these were very much a part of day-to-day life.

This close interaction with the spiritual endowed slaves to visualize a means to overcome the daily misery of chattel slavery. Their songs, which bespeak their profound sufferings, also locate a communal uplift through shared experience.

Founded in the early 1870s at Fisk University in Tennessee, the Jubilee singers, an a capella vocal group, assembled to raise money for their school. One of their early recordings (1909) of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" recalls the staunch resilience of the early North American slaves.

The Vernacular Tradition: A History in the U.S.

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 been aligned with what scholars refer to as 'the folk', and its expressive output as 'folklore.' For some, these terms may be considered pejorative: that is, to call a cultural artifact 'folk' might suggest an 'over-sentimentalization' of black experience, and undermine a more serious consideration of early African American art forms. Gates remarks that the terms 'vernacular' and 'folk,' for some critics suggest a "category of things that are male, attached only to lower-class groups, and otherwise simplistically expressive of a vast and complexly layered and dispersed group of people" (3). However, I wish to point out that 'folk' expression reveals the core resilience and creativity of the early African American, who found ways to preserve a collective experience under the harshest and most malevolent of systems.

The slave trade sought to eradicate the social, cultural, and religious histories and practices of its victims. After having endured the horrors of human trafficking on the African continent, and the brutality of the Middle Passage, African bondsmen suffered the psychological and emotional trauma that attended violent dislocation to strange and hostile New World. Family ties were ruptured; language was eradicated; and religious practices of African tribes were stamped out under penalty of further brutality. Forced conversions to Christianity were followed by periods in which slave owners forbade slaves from practicing religion for fear of conspiracy. What becomes apparent in the lines of the folk songs and tales is the mode of 'signifying' Gates speaks of. While one meaning might be apparent on the surface, these lines served as code for sublimated meaning that ranged from expressions of woe and misery, to cautionary messages, to conveying messages about survival in a hostile and inhumane institution.

The Vernacular Tradition can be best understood, in words of Gates: "...the vernacular is not a body of quaint, folksy items. It is not an exclusive male province. Nor is it associated with a particular level of society or with a particular historical era. It is neither long ago, far away, nor fading. Instead, the vernacular encompasses vigorous, dynamic processes of expression, past and present" (3-4). Further, as we examine the examples of the vernacular tradition, we will discover the ways in which a rich and indomitable spirit and shared heritage has been perpetuated and distilled by a people who had routinely been taught to believe that they 'had no history.'

Welcome!

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 of the National Civil Rights Museum in November. In addition, we will explore the some of the directions that African American literature has taken due to the vibrant imaginations of contemporary African American--and Afro-Caribbean authors, such as Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson.

I look forward to a wonderful semester!

Syllabus

Textbook Information:
Gates, Henry L. et al. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. New York: 
      Norton, 2004. ISBN: 0-393-97778-1