African-American literature
Writing by African Americans that engages the histories, cultures, and experiences of Black life in the United States, across genres and periods.
African American oral tradition: Spoken and performed forms through which African Americans have transmitted stories, beliefs, music, and communal knowledge. Spirituals, folktales, and sermons sustained expressive traditions before and alongside print.
Call and response: A performance pattern in which a leader's phrase is answered by a group or another performer. It shapes the rhythms of sermons, songs, and spoken-word poetry.
Zora Neale Hurston: An American writer and anthropologist whose fiction and folklore scholarship depict Black life in the South. Her use of Black vernacular speech reshaped the possibilities of literary voice.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: A 1789 autobiography by Olaudah Equiano recounting enslavement, freedom, and life in the Atlantic world. Its publication helped establish Black Atlantic autobiography and antislavery testimony.
The canon wars: Debates over which works and authors should define literary education and national literary history. Black writers' inclusion challenged curricula built around a narrow account of American literature.
Slave narrative: First-person accounts of enslavement and escape, often written to expose slavery and assert Black humanity. These testimonies established an influential literary form under slavery.
Signifying: An African American verbal practice of indirect expression, wordplay, and often playful or critical indirection. Henry Louis Gates Jr. uses it to explain intertextual revision in Black writing.
Langston Hughes: An American poet, novelist, and playwright whose work helped define the Harlem Renaissance. His poetry draws on blues and jazz to articulate Black life and aspiration.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: Frederick Douglass's 1845 autobiography describing his enslavement, self-education, and escape. Its account links literacy and self-authorship to resistance against slavery.
Black studies: An interdisciplinary field examining the histories, cultures, and political experiences of people of African descent. Literary criticism and Black-authored texts are central to its study of cultural history.