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Dr. Janis Alene Mayes is an American author, literary critic and translator and a professor in Africana literature. [1] [2] [3]
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Dr. Janis Alene Mayes is an American author, literary critic and translator and a professor in Africana literature. [1] [2] [3]
Mayes gained her undergraduate degree in French literature at Fisk University. She was a Fulbright Scholar. [4] She had additional study as a scholar at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. In the 1980s she moved to Syracuse, New York, where she began teaching at Syracuse University in the Department of African American Studies; she is currently a professor there. [5] She teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University.
Mayes contributed to French and English literature in the African diaspora. Her specialties are in French translation literary practices. She has translated anthologies and books in francophone literatures. Her translation of A Rain of Words is an anthology of francophone poetry. [6] She is the director of a US study abroad program that examines the historical connections between African Americans and "Black Paris", entitled Paris Noir. The Syracuse University program claims to have shaped Africana-focused cultural programs at leading museums in Paris such as the Louvre. [7] [ citation needed ] Nina Simone, Archie Shepp, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sonia Sanchez and Toni Morrison were involved. [7] She was a board member of the Toni Morrison Society. In 2004, she conversed with Morrison at the Theatre de la Madeleine after the unveiling of a bench commemorating the end of slavery in France. [8] She has also organized cultural literary conferences, including an event with Discover Paris! that celebrated Morrison's literary contribution to the African diaspora. [9]
Mayes is a Fulbright Scholar and became President of the African Literature Association in 2003.
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Véronique Tadjo is a writer, poet, novelist, and artist from Côte d'Ivoire. Having lived and worked in many countries within the African continent and diaspora, she feels herself to be pan-African, in a way that is reflected in the subject matter, imagery and allusions of her work.
Négritude is a framework of critique and literary theory, developed mainly by francophone intellectuals, writers, and politicians of the African diaspora during the 1930s, aimed at raising and cultivating "Black consciousness" across Africa and its diaspora. Négritude gathers writers such as sisters Paulette and Jeanne Nardal, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Abdoulaye Sadji, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon Damas of French Guiana. Négritude intellectuals disavowed colonialism, racism and Eurocentrism. They promoted African culture within a framework of persistent Franco-African ties. The intellectuals employed Marxist political philosophy, in the Black radical tradition. The writers drew heavily on a surrealist literary style, and some say they were also influenced somewhat by the Surrealist stylistics, and in their work often explored the experience of diasporic being, asserting one's self and identity, and ideas of home, home-going and belonging.
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.
Seymour Mayne is a Canadian author, editor, or translator of more than seventy books and monographs. As he has written about the Jewish Canadian poets, his work is recognizable by its emphasis on the human dimension, the translation of the experience of the immigrant and the outsider, the finding of joy in the face of adversity, and the linking with tradition and a strong concern with history in its widest sense.
African literature is literature from Africa, either oral ("orature") or written in African and Afro-Asiatic languages. Examples of pre-colonial African literature can be traced back to at least the fourth century AD. The best-known is the Kebra Negast, or "Book of Kings."
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.
Roberta Fernández is a Tejana novelist, scholar, critic and arts advocate. She is known for her novel Intaglio and for her work editing several award-winning women writers. She was a professor in Romance languages & literatures and women's studies at the University of Georgia.
Willis Barnstone is an American poet, religious scholar, and translator. He was born in Lewiston, Maine and lives in Oakland, California. He has translated works by Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pedro Salinas, Pablo Neruda, and Wang Wei, as well as the New Testament and fragments by Sappho and pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (Ἡράκλειτος).
Akasha Gloria Hull is an American poet, educator, writer, and critic whose work in African-American literature and as a Black feminist activist has helped shape Women's Studies. As one of the architects of Black Women's Studies, her scholarship and activism has increased the prestige, legitimacy, respect, and popularity of feminism and African-American studies.
Colleen J. McElroy is an American poet, short story writer, editor, memoirist.
The Department of African American Studies (AAS) at Syracuse University is an academic department supporting Africana studies. It is located at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. It is part of the Syracuse University College of Arts and Sciences. The Department supports an external community based unit that is a part of the department and has played a central role in shaping culture and arts in the Syracuse city community - Community Folk Art Center (CFAC). It has also supported the Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company (PRPAC) in the past. These are both independent units that were housed or founded by the department The department also houses the award-winning library, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. It currently oversees the internationally recognized university wide initiative "Africa Initiative". Its other projects include the nationally recognized "Paris Noir" and the Ford Foundation Environmental Justice and Gender Project. It has had a long history of activism within the university, surrounding community, and abroad through its strong international network. The AAS department has housed many renowned scholars in African, Afro-Caribbean, African-American, Afro-Latin American, and Afro-European studies.
Wangui wa Goro is a Kenyan academic, social critic, researcher, translator and writer based in the UK. As a public intellectual she has an interest in the development of African languages and literatures, as well as being consistently involved with the promotion of literary translation internationally, regularly speaking and writing on the subject. Professor Wangui wa Goro is a writer, translator, translation studies scholar and pioneer who has lived and lectured in different parts of the world including the UK, USA, Germany and South Africa.
Black Orpheus was a Nigeria-based literary journal founded in 1957 by German expatriate editor and scholar Ulli Beier that has been described as "a powerful catalyst for artistic awakening throughout West Africa". Its name derived from a 1948 essay by Jean-Paul Sartre, "Orphée Noir", published as a preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, edited by Léopold Sédar Senghor. Beier wrote in an editorial statement in the inaugural volume that "it is still possible for a Nigerian child to leave a secondary school with a thorough knowledge of English literature, but without even having heard of Léopold Sédar Senghor or Aimé Césaire", so Black Orpheus became a platform for Francophone as well as Anglophone writers.
Trudier Harris is an American literary scholar, author, and Professor Emerita at the University of Alabama. She was the J. Carlyle Sitterson Distinguished Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Irène Assiba d'Almeida is a Beninese poet, translator and literary scholar. She is Professor of Francophone Studies and French at the University of Arizona.
Teresa N. Washington is an African American academic, author, activist, and public speaker. She is known for her research on Àjẹ́, a Yorùbá term that defines both a spiritual power inherent in Africana women and the persons who have that power. Washington's book Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Àjẹ́ in Africana Literature is the first comprehensive book-length study of Àjẹ́. Her book The Architects of Existence: Àjẹ́ in Yoruba Cosmology, Ontology, and Orature gives an in-depth analysis of the power of Àjẹ́ in the Yorùbá ethos and worldview.
Vera Wülfing-Leckie was a German-born British homeopath and a translator of African literature. She lived in Africa for much of her adult life, and translated, among others, works by Boubacar Boris Diop from Senegal and Véronique Tadjo from Côte d'Ivoire. Diop's novel Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks was on the shortlist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award.
Iryna Shuvalova is a Ukrainian poet, translator and scholar.
Karen Van Dyck is an American literary critic and translator. She is currently the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Language and Literature in the Classics Department of Columbia University in the City of New York.