Go There To Know There

The following is a sampling of many of my favorite Africana authors, novels, and theoretical works. This list of course, is by no means comprehensive, as the variety of compelling works available by writers of the African diaspora is very broad and dynamic. However, the following are among the most noteworthy and influential. The Slave Narrative/Reconstruction Clotel; Or The President's Daughter by William Wells Brown Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember edited by James Mellon When I Was a Slave , edited by Norman R. Yetman Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass or My Bondage and My Freedom Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington Narrative of Sojourner Truth Women's Slave Narratives by Annie L. Burton, et al. 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from The Civil War to WWII by Douglas A. Blackmon A Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Craft...

"Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender." (Alice Walker) Alice Walker, (born 1944), the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel, The Color Purple . The author of multiple novels, volumes of poetry, collections of short stories, children's books, and essays, she is perhaps best known for the landmark novel that focuses on Celie, a disaffected black woman from the rural South who has been deliberately disconnected from her children. Our text points out that Walker was interviewed in 1973 by scholar Mary Helen Washington, in which the author professed a commitment to portraying the lives of black women in her novels. Gates, et al. observe that Walker "described the three types of black women characters she felt were missing from much of the literature of the United States. The first were those who were exploited both physically and emotionally, whose lives were narrow and confining, and who were driven sometimes to madness, ...

According to the Huffington Post 's special section entitled Black Voices , Jamaica Kincaid is a "badass." Well, this is not news.  photo from  Huffington Post/Black Voices However, Joseph Erbentraut has discovered the "Twelve Reasons Why" Kincaid continues to impress a new generation of readers, which can be read in full here .  "Jamaica Kincaid is simply not one to mince words. When she speaks, the revered 65-year-old Antiguan-American novelist does so deliberately -- and she's not afraid to interrupt a question when she sees it fit. Kincaid, who got her start at the New Yorker during the magazine's William Shawn era in the '70s, has produced work that has earned her an enviable list of awards, including  an American Book Award  for her latest novel, 2013's  See Now Then . One gets the impression Kincaid is afraid of nothing -- something that comes across in her writing, as well. Her work, at times, has been criticized for...

Born in Pasadena, California in June of 1947, Octavia Estelle Butler, was raised by her mother, a maid, and her father, who shined shoes for a living. When her father passed away when Octavia was seven years old, her grandmother helped to raise her. According to one source, Butler grew up with a painful shyness that made making friends difficult, and dyslexia, which made schoolwork even more difficult. She was often the target of teasing from bullies, but she found a haven in the public library, where she pored over Science Fiction magazines like Amazing Stories and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction . She determined that she would write her own stories, so she begged her mother for a typewriter for the purpose ( 1 ). photo of Butler from tansyrr.com Recipient of two Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, and the first Science Fiction writer to have received a MacArthur Fellowship, Octavia Butler was the first African American woman to have traversed the largely white male-do...

                                  photo from  this site. The Poet He sang of life, serenely sweet, With, now and then, a deeper note. From some high peak, nigh yet remote, He voiced the world's absorbing beat. He sang of love when the earth was young And Love, itself, was in his lays But ah, the world, it turned to praise A jingle in a broken tongue Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), was born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who at the time, were newly freed slaves. Dunbar expressed a prodigious ability for poetry at the tender age of six. He grew up to excel in secondary school, becoming class president and editing the school newspaper. Later, he began publishing with the help of high school classmates, Orville and Wilbur Wright, who later helped to fund Dunbar's own press, The Dayton Tattler ( 1 ). Dunbar's first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy , publishe...

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) enjoyed a long and multifaceted career as essayist, critic, songwriter, poet, diplomat, attorney, educator and politician. In each of these capacities, Johnson dedicated his energies and passions toward the advancement of African Americans. Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida to parents of humble, yet noble vocations: his father worked as a headwaiter at the opulent St. James hotel; and his mother was the first female and black teacher at an elementary school in Florida. It was his mother who taught her son her love for music of the European tradition and English Literature ( 1 ). At the age of sixteen, Johnson became a student at Atlanta University. He graduated with his bachelor's degree in 1894, and later received an honorary MA from that institution. Johnson began a career in education with a teaching post at a rural, backwater Georgia school in which he taught the children of freed slaves. Later he continued at Stanton Preparatory Coll...

James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and the Metaphor of the "Talking Book" "[My Master] used to read prayers in public to the ship's crew every Sabbath day; and then I saw him read. I was never so surprised in my life, as when I saw the book talk to my master, for I thought it did as I observed him to look upon it, and move his lips. I wished it would do so with me. As soon as my master had done reading, I followed him to the place where he put the book, being mightily delighted with it, and when nobody saw me, I opened it, and put my ear down close upon it, in great hopes that it would say something to me; but I was sorry, and greatly disappointed, when I found that it would not speak. This thought immediately presented itself to me, that every body and every thing despised me because I was black" (qtd xxxvi).  In the following video, an actor performs the script of Gronniosaw's narrative: The metaphor of the "Talking Book...