“Unification Via Personification: Revisioned Version” Langston Hughes is known as one of the most influential African American poets. He has a large collection of works that still influence African American society today. Hughes contributed towards the Harlem Renaissance, which produced a surge of African American works in the 1920s. In addition, Langston Hughes is also known as one of the most inspiring African American civil rights activists and advocated for African American unity and solidarity. One of his most famous works is “Negro,” which is a poem that highlights African American identity through the personification of African American heritage.
Poets Claude Mckay and Langston Hughes are both well known for their literary contributions to the Harlem Renaissance. Roughly spanning from the 1910s to the 1930s, about two decades, the Harlem Renaissance is pinned as the intellectual, social, and artistic explosion of African American culture. At the same time, African Americans were treated as second-class citizens and dealt with a common consensus of disdain from the white folk. Authors and poets during this time were determined to write on the sufferings and strengths within the black culture. Through literary works such as "America" by Claude McKay and "Freedom" by Langston Hughes, the struggles encompassing the black experience are realistically portrayed through reoccurring themes
E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington debated whether to confront or appease racist attitudes in the United States. As segregation regimes took hold in the South in the 1890s with the tacit approval of the rest of the country, many African Americans found a champion in Booker T. Washington and adopted his self-help autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), as their guide book to improved fortunes. Washington portrayed his own life in such a way as to suggest that even the most disadvantaged of black people could attain dignity and prosperity in the South by providing themselves valuable, productive members of society deserving of fair and equal treatment before the law. A classic American success story, Up from Slavery solidified Washington’s reputation as the most eminent African American of the new century.
These laws were passed by southern states in 1865 and 1866 to restrict African American’s freedom and forced them to work low income jobs. In 1866, the Supreme Court was able to overrule the Black Codes, giving the black American citizens full citizenship and freedom. This angered the southerners, who had fought to keep slavery, making
Ellison is asking such questions through his veiled narrator. The author, in particular, is said to have drawn inspiration from the critical works of American writer and civil rights activist W.E. B. Dubois. Dubois in his work The Souls of black Folk wrote that the Afro-American lived in “double-consciousness” where he/she always looked at one-self ‘through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’. Dubois along with Ellison tries to demolish the negative image and arise a positive one in this novel.
After World War I, in Harlem, New York, there was a huge splurge of African- American culture. The African-American culture induced literature, poetry, and philosophy. This movement criticized the way these African-Americans were treated by white Americans. During this time, Langston Hughes, a social activist wrote poems that portrayed the struggle of African Americans, showcasing their lives during the Harlem Renaissance, while celebrating their heritage. James Mercer Langston Hughes was born was born in Joplin, Missouri, on the 1st of February, and died May 22nd 1967.
His numerous work shed light on the extent of economic exploitation, cultural isolation, and segregation that dominated the society. The Mis-Education of the Negro is one of the controversial books by Woodson, which attempts to convince the blacks in America that they have accepted white domination as the consequence of being brainwashed. Woodson’s arguments in the book The Mis-Education of the Negro are solid, convincing, and applicable in the contemporary world. Some of the issues mentioned in the book, which were facing the African-Americans, are still relevant today. When the book was being written (1933), African-Americans had no place in the history of the United States.
African American autobiography is motivated by a revisionist attitude toward exploring the issues involving the black people in America and the autobiographer himself. The genre of autobiography is often utilised as a tool to demolish the myths of black inferiority, and to break the chains which have held the African American in bondage to the white man over the generations. Thus, often in its final rendering, African American autobiography is a quest for freedom while opposing and repudiating oppression and discrimination based on colour. Therefore, a study of African American autobiography proves its uniqueness while it continues to adhere to the autobiographical canon. Attempting a general yet comprehensive definition of autobiography, James Olney writes that it is: a recollective/narrative act in which the writer, from a certain point in his life – the present - , looks back over the events of that life and recounts them in such a way as to show how that past history has led to this present state of being.
African-American author Toni Morrison 's book, Beloved, describes a black culture born out of a dehumanising period of slavery just after the Civil War. Culture is a means of how a group collectively believe, act, and interact on a daily basis. Those who have studied her work refer to Morrison 's narrative tales as “literature…that addresses the sacred and as an allegorical representation of black experience” (Baker-Fletcher 1993: 2). Although African Americans had a difficult time establishing their own culture during the period of slavery when they were considered less than human, Morrison believes that black culture has been built on the horrors of the past and it is this history that has shaped contemporary black culture in a positive way. Through the use of linguistic devices, her representation of black women, imagery and symbolic features, and the theme of interracial relations, Morrison illustrates that black culture that is resilient, vibrant, independent, and determined.
In fact, Bigger’s behaviour is some kind of a mirror held to the face of American society by her Black son or, in Wright‘s words, by her “native son”. Through this novel, Wright seems to be arguing that the roots of criminal and illegal activities by Blacks are in White American society and that women are abused by this society — by their own community, by their lovers, by rest of their kith and kin and by their husbands also. Women appear as victims in American society who endure pain to an unimaginable degree. The significance of Wright’s hate, repugnance and antagonism towards religion can be seen in Native Son. This novel is not only a book, but it is also some kind of a White Paper about Black experience in American society.