African Americans and the Classics

African Americans and the Classics
Author: Margaret Malamud
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2016-10-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786720280

A new wave of research in black classicism has emerged in the 21st century that explores the role played by the classics in the larger cultural traditions of black America, Africa and the Caribbean. Addressing a gap in this scholarship, Margaret Malamud investigates why and how advocates for abolition and black civil rights (both black and white) deployed their knowledge of classical literature and history in their struggle for black liberty and equality in the United States. African Americans boldly staked their own claims to the classical world: they deployed texts, ideas and images of ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt in order to establish their authority in debates about slavery, race, politics and education. A central argument of this book is that knowledge and deployment of Classics was a powerful weapon and tool for resistance-as improbable as that might seem now-when wielded by black and white activists committed to the abolition of slavery and the end of the social and economic oppression of free blacks. The book significantly expands our understanding of both black history and classical reception in the United States.

Ulysses in Black

Ulysses in Black
Author: Patrice D. Rankine
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2008-12-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0299220036

In this groundbreaking work, Patrice D. Rankine asserts that the classics need not be a mark of Eurocentrism, as they have long been considered. Instead, the classical tradition can be part of a self-conscious, prideful approach to African American culture, esthetics, and identity. Ulysses in Black demonstrates that, similar to their white counterparts, African American authors have been students of classical languages, literature, and mythologies by such writers as Homer, Euripides, and Seneca. Ulysses in Black closely analyzes classical themes (the nature of love and its relationship to the social, Dionysus in myth as a parallel to the black protagonist in the American scene, misplaced Ulyssean manhood) as seen in the works of such African American writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen. Rankine finds that the merging of a black esthetic with the classics—contrary to expectations throughout American culture—has often been a radical addressing of concerns including violence against blacks, racism, and oppression. Ultimately, this unique study of black classicism becomes an exploration of America’s broader cultural integrity, one that is inclusive and historic. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

Three African-American Classics

Three African-American Classics
Author: Booker T. Washington
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2007-02-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0486457575

"This Dover edition ...is an original compilation of unabridged editions of the following works"--T.p. verso.

African American Writers & Classical Tradition

African American Writers & Classical Tradition
Author: William W. Cook
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2011-06-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0226789985

Constraints on freedom, education, and individual dignity have always been fundamental in determining who is able to write, when, and where. Considering the singular experience of the African American writer, William W. Cook and James Tatum here argue that African American literature did not develop apart from canonical Western literary traditions but instead grew out of those literatures, even as it adapted and transformed the cultural traditions and religions of Africa and the African diaspora along the way.Tracing the interaction between African American writers and the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome, from the time of slavery and its aftermath to the civil rights era and on into the present, the authors offer a sustained and lively discussion of the life and work of Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Rita Dove, among other highly acclaimed poets, novelists, and scholars. Assembling this brilliant and diverse group of African American writers at a moment when our understanding of classical literature is ripe for change, the authors paint an unforgettable portrait of our own reception of “classic” writing, especially as it was inflected by American racial politics.

African American Classics in Criminology and Criminal Justice

African American Classics in Criminology and Criminal Justice
Author: Shaun L Gabbidon
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2002
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780761924333

"This collection of writings is crucially important, in part, because it reminds us the theoretical paradigms of these and other African American scholars are excluded when crime, its causes, and its control are discussed by criminologists, criminal justice practitioners, and policy makers. To understand crime fully, the perspectives advanced by these scholars must become an integral part of discussions about who is a criminal and which public policies will best control crime." --From the forward by Anne Thomas Sulton, Ph.D, J.D. From W.E.B. Dubois through Lee Brown, this anthology provides a collection of the key articles in criminology and criminal justice written by black scholars. Available in a single volume for the first time, the articles collected in this book reflect the voices of African-American scholars and display the diversity of perspectives sought after in today's academic community. Crime in the African-American community is examined from social, economic and political perspectives, and the historical context of each article is provided by the editors. Spanning the 20th century, these works present a historical chronology of African-American views on crime and its control with theoretical perspectives that have often been tangential to mainstream scholarship. For your courses in: Criminological Theory Race and Crime Crime and Social Policy Minorities and Criminal Justice

The Golden Age of the Classics in America

The Golden Age of the Classics in America
Author: Carl J Richard
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2009-07-23
Genre:
ISBN: 0674054490

In a masterful study Carl Richard explores how the Greek and Roman classics became enshrined in American antebellum culture. For the first time, knowledge of the classics extended beyond aristocratic males to the middle class, women, African Americans, and frontier settlers. The Civil War led to a radical alteration of the educational system in a way that steadily eroded the preeminence of the classics.

African Americans and the Classics

African Americans and the Classics
Author: Margaret Malamud
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2019-01-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1788315790

A new wave of research in black classicism has emerged in the 21st century that explores the role played by the classics in the larger cultural traditions of black America, Africa and the Caribbean. Addressing a gap in this scholarship, Margaret Malamud investigates why and how advocates for abolition and black civil rights (both black and white) deployed their knowledge of classical literature and history in their struggle for black liberty and equality in the United States. African Americans boldly staked their own claims to the classical world: they deployed texts, ideas and images of ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt in order to establish their authority in debates about slavery, race, politics and education. A central argument of this book is that knowledge and deployment of Classics was a powerful weapon and tool for resistance-as improbable as that might seem now-when wielded by black and white activists committed to the abolition of slavery and the end of the social and economic oppression of free blacks. The book significantly expands our understanding of both black history and classical reception in the United States.

The Ebony Column

The Ebony Column
Author: Eric Ashley Hairston
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2013-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1572339845

In The Ebony Column, Eric Ashley Hairston begins a new thread in the ongoing conversation about the influence of Greek and Roman antiquity on U.S. civilization and education. While that discussion has yielded many exceptional insights into antiquity and the American experience, it has so regularly elided the African American component that all classical influence on black writing and thought seems to vanish. That omission, Hairston contends, is disturbing not least because of its longevity— from an early period of overt stereotyping and institutionalized racism right up to the contemporary and, one would hope, more cosmopolitan and enlightened era. Challenging and correcting that persistent shortsightedness, Hairston examines several prominent black writers’ and scholars’ deep investment in the classics as individuals, as well as the broader cultural investment in the classics and the values of the ancient world. Beginning with the late-eighteenth-century verse of Phillis Wheatley, whose classically inspired poems functioned as a kind of Trojan horse to defeat white oppression, Hairston goes on to consider the oratory of Frederick Douglass, whose rhetoric and ideas of virtue were much influenced by Cicero, and the writings of educator Anna Julia Cooper, whose classical training was a key source of her vibrant feminism. Finally, he offers a fresh examination of W. E. B. DuBois’s seminal The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and its debt to antiquity, which volumes of commentary have largely overlooked. The first book to appear in a new series, Classicism in American Culture, The Ebony Column passionately demonstrates how the myths, cultures, and ideals of antiquity helped African Americans reconceptualize their role in a Euro-American world determined to make them mere economic commodities and emblems of moral and intellectual decay. To figures such as Wheatley, Douglass, Cooper, and DuBois, classical literature offered striking moral, intellectual, and philosophical alternatives to a viciously exclusionary vision of humanity, Africanity, the life of the citizen, and the life of the mind.

Blacks in Antiquity

Blacks in Antiquity
Author: Frank M. Snowden
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 1970
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674076266

Investigates the participation of black Africans, usually referred to as "Ethiopians," by the Greek and Romans, in classical civilization, concluding that they were accepted by pagans and Christians without prejudice.