Why is african american literature important

There is a problem with people of color in literature being misrepresented. This problem not only incorrectly proves the media right by portraying these stereotypes, but they also affect the way the people who read them leading them to believe the subject being depicted inaccurately portrayed.

This may also affect young writers who read this as an misrepresentation of themselves. Black culture has evolved over the years. The slave narratives show a different side of our story due to the vast differences of upbringing. Throughout the decades, our music has changed, the characters in our books have changed, our style has changed too. Black books can show the growth of change. In its most negative guise, the subconscious begins to associate a Black experience with race relations, slavery, violence or erasure.

It's a nuanced issue, but it feeds into a dysfunctional value system that seeps into everyday lives. This allows non-Black audiences to distance themselves from stories about slavery, race and history simply because they happened in the past and are not explicitly connected to their current world.

With contemporary, positive stories one has to engage with Black people. Specific to literature, we as Black publishers see first-hand how Black writers are marginalised or hidden by the mainstream. Examples include publications refusing to review a book because they have dismissed it as too niche too Black or not Black enough and not of interest to their readers regardless of the quality of the writing.

Their response implies that there is not enough space for equal representation or that literature is not judged on content, rather it is judged on the authors perceived importance to society. Another common occurrence is a literary festival or event only having space for one Black writer on a panel thus rejecting all other Black writers regardless of their merit. New York: HarperCollins, Marvell, Andrew. Ryder, is a man that has left slavery behind and has been able to make an entire new life based in prestige, becoming the leader of the leader of the affluent Blue Vein Society, and being known throughout the town as an influential, educated person.

The only reason he has been able to build himself up to this high of stature is by disengaging from his roots as a slave. However, his entire new life becomes challenged when an old slave woman, not well educated or possessing high stature comes to visit him.

Poulin Jr.. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Contemporary American Poetry-5th Edition. He demonstrated that this period was not just a matter of freedom for the black man but mostly a matter of being treated equally as the white man.

Chesnutt emphasized his writing on two main themes, personal achievement and equal treatment. In his journal, he focuses on ambition and determination as the main keys to success. During the Reconstruction period, one of the main issues Chesnutt was affected by was the evident inequality between white and black writers. In one of his journal, this Afro-American writer give as an example the white writers who were really successful writing about t In my works, black experimental writing refers to the processes by which authors of African descent in the United States and the Caribbean have used writing to contest and transform the meanings afforded to race, and the boundaries of literature and literary expression.

My particular interest is in the rapid explosion of different kinds of experimentation in the period following the U. Civil Rights Movement and decolonization in the Caribbean. The gains and limitations of those movements — and the waning importance of positive representation and writing in ways that can be construed, rightly or wrongly, as appealing for social recognition — open up new terrain for literature as much as they open up new possibilities for black life.

To some extent, almost all black writing is experimental insofar as it tries to make literature accountable to black life in its complexity, and black lives in their singularity. It changes as historical conditions change. In this way, we could say that the conceptual segregation makes non-whites, and perhaps black people in particular, seem to be an exception to — or qualification of — the human.

Race as conceptual segregation precedes and determines residential segregation. It comes to govern what W. The book stresses the importance of the thought that emerges beyond the boundaries of acceptable thought — as transformative.