Книга "What is African-American Literature?" Автор: Марго Н. Кроуфорд является уникальным и информативным исследованием литературы, написанной чернокожими авторами на протяжении всей истории Соединенных Штатов.
Автор начинает свое исследование с исторических, литературных и культурных корней африканской американской литературы. Она рассматривает такие важнейшие периоды, как колониальный период, эпоху Реконструкции и новый день США. Автор освещает в своей книге новаторские работы Генри Форда, Джеймса Пьюроса, О. Бэлджина Торнтона и других выдающихся писателей. Книга "Что такое афроамериканская литература?" представляет увлекательную историю черной литературы и объясняет, почему она имеет такое значение для нашего общества.
African American Authors? In an age in which reference books transcend the latter day edition and expand into multivolume tomes, one might scratch one's head at Margo Crawford's insistence on producing an essay that occupies less than 180 pages. At first, what walks off the New York Times bestseller list and into college English course bookshelf may seem perplexing - what could a book about African American literature entail that could be compressed to just over two chapters and a bibliography? You may have stumbled across Crawford's What Is African American Litera-ture?. In this short but wrenching work, Crawford sheds light on many of the darker corners of the African American literary tradition, from Harlem Renaissance writers to the Harlem novel movement to Hilton family and Allen Ginsberg. The Cambridge Introduction series has accomplished much in diminishing the legacy of racism and rehabilitating some of the most obscure yet essential movements of our history, but Crawford fills a gap left by these compilations: she charts Black authors who, like Alice Walker and Richard Wright, will seemingly always be labeled second-tier relative to their celebrated white and black counterparts.A prose style wholly at home in a commuter train bathroom stall, Crawford offers readers a jaunt through the apparently unmappable terrain of an advanced Black literary history course. She seems almost always on the cusp of the text's electrifying revelations, fireworks uncapsules that splash across turgidly stretched realities. Her command of material is remarkable: not only does she offer astute analyses of marginalized texts written by exciting unnamed authors, but she also deftly handles comprehensive commentary on such important topics as the place of Du Bois in African American studies and Woodson's status among African American scholarly circles, bringing complexity to her account. Though African American lit (for us, graduate students so eagerly chasing after our true loves) is also far too vast a field to encompass within the two chapters granted, one reads What Is African African American Lite with a sense of discovery born of strange-sounding names and moments long presumed distant. Crawford confronts our presuppositions about "good" and "bad" literary periods with her charmingly inconsistent narration-discourse--the story becomes disentangled before it begins. This book can, in short, sharpen the mind and allow students to see the vitality of forensic literary studies starting from unexpected new angles: analytical essays rarely decrepit regardless of their author's age.African American voices will be more accessible to students thanks to Crawford's thorough, if self-conscious, treatment of their history and contribution to literary history. A truly fair and comprehensive launching pad for later reading in the subfield.
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