tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/african-american-writers-66795/articlesAfrican American writers – The Conversation2020-05-14T12:47:03Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1384492020-05-14T12:47:03Z2020-05-14T12:47:03ZFive books from the 19th century that will help you understand modern America better<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334660/original/file-20200513-156637-qpwvsv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=192%2C0%2C1285%2C790&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Harriet Jacobs, writer of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Jacobs#/media/File:Harriet_Ann_Jacobs1894.png">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>There’s a reason why one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/ralph-ellisons-invisible-man-as-a-parable-of-our-time">Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man</a> (1952), begins with an <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3199183?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">epigraph by the writer Herman Melville</a> and an allusion to the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7256636-i-am-an-invisible-man-no-i-am-not-a">ghosts who haunted Edgar Allan Poe</a>. </p>
<p>If you want to understand anything about the US in the 20th and 21st centuries, you need to know 19th-century American literature. The 19th century was when many, if not most, of the problems and ideologies that define American culture were codified, and literature of the period shows creative responses to this change. </p>
<p>For the first half of the 19th century, a lot of ink was spilt worrying whether the US would ever have a literature of its own. Many famous writers, including <a href="http://digitalemerson.wsulibs.wsu.edu/exhibits/show/text/the-american-scholar">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a> and <a href="https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1855/whole.html">Walt Whitman</a>, urged Americans to leave English literature behind and take up specifically American themes, peoples and spaces.</p>
<p>At the same time, indigenous and enslaved Americans such as Harriet Jacobs, William Apess and Frederick Douglass used their pens and their rhetorical might to urge the US government to end race and ethnicity-based persecution and genocide. </p>
<p>After the American Civil War (1861-1865), writers rarely worried about whether the country had a literature and whether it was any good (it quite obviously was). They had innovated new genres (think of Emily Dickinson’s spare and searing verses) and turned their attention to issues of inequality embedded in American culture, as in Kate Chopin’s proto-feminist novella The Awakening and Charles Chesnutt’s exposure of racism and white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South.</p>
<p>The following five works embody both the beauty of 19th-century American literature as well as its ability to change hearts and minds.</p>
<h2>1. <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/293309/incidents-in-the-life-of-a-slave-girl-by-harriet-jacobs/">Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl</a> by Harriet Jacobs (1861)</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/16/incidents-life-slave-girl-harriet-jacobs-true-account-reads-as-novel">Jacobs’ slave autobiography</a> may not be the earliest written or the most famous, but it’s a devastatingly effective piece of storytelling that reads like a novel. Jacobs’ story of surviving slavery is so remarkable a narrative that sheds a rare light on the female experience of slavery. </p>
<p>Written under a pseudonym (Linda Brent), for a long time scholars assumed it must be fiction written by a white abolitionist. It wasn’t until African-American and feminist scholars <a href="http://nbhistoricalsociety.org/Important-Figures/harriet-jacobs-writer/">unearthed the true identity</a> in 1987 of Harriet Jacobs that the truth of her life story was accepted. Her narrative has since become a classic text of resistance, and it’s an essential read for understanding how white supremacy continues to function in America today. </p>
<h2>2. <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/305252/leaves-of-grass/9780241303122.html">Leaves of Grass</a> by Walt Whitman (1855; last new edition 1881)</h2>
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<span class="caption">Engraving of Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaves_of_Grass#/media/File:Walt_Whitman,_steel_engraving,_July_1854.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
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<p>Walt Whitman was a virtually unknown journalist and printer when the first edition of <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-walt-whitmans-leaves-of-grass-and-the-complex-life-of-the-poet-of-america-116055">Leaves of Grass</a> thundered upon the American literary world. The strange book listed no author and contained a casual engraving of Whitman with hand on hip and head cocked to the side. Most importantly, it included poems like the world had never seen before. Poems with long cascading lines and little rhyme or metre to be found. Whitman continually added to and edited Leaves of Grass over the course of his life, crafting his biography in poetry that we now recognise as revolutionary in both form and content. It made Whitman a touchstone for 20th-century poets like Allen Ginsberg and Adrienne Rich.</p>
<h2>3. <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/645811/little-women-by-louisa-may-alcott/">Little Women</a> by Louisa May Alcott (1868-69)</h2>
<p>If you’ve seen the most recent movie adaptation of <a href="https://theconversation.com/little-women-greta-gerwigs-direction-creates-big-emotions-and-deserved-an-oscar-129998">Little Women</a> (or any of the many previous adaptations), you’ll know that there’s something about Alcott’s novel (originally two novels, now published as one) that strikes a chord. Written in the shadow of the Civil War, Little Women draws upon Alcott’s own remarkable family life among famous Transcendentalist writers and thinkers in Concord, Massachusetts. It’s a skillfully crafted book about how the dreams of childhood do and, more often, do not come to fruition.</p>
<h2>4. <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-conjure-woman-and-other-conjure-tales">The Conjure Woman</a> by Charles Chesnutt (1899)</h2>
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<span class="caption">First edition book cover of The Conjure Woman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conjure_Woman#/media/File:Conjure_Woman_book_cover.JPG">Wikimedia</a></span>
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<p>In the late 19th centuries, a genre called “<a href="https://public.wsu.edu/%7Ecampbelld/amlit/lcolor.html">local color</a>” dominated American literary magazines. These stories introduced areas of the increasingly expanding United States to those living in urban centres. African-American writer Charles Chesnutt turned this genre on its head in his series of “conjure” stories – tales of magic and cunning told by a formerly enslaved man named Julius to entertain a white northern businessman. Julius’ stories weave together African-American folklore and Southern Gothic ambience to expose white supremacy in the south before the Civil War. These stories indirectly comment on the racism that continued to haunt the post-Civil War US under a different guise.</p>
<h2>5. <a href="https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/benito-cereno/">Benito Cereno</a> by Herman Melville (1855)</h2>
<p>While these days Melville’s gargantuan 1851 novel Moby-Dick may be more famous (and
you should definitely read that too, when you have a few months to spare), nothing packs a punch quite like the novella Benito Cereno. Based on the story of a real slave revolt on board a ship, the text is paced like a horror story and full of ambivalences and doubled meanings. It reveals the true horror of race-based chattel slavery and anticipates the eruption of violence that would tear apart the United States within a few short years.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/138449/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jillian Spivey Caddell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The problems and ideologies that define American culture were formed in the 19th century.Jillian Spivey Caddell, Lecturer in nineteenth-century American literature, University of KentLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1215272019-08-07T13:10:08Z2019-08-07T13:10:08ZToni Morrison: American literary giant made it her life’s work to ensure that black lives (and voices) matter<p>The peerless novelist and cultural commentator Toni Morrison, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/toni-morrison-dead.html">who has died aged 88</a>, never accepted the received wisdom about anything. In a writing career that spanned half a century – from the appearance of the first of her 11 novels, The Bluest Eye, in 1970, to that of her last essay collection, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/08/mouth-full-of-blood-toni-morrison-review">Mouth Full of Blood</a>, in February 2019 – she unfailingly cast in new light both aspects of human experience and moments in American history that, in our complacency, we thought we already knew.</p>
<p>Morrison was born (as Chloe Wofford) in the depressed Rustbelt town of Lorain, Ohio, to a family of modest financial means and rich cultural and emotional resources. Her father worked as a welder at the nearby US Steel plant and her mother was a key member of the African Methodist Episcopal church choir. Her grandparents – who had migrated north from Alabama and Georgia – were also a significant presence and influence. The music, storytelling and reading from the King James Bible that characterised Morrison’s childhood were to indelibly shape the values and aesthetics of her own writing.</p>
<p>As the first member of her family to go to college, Morrison attended Howard University in Washington DC between 1949-53 (where she majored in English and minored in classics) – and was shocked by the segregation and “colourism” she encountered. She went on to complete her MA in English at Cornell in 1955 and, after various teaching and publishing jobs, became a trade editor for Random House in 1968. </p>
<p>Here, in the New York office, she reshaped the American literary scene by actively seeking out and promoting the fiction of black authors such as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Toni-Cade-Bambara">Toni Cade Bambara</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leon-Forrest">Leon Forrest</a> and <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/jones-gayle-1949/">Gayl Jones</a>. She also edited the autobiographies of <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/people-african-american-history/davis-angela-1944/">Angela Davis</a> and Muhammad Ali.</p>
<p>Morrison was able to focus full time on her writing after the resounding success of her third novel, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/beloved-morrison-song-of-solomon-bluest-eye.html">Song of Solomon</a>, in 1977. Reputed to be one of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ICSvbzZGVE">Barack Obama’s favourite books</a>, this text – which focused on the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s – is typically Morrisonian in its mock-heroic blending of the Bildungsroman (conventions about an individual’s progression to knowledge through experience), with classical epic paradigms, West African myth and African American folkloric wisdom. </p>
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<p>It is notably untypical, at the same time, in its focus on a male protagonist (the strangely named Milkman Dead – names and naming were always all-important to Morrison), and on friendships and family ties between men.</p>
<p>The novel for which Morrison is best known, <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/8/6/20756895/toni-morrison-obituary-legacy-beloved-editor">Beloved</a>, was to follow in 1987 and next came her arguably underrated (because it was insufficiently understood?) masterpiece, <a href="http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/morrison-jazz.html">Jazz</a> (1992). Each of these continues the intense focus on individuals that both society and history have spurned or overlooked. These are those Morrison has called the “disremembered and unaccounted for”, that she initiated with her examination of the interior life of the abused “ugly” black girl, Pecola Breedlove, in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2016/jan/11/the-bluest-eye-toni-morrison-review">The Bluest Eye</a>. </p>
<p>Both the exploration of an infanticidal, formerly enslaved mother’s quest for atonement in Beloved and the depiction in Jazz of the struggles and triumphs of a middle-aged couple, migrants from rural Virginia, in 1920s Harlem, epitomise Morrison at her uncanny best. Her work is unflinching in her attention to the brutal realities of innumerable black lives and attends equally to their creative resilience – combining broad historical sweep with an intimate knowledge of the individual human psyche.</p>
<h2>Nobel laureate</h2>
<p>Morrison was <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/summary/">awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993</a> and numerous other awards and accolades have followed. She is read, studied and revered in numerous languages all over the world. But our sense of loss at her passing should not blind us to the fact that for far too long she was at once a celebrity and insufficiently acknowledged – particularly in the more conservative wings of academia and the media – as a figure of universal (as opposed to “minority”) significance. </p>
<p>Even now, there persists some resistance to including her work on “high literary” syllabi. She once observed wryly, at a book reading, that she was taught in the African American studies departments, in sociology and even in Law faculties, but rarely in the English departments of elite universities. There continues a failure to recognise the extent of her contribution to intellectual history that both her fiction and her extraordinary essays constitute. </p>
<p>Her reclaiming of modernism as primarily a black experience, as well as her insistence that any distinction between the aesthetic and the political is a false dichotomy, and her illuminations of the way colonialism and imperialism consciously fabricated African culture and history as irrelevant, are among her greatest legacies.</p>
<h2>Public intellectual</h2>
<p>Morrison herself was acutely aware of the complex and sometimes insidious nature of her reception, repeatedly addressing this in interviews and comment pieces. She frequently mentioned the initial New York Times review of Sula, for example, which implied that such a powerful writer ought really to focus her attention on something more important than the lives of black women in the Midwest. In a 1983 <a href="https://www.bookdepository.com/Critical-Essays-on-Toni-Morrison-Nellie-McKay/9780816188840">interview with literary critic Nellie McKay</a>, she famously insisted that she was “not <em>like</em> James Joyce, not <em>like</em> Thomas Hardy, not <em>like</em> Faulkner”. Such comparisons at that time, she believed, obscured her specific commitment to black politics and aesthetics.</p>
<p>Never resting on her laurels, throughout her <a href="https://dof.princeton.edu/about/clerk-faculty/emeritus/toni-morrison">professorship at Princeton</a>, her <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/books/21morr.html">guest curatorship at the Louvre</a> in 2006-07, in her retirement and until the very end, she remained profoundly alert to the way her books and essays were read, (mis)understood and (mis)represented. In her role as public intellectual and fearless social commentator, she was prescient about the racist violence that precipitated the Black Lives Matter movement and prophetic about the regressions that the Trump era has entailed. </p>
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<p>Although her unwavering commitment to social justice and radical change perhaps occasionally led her to overexplain – in the forewords she wrote for the Vintage reissues of the novels in the early 2000s, for example, or in her final novel, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/29/god-help-the-child-toni-morrison-review-novel">God Help the Child</a>, which lacks the pitch perfection of its predecessors – we shall ignore her wisdom about power (and how to subvert it) at our peril.</p>
<p>A recent documentary film, <a href="https://www.theforeignershome.com/">The Foreigner’s Home</a>, depicts Morrison drawing parallels between the trauma undergone by captured Africans transported on the slaving ships’ Middle Passage to the Americas, the experience of black residents of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the current worldwide migrant crisis. The very making of such connections, and the way she deploys her customary stunning oratory to expose uncomfortable truths about the nature of “home” and “homelessness”, epitomises all that will endure about the phenomenon that was Toni Morrison. </p>
<p>Above all, the insights of this film insist, as does her fiction implicitly, and her Nobel Prize lecture explicitly, that the future is “in our hands”. The power and the responsibility for making the world a better place lies not with the great artists whose passing we mourn, Morrison always maintained, but with ourselves – the readers and thinkers who have so much work still to do.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121527/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tessa Roynon was awarded an AHRC Postgraduate Award for her doctoral dissertation on Toni Morrison in 2001. She is a senior research fellow at the Rothermere American Institute and a member of the English Faculty, both at the University of Oxford. Tessa is also the author of two books and numerous articles on Toni Morrison.</span></em></p>With her writing, and her work as a publisher, Morrison brought the African-American experience to the fore in the US and around the world.Tessa Roynon, Teaching and Research Fellow, Rothermere American Institute, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1119542019-02-21T22:19:57Z2019-02-21T22:19:57ZA must-read list: The enduring contributions of African American women writers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260101/original/file-20190221-148520-ceix1w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen are on this short list of enduring must-read writers.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Left to right: Nobel Prize, U.S. Library of Congress, Yale archive</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In <em>Mules and Men</em> (1935), anthropologist, creative writer and Harlem Renaissance upstart Zora Neale Hurston relays the evocative folktale “Why the Sister in Black Works Hardest.” Fatigued after the work of Creation, God casts a massive bundle onto the earth. Intrigued by the mysterious object, a white Southern woman during the antebellum era asks her husband to retrieve it. <a href="http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7Ema01/grand-jean/hurston/chapters/Chapter4.html#3">Reluctant to tote the load himself, the master instructs a slave to fetch it</a>. </p>
<p>Soon wearied of the task, the slave then commands his wife to shoulder the burden. She does so, excited at the prospect of exploring the contents. When she opens the package, however, what leaps out at her and Black women for all posterity is none other than hard work.</p>
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<span class="caption">Ann Petry (right) was interviewed after she won a fiction award for ‘The Street.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/2018600204/">All-American news 4 / All American news IV / All-American news reel no. 4/Library of Congress</a></span>
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<p>African American women writers have tackled the hard work of representing a diverse spectrum of lived and imagined experiences, including and especially their own. This labour occurs against the backdrop of centuries-long struggles with racist oppression and gender-based violence, including — but not limited to — slavery’s culture of endemic rape, forced or interrupted motherhood, infanticide, concubinage, fractured families and egregious physical and mental abuse. </p>
<h2>Hard work as groundwork</h2>
<p>Renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass recalls in his 1845 slave narrative how witnessing the serial whippings of his Aunt Hester impacted him “with awful force.” He explains, <a href="http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/abolitn/abaufda3t.html">“it was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle.” </a> </p>
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<p>These ordeals also emerge in slave narratives by women. Harriet Jacobs’ <em>Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl</em> (1861) emphasizes such travails. A target of relentless sexual harassment by her much-older master, Jacobs laments, “When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. <a href="https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html">Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”</a></p>
<p>Once emancipated, African American women still faced staggering impediments when pursuing educational, entrepreneurial and employment opportunities. Political participation meant restrictions on voting rights both as women and as people of colour. Racist caricatures impugned everything from a woman’s intelligence and moral capacity to <a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mfsfront;c=mfs;c=mfsfront;idno=ark5583.0022.105;g=mfsg;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1">her skin color, texture of hair and body shape</a>. Stereotypes like the docile Mammy, the Tragic Mulatta, the clownish Topsy, the oversexed Jezebel, the greedy Welfare Queen, the amoral Hoodrat and the Mad Black Woman (still prevalent today) remain testaments to a history of disrespect and erasure. </p>
<p>Hurston’s tale symbolizes the enduring social struggles Black women have faced living in what feminist critic bell hooks has termed <a href="http://imaginenoborders.org/pdf/zines/UnderstandingPatriarchy.pdf">white supremacist capitalist patriarchy</a>.</p>
<p>In addition to influential autobiographers like Maya Angelou, dramatists like Lorraine Hansberry and poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, fiction writers have consistently demonstrated how imaginative art can simultaneously inform, persuade, entertain, catalyze social change and address individual as well as collective concerns. </p>
<p>Here is a short list of pivotal texts by African American women from the past century. These writers are but a small sample of the artists and intellectuals whose output resisted the force of what contemporary feminist critic <a href="https://www.moyabailey.com/">Moya Bailey</a> has termed <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447395">misogynoir</a>, or the corrosive fusion of anti-Blackness and misogyny prevalent in popular culture today. These women have completed the groundwork — and hard work — of envisioning a more just, inclusive society going forward.</p>
<h2><em>Quicksand</em> (1928) and <em>Passing</em> (1929) by Nella Larsen</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>These novellas follow mixed-race women whose uneasy status on the colour line (including the lure of passing as white) complicates their lives in dangerous, even fatal ways. <em>Passing</em> is revolutionary for its depiction of homoerotic tension between two upper-middle-class Black women. <em>Quicksand</em> offers insight into the exoticization of African American women abroad and the contest between art and domesticity as viable avenues for a fulfilling life.</p>
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<h2><em>Their Eyes Were Watching God</em> (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>This story is the lyrical account of thrice-married Janie Crawford who finds a mature vision of love and fulfillment amid incessant gossip and a difficult family history. The all-Black township of Eatonville, Fla., and the rich “muck” of the Everglades contribute to a portrait of community health, daily striving and resolute self-awareness.</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>The Street</em> (1946) by Ann Petry</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=994&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=994&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=994&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1250&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1250&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1250&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>This social realist novel follows single mother Lutie Johnson as she attempts to make a life for her young son in a predatory urban space. Weathering sexism, racism, classism, poverty and intense personal frustration, Lutie attempts to resist the brutality of the environment that gives the novel its loaded name.</p>
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<h2><em>The Bluest Eye</em> (1970) by Toni Morrison</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1010&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1010&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1010&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1269&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1269&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1269&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>This book is a searing portrait of a young girl’s coming-of-age and eventual undoing in the years following the Great Depression. Tumultuous family dynamics, psychological trauma and incest, the quest for compassion and self-love, and the toxic myth of Black ugliness coalesce in this first novel by the Nobel Laureate and author of neo-slave narrative <em>Beloved</em> (1987).</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>Kindred</em> (1979) by Octavia Butler</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>Oscillating between the 1970s and the early 19th century, this science fiction odyssey (re)connects a contemporary Black woman writer and her white husband with her ancestors on a Maryland plantation. The novel is buoyed up by the dramatic tension of time travel and the juxtaposition of the pre-civil War <a href="https://www.historynet.com/antebellum-period">Antebellum-era</a> with Civil Rights-era racial attitudes, including those about interracial love and allyship.</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>The Women of Brewster Place</em> (1982) by Gloria Naylor</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>Structured like a narrative quilt, these interconnected experiences of seven women span different generations, professions, class backgrounds and understandings of their place in the world. The eroded apartment complex that links them is the backdrop for unbearable pain as well as the promise of transformation and reconciliation.</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>The Color Purple</em> (1982) by Alice Walker</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>A tale of two sisters, Celie and Nettie, this novel constellates their love and longing via letters and imagined conversations across the Atlantic. Unsparing in its critique of domestic violence and toxic masculinity, yet tender in its treatment of various human weaknesses, the novel underscores Black women’s need for self-regard and mutual care. Not only are these acts revolutionary, but they also offer a glimpse of the divine.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111954/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nancy Kang has received grant funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs program. </span></em></p>Here is a small list of pivotal texts by African American women from the past century.Nancy Kang, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Transnational Feminisms and Gender-Based Violence, University of ManitobaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.