2. • African American culture was created in the United
States by descendant of African slaves that came to
United States
African- American culture
• African American culture was not
only in written forms. but also
incorporated in oral forms such as:
spirituals, sermons gospel music.
blues and rap.
3. African American literature was created
for multiple reasons :
Part of the creation of African American literature was a
response to racism and a proof of black humanity and
intelligence.
African Americans felt they had the right to express
themselves and create writings
To tell the others about the struggles that African and
African American people experienced.
4. Historical Development of African-American Criticism
1746 1773 1792 1827 1853 1859 1882
Lucy Terry
“Bars Fight”
Phillis
Wheatley
Various subjects,
religious and moral
Benjamin
Banneker
First Alamanac
Freedom’s
Journal
First Newspaper
William
Wells
First Novel
Harriet
Wilson
First novel by
Woman
First
Objective
History
5. ??
Oct
1993
1993
1953
1950
1920’s
1930’s
Poet
Gwendolyn
Brooks
wins Pulitzer
Prize in
literature for
“Annie Allen”
Poet Rita
Dove
became Poet
laureate of
the US
What’s
Next?
Harlem
Renaissance
Harlem became
the idealized
center of hope for
African-Americans
Ralph
Ellision wins
The National
Book Award
for
“Invisible
man”
Toni
Morrison
First to win
nobel prize
for literature
Historical Development of African-American Criticism
6. An examination of Wheatley’s life highlights the multiple
concerns of contemporary African-American criticism:
Marginalization of
blacks
Social, political,
economic, ideological,
and literary oppression
The historical and
cultural significance of
the black experience
that has ties to African
language and culture
Celebrating that which
is black in black art
The significance of
slavery as a historical
event and its present-
day racial implications
Reading race into all
American literature
because whiteness is
"the Other” of
blackness.
7. Another
Well-known
African-
American
literature:
Jupiter Hammon’s An Evening Thought: Salvation by
Christ with Penitential Cries (1761)
Harriet Iacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(1861)
Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass (1845)
Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1852)
William Wells’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter in
London (1853)
8. Post-Civil War era (1865-1920)
African-American authors continued to write nonfiction
works concerning the condition of African-Americans in
America
• W.E.B. DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903)
• Booker T. Washington
– Up From Slavery (1901)
– The Future of the American Negro (1899)
– Tuskegee and Its People (1905)
– My Larger Education (1911)
9. Harlem Renaissance (1920s-1930’s)
For a short time, Harlem became the idealized center of hope for African-
Americans, a hope that one day they would receive equal rights under the
law.
- Alain LeRoy’s The New Negro (1925)
- Zora Neale Hurston’s Spunk (1925)
- Langston Hughes’s
- The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921)
- The Weary Blues (1926)
- Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928)
10. Civil Rights Era of the 1950s and ‘60s
James Baldwin
• Civil rights
movement.
• Baldwin captures
in his prose what
it is like to be
black in an
intensely personal
way
Richard Wright
• Marxism.
• He embraces
Marxist principles
and opts to
change the
society in which
he lives.
Ralph Elliso
• Equality.
• He thoughts that
in America race is
the central and
most profound
issue.
11. Stand Out experts
of African-American Criticisms:
• He argues that literature authored by the
colonized is more interesting for its
noematic value-the complexities of the
world it reveals-than for its noetic or
Subjective qualities concerning what it
perceives.
• JanMohamed delineates the antagonistic relationship that
develops between hegemonic and non-hegemonic
literature..
Abdul R. JanMohamed
Postcolonial Theorists
12. Stand Out experts
of African-American Criticisms:
• He argues that he "must redefine ’theory’
itself from within [their] own black cultures,
refusing to grant the premise that theory is
something that white people do. We are all
heirs to critical theory, but we Black critics
are heir to the black vernacular as well.
• In this framework, he insists that African-American literature be
viewed as a form of language, not a representation of social
practices or culture.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
African & African
American Research
