‘So long, / So far away / Is Africa,’ wrote Langston Hughes in his 1922 poem ‘Afro-American Fragment’ (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad, Vintage, 1994, p. 129). Consider how Africa is represented, and what it signifies, in your chosen African American materials.
For W. E. B. Du Bois, African Americans exist in a state of ‘double-consciousness’, fated in a racially unequal society to be ‘always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’ (The Souls of Black Folk, edited by Brent Hayes Edwards, Oxford UP, 2007 [1903], p. 8). Research Du Bois’s concept and, applying it to contemporary African American cultural materials of your choice, assess its explanatory power now.
‘I’m crazy about this City. […] A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things’ (Toni Morrison, Jazz, Plume, 1993 [1992], p. 7). Explore how urban space is represented in your chosen works of African American culture, and assess what it means.
‘Fight the Power’ (Public Enemy, Motown Records, 1989). To what extent is contemporary rap music ‘fighting the power’?
‘For poetry makes nothing happen,’ writes W. H. Auden in his 1939 verse elegy on the Irish poet W. B. Yeats (Auden, Poems, Volume 1: 1927-1939, edited by Edward Mendelson, Princeton UP, 2022, p. 373). Is this true of what we might call the Black Lives Matter poem?
‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing’ (Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Arthur L. Humphreys, 1912 [1891], p. 43). Is Utopia anywhere to be seen in your chosen works of African American culture?
Study Activities
Scholars of chattel slavery in America have documented the many instruments at the institution’s disposal for managing not only the bodies of the enslaved, but their minds and spirits, too. Indeed, for the US historian Stanley Elkins, writing in Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (first published in 1959), slaveholders’ disciplinary power was so extensive as to make the plantation equivalent to the Nazi concentration camp. More recent scholars, however, have contested this parallel as extreme and have sought instead to acknowledge the varied means of resistance still available to the enslaved. Compile an inventory of these forms of opposition or subversion, and assess their effects (and their risks).
Cultural historian George Lipsitz argues that ‘counter-memory’, the process of telling stories alternative to those circulated by the authoritative or coercive mainstream, is best studied by first focusing on ‘the particular and the specific’ (Time Passages, U of Minnesota P, 1990, p. 217). Home in on particular instances of African American culture – your examples might range from poems to foodways, films to songs, plays to paintings, hairstyles to fashion choices, etc. – and identify and evaluate the counter-memories they embody.
The Harlem Renaissance, extending from the end of the First World War to the mid-1930s, saw an explosion of African American creativity in multiple forms, including painting. Sample the work of Harlem Renaissance painters, analysing their choices of subject matter, their colour palettes, their distinct compositional practices (from African-influenced abstraction to wispy watercolour). As well as Lois Mailou Jones who we discuss in Chapter 3, case studies might include Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, William H. Johnson and Archibald Motley. You can find examples of their work on Google Images, or via the websites of US art galleries and museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of African American Art Los Angeles.
‘Dey laughs too much and dey laughs too loud,’ complains Mrs Turner, an African American character who is repulsed by her own community in Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (the quotation is in the 1986 Virago edition, p. 210). Not only in Hurston’s writing, however, but elsewhere in African American culture (novels, films, TV shows, stand-up routines, everyday oral exchanges, etc.), laughter and comedy have been crucial in documentation of and resistance to oppressive socio-economic circumstances. Explore the forms, targets and effects of African American laughter.
The mixtape, bringing together eclectic musical tracks, is an important artefact in hip-hop culture. Create your own Black Lives Matter mixtape, in which you combine recent African American work of various kinds that, either directly or obliquely, engages with BLM’s key themes. Modifying the musical bias built into this particular cultural product, your samples do not have to be confined to songs, but may extend to poems, novels and short stories, films and videos, street murals and graffiti, social media posts, etc.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade – maintained by National Museums Liverpool and sampling interesting scholarly work, including on ‘the archaeology of slavery’
North American Slave Narratives – housed by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and valuably bringing together familiar slave narratives and lesser-studied testimonies of the American enslaved
African American Perspectives – rare materials from the nineteenth century, curated by the Library of Congress: includes not only slave narratives, but speeches, sermons, reports, etc. that document African Americans’ involvement in civil society in the US
African American Women Writers of the 19th Century – rich collection of writings, from fiction and poetry to autobiography and biography, curated by New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Freedmen and Southern Society Project – substantial archive of materials, hosted by the University of Maryland, on the emancipation of African American enslaved peope between 1861 and 1867
W. E. B. Du Bois – diligently curated by Robert W. Williams and bringing together in one place many of the prolific writings of this major African American sociologist, cultural theorist and activist (1868-1963)
The Harlem Renaissance – maintained by the Library of Congress: a treasure trove of texts, images and sounds relating to this vibrant period of African American cultural activity
The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow – no longer actively maintained, but still helpful, deriving from a 2002 PBS TV series and documenting segregation in the American South from the end of the Civil War to the beginnings of the civil rights era
United States Civil Rights Trail – combining scholarly work with commercial interests, but interesting in its mapping of the sites across the American South in which civil rights activism played out
Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute – based in Stanford University and including, among its many materials, an interactive resource that shows the evolution of King’s iconic speech, ‘I Have a Dream’ (1963)
Malcolm X – website diligently maintained by Abdul Alkalimat; especially valuable, perhaps, for its many recordings of speeches by Malcolm X
Kara Walker – website of this important African American artist, whose work explores racial and gendered injustice in a range of media, including paintings, prints, site-specific installations and – above all – paper silhouettes
Black Lives Matter – website of an important movement created in 2013 to campaign against racialised injustice and pursuing now ‘a future fully divested from police, prisons, and all punishment paradigms and which invests in justice, joy, and culture’