Back to the Land

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-98
Author(s):  
Matthew M. Lambert
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Environmental Effects ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Victor Fleming ◽  
Erskine Caldwell ◽  
American Folklore ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
William Wyler ◽  
Back To The Land

This chapter focuses on ways that southern depression-era authors contributed or responded to a renewed interest in the “old” South during the period. While the Southern Agrarians, William Alexander Percy, and filmmakers like Victor Fleming and William Wyler created nostalgic depictions of antebellum southern life, Richard Wright and Erskine Caldwell responded with “antipastoral” depictions of sharecropping that expose the exploitive social, economic, and environmental effects of plantation agriculture. The chapter also identifies ways that Zora Neale Hurston creates alternative forms of social and environmental thought through her depictions of African American folklore in Mules and Men (1935).

Religion, Race, and Humanism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony B. Pinn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unitarian Universalist ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lorraine Hansberry

This chapter explores the history of humanism within African American communities. It positions humanist thinking and humanism-inspired activism as a significant way in which people of African descent in the United States have addressed issues of racial injustice. Beginning with critiques of theism found within the blues, moving through developments such as the literature produced by Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, to political activists such as W. E. B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph, to organized humanism in the form of African American involvement in the Unitarian Universalist Association, African Americans for Humanism, and so on, this chapter presents the historical and institutional development of African American humanism.

Chicago’s Letters Group and the Emergence of the Black Chicago Renaissance

2020 ◽  
pp. 222-244
Author(s):  
Richard A. Courage
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
University Students ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Black Literature ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Chicago Renaissance ◽  
History Of

This chapter unearths the history of a literary circle formed in 1927 to publish a journal called Letters and foster appreciation of black literature. Its leader was Chicago Defender city editor Dewey Roscoe Jones, whose reviews in his weekly “Bookshelf” column established him as black Chicago’s premier literary critic and commentator on the Harlem Renaissance. Most participants in Letters were university students, but they were joined by several older writers, including poets Fenton Johnson and W. H. A. Moore. Future Black Chicago Renaissance luminaries Richard Wright and Frank Marshall Davis visited occasionally but felt unwelcome. Recovering this missing link in cultural history deepens scholarly understanding of the New Negro movement beyond 1920s Harlem and of early evolution of an African American literary tradition in Chicago.

Richard Wright, Bandung, and the Poetics of the Third World

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Philip Bradley
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Third World ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
American Writer ◽  
The Third ◽  
Social Gathering ◽  
The Third World

“Do you think that whenever I'm talking to someone I'm conscious of whether or not he is ‘white’ or ‘colored’? … I was born a ‘native,’ and I've lived with racial discrimination. But we are free now. I'm no longer a ‘native’ but an Indonesian…. I don't feel inferior to whites, and I don't hate them either,” Sitor Situmorang, a preeminent Indonesian poet and essayist, told African American writer Richard Wright at an April 1955 social gathering in Wright's honor. Growing more agitated, Situmorang raised his voice and continued, “We are against colonialism, but we are not against whites. We struggled for racial equality, not for the belief in another superrace, a colored superrace.”

African American Folklore

1997 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 435-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tolagbe Ogunleye
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Folklore
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