Word: africanism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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People honored for making up stories or poems or plays are then expected to make pronouncements, in front of packed houses, on public issues. As an African-American woman, Morrison has faced such expectations constantly. "Most of the questions I get after readings or talks," she says, "are anthropological or sociological or political. They are not about literary concerns...
...African-American woman, Morrison knew that some people would believe, even if they wouldn't say it out loud, that the notoriously inconsistent Swedish committee, often swayed by geopolitical rather than literary criteria, had given her the prize because of what she was rather than what she wrote. But Morrison shrugs off these suspicions, which have accompanied every upward step of her career. "When I heard I'd won," she says, "you heard no 'Aw, shucks' from me. The prize didn't change my inner assessment of what I'm capable of doing, but I welcomed it as a public...
Morrison traces the genesis of this brutal act back to the 1870s, when nine African-American patriarchs, ex-slaves in Mississippi and Louisiana, joined together, gathered their wives and children, picking up a few strays in the process, and headed west to settle in the Oklahoma Territory. Eventually, arduously, they reach a town called Fairly, where their spokesmen appeal to the local citizens, blacks like them except with lighter skin, for permission to settle there. The Fairly leaders say no ("Come Prepared or Not at All"). This rejection will reverberate through the next hundred years of the outcasts' collective memory...
This assertion may surprise some people, since it comes from the author who almost single-handedly gave African-American women their rightful place in American literature. Racial questions have figured prominently in many of Morrison's critical essays. But there is really no contradiction between what she says now and what she has written in the past. She views her life and work as a struggle against the use of racial categories, or any categories, as a means of keeping groups of people powerless and excluded. She resents seeing her writing pigeonholed by her skin color. "I was reading some...
...past three years this baggy-preppy scene has been dominated by giants like Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, but now more than two dozen tiny African-Americanowned labels are beginning to steal some of their cool. And even a little bit of cool can be worth it: it may look like merely oversize jeans and hooded sweatshirts, but the $5 billion male urban-clothing niche is growing faster than any other apparel category except, perhaps, lingerie. And how long before Hilfiger offers low-slung panties with his name on the butt...