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The Postwar African American Novel

Author: Stephanie Brown

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2011-03-14

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1604739746

Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. But the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the now-familiar Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and J. Saunders Redding. In this book, Stephanie Brown recovers the work of these innovative novelists, overturning conventional wisdom about the writers of the period and the trajectory of African American literary history. She also questions the assumptions about the relations between race and genre that have obscured the importance of these once-influential creators. Wright's Native Son (1940) is typically considered to have inaugurated an era of social realism in African-American literature. And Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) has been cast as both a high mark of American modernism and the only worthy stopover on the way to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. But readers in the late 1940s purchased enough copies of Yerby's historical romances to make him the best-selling African American author of all time. Critics, meanwhile, were taking note of the generic experiments of Redding, Himes, and Smith, while the authors themselves questioned the obligation of black authors to write protest, instead penning campus novels, war novels, and, in Yerby's case, "costume dramas." Their status as "lesser lights" is the product of retrospective bias, Brown demonstrates, and their novels established the period immediately following World War II as a pivotal moment in the history of the African American novel.

Abandoning the Black Hero

Author: John C. Charles

Publisher: American Literatures Initiativ

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 9780813554334

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Abandoning the Black Hero examines the motivations that led certain African American authors in mid-twentieth century to shift from writing protest novels about racial injustice to novels focusing primarily, if not exclusively on whites, or white-life novels. These fascinating works have been understudied despite having been written by such defining figures as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ann Petry, and Chester Himes, as well as lesser known but formerly best-selling authors Willard Motley and Frank Yerby.

Fighting for Hope

Author: Robert F. Jefferson

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2008-11-24

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 080188828X

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Integrating social history and civil rights movement studies, Fighting for Hope examines the ways in which political meaning and identity were reflected in the aspirations of these black GIs and their role in transforming the face of America.

Abandoning the Black Hero

Author: John C. Charles

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2012-12-15

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0813554349

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Abandoning the Black Hero is the first book to examine the postwar African American white-life novel—novels with white protagonists written by African Americans. These fascinating works have been understudied despite having been written by such defining figures in the tradition as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ann Petry, and Chester Himes, as well as lesser known but formerly best-selling authors Willard Motley and Frank Yerby. John C. Charles argues that these fictions have been overlooked because they deviate from two critical suppositions: that black literature is always about black life and that when it represents whiteness, it must attack white supremacy. The authors are, however, quite sympathetic in the treatment of their white protagonists, which Charles contends should be read not as a failure of racial pride but instead as a strategy for claiming creative freedom, expansive moral authority, and critical agency. In an era when “Negro writers” were expected to protest, their sympathetic treatment of white suffering grants these authors a degree of racial privacy previously unavailable to them. White writers, after all, have the privilege of racial privacy because they are never pressured to write only about white life. Charles reveals that the freedom to abandon the “Negro problem” encouraged these authors to explore a range of new genres and themes, generating a strikingly diverse body of novels that significantly revise our understanding of mid-twentieth-century black writing.

The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro

Author: Mark Whalan

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780813032061

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Examining the legacy of the Great War on African American culture, this book considers the work of such canonical writers as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen and Alain Locke. It also considers the legacy of the war for African Americans as represented in film, photography and anthropology.

The African American Experience during World War II

Author: Neil A. Wynn

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2010-05-16

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1442200170

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Drawing on more than thirty years of teaching and research, Neil A. Wynn combines narrative history and primary sources as he locates the World War II years within the long-term struggle for African Americans' equal rights. It is now widely accepted that these years were crucial in the development of the emerging Civil Rights movement through the economic and social impact of the war, as well as the military service itself. Wynn examines the period within the broader context of the New Deal era of the 1930s and the Cold War of the 1950s, concluding that the war years were neither simply a continuation of earlier developments nor a prelude to later change. Rather, this period was characterized by an intense transformation of black hopes and expectations, encouraged by real socio-economic shifts and departures in federal policy. Black self consciousness at a national level found powerful expression in new movements, from the demand for equality in the military service to changes in the shop floor to the "Double V" campaign that linked the fight for democracy at home for the fight for democracy abroad. As the nation played a new world role in the developing Cold War, the tensions between America's stated beliefs and actual practices emphasized these issues and brought new forces into play. More than a half century later, this book presents a much-needed up-to-date, short and readable interpretation of existing scholarship. Accessible to general and student readers, it tells the story without jargon or theory while including the historiography and debate on particular issues.

Playing in the Shadows

Author: William H. Bridges

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2020-02-10

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 0472126520

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Playing in the Shadows considers the literature engendered by postwar Japanese authors’ robust cultural exchanges with African Americans and African American literature. The Allied Occupation brought an influx of African American soldiers and culture to Japan, which catalyzed the writing of black characters into postwar Japanese literature. This same influx fostered the creation of organizations such as the Kokujin kenkyū no kai (The Japanese Association for Negro Studies) and literary endeavors such as the Kokujin bungaku zenshū (The Complete Anthology of Black Literature). This rich milieu sparked Japanese authors’—Nakagami Kenji and Ōe Kenzaburō are two notable examples—interest in reading, interpreting, critiquing, and, ultimately, incorporating the tropes and techniques of African American literature and jazz performance into their own literary works. Such incorporation leads to literary works that are “black” not by virtue of their representations of black characters, but due to their investment in the possibility of technically and intertextually black Japanese literature. Will Bridges argues that these “fictions of race” provide visions of the way that postwar Japanese authors reimagine the ascription of race to bodies—be they bodies of literature, the body politic, or the human body itself.

Redlining Culture

Author: Richard Jean So

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-12-15

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 0231552319

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The canon of postwar American fiction has changed over the past few decades to include far more writers of color. It would appear that we are making progress—recovering marginalized voices and including those who were for far too long ignored. However, is this celebratory narrative borne out in the data? Richard Jean So draws on big data, literary history, and close readings to offer an unprecedented analysis of racial inequality in American publishing that reveals the persistence of an extreme bias toward white authors. In fact, a defining feature of the publishing industry is its vast whiteness, which has denied nonwhite authors, especially black writers, the coveted resources of publishing, reviews, prizes, and sales, with profound effects on the language, form, and content of the postwar novel. Rather than seeing the postwar period as the era of multiculturalism, So argues that we should understand it as the invention of a new form of racial inequality—one that continues to shape the arts and literature today. Interweaving data analysis of large-scale patterns with a consideration of Toni Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House and readings of individual works by Octavia Butler, Henry Dumas, Amy Tan, and others, So develops a form of criticism that brings together qualitative and quantitative approaches to the study of literature. A vital and provocative work for American literary studies, critical race studies, and the digital humanities, Redlining Culture shows the importance of data and computational methods for understanding and challenging racial inequality.