Go There To Know There

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...