Designs of Blackness

Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America

Bibliographic Data

ID5801798
AuthorsMoore (0000-0002-8466-9750), Sharon L Moore, A Robert Lee (Nihon University)
Year2001
Volume31
Pages311-311
Publication date2001-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Yearbook of English Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0306-2473 • E-ISSN: 2222-4289
PublisherModern Humanities Research Association (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.2307/3509451
OpenAlexW2040011198
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited52

Across more than two centuries Afro-America has created a huge and dazzling variety of literary self-expression.Designs of Blackness provides less a narrative literary history than, precisely, a series of mappings-each literary-critical and comparative while at the same time offering cultural and historical context.This carefully re-edited version of the 1998 publication opens with an estimation of earliest African American voice in the names of Phillis Wheatley and her contemporaries.It then takes up the huge span of autobiography from Frederick Douglass through to Maya Angelou."Harlem on My Mind," which follows, sets out the literary contours of America's premier black city.Womanism, Alice Walker's presiding term, is given full due in an analysis of fiction from Harriet E. Wilson to Toni Morrison.Richard Wright is approached not as some regulation "realist" but as a more inward, at times near-surreal, author.Decadology has its risks but the 1940s has rarely been approached as a unique era of war and peace and especially in African American texts.Beat Generation work usually adheres to Ginsberg and Kerouac, but black Beat writing invites its own chapter in the names of Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman.The 1960s has long become a mythic change-decade, and in few greater respects than as a black theatre both of the stage and politics.In Leon Forrest African America had a figure of the postmodern turn

Black British · Black Power · Modernism · Trilogy · Wright · American and British Literature Analysis · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Race, History, and American Society

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access