Heroism in the New Black Poetry
Title | Heroism in the New Black Poetry PDF eBook |
Author | D.H. Melhem |
Publisher | University Press of Kentucky |
Total Pages | 325 |
Release | 2021-12-14 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0813189888 |
D.H. Melhem's clear introductions and frank interviews provide insight into the contemporary social and political consciousness of six acclaimed poets: Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jayne Cortez, Haki R. Madhubuti, Dudley Randall, and Sonia Sanchez. Since the 1960s, the poet hero has characterized a significant segment of Black American poetry. The six poets interviewed here have participated in and shaped the vanguard of this movement. Their poetry reflects the critical alternatives of African American life—separatism and integration, feminism and sexual identity, religion and spirituality, humanism and Marxism, nationalism and internationalism. They unite in their commitment to Black solidarity and advancement.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Title | Gwendolyn Brooks PDF eBook |
Author | D.H. Melhem |
Publisher | University Press of Kentucky |
Total Pages | 280 |
Release | 2014-07-11 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0813148588 |
Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the major American poets of this century and the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1950). Yet far less critical attention has focused on her work than on that of her peers. In this comprehensive biocritical study, Melhem -- herself a poet and critic -- traces the development of Brooks's poetry over four decades, from such early works as A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, and The Bean Eaters, to the more recent In the Mecca, Riot, and To Disembark. In addition to analyzing the poetic devices used, Melhem examines the biographical, historical, and literary contexts of Brooks's poetry: her upbringing and education, her political involvement in the struggle for civil rights, her efforts on behalf of young black poets, her role as a teacher, and her influence on black letters. Among the many sources examined are such revealing documents as Brooks's correspondence with her editor of twenty years and with other writers and critics. From Melhem's illuminating study emerges a picture of the poet as prophet. Brooks's work, she shows, is consciously charged with the quest for emancipation and leadership, for black unity and pride. At the same time, Brooks is seen as one of the preeminent American poets of this century, influencing both African American letters and American literature generally. This important book is an indispensable guide to the work of a consummate poet.
Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature
Title | Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature PDF eBook |
Author | Trudier Harris |
Publisher | University of Alabama Press |
Total Pages | 197 |
Release | 2014-11-15 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0817318445 |
Defiance of the law, uses of indirection, moral lapses, and bad habits are as much a part of the folk-transmitted biography of King as they are a part of writers' depictions of him in literary texts. Harris first demonstrates that during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, when writers such as Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) were rising stars in African American poetry, King's philosophy of nonviolence was out of step with prevailing notions of militancy (Black Power), and their literature reflected that division. In the quieter times of the 1970s and 1980s and into the twenty-first century, however, treatments of King and his philosophy in African American literature changed. Writers who initially rejected him and nonviolence became ardent admirers and boosters, particularly in the years following his assassination. By the 1980s, many writers skeptical about King had reevaluated him and began to address him as a fallen hero.
Soundworks
Title | Soundworks PDF eBook |
Author | Anthony Reed |
Publisher | Duke University Press |
Total Pages | 169 |
Release | 2020-11-23 |
Genre | Music |
ISBN | 147801279X |
In Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. Soundwork is Reed’s term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes’s collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka’s work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez’s albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes.
Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995
Title | Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995 PDF eBook |
Author | Julius E. Thompson |
Publisher | McFarland |
Total Pages | 356 |
Release | 2005-02-15 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 9780786422647 |
In 1965 Dudley F. Randall founded the Broadside Press, a company devoted to publishing, distributing and promoting the works of black poets and writers. In so doing, he became a major player in the civil rights movement. Hundreds of black writers were given an outlet for their work and for their calls for equality and black identity. Though Broadside was established on a minimal budget, Randall's unique skills made the press successful. He was trained as a librarian and had spent decades studying and writing poetry; most importantly, Randall was totally committed to the advancement of black literature. The famous and relatively unknown sought out Broadside, including such writers as Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Mae Jackson, Lance Jeffers, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde and Sterling D. Plumpp. His story is one of battling to promote black identity and equality through literature, and thus lifting the cultural lives of all Americans.
The American Poet at the Movies
Title | The American Poet at the Movies PDF eBook |
Author | Laurence Goldstein |
Publisher | University of Michigan Press |
Total Pages | 306 |
Release | 1995 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 9780472083183 |
A timely and engaging exploration of cinema's influence on verse--a treat for poetry lovers and film buffs alike
Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva
Title | Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva PDF eBook |
Author | Kimberly Nichele Brown |
Publisher | Indiana University Press |
Total Pages | 294 |
Release | 2010-09-09 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0253004705 |
Kimberly Nichele Brown examines how African American women since the 1970s have found ways to move beyond the "double consciousness" of the colonized text to develop a healthy subjectivity that attempts to disassociate black subjectivity from its connection to white culture. Brown traces the emergence of this new consciousness from its roots in the Black Aesthetic Movement through important milestones such as the anthology The Black Woman and Essence magazine to the writings of Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Jayne Cortez.