Go There To Know There

Much like her predecessor Phillis Wheatley and her contemporary, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen's early life and death are shrouded in pathos and tragedy. That Larsen's career assumed a similar trajectory as those women who came before her and alongside her in the literary world should be viewed as a testimony to the sometimes inescapable fate of the woman artist. Before 1970, women writers--particularly African American women writers--faced a formidable challenge when attempting to publish alongside their male contemporaries. While DuBois made the hue and cry of the Harlem Renaissance to make all "art propaganda," and to create for the purpose of racial uplift, gender uplift was lagging behind on the road to literary recognition.  Nella Larsen. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten (featured here ).  Larsen's novellas, Quicksand and Passing were her solitary publications during her long life, but these narratives were significant in their treatment and interr...

On April 19, 2014, I had the privilege of accompanying my students on a trip to Elmwood Cemetery. At that time, Elmwood was hosting an annual African American History Tour that featured a guided tour of some of the most influential Memphians of African American descent. Students learned of the Walker family, who began the Universal Life Insurance Company on Vance and Danny Thomas, Aleda Condell, a former slave who became a Latin teacher, and of Robert Church, a prominent landowner and businessman, and father of activist Mary Church Terrell. Our tour was the subject of an item in The Commercial Appeal . The Church family crypt. A student of mine, Angel Lacy, takes notes during the tour.  The headstone of journalist L. Alex Wilson and his wife. Wilson was the editor of the Tri-State Defender , and was attacked by racists during his coverage of the Little Rock integration. The headstone of Mary J. Langston, the beloved cook of Elvis Presley. T...

Perhaps one of the most intrepid and inflammatory anti-slavery documents ever written, David Walker's Appeal (1830) has been largely overlooked by historians, but lauded for its self-affirming, no-nonsense confrontation with white power structures over the issue of chattel slavery. Walker's act of open protest was, in many ways, one that was characteristic of an age of uprising, as Walker's words mirrored the courageous acts of other early civil rights martyrs such as Nat Turner, who led the historical slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, the following year. Walker, the self-proclaimed "restless disturber of the peace" (Gates et al., 227) models his document after the United States Constitution, by presenting a preamble in which he decries the abhorrent state of his people. From the preamble Walker addresses the wrongs done to the colored people of the U.S. in articles and sections, denounces U.S. slavery as the most wretched manifestation of huma...

Harriet E. Wilson was born a free person of color in New Hampshire in 1825. A source encapsulates her early life, noting that she was born Harriet, “Hattie” Adams in Milford, New Hampshire, and was the biracial dauther of Margaret Adams Smith, an Irish woman, and Joshua Green, an African American. Her father died when Hattie was still a child, and her mother left her at the home of a wealthy New Hampshire farmer, where she was indentured to his family. This indenturement was, at the time, “a customary way for society at the time to arrange support and education for orphans. In exchange for labor, the orphan child would be given room, board and training in life skills, so that she could make her way in society” (1). Harriet Wilson is now considered by many scholars to have been the first African American to have published a novel in the United States. The novel, published anonymously in 1859, was entitled Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black , but received little a...

Pierian and the Languages and Literature Department Present  Poet  Jason McCall Friday, September 26, 2014 Union Campus, Parrish 100 1:00PM Jason will read from his work and conduct a poetry workshop * Jason McCall is the author of Dear Hero, (winner of the 2012 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize), Silver (Main Street Rag), I Can Explain (Finishing Line Press), and Mother, Less Child (winner of the 2013 Paper Nautilus Vella Chapbook Prize). He is from the great state of Alabama, where he currently teaches at the University of Alabama. He holds an MFA from the University of Miami, and his work has been featured in Cimarron Review , The Los Angeles Review , New Letters , The Rumpus , and other journals. If you are interested in submitting your poems and participating in the workshop, please contact Jerome Wilson at 901-333-5215 or e-mail at wjwilson2@southwest.tn.edu. *Participation is limited and preference is given to current Southwest students. Funded by...

It is not necessarily vital, but it is helpful, to understand the concept of Post-colonialism  to appreciate more fully the literature of Edwidge Danticat. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1969, Edwidge was raised by her grandmother until her parents found work in the U.S. From the age of four she was raised in a Haitian-populated section of Brooklyn, New York. Among her many publications, she has produced a collection of short stories entitled Krik? Krak! , and the novels Breath, Eyes, Memory , The Farming of the Bones , and The Dew Breaker . She has also published numerous essays and literature for young adults ( 2 ).  Post-Colonialism is a term that reaches across several disciplines, from anthropology, to history, to literary theory. Throughout, post-colonialist theorists concern themselves with the condition and aftermath of postcolonialism--and imperialism: a period in history in which powerful nations sought to subdue, enslave, and exploit the aboriginal people of ...

    Ralph Ellison 1914-1994 Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1914, Ralph Ellison was still just a young child when the Harlem Renaissance began to emerge on the national scene, and a teenager when the era had begun to dwindle; however, he was a Renaissance Man in quite another sense--as Gates points out. While still a child he became interested in music, learning to play the trumpet among other instruments. Ellison's artistic interests expanded at Tuskegee Institute, where he discovered a love of literature and applied art. However, his time at Tuskegee was cut short, Gates adds, due to funding, and the fact that Ellison became disillusioned by Tuskegee and found it "anti-intellectual and overly accommodationist." He soon found new horizons in New York, where he was introduced to author Richard Wright. The two writers became friends immediately, and several of Ellison's work was published with Wright's encouragement" (Gates, et al. 1535). Though E...

English 2650 Sections 150 and 201 Spring 2014 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. 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 e...

On a random search through YouTube, I discovered this very interesting piece that complements our present section quite well: a dramatic reenactment of slave memories that were recorded and transcribed. You may recognize the familiar voices and faces of some well-known and well-loved African American actors such as Whoopi Goldberg, Angela Basset, Robert Guillaume, Roscoe Lee Brown, and a popular talk show host, entrepreneur, philanthropist and owner of cocker spaniels...