Bearing Witness to African American Literature

<p>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.</p>