Running notes on Black Aesthetic Movement

• how slave narrative came to be called literature.
• the slave narrative start a literary tradition.
• emotive language. emotive situation. the pathos of the position of the narrator.
• oral histories
• language is strikingly similar in structure, content and theme.

1. a corpus of non- fiction and fiction, oral and written, which asserts the equality, differentness -and sometimes superiority- of Blacks and Black- American way of doing and perceiving things.
2. a set of political principles, primarily consistent in their outrage against inequality.
3. a brace of ethical and artistic critiria which will be considered valid or invalid writing by Black Americans.
4. a human code for translating the mute matter of a world in which certain races and inhuman system combine to destroy other races and more humane systems.

 

Josiah Henson (1789- 1883) - “Truth Stranger than Fiction” (1858)

• feeling of pride in fulfilling his slave duties to his master.
• Henson tells of his decision not to choose freedom for himself and his compatriots when it is effortlessly graspable.

 

The three types of emotive language in a slave narrative:

1. prejudicial- negetive connotation
2. prepossessive- positive
3. euphemistic- expression of understatement or grim humour.

“Each man to his own Canada” -Ishmael Reed.

[Canada became a state of mind. Where men with black skin may be free.]

“The life and Times of Frederick Douglass” - Frederick Douglass(1881)

• “American Slavery”
• makes satire of the celebration of the Fourth of July as day of “independence” for all.
• “what the negro wants”
• “immediate, unconditional, and universal enfranchise of the black man”.

Booker T. Washington: advocate a sort of seperate, skilled guild of black blue-collar workers who would be content with their stations.

• education as an organic part of Black self- realisation.

W. E. B. Du Bous: often called the father of sociology in US.

US as a literate, print- sensitive culture. as opposed to preliterate, oral and aural- sensitive culture.

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