Visualizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary TraditionNegative stereotypes of African Americans have long been disseminated through the visual arts. This original and incisive study examines how black writers use visual tropes as literary devices to challenge readers' conceptions of black identity. Lena Hill charts two hundred years of African American literary history, from Phillis Wheatley to Ralph Ellison, and engages with a variety of canonical and lesser-known writers. Chapters interweave literary history, museum culture, and visual analysis of numerous illustrations with close readings of Booker T. Washington, Gwendolyn Bennett, Zora Neale Hurston, Melvin Tolson, and others. Together, these sections register the degree to which African American writers rely on vision - its modes, consequences, and insights - to demonstrate black intellectual and cultural sophistication. Hill's provocative study will interest scholars and students of African American literature and American literature more broadly. |
Contents
Witnessing Moral Authority in PreAbolition Literature | 23 |
Picturing Education and Labor in Washington and Du Bois | 55 |
Gazing upon Plastic Art in the Harlem Renaissance | 81 |
Seeing by the Rules of the Natural | 119 |
Gaining Modernist Perspective in the | 148 |
Other editions - View all
Visualizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary ... Lena Hill Limited preview - 2014 |
Visualizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary ... Lena Hill No preview available - 2017 |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic African American literature African American writers American Literature American Museum anthropologists audience Bathesda black Americans black art black artists black identity black women black writers Booker celebrate chapter character color creative critics cultural Curator Curator's depictions display Douglass ekphrasis exhibits experience eyes fiction focus Folder frame Franz Boas Frederick Douglass gaze Gwendolyn Bennett Harlem Gallery Harlem Renaissance Helga Hickman Hideho highlights Ibid images of black interpret investment Janie John labor literary Madonna Melvin Tolson modern modernist moral Moses narrative natural history museum Negro novel painting Phillis Wheatley philosophy photographs Picture Book poem poet speaker poetry political portrait portrayal protagonists race racial Ralph Ellison readers reveals role scenes sexual sight slave slavery sophisticated space Spencer texts tion Tolson traditional trope Tuskegee U.S. society University Press verse visual art Visualizing Blackness W. E. B. Du Bois Washington Wheatley's York Zora Neale Hurston