Early African American Classics

Informationen zum Autor Kwame Anthony Appiah  is the author of  The Ethics of Identity ,  Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy ,  The Honor Code , and the prize-winning  Cosmopolitanism . Raised in Ghana and educated in England, he has taught philosophy on three continents and is currently a professor at Princeton University. Klappentext This essential one-volume collection brings together some of the most influential and significant works by African-American writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Included herein are such classics as Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) and excerpts from W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861), Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901), and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). Whether read as records of African-American history, autobiography, or literature, these invaluable texts stand as timeless monuments to the courage, intellect, and dignity of those for whom writing itself was an act of rebellion—and whose voices and experiences would have otherwise been silenced forever. Edited with an introduction by Anthony Appiah, who explains the distinctive American literary and cultural context of the time, this edition of Early African-American Classics remains the standard by which all similar collections will inevitably be compared. Introduction by Anthony Appiah The "American Negro," W.E.B. Du Bois writes in the Souls of Black Folk , ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.... The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American.... It is always important, then, to remember that African-American writing is American. The African-American classics gathered here—Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative , Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery , and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man —have an American literary and cultural context without which they cannot be understood. Indeed, as we shall see, the narratives of self-fashioning that make up this book are American in their broadest outlines and their minutest details. But it is, of course, crucial too to recall that they are the writings of black men and women. In this brief introduction, I should like to point to some of the major features of these four texts—some they share, some in which they differ—and to the cultural and literary contexts, both American, in general, and African-American in particular, that helped to form them. It is not too much to say that the popular literature of the Christian world, since the discovery of America, or, at least for the last two hundred years, has been anti-Negro.1 So wrote the West Indian black nationalist, Edward W. Blyden, in Fraser's Magazine in 1875; and we know all too well that a substantial part of the "anti-Negro" argument was that "Negro" men and women could not master those "sublimer" realms of literate culture and the arts that constituted the highest aspirations of a middle-class Christian culture. The "evidence" proffered for this proposition until the middle of the nineteenth century consisted in large part of the absence of any substantial body of writing by Africans and African-Americans: the few writings by black people of which most Euro-American thinkers were aware they dismissed as derivative or derisory. Yet if we ask why so little published writing by African-Americans remains to us from befo...

About the author

Kwame Anthony Appiah is the author of The Ethics of Identity, Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, The Honor Code, and the prize-winning Cosmopolitanism. Raised in Ghana and educated in England, he has taught philosophy on three continents and is currently a professor at Princeton University.

Product details

• Authors: Anthony Appiah, Kwame Anthony Appiah
• Assisted by: Anthony Appiah (Editor)
• Publisher: Bantam Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 01.04.1990
• EAN: 9780553213799
• ISBN: 978-0-553-21379-9
• No. of pages: 704
• Dimensions: 104 mm x 175 mm x 46 mm
• Series: Bantam classic; Bantam Classics; Bantam Classics; Bantam Classic
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature