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Great Works of African American Literature: Captivity, Enslavement, Resistance

Great Works of African American Literature
Captivity, Enslavement, Resistance
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table of contents
  1. Front Matter
  2. Captivity, Enslavement, Resistance
    1. Olaudah Equiano
    2. Mary Prince
    3. Phillis Wheatley
    4. Jupiter Hammon
    5. Jarena Lee
    6. George Moses Horton
    7. Nat Turner
    8. Frederick Douglass
    9. Sojourner Truth
    10. Solomon Northup
    11. Harriet Jacobs
    12. Harriet E. Wilson
    13. Elizabeth Keckley
    14. Ellen Craft, William Craft
    15. William Wells Brown
    16. Slave Voyages During the Transatlantic Slave Trade
  3. Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance
    1. Charlotte Forten Grimké
    2. Booker T. Washington
    3. W.E.B. Du Bois
    4. Ida Bell Wells-Barnett
    5. Charles Waddell Chesnutt
    6. Paul Laurence Dunbar
    7. Alice Dunbar Nelson
    8. James Weldon Johnson
    9. Angelina Weld Grimké
    10. The Reconstruction Era Through Documentary Film
  4. The Harlem Renaissance
    1. Marcus Garvey
    2. Alain Locke
    3. Wilfred Adolphus Domingo
    4. Claude McKay
    5. Countee Cullen
    6. Nella Larsen
    7. Wallace Thurman
    8. Jean Toomer
    9. George Schuyler
    10. Zora Neale Hurston
    11. Langston Hughes
    12. Key Topics Podcast
  5. Urban Realism
    1. Richard Wright
    2. Ann Petry
    3. Ralph Ellison
    4. Robert Hayden
    5. Margaret Walker
    6. Gwendolyn Brooks
    7. James Baldwin
    8. Lorraine Hansberry
    9. Key Topics Podcast
  6. The Black Arts Movement
    1. Martin Luther King Jr.
    2. Malcolm X
    3. Amiri Baraka
    4. Etheridge Knight
    5. Sonia Sanchez
    6. Audre Lorde
    7. June Jordan
    8. Ishmael Reed
    9. Ntozake Shange
    10. Nikki Giovanni
    11. Key Topics Podcast
  7. Late Twentieth Century to the Present
    1. August Wilson
    2. Maya Angelou
    3. Toni Morrison
    4. James Alan McPherson
    5. Colson Whitehead
    6. Ta-Nehisi Coates
    7. Roxane Gay
    8. Mateo Askaripour
    9. Zakiya Dalila Harris
    10. Ariel Felton
    11. Monica West
    12. Camille Acker
    13. Rita Dove
    14. Gregory Pardlo
    15. Tracy K. Smith
    16. Natasha Trethewey
    17. Amanda Gorman
    18. Octavia Butler
    19. Nalo Hopkinson
    20. Tananarive Due
    21. Analyzing Poetry Through Documentary Film

CAPTIVITY, ENSLAVEMENT, RESISTANCE

The roots of African American literature lie across the Atlantic Ocean on the continent bearing traditions in word, song, and cultural aesthetics. African culture richly rooted and intellectually vested in language, music, religions, art, architecture, agriculture and aquaculture, storytelling, foodways, healing, and textiles which survived and continue to inspire literary genres and texts to this day. The result is a shore-to-shore phenomenon. To be clear, African voices started a rough draft of this literary collection during all stages of a complex journey that began in freedom and happiness in Africa and ended in a transatlantic nightmare. The first section of this text introduces those literary creations curated to represent Africans brought to the Eastern shores of the American colonies and traces the lived experiences of captivity, enslavement, and resistance in a variety of genres such as slave narratives, essays, and speeches.

In the category of the slave narrative, there are several widely known and accepted such as the confessional, the fugitive, and more recently from the contemporary period, the re-visioned slave narrative. An overall impression of slave narratives points to the form of autobiography or memoir using a variety of rhetorical strategies such as description, formal and informal register English, allusions, a record of the real time period or a re-visioning from a current perspective imagination, incidents of travel trauma, the use of writing to recover and heal, and a recounting of adventures of capture, escape, and survival as common characteristics.

To begin, the opening chapters of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano published in 1789 chronicles a pre-enslavement captivity experience of Equiano and his sister which allows readers to identify the characteristics of the captivity narrative. Much like its colonial American cousin, the African American captivity narrative shares the same elements of capture by a foreign or unknown identity, separation from family and culture, imprisonment, fear, and the struggle to survive physically and psychologically. Equiano makes effective use of thick description and interior monologue to relate the experience of kidnapping, physical and cultural stripping with the loss of language, traditions, and family. Additional titles illustrate this genre. The Confessions of Nat Turner; The Narrative of Frederick Douglas; Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs; Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson; Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes; Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by Ellen and William Craft; and The Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave round out a variety of selections for reading and analysis.

In other titles, we find authors who provide a show-and-tell of the experience of enslavement directly from their own feathered quill and ink pens or those who dictated to a sponsor. From the poetry and recitations of Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), and George Moses Horton (1798-1884), nicknamed “The Slave Poet of North Carolina” (1798-1880) we learn of the desires for freedom, attitudes towards the urban and plantation slave owners, and expressions of protest and resistance in overt and subverted forms. As a sidenote, Jarena Lee (1783-1864), is regarded as the first black female minister in the African American Episcopal Church denomination founded by its leader Richard R. Allen. To her we owe development of the spiritual autobiography characterized by the use of personal anecdotes, biblical scriptures, meditation, and criticism of unjust social and religious acts. To further look beyond Sojourner Truth, readers may also look outside this publication at the speeches and editorials written by Maria W. Stewart, a free black woman, (1803-1879) for William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. These voices are among the earliest who expressed in their own way that the lives of 18th and 19th century Africans in America mattered in terms of gender equality and social, cultural, and political justice.

The work of Jupiter Hammon (1711-1806) which must be recognized for its historical contribution to African American literature as the first published in America (Wheatley was published abroad in England). Equally noteworthy is James Monroe Whitfield (1822-1871) who is recognized as a major voice for civil and natural rights and the first to call for the formerly enslaved to emigrate from the United States. To learn more about the spirit of resistance and radicalism , readers may seek out David Walker’s Appeal (1829) and Martin R. Delany’s The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852).

Though limited as enslaved persons, some literate and some not, Africans in America produced an abundance of texts that have survived the centuries. Among the gifts left to us and growing out of the need to use the power of words for liberation are rhetorical strategies best suited to resist the vile institution of slavery. The various forms of the slave narrative help to tell the stories in autobiographical and memoir. Those early orators such as Sojourner Truth provide a feminist and abolitionist stance. Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton provide a brief glimpse into the poetry genre. While all cannot be represented in one section, these selections provide a few examples of captivity, enslavement, and the spirit of resistance.

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