Judy Lightfoot, PhD - Greatness in African American Lit: 4 Schools of Thought

WHAT MAKES FOR GREATNESS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE?

FOUR MAJOR SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT

(1) A Separatist emphasis -- Black Affirmation:
In this view, African American literature should focus on honoring and affirming traditional Black values of personal intuition, spiritual power, emotional force, sensuous intensity, and communal belonging &emdash; especially as these values derive from African traditions rooted in the primal closeness to nature that develops in tribal agricultural and hunting economies. In African traditions, the world is imagined as a loose system of powerful forces, all of which are necessary and important, and human beings embody and express these forces. Arts are not separate from everyday work and life, and are expressions of individual or personal essence in relation to the clan or group.
One example of this school of thought is the mid-20th-century "Negritude" movement to establish the value of African forms and styles from a non-Western perspective and in their own right instead of as a tributary of or adjunct to Western culture. Some in this movement even claimed that Black values and styles are superior to Western White values, which (they say) honor reason, technology, and a narrow individualism within large-scale logical, bureaucratic, abstract, or mechanical systems.

(2) A Separatist emphasis -- Black Protest:
According to this view, Black literature should emphasize protest more than affirmation &emdash; remembering, exposing, and fighting against past and present oppression and rejection of Black people by Whites in America and Africa. Major themes and subjects:

Survival as have-nots or exiles in a White world.
Intensity of despair, rage.
Subversion: deliberate dissonance (cf. blues and jazz); intentional deviance from White norms (e.g., being ba-ad) , conscious iconoclasm; cultural or political rebellion and resistance, anti-Puritanism, critical perspectives on Whites and White society from the bottom or from the outside.
Liberation: personal freedom here-and-now is preferable to any future salvation. What threatens the essence of the person must be defused or destroyed.

(3) An Assimilationist emphasis ("Middle-Class" or Bourgeois Black Art):

According to this school of thought, "The best Black literature should be indistinguishable from White middle-class mainstream literature." Its themes, styles, characters, and settings don't need to be "Black" at all.
"As the Negro middle class becomes differentiated from the masses by virtue of income, education, and social status, it looks back upon its origins with embarrassment and shame. Negro folk culture, this rising middle class would argue, is the creation of an illiterate peasantry. It is vulgar and often shocking, permeated with the smell of poverty, reminiscent of our degradation and our pain. However well it may attest to what we were, it contains nothing of enduring value for us or for our children. On the contrary, it is a major obstacle to integration. The white middle class will accept us only to the extent that we become like them. It is therefore necessary to expunge every trace of Negro-ness' from our behavior" -- so the middle-class African American "assimilationist" would argue. (Robert Bone, "Ralph Ellison and the Uses of Imagination")

(4) An American emphasis (eclectic and inclusive):

"Great American writers, whether Black or not, are influenced by all American traditions, and by traditions around the world, and they use everything these traditions offer them." Black American culture is inseparable from White American culture because American culture is (among other things) both Black and White. Black artists rightly resist any pressure (e.g., the pressures bearing on Black artists during the Harlem Renaissance) to produce racial, political, or social simplifications of experience.
Within and through the confluences of many streams of awareness and expression (Puritan, Yankee, Native American, British, Hispanic, African, Caribbean, British, European, Asian, agricultural, cosmopolitan, high art traditions and folkways), the individual American artist finds a voice to speak his or her particular vision. By By using various conflicting sources for and claims upon his art, writers make themselves and their world whole, uniting divided identities and loyalties.

"4 SCHOOLS" WORKSHEET FOR STUDENTS:

1. Read the above material carefully until you understand it.

2. Decide, using details to support your decision, which "school of thought" about African American literature each of the major works below reflects. For each of the 4, consider: (a) Any broad ideas or themes, stated or implied in the work, which directly or indirectly communicate the school to which the work seems to belong. (b) Any other content within the work (character, situation, setting) (c) The style of the work.

3. Use this worksheet for notes:

Their Eyes Were Watching God