African American literature
Black American canon
African American literature is writing by Black Americans, encompassing poetry, fiction, essays, autobiography, and drama from the colonial era to the present.
The tradition includes slave narratives, the Harlem Renaissance, and contemporary works exploring Black identity, history, and experience in America.
Major figures include Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
- Reconstruction EraPost-secession national mending period
- double consciousnessAwareness of conflicting identities
- FolkloreInherited cultural narratives
- AfrofuturismAfrican diaspora speculative movement
- Harlem RenaissanceBlack arts explosion, 1920s
Zora Neale Hurston · Langston Hughes · James Baldwin · W.E.B. Du Bois · Alice Walker · Toni Morrison · Antebellum South · Maya Angelou · Richard Wright · Great Migration · Ralph Ellison · Jim Crow era · call and response · oral tradition · Emancipation Proclamation · Freedom · Invisible Man · Frederick Douglass
- cultural artsart, music, dance, theater, opera
- world literatureFrench novels, Russian novels, Japanese fiction, translated works, British novels
- fictionfiction, novel, novels, novella, novellas
- Black HistoryMartin Luther King Jr., MLK, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass
- Black Americanalawn jockeys, slave shackles, cookie jars, salt shakers, trade cards
African American literatureWestern canon
Influential European literary tradition
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