Race and Gender in the Making of an African American Literary Tradition

Download or read book Race and Gender in the Making of an African American Literary Tradition written by Aimable Twagilimana and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the ways in which race and gender have shaped and continue to inform African American literature. African American texts create a black literary and cultural identity interpreting and recording the survival of their cultures shattered by years of slavery. Black women writers, who have to deal with both racism and sexism, use additional strategies to undo this double reduction. They strive to invent a new language to talk about their experience and their lives as black and as women. After a typology of the African American text, the book proposes a reading of major African American writers including Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Charles Chesnutt, Booker T. Washington, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.