Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- PART I HISTORY
- Introduction: The Problem with the Title of this Volume
- 1 Out of Many One: The Beginnings of a Novelistic Tradition, 1850s– 1900s
- 2 Publish or Perish: African American Novels, 1900s– 1920s
- 3 Aesthetics of Race and Culture: African American Novels, 1920s– 1940s
- 4 Home of the Brave: African American Novels, 1940s– 1960s
- 5 Black Arts and Beyond: African American Novels, 1960s– 1970s
- 6 From Margin to Center: African American Novels, 1970s– 1990s
- 7 “Bohemian Cult Nats”: African American Novels, 1990s and Beyond
- PART II SIGNIFICANT GENRES OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN NOVEL
- Coda
- Appendix
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Introduction: The Problem with the Title of this Volume
from PART I - HISTORY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2017
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- PART I HISTORY
- Introduction: The Problem with the Title of this Volume
- 1 Out of Many One: The Beginnings of a Novelistic Tradition, 1850s– 1900s
- 2 Publish or Perish: African American Novels, 1900s– 1920s
- 3 Aesthetics of Race and Culture: African American Novels, 1920s– 1940s
- 4 Home of the Brave: African American Novels, 1940s– 1960s
- 5 Black Arts and Beyond: African American Novels, 1960s– 1970s
- 6 From Margin to Center: African American Novels, 1970s– 1990s
- 7 “Bohemian Cult Nats”: African American Novels, 1990s and Beyond
- PART II SIGNIFICANT GENRES OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN NOVEL
- Coda
- Appendix
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The title of this study was selected by the publisher. As I began writing, however, I found the term African American resonated differently with each novelist discussed in this volume. For some, it was not common usage in their time; for others, it was too restrictive because it connoted a vexed racial category or it did not take into account the variety of ethnicities to which people with African antecedents belong; still others felt it aptly described who they were. The varying responses to the nomenclature showed cultural identity to be less a fixed entity and more a process of coming to terms with the legacies of African encounters with Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. The many events, considerations, and reconsiderations that went into creating an identity variously called black, colored, negro, Negro, African American, Afro-American, African American again, and black again, over the course of the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, reveal much about how different nations and ethnicities were coalesced into a race.
In the United States, the region at the core of this study, much history underlies these changes in terms. For those raced as white, “black” solidified the dominant identity of whiteness that art, politics, and popular culture made synonymous with American. “Colored” and “negro,” used as segregationist terms, vivified for many whites on the social margins what freedom and privilege meant. For those raced as black, the advocacy implied in changing designations recorded responses to the end of enslavement, the demand for civil rights, and the reshaping of larger American culture. This advocacy further suggested metaphors and strategies for other marginalized groups, from the nineteenth-century women's movement to twentieth and twenty-first century LGBTQ activism, as each mounted their efforts for social recognition and enfranchisement. Throughout these cultural metamorphoses, novels produced by writers raced as black made clear that once the significances of these terms were understood, so too was much of human political, social, economic, and historical dynamics.
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- A History of the African American Novel , pp. 3 - 8Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2017
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