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Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. 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.
Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, theorist, educator, and social critic who was a Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She was best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class. She used the lower-case spelling of her name to decenter herself and draw attention to her work instead. The focus of hooks' writing was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published around 40 books, including works that ranged from essays, poetry, and children's books. She published numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed love, race, social class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.
Beloved is a 1987 novel by American novelist Toni Morrison. Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of a dysfunctional family of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. The narrative of Beloved derives from the life of Margaret Garner, an enslaved person in the slave state of Kentucky who escaped and fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. Olaudah Equiano was an African man who wrote The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, an autobiography published in 1789 that became one of the first influential works about the transatlantic slave trade and the experiences of enslaved Africans. His work was published sixteen years after Phillis Wheatley's work. She was an enslaved African woman who became the first African American to publish a book of poetry, which was published in 1773. Her collection, was titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.
The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison. The novel takes place in Lorain, Ohio, and tells the story of a young African-American girl named Pecola who grew up following the Great Depression. Set in 1941, the story is about how she is consistently regarded as "ugly" due to her mannerisms and dark skin. As a result, she develops an inferiority complex, which fuels her desire for the blue eyes she equates with "whiteness".
Show, don't tell is a narrative technique used in various kinds of texts to allow the reader to experience the story through actions, words, subtext, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the author's exposition, summarization, and description. It avoids adjectives describing the author's analysis and instead describes the scene in such a way that readers can draw their own conclusions. The technique applies equally to nonfiction and all forms of fiction, literature including haiku and Imagist poetry in particular, speech, movie making, and playwriting.
Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content", or "without the smallest unit of meaning". With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would deduce meaning from an abstract work of art. Where asemic writing distinguishes itself among traditions of abstract art is in the asemic author's use of gestural constraint, and the retention of physical characteristics of writing such as lines and symbols. Asemic writing is a hybrid art form that fuses text and image into a unity, and then sets it free to arbitrary subjective interpretations. It may be compared to free writing or writing for its own sake, instead of writing to produce verbal context. The open nature of asemic works allows for meaning to occur across linguistic understanding; an asemic text may be "read" in a similar fashion regardless of the reader's natural language. Multiple meanings for the same symbolism are another possibility for an asemic work, that is, asemic writing can be polysemantic or have zero meaning, infinite meanings, or its meaning can evolve over time. Asemic works leave for the reader to decide how to translate and explore an asemic text; in this sense, the reader becomes co-creator of the asemic work.
Connie Rose Porter is an African-American writer of young-adult books, and a teacher of creative writing. Porter is best known for her contribution to the American Girl Collection Series as the author of the Addy books: six of her Addy books have gone on to sell more than 3 million copies. In addition, she published two novels with Houghton-Mifflin, All-Bright Court (1991), and Imani All Mine (1999).
Gayl Carolyn Jones is an American writer from Lexington, Kentucky. She is recognized as a key figure in 20th-century African-American literature.
In critical theory, philosophy, sociology, and psychoanalysis, the gaze, in the figurative sense, is an individual's awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. Since the 20th century, the concept and the social applications of the gaze have been defined and explained by phenomenologist, existentialist, and post-structuralist philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre described the gaze in Being and Nothingness (1943). Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), developed the concept of the gaze to illustrate the dynamics of socio-political power relations and the social dynamics of society's mechanisms of discipline. Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am (1997), elaborated upon the inter-species relations that exist among human beings and other animals, which are established by way of the gaze.
Sarah Ladipo Manyika FRSL is a British-Nigerian writer of novels, short stories and essays and an active member of the literary community, particularly supporting and amplifying young writers and female voices. She is the author of two well-received novels, In Dependence (2009) and Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun (2016), as well as the non-fiction collection Between Starshine and Clay: Conversations from the African Diaspora (2022), and her writing has appeared in publications including Granta, Transition, Guernica, and OZY, and previously served as founding Books Editor of OZY. Manyika's work also features in the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Dreaming Emmett is the debut play by American writer Toni Morrison. First performed in 1986, it was commissioned by the New York State Writers Institute at SUNY-Albany. The play's world premiere, directed by Gilbert Moses, took place on January 5, 1986 at Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany, New York for a four-week run.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a 1992 work of literary criticism by Toni Morrison. In it she develops a reading of major white American authors and traces the way their perceptions of blackness gave defining shape to their works, and thus to the American literary canon.
Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian American novelist. Her work, most notably her 2016 debut novel Homegoing and her 2020 novel Transcendent Kingdom, features themes of lineage, generational trauma, and Black and African identities. At the age of 26, Gyasi won the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" honors for 2016 and the 2017 American Book Award. She was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature in 2020. As of 2019, Gyasi lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Hermione Hoby is a British author, journalist, and cultural critic. In her career as a journalist she writes on books, music, theatre and feminism. She is the author of the novels Neon in Daylight and Virtue.
Shelley P. Haley is the Edward North Chair of Classics and Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College, New York, and President of the Society for Classical Studies. She is an expert in applying Black feminist and critical race approaches to the study and teaching of Classics.
The Good Immigrant is an anthology of twenty-one essays edited by Nikesh Shukla and first published by Unbound in the UK in 2016 after a crowd-funding campaign endorsed by celebrities. Written by British authors who identify as BAME, the essays concern race, immigration, identity, 'otherness', exploring the experience of immigrant and ethnic minority life in the United Kingdom from their perspective. Contributors include actor/musician Riz Ahmed, journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge, comedian Nish Kumar and playwright Vinay Patel. The compilation inspired the American sequel The Good Immigrant USA, published in 2017, which featured BAME authors from the United States.
Black Futures is an American anthology of Black art, writing, and other creative work, edited by writer Jenna Wortham and curator Kimberly Drew. Writer Teju Cole, singer Solange Knowles and activist Alicia Garza, who cofounded Black Lives Matter, are among the book's more than 100 contributors. The 544-page collection was published in 2020, receiving strongly favorable reviews.
Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) is a network organizing white people for racial and economic justice. SURJ was founded in 2009 amidst the backlash to election of Barack Obama as the first black President of the United States. SURJ seeks to bring more white people into racial justice work and to find mutual interest with movements led by black people and people of color.
"What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?" is an informal opinion poll conducted in 2006 by the New York Times Book Review (NYTBR) to determine "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Eligible works were those written by an American author and published during the quarter-century period from 1980 through 2005. The poll was conducted by NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus, who sent letters to literary figures requesting their participation and received 124 responses. The results were published on May 21, 2006, in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. An essay by A. O. Scott, titled "In Search of the Best", reflected on the results and the premise of the "Great American Novel".
References
- 1 2 3 4 "Writing Past The White Gaze As A Black Author". NPR.org. Retrieved 2020-09-13.
- 1 2 3 4 "Go beyond Toni Morrison with these 7 books that stare down the white gaze". PBS NewsHour. 2019-07-12. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
- ↑ Demirtürk, E. Lâle (2009-12-01). "Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race". MELUS. 34 (4): 221–222. doi:10.1353/mel.0.0061. ISSN 0163-755X. S2CID 162349036.
- ↑ Wallowitz, Laraine (2008). "Chapter 9: Resisting the White Gaze: Critical Literacy and Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye"". Counterpoints. 326: 151–164. ISSN 1058-1634. JSTOR 42980110.
- ↑ "Morrison speaks on evil, language and 'the white gaze'". Cornell Chronicle. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
- ↑ Holdren, Sara (2018-06-17). "Reviewing Fairview, a Play That Almost Demands That I Not Do So". Vulture. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
- ↑ Miao, Hanna (17 October 2019). "'Fairview' and tackling the white gaze". The Chronicle. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
- ↑ "Fairview review – a daring challenge to the white gaze". the Guardian. 2019-12-05. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
- ↑ "WHITE GAZE: Michelle Dizon". www.ciis.edu. Retrieved 2020-09-14.