Race and Gender in the Making of an African American Literary Tradition Studies in African American History and Culture Series

This book examines the ways in which race and gender have shaped and continue to inform African American literature. African American texts create a black literary and cultural identity interpreting and recording the survival of their cultures shattered by years of slavery. Black women writers, who have to deal with both racism and sexism, use additional strategies to undo this double reduction. They strive to invent a new language to talk about their experience and their lives as black and as women. After a typology of the African American text, the book proposes a reading of major African American writers including Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Charles Chesnutt, Booker T. Washington, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.

Chapter I A Typology of the African American Text; Chapter II Strategies of Self-Representation: Phillis Wheatley, Equiano and the Language of Power; Chapter III The Thematization and Staging of Knowledge in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Chapter IV A Home of Their Own: Strategies of Writing by Black Women; Chapter V Mules and Women: Hurston’s Poetics of Gender and the Redemption of the Tragic Mulatta;

Aimable Twagilimana