||| Publisher’s blurb ||| “The Making of the New Negro examines black masculinity in the period of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s in America and was marked by an outpouring of African American art, music, theater and literature.
Drawing on African American texts, archives, unpublished writings, and contemporaneous European discourses, this book highlights both the canonical figures of the New Negro Movement and African American culture such as W. E. B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Alain Locke, and Richard Wright, and other writers such as Wallace Thurman, who have not received as much scholarly attention despite their significant contributions to the movement.”
|||Contents||| Acknowledgements
Introduction: Chapter One: Prologue: The Question of Manhood in the Booker T. Washington-W. E. B. Du Bois Debate Part 1: Alain Locke and the New Negro Chapter Two: Midwifery and Camaraderie: Alain Locke’s Tropes of Gender and Sexuality Chapter Three: Arts, War, and the Brave New Negro: Gendering the Black Aesthetic Part 2: Wallace Thurman and Niggerati Manor Chapter Four: Gangsters and Bootblacks, Rent Parties and Railroad Flats: Wallace Thurman’s Guide to the Black Bourgeoisie Chapter Five: Discontents of the Black Dandy Chapter Six: Epilogue: Richard Wright’s Interrogations of the New Negro Conclusion: Black Male Authorship, Sexuality, and the Transatlantic Connection
The content we consume and its authenticity are called into question on a daily basis. But just 50 years ago, this was far from a common way to engage with art, culture and literature. That all changed with Barbara Christian.
From a young age, Christian was an avid reader, questioning why there were no African American or Afro Caribbean women included in the books she read. Born and raised in the U.S. Virgin Islands, she dedicated her life to changing ideas about race, gender and class, particularly around the representation of black women in American literature, ultimately asking, “who gets to tell their stories?”
While pursuing a graduate degree in literature at Columbia University, Christian became friends with Langston Hughes and was introduced to the works of many black writers. Her exploration of these writings would be realized later in her career — she was one of the first scholars to bring the works of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker to the attention of academia.
In 1972, two years after graduating from Columbia, Christian became an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. She was pivotal in creating the university’s African American studies department and, in 1978, was the first African American to be granted tenure. “She was a path-breaking scholar,” said Percy Hintzen, chair of the UC Berkeley department of African American studies. "Nobody did more to bring black women writers into academic and popular recognition.”
For so long, the majority of representations of black women in literature were crafted by white writers. Christian wanted to change that. Her theories provided a foundation for black women to assert control over their own image in American literature. Her 1980 study, “Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition,” was the first of its kind to look at black feminist literature from the nineteenth century to contemporary times. In her lifetime, Christian truly pioneered the birth of black women’s literary criticism and theory.
“I can only speak for myself. But when I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life. And I mean that literally,” she noted. “For me literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/know is.”
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
(Beloved, 1987)
Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019) - women in history(40/?)
Toni Morrison was an American writer who was known for her examination of Black experience (particularly Black female experience). She won the Nobel prize for literature in 1993.
Toni published her first book, The Bluest Eyes, in 1970 in which she talks about a black girl who is obsessed with white beauty standards. In 1973, her book Sulafollowed.Song of Solomon came out in 1977; in this book, Toni intruduces her first male protagonist and she blends African American folklore and history in a book about the search for identity. Ten years later the critically acclaimed Belovedcame out. In this work, Toni tells a story, based on true events, of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery. This book won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Toni wrote many other books, in which she talked about many aspects, important to the black community, such as a Black utopian community (Paradise, 1998).
What is always central in the works of Toni Morrison is the Black American experience: her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity in an unjust society.
Rest in peace to author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison! She was the first Black American woman to win a Nobel Prize. She was a towering force who spoke about the Black American experience. She has such a special place in my heart and she’s an inspiration to so many. (18 February 1931 - 05 August 2019)
