African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. Phillis Wheatley was an enslaved African woman who became the first African American to publish a book of poetry, which was published in 1773. Her collection was titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–1797) was an African man who wrote The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, an autobiography published in 1789 that became one of the first influential works about the transatlantic slave trade and the experiences of enslaved Africans. His work was published sixteen years after Phillis Wheatley's work (c. 1753–1784).
Other prominent writers of the 18th century that helped shape the tone and direction of African American literature were David Walker (1796–1830), an abolitionist and writer best known for his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829); Frederick Douglass, who was a former enslaved person who became a prominent abolitionist, orator, and writer famous for his autobiographies, including Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845); and Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman who wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).
Autobiography, memoir, and other forms of life writing are an important part of the African American literary tradition from its beginnings in the late 18th century through the present. Slave narratives, one major genre of African American autobiography, are first-person, factual accounts of life under enslavement, escape and fugitivity and, often, the story of how the author attained literacy.
The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.Jerry W. Ward Jr., "To Shatter Innocence: Teaching African American Poetry", in Teaching African American Literature, ed. M. Graham, Routledge, 1998, p. 146, .
As African Americans' place in American society has changed over the centuries, so has the focus of African American literature. Before the American Civil War, the literature primarily consisted of memoirs by people who had escaped from enslavement—the genre of slave narratives included accounts of life in enslavement and the path of justice and redemption to freedom. There was an early distinction between the literature of freed slaves and the literature of free blacks born in the North. Free blacks expressed their oppression in a different narrative form. Free blacks in the North often spoke out against enslavement and racial injustices by using the spiritual narrative. The spiritual addressed a number of the same themes of enslaved people narratives but has been largely ignored in current scholarly conversation.
At the turn of the 20th century, non-fiction works by authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington debated how to confront racism in the United States. During the Civil Rights Movement, authors such as Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about issues of racial segregation and black nationalism. Today, African American literature has become accepted as an integral part of American literature, with books such as Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker, which won the Pulitzer Prize; and Beloved by Toni Morrison achieving both best-selling and award-winning status.
In broad terms, African American literature can be defined as writings by people of African descent living in the United States. It is highly varied.Darryl Dickson-Carr, The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 10-11, . African American literature has generally focused on the role of African Americans within the larger American society and what it means to be an American.Katherine Driscoll Coon, "A Rip in the Tent: Teaching African American Literature", in Teaching African American Literature, ed. M. Graham, Routledge, 1998, p. 32, . As Princeton University professor Albert J. Raboteau has said, all African American literary study "speaks to the deeper meaning of the African-American presence in this nation. This presence has always been a test case of the nation's claims to freedom, democracy, equality, the inclusiveness of all." African American literature explores the issues of freedom and equality long denied to Blacks in the United States, along with further themes such as African American culture, racism, religion, enslavement, a sense of home,Valerie Sweeney Prince, Burnin' Down the House: Home in African American Literature, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, . segregation, migration, feminism, and more. African American literature presents experience from an African American point of view. In the early Republic, African American literature represented a way for free blacks to negotiate their identity in an individualized republic. They often tried to exercise their political and social autonomy in the face of resistance from the white public. Thus, an early theme of African American literature was, like other American writings, what it meant to be a citizen in post-Revolutionary America.
Characteristics and themes
African American literature has both been influenced by the great African diasporic heritageDickson-Carr,The Columbia Guide, p. 73. and shaped it in multiple countries. It has been created within the larger realm of post-colonial literature, although scholars distinguish between the two, saying that "African American literature differs from most post-colonial literature in that it is written by members of a minority community who reside within a nation of vast wealth and economic power."Radhika Mohanram and Gita Rajan, English Postcoloniality: Literatures from Around the World, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996, p. 135, .
African American oral culture is rich in poetry, including spirituals, gospel music, blues, and rap. This oral poetry also appears in the African American tradition of Christian sermons, which make use of deliberate repetition, cadence, and alliteration. African American literature—especially written poetry, but also prose—has a strong tradition of incorporating all of these forms of oral poetry.Ward Jr., "To Shatter Innocence", p. 146. These characteristics do not occur in all works by African American writers.
Some scholars resist using Western literary theory to analyze African American literature. As the Harvard literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., said, "My desire has been to allow the black tradition to speak for itself about its nature and various functions, rather than to read it, or analyze it, in terms of literary theories borrowed whole from other traditions, appropriated from without."Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, New York: Oxford, 1988, p. xix, . One trope common to African American literature is "signifying". Gates claims that signifying "is a trope in which are subsumed several other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and also hyperbole and litotes, and metalepsis."Henry Louis Gates Jr., "The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey", in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (eds), Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd edn, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004, p. 988. Signifying also refers to the way in which African American "authors read and critique other African-American texts in an act of rhetorical self-definition."Gates, "The Blackness of Blackness", in Literary Theory (2004), p. 992.
Notable poetic forms developed by African-Americans include golden shovel, the duplex,"Duplex", poets.org. eintou,Lehman, Herb (March 3, 2006), "The Eintou", LiveJournal., and kwansaba.Brewer, Robert Lee (October 18, 2019), "Kwansaba: Poetic Forms", Writer's Digest.
History
Early African American literature African American literature began with slave narratives.
African American history predates the emergence of the United States as an independent country, and African American literature has similarly deep roots.
Lucy Terry is the author of the oldest known piece of African American literature, "Bars Fight". Terry wrote the ballad in 1746 after a Native American attack on Deerfield, Massachusetts. She was enslaved in Deerfield at the time of the attack, when residents were killed and more than 100, mostly women and children, were taken on a forced march overland to Montreal. Some were later ransomed and redeemed by their families or community; others were adopted by Mohawk families, and some girls joined a French religious order. The ballad was first published in 1854, with an additional couplet, in The Springfield Republican and in 1855 in Josiah Holland's History of Western Massachusetts.
The poet Phillis Wheatley (–1784) published her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773, three years before American independence. Wheatley was not only the first African American to publish a book, but the first to achieve an international reputation as a writer. Born in Senegal or The Gambia, Wheatley was captured and sold into slavery at around the age of seven. Kidnapped to Massachusetts, she was purchased and owned by a Boston merchant. By the time she was 16, she had mastered her new language of English. Her poetry was praised by some of the leading figures of the American Revolution, including George Washington, who thanked her for a poem written in his honor.
Some whites found it hard to believe that a Black woman could write such refined poetry. Wheatley had to defend herself to prove that she had written her own work, so an authenticating preface, or attestation, was provided at the beginning of her book, signed by a list of prominent white male leaders in Massachusetts, affirming her authorship. Some critics cite Wheatley's successful use of this "defensive" authentication document as the first recognition of African American literature. As a result of the skepticism surrounding her work, Poems on Various Subjects was republished with "several introductory documents designed to authenticate Wheatley and her poetry and to substantiate her literary motives."
Another early African American author was Jupiter Hammon (1711–1806?), a domestic slave in Queens, New York. Hammon, considered the first published Black writer in America, published his poem "An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries" as a broadside in early 1761. In 1778 he wrote an ode to Phillis Wheatley, in which he discussed their shared humanity and common bonds.
In 1786, Hammon gave his "Address to the Negroes of the State of New York". Writing at the age of 76 after a lifetime of slavery, Hammon said: "If we should ever get to Heaven, we shall find nobody to reproach us for being black, or for being slaves." He also promoted the idea of gradual emancipation as a way to end slavery.An address to the Negroes in the state of New-York , by Jupiter Hammon, servant of John Lloyd, Jun, Esq; of the manor of Queen's Village, Long-Island. 1778. Hammon is thought to have been a slave on Long Island until his death. In the 19th century, his speech was later reprinted by several abolitionist groups.