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literature’ F Vanlalpeki

Professor Margaret L Pachuau

Fiction I

17 September 2021

The Afro American Novel: An Overview of 2000 -2021

Introduction

Speaking of Afro American literature raises a vital question which is – Why is this

particular literature called Black/Afro American literature? Why not just American literature

as the writers are also rightfully and legally Americans! There are history books of American

literature which only state ‘American literature ‘or ‘History of American’. But if you go

through such books, you will find that black writers or any minority writers are not included

in that type of history book. Then why not add ‘White’ to make a statement that it’s White

American literature? These questions ultimately boil down to power. The Black people does

not have the position of power or controls the territory.

The discrimination at the cultural and social level continues. They are still separated

by colours and their novel speaks of such separation. African literature means different things

to different people. Some consider it a political document, characterized by the protest

against colonialism’s downgrading of the blacks. It is didactic and instructive; it is a

handicraft more often than an art.

The African ancestors were the unwilling, un intact ones: children torn from parents,

parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain

point, the family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there. The new generation of

writers could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past by
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researching genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of themselves and the rest of the

African American population in mouldering old sale documents and scanned images on

microfiche. To quote Toni Morrison, “Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not

as a serious, rigorous art form.” In the past we favoured revelations about black men trying to

survive in a hostile white world. Then, with the increased availability of books by women, we

initiate a limited ritualized consideration of gender relations among African Americans who

are struggling to survive one another in a hostile white world. The African American writers

in the past and present have experimented with literary form and technique, but the literary

study is now again much as it was then.

To understand why Afro-American is a range of literature on its own, we need to

understand its comprehensive sociopsychological sociocultural interpretive history. From the

themes with historical and biographical contexts to the hybrid nature, it derives from both the

resources of Afro-American folklore and the literary genres of the western world. Afro-

American literature is simply an extended prose narrative written by an American of African

ancestry that illuminates the experience of black Americans in a formal, imaginatively

distinctive manner- thematically, structurally or stylistically- and whose intrusive linguistic

properties do not wholly explain its interpretation, reception and reputation. African

American tradition that readers need to grasp is the crucial context for these important, but

not wholly self-sufficient, “linguistic properties”.

African American literature tends to focus on themes of particular interest to Black

people, for example, the role of African Americans within the larger American society and

issues such as African American culture, racism, religion, slavery, freedom, and equality.

Richard Wright’s Native Son, (1940) Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) enriched the

African-American literary tradition with philosophical and existential depth. Their works
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highlight themes of black man’s alienation, discrimination, and humiliation in white society,

however, at the very center of their fiction is a character’s loss of identity and his desperate

attempt to discover his true self, and in case of failing to do that, at least ‘invent’ himself.

On the other hand, black women writers while dissenting to white supremacy also claimed

for rejection of male power over women, the deconstruction of dominant images of black

women, and the need for women to construct their own experience, history and identity. The

most representative black female writers of recent periods include Toni Morrison, Alice

Walker, Maya Angelou who continue such central themes in African –American women’s

literary tradition as female friendship, search for and discovery of identity and community,

racial oppression and sexual violence, the importance of ancestry. The literature of former

and recent African-American women writers provide a comprehensive view of black

women’s struggle to form positive self-definition in the face of derogatory images of black

womanhood. African-American woman’s experience of internalized oppression has been the

prominent theme in African American women’s writing. it is right to say that contemporary

women writers not only African American women’s literary tradition but they also enrich this

tradition with new elements making it more significant. In their works, African-American

writers of recent periods revisit the historical past and African-American tradition and

experiment with postmodern techniques in an attempt to express their attitude to intersection

of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.

Few Contemporary African American writers and their works (2000-2021)

To start off with one of the few contemporary African American writers and their works we

are going to go in-depth on, Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) worked over the issues of politics,
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race, sex and the afterlife, though the focus is always on ideas and wordplay. He was an

African American poet, activist and scholar- an influential Black Nationalist who later

politically changed his stance to that of a Marxist. He is one of the most prominent and

controversial African American voices in the world of American letters. Amiri Baraka’s

writing career spans over nearly fifty years and has mostly focused on the subjects of Black

Liberation and White Racism. His work galvanized generations of younger artists, even as his

stridency alienated him from the mainstream. But he managed to work in both worlds. In the

1960s, Amiri Baraka co-founded the Black Arts Movement. It promoted a black nationalist

perspective on art and influenced a generation of black writers. 

Through Baraka’s words in Tale of the Out & the Gone, the struggle against racism and

imperialism is aesthetic and social, often both at the same time. The “War Stories” in the

book’s first section are, for the most part, taken from a life lived and experienced, from one

kind of war to another. It's a collection of short stories written over a span of more than 33

years. The first half of "Tales," "War Stories," is made up of five pieces from the mid- ' 70s

and early '80s. These hew closer to Baraka's lived experiences, and to convention The themes

that are most significantly evident in his writings ranges from resistance, black liberation to

white racism. The use of science fiction to depict a world where a black man is powerful and

dangerous, the power dynamics of the white and black people reversing its role.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an American author and journalist. He gained a wide readership during

his time as national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he wrote about cultural, social, and

political issues, particularly regarding African Americans and white supremacy. Coates’

“Between the World and Me”, was published in July 2015. The title is drawn from a Richard

Wright poem of the same name about a black man discovering the site of a lynching and

becoming incapacitated with fear, creating a barrier between himself and the world. Ta-

Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding the nation’s history and
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current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages

us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited

through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all

proportion. The themes of his book was what affected the lives of African Americans on

repeated basis; various forms of institutional racism, violence that came from slavery now

enacted in a ‘modern way’ and their bodies being enslavedThe recurrent themes that we see

in African American literature, while they have the freedom to write about anything and

everything yet they find their works rooted in their history, the time before they existed, the

world of their ancestors. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his

awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences,

beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally

charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly

confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward. Coates’ touch the

theme of nationalism, Black Nationalism to be precise, that infuse among blacks a sense of

community and group feeling.

African American literature now is a framework of civilization trying to find new values but

lacking the will to destroy its traditional inheritance.

Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead (born November 6, 1969) is an American novelist. He is the

author of eight novels, including his 1999 debut work, The Intuitionist, and The Underground

Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020 for The Nickel

Boys.[1][2] He has also published two books of non-fiction. In 2002, he received a

MacArthur Genius Grant. The Nickel Boys is a 2019 novel by American novelist Colson

Whitehead. It is based on the real story of the Dozier School, a reform school in Florida that

operated for 111 years and had its history exposed by a university's investigation. The
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negative themes in The Nickel Boys are mainly Trauma, Repression and Racism and on the

other hand, there is unity, support, hope and history that combines every experience of

African Americans through the words carefully put together by Colson. He draws attention to

the fact that escaping physical trauma doesn’t necessarily end a person’s suffering. He also

emphasizes the capacity of friendship and interpersonal support to sustain people facing

adversity and oppression. The Nickel Boys is a novel about the lasting reverberations of

slavery. Examining the ways in which a painfully racist history works its way into the

present, Colson Whitehead draws an important distinction between laws and reality,

demonstrating that racists often point to official condemnations of bigotry to avoid taking

responsibility for their own prejudiced ways. In many ways, the novel also looks at how

people in positions of power often use fear to subjugate others.

The African American writers in the past did not have access to the kind of reading and

writing materials the present-day writers have. As the world goes on, there are more things

added to the history which makes the recurring and repeated themes that we see even in the

current day’s literature, how it is still rooted to the same haunted emotions, of shared and

imagined experience of anger, the older African American writers spoke of and wrote about,

it is safe to say that the world will remember the history from the eyes of Black people as

much as the white Americans try to trudge forward, some in solidarity and some with

blindfolds on.
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Cited works

1. Foster, Frances Smith. “African American Literary Study, Now and Then and

Again.” PMLA, vol. 115, no. 7, Modern Language Association, 2000, pp. 1965–

67, https://doi.org/10.2307/463617.

2. Glasgow, Jacqueline N. “Radical Change in Young Adult Literature Informs the

Multigenre Paper.” The English Journal, vol. 92, no. 2, National Council of

Teachers of English, 2002, pp. 41–51, https://doi.org/10.2307/822225.

3. Wästberg, Per. “Themes in African Literature Today.” Daedalus, vol. 103, no. 2,

The MIT Press, 1974, pp. 135–50, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024208.

4. Lannamann, Taylor. "The Nickel Boys Themes." LLC, 20 Aug 2019. Web. 7

Aug 2021.

5. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. By Bernard Bell. Amherst:

University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. xix + 421 pages.

6. Spikes,M.P(1997)Understanding Contemporary AmericanLiterary

Theory.Columbia:University of South Carolina Press

7. Andrews.W.Foster,F.Harris.T(1997)The Oxford Companion to African American

Literature .New York: Oxford University Press

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8. Bernard, E.(2011)The New Negro Movement and the politics of Art. The

Cambridge History of African American Literature, London: Cambridge

University Press

9. Baker, H.A.Jr (1987) Blues, Ideology. and AfricanAmerican Literature A

vernacular Theory, Chicago,IL :University of Chicago Press

10. . Gayle, A(Ed.)(1971)The Black Aesthetics ,New York: Doubledy