Multilingual America

Multilingual America
Author: Werner Sollors
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 1998-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780814780930

Aside from the occasional controversy over "Official English" campaigns, language remains the blind spot in the debate over multiculturalism. Considering its status as a nation of non-English speaking aborigines and of immigrants with many languages, America exhibits a curious tunnel vision about cultural and literary forms that are not in English. How then have non-English speaking Americans written about their experiences in this country? And what can we learn-about America, immigration and ethnicity-from them? Arguing that multilingualism is perhaps the most important form of diversity, Multilingual America calls attention to-and seeks to correct-the linguistic parochialism that has defined American literary study. By bringing together essays on important works by, among others, Yiddish, Chinese American, German American, Italian American, Norwegian American, and Spanish American writers, Werner Sollors here presents a fuller view of multilingualism as a historical phenomenon and as an ongoing way of life. At a time when we are just beginning to understand the profound effects of language acquisition on the development of the brain, Multilingual America forces us to broaden what in fact constitutes American literature.

Word, Image, and the New Negro

Word, Image, and the New Negro
Author: Anne Elizabeth Carroll
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2005
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780253345837

This book focuses on the collaborative illustrated volumes published during the Harlem Renaissance, in which African Americans used written and visual texts to shape ideas about themselves and to redefine African American identity. Anne Elizabeth Carroll argues that these volumes show how participants in the movement engaged in the processes of representation and identity formation in sophisticated and largely successful ways. Though they have received little scholarly attention, these volumes constitute an important aspect of the cultural production of the Harlem Renaissance. Word, Image, and the New Negro marks the beginning of a long-overdue recovery of this legacy and points the way to a greater understanding of the potential of texts to influence social change. Anne Elizabeth Carroll is Assistant Professor of English at Wichita State University.

Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro

Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro
Author: Alain LeRoy Locke
Publisher: Black Classic Press
Total Pages: 108
Release: 1980
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780933121058

The contributors to this edition include W.E.B Du Bois, Arthur Schomburg, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen. Harlem Mecca is an indispensable aid toward gaining a better understanding of the Harlem Renaissance.

The Forum

The Forum
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 954
Release: 1924
Genre: United States
ISBN:

Current political, social, scientific, education, and literary news written about by many famous authors and reform movements.

Crisis

Crisis
Author: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
Publisher:
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1924
Genre: African Americans
ISBN:

Hearing the Hurt

Hearing the Hurt
Author: Eric King Watts
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2012-06-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 081731766X

Hearing the Hurt is an examination of how the New Negro movement, also known as the Harlem Renaissance, provoked and sustained public discourse and deliberation about black culture and identity in the early twentieth century. Borrowing its title from a W. E. B. Du Bois essay, Hearing the Hurt explores the nature of rhetorical invention, performance, and mutation by focusing on the multifaceted issues brought forth in the New Negro movement, which Watts treats as a rhetorical struggle over what it means to be properly black and at the same time properly American. Who determines the meaning of blackness? How should African Americans fit in with American public culture? In what way should black communities and families be structured? The New Negro movement animated dynamic tension among diverse characterizations of African American civil rights, intellectual life, and well-being, and thus it provides a fascinating and complex stage on which to study how ideologies clash with each other to become accepted universally. Watts, conceptualizing the artistic culture of the time as directly affected by the New Negro public discourse, maps this rhetorical struggle onto the realm of aesthetics and discusses some key incarnations of New Negro rhetoric in select speeches, essays, and novels.

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes
Author: Eric B White
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748645225

Provides an alternative account of the modernist transatlanticTransatlantic Avant-Gardes offers a revisionary account of the evolution of twentieth-century modernism. Complimenting recent studies of modernist expatriates, Eric White explores new points of contact between European and American avant-gardes to place 'located' figures such as William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, and Alfred Kreymborg back into the 'global design' of literary modernism. Focusing on artist-run 'little magazines' (including Others, Contact, The Little Review, Blast, The Dial, Fire!!, and Pagany) and selected fine press publications and mainstream periodicals, White also reconsiders the boundaries that traditionally divide modernist literature into 'exile' and 'localist', or 'regionalist' and 'cosmopolitan', factions. Thus, the book proposes a version of localist modernism that prioritises issues of geographic and textual 'location' to deliver a 'networked' approach to American modernism in the transatlantic context. Combining literary-historical, textual, and cultural criticism, Transatlantic Avant-Gardes provides a new reading of the specialised literary networks that interrogated the relationship between geographic place, textual space and national identity in the modernist transatlantic.