The Black Aesthetic Unbound

by Langley, April C. E.

• ISBN13: 9780814210772
• ISBN10: 0814210775
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-01-08
• Publisher: Ohio State Univ Pr

Summary

During the era of the slave trade, more than 12 million Africans were brought as slaves to the Americas. Their memories, ideas, beliefs, and practices would forever reshape its history and cultures. April C. E. Langleyrs"sThe Black Aesthetic Unboundexposes the dilemma of the literal, metaphorical, and rhetorical question, "What is African in African American literature?" Confronting the undeniable imprints of West African culture and consciousness in early black writing such as Olaudah Equianors"sThe Interesting Narrativeor Phillis Wheatleyrs"s poetry, the author conceives eighteenth-century Black Experience to be literally and figuratively encompassing and inextricably linked to Africa, Europe, and America. Consequently, this book has three aims: to locate the eighteenth century as the genesis of the cultural and historical movements which mark twentieth-century black aestheticism-known as the Black Aesthetic; to analyze problematic associations of African identity as manifested in an essentialized Afro-America; and to study the relationship between specific West African modes of thought and expression and the emergence of a black aesthetic in eighteenth-century North America. By exploring how Senegalese, Igbo, and other West African traditions provide striking new lenses for reading poetry and prose by six significant writers, Langley offers a fresh perspective on this important era in our literary history. Ultimately, the author confronts the difficult dilemma of how to use diasporic, syncretic, and vernacular theories of Black culture to think through the massive cultural transformations wrought by the Middle Passage.

Author Biography

April C. E. Langley is associate professor of English, University of Missouri-Columbia.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Historical and Cultural Recovery: Eighteenth-Century Scholarship and the Politics of Visibility	p. 1
The Dilemma of a Ghost: Early Black American Literature and Its Mournings/Moorings	p. 17
What a Difference a "Way" Makes: Wheatley's Ways of Knowing	p. 57
Kaleidoscopic Re-memory in Equiano's Interesting Narrative: Shifting the Lens to Replace the Landscapes	p. 97
Reading "Others" in Eighteenth-Century Afro-British American Literature: The Promise and the Dilemma of New Ways of Reading	p. 139
Concluding Remarks	p. 155
Notes	p. 161
Bibliography	p. 185
Index	p. 199
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