Situation Report from a Culture of Reading: Part 2

Editor's note: two weeks ago we posted Situation Report from a Culture of Reading: Part 1. Below is part 2 of the post. 



To the slave, revolution is an imperative, a love-inspired, conscious act of desperation. It’s aggressive. It isn’t “cool” or cautious. It’s bold, audacious, violent, an expression of icy, disdainful hatred! It can hardly be any other way without raising a fundamental contradiction.

George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (1972)

Serendipity allows you to happen upon humorous insights.  Ralph Ellison was one of the most elegant prose writers of the twentieth-century. You find aesthetic pleasure in his writing as well as less than obvious evidence of self-contradiction. From time to time, Ellison was out to brunch. In his essay “Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction” (1960), Ellison justly praised Crane for looking “steadily at the wholeness of American life” and for discovering “far-reaching symbolic equivalents for its unceasing state of civil war.”

5 Rebel Writers During Slavery

 [By Alysha Griffin]

In the same way that threats of violence did not always dissuade  slaves’ attempts to escape, the threat of injury or even death was not enough to keep many African Americans quiet. In some instances, African Americans made the pen mightier than the whip.

Disrupting and Expanding the Notion of "Self-Taught"

[By Kenton Rambsy]

Over the past month, I have commented on the particular ways in which a number of authors provide us readers with useful information concerning their views of how African American men acquire and share knowledge. These fictional representations have led me to think about autobiographical examples, specifically the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Richard Wright and the overall tradition of education in African American literature and literacy as a tool for gaining higher degrees of social agency.

Education and Revolution: Reading the novels of Sutton E. Griggs and Toni Morrison

[By Kenton Rambsy]

Continuing our conversations of linking education to freedom Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899) and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977). Griggs’s principle characters Bernard Belgrave and Belton Piedmont and Morrison’s secondary character Guitar Baines both illustrate how black people subvert educational practices as a means to produce alternative political societies in America.

Black Men and Informal Educational Networks

[By Kenton Rambsy]

Over the past two weeks, I have explored how issues related to literacy and access as central thematic concerns in books by African American writers. Here is a list of novels,  ranging from 1852-2006, mentioned so far:

 

Frederick Douglass’s Heroic Slave (1852)

Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America (1862)

Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899)

Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976)

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977)

Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990)

Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) 

Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001)

Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006)

Literary Traditions: Education and Political Activism

[By Kenton Rambsy]

I first encountered Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave during my sophomore year at Morehouse College in Atlanta. At the time, I had read his slave narrative and become thoroughly familiar with his pursuits of literacy despite great social, economic, and racial barriers. Reading his novella, though, gave me a chance to reconsider the links between literacy and emancipation from physical bondage.

The Heroic Slave sought to dispel ideas about slavery during the time of its publication. Douglass criticized Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852, because of the manner in which it portrayed African Americans as being passive and incapable of demanding their freedom from slavery. Robert S. Levine’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Frederick Douglass’ Paper: An Analysis of Reception” highlights Douglass’s concerns with Stowe’s work by suggesting that “Douglass believed that the most effective way to combat slavery was to champion political activism over moral suasion” (72 ).