Trisha Anne Lopez

BSE 3C

WRITTEN REPORT IN LITERARY CRITICISM

African-American Criticism

African-American Criticism

The issue of race and tensions of color pushed African Americans to use writing to

establish a place for themselves in that community. The English contributed to the issue of

segregation. They had developed the ideas of inferiority and distinction through drawing on

preconceptions rooted in images of blackness and physical differences between the two peoples

(Bruce). Those negative images were created by English adventurers and traders who visited the

African Continent. The literature read at that time in England offered a negative portrayal of

Africans and their ways of life. The Africans were described as brutal and ugly people.

African Americans were given different names like ‘Colored’ ‘Negros’ ‘Black’ and

‘African American’. In fact, African American literature embodies novels, poems and plays

showing the status of race as a whole. The writers’ works reflect their identities.

African American literature begins with a meditation on the meaning of slavery and

freedom, as early writers create new narrative forms to seek agency, subjectivity, and community

within the dehumanizing conditions of forced migration and enslavement. The Reconstruction

era prompts the literature of racial uplift and the theorization of double consciousness. During

the Harlem Renaissance and the black arts era, writers turn to realist protest fiction, lyrical

poetry, and committed theater to develop a cultural nationalism that combats continuing

segregation. Contemporary African American literature includes strains of black postmodernism,

neo-slavery, and Afrofuturism, as writers continue to develop innovative forms to complicate

existing notions of race and representation through debates over politics and aesthetics, diaspora

and transnationalism, and gender and sexuality. African American literature tends to focus on

themes of particular interest to Black people, for example, the role of African Americans within

the larger American society and issues such as African American culture, racism, religion,

slavery, freedom, and equality.

Many early writers in the genre strove to forge a new narrative form that would not only

focus on the overall dehumanization of individuals through slavery in America but also
examining and exploring the cultural consciousness that allowed forced migration to occur and

proliferate in the first place in the so-called “land of the free.”

Some of the characteristics one will find in African American literature are:

 Concern for identity, freedom and independence.

 Concern with position in a dominant society

 Use of religious imagery, songs, settings and the dominance of the black church

in the Southern black community.

Hegemony - the dominance of a ‘white’ America.

Racism - unequal power relations that grow from the sociopolitical domination of one race by

another and that result in systematic discriminatory processes.

White privilege - the belief that white is the dominant race.

The White/Black Binary Opposition - It is the system that maintains white supremacy and

systemic racism.

Toni Morisson

She is a novelist, editor and professor. Toni Morrison believes

that one can read blackness in white American writing

because, in cultural, ideological, political terms, race is

essential to America: if one says someone is an African, one then says they are a white or a black

African -- you designate either; if one says someone is an American, that means they are white,

unless otherwise noted -- the 'white' is automatic".

References to other theories

African American can connect to Colonial criticism and Feminist criticism.

Colonial criticism

Ties to African American theory with the issue of the representation of the "other". The blacks

being the "other". The reclamation of identity in the forms and language of the oppressor.

Femenism criticism
Tiesto the African American theory with the issue of "who speaks for the black?" in a sense that

they are not capable of representing themselves, "just like women".

African American literature was created part because of the struggles the African and African

American people experienced. And part because they felt, which was their complete right, that

they, like any "white" person, had the right to express themselves and create new writings that

would live for long.