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  3. African American Literature in Transition

Across seventeen authoritative volumes and featuring over a hundred of today's foremost literary critics and social historians, African American Literature in Transition offers a critical and comprehensive revisionary analysis of creative expression by people of African descent. Reading transtemporally from the origins of 'African American literature' by the first peoples calling themselves 'African Americans', African American Literature in Transition foregrounds change, and examines pivotal moments, years, decades, and centuries in African American literature and culture. While collectively analyzing both far-reaching and flash-forward transitions within four centuries, the multi-volume series replaces conventional historical periodization in African American scholastic and literary anthologies with a framework that contextualizes shifts, changes, and transformations in African American literature, culture, politics, and history.

  • General Editors: Joycelyn Moody, University of Texas, San Antonio
  • Associate Editors: Cassander Smith, University of Alabama

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10 results in African American Literature in Transition

African American Literature in Transition, 1980–1990
  • Volume 15
  • Edited by D. Quentin Miller, Rich Blint
  • Published online:
    02 February 2023
    Print publication:
    09 February 2023
  • African American Literature in Transition, 1980–1990 tracks Black expressive culture in the 1980s as novelists, poets, dramatists, filmmakers, and performers grappled with the contradictory legacies of the civil rights era, and the start of culture wars and policy machinations that would come to characterize the 1990s. The volume is necessarily interdisciplinary and critically promiscuous in its methodologies and objects of study as it reconsiders conventional temporal, spatial, and moral understandings of how African American letters emerged immediately after the movement James Baldwin describes as the 'latest slave rebellion.' As such, the question of the state of America's democratic project as refracted through the literature of the shaping presence of African Americans is one of the guiding concerns of this volume preoccupied with a moment in American literary history still burdened by the legacies of the 1960s, while imagining the contours of an African Americanist future in the new millennium.

African American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970
  • Black Art, Politics, and Aesthetics
  • Volume 13
  • Edited by Shelly Eversley
  • Published online:
    10 November 2022
    Print publication:
    24 November 2022
  • This volume considers innovations, transitions, and traditions in both familiar and unfamiliar texts and moments in 1960s African American literature and culture. It interrogates declarations of race, authenticity, personal and collective empowerment, political action, and aesthetics within this key decade. It is divided into three sections. The first section engages poetry and music as pivotal cultural form in 1960s literary transitions. The second section explains how literature, culture, and politics intersect to offer a blueprint for revolution within and beyond the United States. The final section addresses literary and cultural moments that are lesser-known in the canon of African American literature and culture. This book presents the 1960s as a unique commitment to art, when 'Black' became a political identity, one in which racial social justice became inseparable from aesthetic practice.

African American Literature in Transition, 1750–1800
  • Volume 1
  • Edited by Rhondda Robinson Thomas
  • Published online:
    01 April 2022
    Print publication:
    07 April 2022
  • This volume provides an illuminating exploration of the development of early African American literature from an African diasporic perspective—in Africa, England, and the Americas. It juxtaposes analyses of writings by familiar authors like Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano with those of lesser known or examined works by writers such as David Margrett and Isabel de Olvera to explore how issues including forced migration, enslavement, authorship, and racial identity influenced early Black literary production and how theoretical frameworks like Afrofuturism and intersectionality can enrich our understanding of texts produced in this period. Chapters grouped in four sections – Limits and Liberties of Early Black Print Culture, Black Writing and Revolution, Early African American Life in Literature, and Evolutions of Early Black Literature – examine how transitions coupled with conceptions of race, the impacts of revolution, and the effects of religion shaped the trajectory of authors' lives and the production of their literature.

African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940
  • Volume 10
  • Edited by Eve Dunbar, Ayesha K. Hardison
  • Published online:
    25 March 2022
    Print publication:
    07 April 2022
  • The volume explores 1930s African American writing to examine Black life, culture, and politics to document the ways Black artists and everyday people managed the Great Depression's economic impact on the creative and the social. Essays engage iconic figures such as Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Richard Wright as well as understudied writers such as Arna Bontemps and Marita Bonner, Henry Lee Moon, and Roi Ottley. This book demonstrates the significance of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and Black literary circles in the absence of white patronage. By featuring novels, poetry, short fiction, and drama alongside guidebooks, photographs, and print culture, African American Literature in Transition 1930-1940 provides evidence of the literary culture created by Black writers and readers during a period of economic precarity, expanded activism for social justice, and urgent internationalism.

African American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930
  • Volume 9
  • Edited by Miriam Thaggert, Rachel Farebrother
  • Published online:
    17 March 2022
    Print publication:
    07 April 2022
  • African American Literature in Transition, 1920-1930 presents original essays that map ideological, historical, and cultural shifts in the 1920s. Complicating the familiar reading of the 1920s as a decade that began with a spectacular boom and ended with disillusionment and bust, the collection explores the range and diversity of Black cultural production. Emphasizing a generative contrast between the ephemeral qualities of periodicals, clothes, and décor and the relative fixity of canonical texts, this volume captures in its dynamics a cultural movement that was fluid and expansive. Chapters by leading scholars are grouped into four sections: 'Habitus, Sound, Fashion'; 'Spaces: Chronicles of Harlem and Beyond'; 'Uplift Renewed: Religion, Protest, and Education,' and 'Serial Reading: Magazines and Periodical Culture.'

African American Literature in Transition, 1830–1850
  • Volume 3
  • Edited by Benjamin Fagan
  • Published online:
    07 May 2021
    Print publication:
    13 May 2021
  • This volume charts the ways in which African American literature fosters transitions between material cultures and contexts from 1830 to 1850, and showcases work that explores how African American literature and lived experiences shaped one another. Chapters focus on the interplay between pivotal political and social events, including emancipation in the West Indies, the Irish Famine, and the Fugitive Slave Act, and key African American cultural productions, such as the poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the writings of David Walker, and the genre of the Slave Narrative. Chapters also examine the relationship between African American literature and a variety of institutions including, the press, and the post office. The chapters are grouped together in three sections, each of which is focused on transitions within a particular geographic scale: the local, the national, and the transnational. Taken together, they offer a crucial account of how African Americans used the written word to respond to and drive the events and institutions of the 1830s, 1840s, and beyond.

African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910
  • Volume 7
  • Edited by Shirley Moody-Turner
  • Published online:
    29 April 2021
    Print publication:
    13 May 2021
  • African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910 offers a wide ranging, multi-disciplinary approach to early twentieth century African American literature and culture. It showcases the literary and cultural productions that took shape in the critical years after Reconstruction, but before the Harlem Renaissance, the period known as the nadir of African American history. It undercovers the dynamic work being done by Black authors, painters, photographers, poets, editors, boxers, and entertainers to shape 'New Negro' identities and to chart a new path for a new century. The book is structured into four key areas: Black publishing and print culture; innovations in genre and form; the race, class and gender politics of literary and cultural production; and new geographies of Black literary history. These overarching themes, along with the introduction of established figures and movement, alongside lesser known texts and original research, offer a radical re-conceptualization of this critical, but understudied period in African American literary history.

African American Literature in Transition, 1850–1865
  • Volume 4, 1850–1865
  • Edited by Teresa Zackodnik
  • Published online:
    07 April 2021
    Print publication:
    13 May 2021
  • The period of 1850-1865 consisted of violent struggle and crisis as the United States underwent the prodigious transition from slaveholding to ostensibly 'free' nation. This volume reframes mid-century African American literature and challenges our current understandings of both African American and American literature. It presents a fluid tradition that includes history, science, politics, economics, space and movement, the visual, and the sonic. Black writing was highly conscious of transnational and international politics, textual circulation, and revolutionary imaginaries. Chapters explore how Black literature was being produced and circulated; how and why it marked its relation to other literary and expressive traditions; what geopolitical imaginaries it facilitated through representation; and what technologies, including print, enabled African Americans to pursue such a complex and ongoing aesthetic and political project.

African American Literature in Transition, 1865–1880
  • Black Reconstructions
  • Volume 5, 1865–1880
  • Edited by Eric Gardner
  • Published online:
    18 March 2021
    Print publication:
    13 May 2021
  • This volume offers the most nuanced treatment available of Black engagement with print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It locates and studies materials that many literary historians leave out of narratives of American culture. But as important as such recovery work is, African American Literature in Transition, 1865–1880 also emphasizes innovative approaches, recognizing that such recovery inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. At the book's core is the recognition that many period texts - by writers from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and William Wells Brown to Mattie Jackson and William Steward - are not only aesthetically striking but also central to understanding key socio-historical and cultural trends in the nineteenth century. Chapters by leading scholars are grouped in three sections - 'Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities', 'Persons and Bodies', and 'Memories, Materialities, and Locations' - and focus on debates over race, nation, personhood, and print that were central to Reconstruction.

African American Literature in Transition, 1800–1830
  • Volume 2, 1800–1830
  • Edited by Jasmine Nichole Cobb
  • Published online:
    11 March 2021
    Print publication:
    13 May 2021
  • African American literature in the years between 1800 and 1830 emerged from significant transitions in the cultural, technological, and political circulation of ideas. Transformations included increased numbers of Black organizations, shifts in the physical mobility of Black peoples, expanded circulation of abolitionist and Black newsprint as well as greater production of Black authored texts and images. The perpetuation of slavery in the early American republic meant that many people of African descent conveyed experiences of bondage or promoted abolition in complex ways, relying on a diverse array of print and illustrative forms. Accordingly, this volume takes a thematic approach to African American literature from 1800 to 1830, exploring Black organizational life before 1830, movement and mobility in African American literature, and print culture in circulation, illustration, and the narrative form.