AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE NADIR: THE MISSION OF THE INTELLIGENTSIA AND ‘GOING TO THE PEOPLE’
Keywords:
American literary history, African American literature of the 1870s–1900s, nadir, genteel tradition, rural folk character, intelligentsia, Victoria Earle Matthews, James H. W. Howard, African American studies.Abstract
The period in the African American literary history after the Civil War and Reconstruction and up to the Harlem Renaissance (1870s–1910s) remains understudied both in Russia and in the USA. It was called ‘the nadir of American race relations’ by Rayford W. Logan, an African American historian and Pan-African activist. The ‘nadir’ (which means the ‘lowest point’) was, at the same time, the turning point in African American social and literary history that led to the new epoch, the 20th century. The educated Black elite – ‘Negro middle class’, being the creative community that pushed forward ‘cultural production’, was then a tiny group of intellectuals (priests, doctors, teachers, engineers, lawyers, etc.) who often combined their professional work with creative writing. The main conflict of the epoch was the opposition between the gentility code along with assimilationist aspirations, typical of the Black intellectual elite, and the color line – racist prejudices and segregation, typical of the American post-Reconstruction society with its fear of miscegenation. Under these circumstances, the Black intellectual elite, feeling its double alienation (racial – from the middle class whites, and social – from the Blacks of the lower class), comes to an understanding of racial solidarity and racial uplift as the mission of African American intelligentsia. Their ‘going to the people’ included criticism of their own class as hypocritical, passive, and indifferent to the sufferings of their 'Black brothers’ as well as praising of the Negro rural folk character, its best moral qualities. Besides referring to the best-known writers of the period (Albery A. Whitman, Paul Dunbar, Charles W. Chesnutt), the paper covers some of the less known literary works – short stories by V. Earle Matthews, poems by Solomon G. Brown, and novels by James H. W. Howard, Walter H. Stowers and W. Anderson.References
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Bell B. W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. 448 p. (In Eng.)
Brown S. A. Negro Poetry and Drama. The Negro in American Fiction. New York, Atheneum, 1978. 209 p. (In Eng.)
Brown S. G. Kind Regards of S. G. Brown.
Selected Poems of Solomon G. Brown. Ed. by L. D. Hutchinson, G. S. Lowe. Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institution Press. 1983. 49 p. (In Eng.)
Bruce D. D. Black American Writing from the Nadir. The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–1915. Baton Rouge, LA, L., Louisiana State University Press, 1989. xiii, 279 p. (In Eng.)
The College-Bred Negro: Report of a Social Study Made under the Direction of Atlanta University, together with the Proceedings of the fifth Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems, Held at Atlanta University, May 29–30, 1900. Ed. by W. E. B. Du Bois. Atlanta, GA, Atlanta University Press, 1900. 115 p. (In Eng.)
Franklin F. E. Black Bourgeoisie. The Rise of a New Middle-Class in the United States. New York, Free Press, 1957. 264 p. (In Eng.)
Gayle A. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, NY, Anchor Press / Doubleday, 1975. 332 p. (In Eng.)
Genovese E. D. Roll, Jordan, roll: The world the slaves made: Two essays in interpretation. New York, Pantheon Books, 1974, vol. 22. 823 p. (In Eng.)
Howard J. H. . Bond and Free; a True Tale of Slave Times. Harrisburg, PA, E. K. Meyers, 1886. 280 p. (In Eng.)
Levine L. W. Black culture and black consciousness: Afro-American folk thought from slavery to freedom. New York, Oxford University Press, 1977, vol. 20. 522 p. (In Eng.)
Logan R. W. The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodraw Wilson. New York, Collier Books, 1965. 447 p. (In Eng.)
Logan R. W. The Negro in American Life and Thought: the Nadir, 1877–1901. New York, The Dial Press, 1954, vol. 10. 380 p. (In Eng.)
Matthews V. E. Aunt Lindy: A Story Founded on Real Life. New York, 1893. 14 p. (In Eng.)
Moses W. J. Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth. University Park, PA, L., University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982, vol. 12. 278 p. (In Eng.)
Sanda (Stowers W. H., Anderson W. H.). Ap-pointed: An American Novel. Detroit, Law Print Co, 1894. 321 p. Rpr: N. Y.: AMS Press 1977. 371 p. (In Eng.)
Simmons W. J. Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive, and Rising (1887). Chicago, IL, Johnson Publishing Co, 1970, vol. 19. 829 p. (In Eng.)
Stuckey S. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. New York, Oxford University Press, 1987. 444 p. (In Eng.)
Van Vechten C. The Negro in art: How shall he be portrayed? The Crisis, 1926, March, vol. 31. p. 219. (In Eng.)
Whitman A. A. Preface. Whitman A.A. Twasinta’s Seminoles, or The Rape of Florida (1884). St. Louis, MO, Nixon-Jones Printing Co, 1890, pp. 5–6. (In Eng.)
Who’s Who of Colored Race. A General Bio-graphical Dictionary of Men and Women of African Descent. Memento ed. Ed. by F. L. Mather. Chicago, IL, F. L. Mather, 1915. 296 p. (In Eng.)
Williamson J. The Crucible of Race: Black/White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation. New York, Oxford University Press, 1984, vol. 18. 561 p. (In Eng.)
