Frances Smith Foster

Last updated
Foster, Frances Smith (1944– ). (1994). Witnessing slavery : the development of ante-bellum slave narratives. The University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN   978-0-299-14214-8. OCLC   985816329.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  • Foster, Frances Smith. (1993). Written by herself literary production by African American women, 1746-1892. Indiana University Press. ISBN   0-253-20786-X. OCLC   1178676105.
  • Andrews, William L.; Frances Smith Foster; Trudier Harris, eds. (1997). The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Oxford University Press. ISBN   0-19-506510-7. OCLC   35305158.
  • Related Research Articles

    The slave narrative is a type of literary genre involving the (written) autobiographical accounts of enslaved persons, particularly Africans enslaved in the Americas, though many other examples exist. Over six thousand such narratives are estimated to exist; about 150 narratives were published as separate books or pamphlets. In the United States during the Great Depression (1930s), more than 2,300 additional oral histories on life during slavery were collected by writers sponsored and published by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program. Most of the 26 audio-recorded interviews are held by the Library of Congress.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Frances Ellen Watkins Harper</span> African-American author and activist

    Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an American abolitionist, suffragist, poet, temperance activist, teacher, public speaker, and writer. Beginning in 1845, she was one of the first African American women to be published in the United States.

    Mari Evans was an African-American poet, writer, and dramatist associated with the Black Arts Movement. Evans received grants and awards including a lifetime achievement award from the Indianapolis Public Library Foundation. Her poetry is known for its lyrical simplicity and the directness of its themes. She also wrote nonfiction and edited Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, an important and timely critical anthology devoted to the work of 15 writers. Evans died at the age of 97 in Indianapolis, Indiana.

    African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.

    <i>Iola Leroy</i> 1892 novel by Frances Harper

    Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, an 1892 novel by Frances E. W. Harper, is one of the first novels published by an African-American woman. While following what has been termed the "sentimental" conventions of late nineteenth-century writing about women, it also deals with serious social issues of education for women, passing, miscegenation, abolition, reconstruction, temperance, and social responsibility.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Johnnetta Cole</span> American anthropologist

    Johnnetta Betsch Cole is an American anthropologist, educator, museum director, and college president. Cole was the first female African-American president of Spelman College, a historically black college, serving from 1987 to 1997. She was president of Bennett College from 2002 to 2007. During 2009–2017 she was Director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art. Cole served as the national chair and 7th president for the National Council of Negro Women from 2018 to 2022.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Dorothy B. Porter</span> American librarian (1905–1995)

    Dorothy Louise Porter Wesley was a librarian, bibliographer and curator, who built the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University into a world-class research collection. She was the first African American to receive a library science degree from Columbia University. Porter published numerous bibliographies on African American history. When she realized that the Dewey Decimal System had only two classification numbers for African Americans, one for slavery and one for colonization, she created a new classification system that ordered books by genre and author.

    Nellie Yvonne McKay was an American academic and author who was the Evjue-Bascom Professor of American and African-American Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she also taught in English and women's studies, and is best known as the co-editor of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Saidiya Hartman</span> American academic and writer (born 1961)

    Saidiya Hartman is an American academic and writer focusing on African-American studies. She is currently a university professor at Columbia University in their English department. Her work focuses on African-American literature, cultural history, photography and ethics, and the intersections of law and literature.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Victoria Earle Matthews</span> American author and activist (1861–1907)

    Victoria Earle Matthews was an American author, essayist, newspaperwoman, settlement worker, and activist. She was born into slavery in Fort Valley, Georgia, and moved to New York City with her family after emancipation. There, she briefly attended school and worked as a domestic servant to help her family.

    <i>Dessa Rose</i> 1986 novel by Sherley Anne Williams

    Dessa Rose is a novel by Sherley Anne Williams published in 1986 by HarperCollins. The book is a neo-slave narrative, incorporating many elements of traditional slave narratives. The book is divided into three sections: "The Darky", "The Wench" and "The Negress". The sections represent a different stage of growth in the life of the protagonist, Dessa Rose.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Meriwether</span> American novelist (1923–2023)

    Louise Meriwether was an American novelist, essayist, journalist and activist, as well as a writer of biographies of historically important African Americans for children. She is best known for her first novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970), which draws on autobiographical elements about growing up in Harlem, New York City, during the Depression and in the era after the Harlem Renaissance.

    Hortense J. Spillers is an American literary critic, Black Feminist scholar and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University. A scholar of the African diaspora, Spillers is known for her essays on African-American literature, collected in Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003, and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, a collection edited by Spillers published by Routledge in 1991.

    Dwight A. McBride is an American academic administrator and scholar of race and literary studies. From April 16, 2020, to August 2023, he served as the ninth president of The New School. McBride previously served as provost, executive vice president for academic affairs, and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of African American studies at Emory University.

    Kali Nicole Gross is an American historian. She is an African American Studies professor at Emory University. She is also a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians, and the 2019–2021 National Publications Director of the Association of Black Women Historians. She is an expert on the experiences of African American women in the United States criminal justice system in the late 1800s and early 1900s. She has written about how these experiences reflect the roles of race and gender in late nineteenth-century urban America, particularly Philadelphia.

    Joyce Viola Hansen is an American writer and retired schoolteacher. She has earned recognition for her books for children and youth, particularly her historical fiction and non-fiction works about African-American history.

    Mildred Pitts Walter is an American children's book writer, known for her works featuring African-American protagonists. Walter has written over 20 books for young readers, including fiction and nonfiction. Several of her books have won or been named to the honor list of the Coretta Scott King Awards. A native of Louisiana who later moved to Denver, Walter was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. She published her autobiography, Something Inside So Strong: Life in Pursuit of Choice, Courage, and Change, in 2019.

    Noliwe Rooks is an American academic and author. She is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor and chair of Africana Studies at Brown University and is the founding director of the Segrenomics Lab at Brown. She previously held the W.E.B. Du Bois Professorship of Literature at Cornell University.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Krauthamer</span> American historian (born 1967)

    Barbara Krauthamer is an American historian specializing in African-American history. She has been the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University since 2023. Prior to this, Krauthamer was the dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 2020 until 2023.

    William Leake Andrews is an American Professor Emeritus of English at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a scholar of early African-American literature. With books such as To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (1986), Andrews helped establish the academic study of African-American literature in the late twentieth century. In 2017, Andrews received the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature from the Modern Language Association.

    References

    1. Koolish, Lynda (2001). African American Writers: Portraits and Visions. Univ. Press of Mississippi. ISBN   978-1-57806-258-4.
    2. 1 2 3 4 5 ""Frances Smith Foster"". Notable Black American Women . Gale. 2002. Retrieved 8 August 2020 via Gale In Context: Biography.
    3. Foster, Frances Smith (1976). Slave narratives: text and social context (Thesis). OCLC   917928917.
    4. 1 2 3 Moody, Joycelyn; Elizabeth Cali (2013). "A Tribute to Frances Smith Foster". Legacy. 30 (2): 219–225. doi:10.5250/legacy.30.2.0219. ISSN   0748-4321. JSTOR   10.5250/legacy.30.2.0219. S2CID   154460943.
    5. "The Study of African American Women's Writing: Pasts & Futures". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 8 March 2019. Retrieved 2020-08-02.
    6. 1 2 Koolish, Lynda (2001). African American Writers: Portraits and Visions. Univ. Press of Mississippi. p. 38. ISBN   978-1-57806-258-4.
    7. "The Norton Anthology of African American Literature". wwnorton.com. Retrieved 2020-08-02.
    8. Mathilda B. Canter, Recipient of the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in the Practice of Psychology, American Psychological Association (APA), 2002, doi:10.1037/e565682006-014
    9. 1 2 "Hubbell Medal 2010 | Frances Smith Foster | Report of the Hubbell Award Committee". www.als-mla.org. Retrieved 2020-08-02.
    10. "Foster's contributions to literature honored". www.emory.edu. January 12, 2011. Retrieved 2020-08-02.
    11. "NewsCenter | SDSU | Humanities Vital for Personal Growth". newscenter.sdsu.edu. Retrieved 2020-08-02.
    12. "Frances Smith Foster and Clayborne Carson". www.brandeis.edu. Retrieved 2020-08-02.
    13. Tuttle, Jennifer S. (2013-11-29). "Introduction". Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. 30 (2): 217–218. doi:10.5250/legacy.30.2.0217. ISSN   1534-0643.
    Frances Smith Foster
    Frances Smith Foster at Emory School of Law.jpg
    Foster interviewed at Emory School of Law in 2012
    Born (1944-02-08) February 8, 1944 (age 80)
    Children3
    Academic background
    Alma mater University of California, San Diego
    University of Southern California
    Miami University
    Thesis Slave narratives : text and social context  (1976)