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Solidarity Threatened: Destruction of the Black Family in African American Literature

Solidarity Threatened Destruction of the Black Family in African American Literature During the time of American chattel slavery, the sales of enslaved Black people to other landowners often resulted in the physical separation of families, due in part to physical distance and in part to the lack of freedom of movement enslaved people enjoyed. This tendency of the institution of slavery to separate families appears well-documented in African American literature about the slavery and post-slavery eras, such as through the separation of a wife and husband in Charles W. Chestnutt’s“The Wife of His Youth.” The physical separation of families would have for the most part ended after the abolition of slavery in 1865; however, other works continue throughout the course of African American literature to depict an emotional splintering of the Black family under the pressure of enslavement, economic disadvantage, and double consciousness – all conditions resulting from white American society’s ex...
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Restoring Black Dignity: The Role of African Heritage in New Negro Identity

Restoring Black Dignity The Role of African Heritage in New Negro Identity According to Alain Locke, the concept of the New Negro which emerged during the Harlem Renaissance finds its cornerstone in Black individuals’ and communities’ “renewed self-respect and self-dependence” (as compared with the Old Negro’s “protective social mimicry forced upon him by the adverse circumstances of dependence”) (Locke 3-4). In this essay, I explore how representations of the New Negro’s African culture and heritage in Harlem Renaissance poetry (more specifically Helene Johnson’s “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” and Gwendolyn Bennett’s “To a Dark Girl”) enforce and facilitate the restoration of Black dignity in the United States. Helene Johnson’s “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” exemplifies the newfound self-respect and self-sufficiency of the New Negro through its depiction of its central subject (the titular “Negro in Harlem”). Throughout the poem, the subject is represented as more “magnificent” than h...
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Abolition vs. Assimilation: The Role of Audience in Up From Slavery and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Abolition vs. Assimilation The Role of Audience in Up From Slavery and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl In Mr. Leff’s U.S. History class we are taught to evaluate narrator bias through five lenses: Historical Context, Audience, Point of View, Purpose, and Significance (rather oddly abbreviated HAPPY, with the Y representing the homophonic “Why”). In this blog post, I will investigate comparatively the role of the second of these lenses, Audience, in shaping the autobiographical narratives and the representations of the Black experience found within Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery .  According to the Preface by the Author in Jacobs’s Incidents , “I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself… But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women in the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered” (5). Altho...
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