Race and Gender in the Making of an African American Literary Tradition

This new 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 by retrieving, expressing, interpreting and recording the survival of their cultures shattered by the Middle Passage and by years of slavery. In so doing, they draw on existing literary strategies including but not limited to humility, intertextuality, mimicry, reversal, abrogation, appropriation, chiasmus and other tropes. 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 books proposes a reading of major African American writers including but not limited to Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson's, Charles Chesnutt, Booker T. Washington, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.