Word: afros
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...American becomes the painful burden of the cutting essays of James Baldwin; a master of form, if ever there was one in America. In this peculiar adaptation of form, Baldwin uses his peculiar gift of language, comingling the art of rapping with the terror and brimstone of the Afro-American sermon which possesses its own peculiar cadences, to orchestrate in an intensely personal manner the intense emotional experiences of Afro-Americans. For Baldwin, of course, this violent synthesis of being negroid and American can only be negotiated in a successful manner if one, as he says, "makes a truce with...
...artistic works of black people which reflect the special character and imperatives of black experiences." This was an important movement which attempted to excoriate the whiteness that blackened out souls and to fashion new ideals and idols of beauty. More importantly, the Movement sought to articulate the fact that Afro-American peoples were beautiful and capable of creating beautiful artifacts...
...excoriation of whiteness was not a thing to sneer at. In the portals of ivy, Afro-American literature was not a subject to be studied or even understood. After all, what did Afro-Americans know about versification, the strophe or the periphrase? How else could one explain the fact that The American Tradition in Literature by Bradley, Beatty and Long, one of the standard texts used in American colleges during the 1960's, devoted only two-and-one-half of its 1734 pages to Afro-American literature...
...clarify. Here was an anthology which was used by most of the universities and colleges of the USA. Some of the men who edited this text possessed some of the most enviable credentials the Euro-American world could confer upon them. Yet they could only find one Afro-American poet worthy of being anthologized. Was this racism? I leave the audience to decide. Yet these are some of the same people who tell us today that we do not need Afro-American literature courses, that the quality of Afro-American literature cannot be compared with that of Euro-American literature...
...Morrison is indeed of tremendous literary significance or that Margaret Walker's fusion of history and literature poses some rather interesting questions of epistemological significance, one is told that he/she is not a serious scholar and that even the most pedantic and empty scholasticism is superior to that of Afro-American scholarship if it deals with anything other than the Afro-American experience...