AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

a) What is African American literature?

•To understand African American literature one needs to understand the history of blacks in America who moved to America in the year 1501 so they were in America almost the same time with whites.

•Presence of blacks in the US was affected by the history behind their arrival - the 16th century Trans-Atlantic Slave trade.

•This history that made them second class citizens and exposed them to brutalities by whites.

•Presence of blacks in the US was affected by the history behind their arrival - the 16th century Trans-Atlantic Slave trade.

•This history that made them second class citizens and exposed them to brutalities by whites.

Understanding African American

Literature alo requires one to

Understand Blacks life in

America.

- How and why second class citizens? 

•Black race was a problem to whites - ones race was considered in BLOOD not in colour.

•Being black in the US was considered being a liability - blacks were associated with all evils i.e. criminality (drug use , rape, theft

 

•The beginning of racial segregation in the US is associated with the introduction of Jim Crow, a phenomenon believed to have been at the center of segregation.

  What was Jim Crow?

 

•It was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. It was blessed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 with the infamous "separate but equal" ruling