This book is written by teachers interested in bringing African American literature into the classroom. Documented here is the learning process that these educators experienced themselves as they read and discussed the stories & pedagogical.

This book focuses on teaching African American literature through experiential praxis. Specifically, the book presents several canonical African American literature authors in a study abroad context. The book chapters consider the historical implications of travel within the African American literature tradition including slave narratives, migration narratives, and expatriate narratives. The book foregrounds this tradition and includes activities, rhetorical prompts, and thematic discussion that support instruction.

The essays in Teaching African American Women's Writing provide reflections on issues, problems and pleasures raised by studying the texts. They will be of use to those teaching and studying African American women's writing in colleges, universities and adult education groups as well as teachers involved in teaching in schools to A level.

An interdisciplinary, code-switching, critical collection by revisionist African American scholar and activist Bernard W. Bell. Bearing Witness to African American Literature: Validating and Valorizing Its Authority, Authenticity, and Agency collects twenty-three of Bernard W. Bell’s lectures and essays that were first presented between 1968 and 2008. From his role in the culture wars as a graduate student activist in the Black Studies Movement to his work in the transcultural Globalization Movement as an international scholar and Fulbright cultural ambassador in Spain, Portugal, and China, Bell’s long and inspiring journey traces the modern institutional origins and the contemporary challengers of African American literary studies. This volume is made up of five sections, including chapters on W. E. B. DuBois’s theory and trope of double consciousness, an original theory of residually oral forms for reading the African American novel, an argument for an African Americentric vernacular and literary tradition, and a deconstruction of the myths of the American melting pot and literary mainstream. Bell considers texts by contemporary writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, William Styron, James Baldwin, and Jean Toomer, as well as works by Mark Twain, Frederick Douglas, and William Faulkner. In a style that ranges from lyricism to the classic jeremiad, Bell emphasizes that his work bears the imprint of many major influences, including his mentor, poet and scholar Sterling A. Brown, and W. E. B. DuBois. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate Bell’s central place as a revisionist African American literary and cultural theorist, historian, and critic. Bearing Witness to African American Literature will be an invaluable introduction to major issues in the African American literary tradition for scholars of American, African American, and cultural studies.

This essential volume provides an overview of and introduction to African American writers and literary periods from their beginnings through the 21st century. This compact encyclopedia, aimed at students, selects the most important authors, literary movements, and key topics for them to know. Entries cover the most influential and highly regarded African American writers, including novelists, playwrights, poets, and nonfiction writers. The book covers key periods of African American literature—such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and the Civil Rights Era—and touches on the influence of the vernacular, including blues and hip hop. The volume provides historical context for critical viewpoints including feminism, social class, and racial politics. Entries are organized A to Z and provide biographies that focus on the contributions of key literary figures as well as overviews, background information, and definitions for key subjects.

Uno de los aspectos más valiosos de este libro es que comienza enlazando, a través de los dos primeros artículos, la educación universitaria con su nivel inmediatamente anterior: la escuela de secundaria; una conexión que a menudo se olvida con serios resultados para ambos. En este sentido, Benito Camacho Martín, el autor de uno de los artículos, realiza un análisis lúcido y en cierto modo dogmático sobre el declive de la enseñanza de literatura en las escuelas de secundaria, tanto en horas dedicadas como en conocimientos adquiridos. Los otros artículos –algunos en inglés y otros en castellano– tratan distintos aspectos de la enseñanza de literatura norteamericana, con un énfasis manifiesto en materiales del siglo XX y, sobre todo, en la literatura afro-americana; de hecho, el libro resultará particularmente útil para los profesores de esto último

Explores the interdisciplinary dimensions of black studies.

"Funny, painful, and disturbing by turns, this absolutely necessary volume powerfully engages readers in passionate debates about the place of the non-African American teacher of African American literature."-Maureen Reddy, coeditor of Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics What makes someone an authority? What makes one person's knowledge more credible than another's? In the ongoing debates over racial authenticity, some attest that we can know each other's experiences simply because we are all "human," while others assume a more skeptical stance, insisting that racial differences create unbridgeable gaps in knowledge. Bringing new perspectives to these perennial questions, the essays in this collection explore the many difficulties created by the fact that white scholars greatly outnumber black scholars in the study and teaching of African American literature. Contributors, including some of the most prominent theorists in the field as well as younger scholars, examine who is speaking, what is being spoken and what is not, and why framing African American literature in terms of an exclusive black/white racial divide is problematic and limiting. In highlighting the "whiteness" of some African Americanists, the collection does not imply that the teaching or understanding of black literature by white scholars is definitively impossible. Indeed such work is not only possible, but imperative. Instead, the essays aim to open a much needed public conversation about the real and pressing challenges that white scholars face in this type of work, as well as the implications of how these challenges are met.

First published in 1996. This volume includes a collection of essays that where collected after the inspiration of finding positive interactions between African-American and Irish Writers during the Harlem Renaissance, a time when these two groups were hardly on good terms. The essays look at theories and realities of literary influence that especially affect African-American writers.

This book comprises reflections by experienced scholar teachers on the principles and practice of higher education English teaching. In approaching the subject from different angles it aims to spark insights and to foster imaginative teaching. In the era of audit, and the Teaching Excellence Framework it invites teachers to return to the sources of their own teaching knowledge. The shift from a student-centred to a research-centred paradigm has particular implications for a discipline which prides itself on its teaching, and has always had teaching and dialogue at its heart. One which also talks across the tertiary / secondary border to the cognate (though different) subject called ‘English’ in school. The argument which informs this book, and which is developed in the individual chapters, is that the future of the subject relies not alone upon fostering communities of ‘research excellence’, but on re-awakening and reviving its pedagogic traditions.