Book Description
Washington challenges the long-held assumption that African American literature aptly reflects black American social consciousness. Offering a novel sociological approach, Washington delineates the social and political forces that shaped the leading black literary works, and shows that deep divisions between political thinkers and writers prevailed throughout the 20th century. Successful black writers inevitably diluted their ideological constructions of African American life as they gained celebrity as part of the mainstream American literary establishment. Encompassing the tumultuous and often volatile decades of transition in American race relations from 1920 to 1970, the book analyzes the sociological origins and cultural implications of the ideological images of black America projected by the dominant black literary schools: the primitivist Harlem Renaissance school of the 1920s, the naturalistic protest school of the Depression years, the existentialist school of the Cold War era, the moral suasion of the civil rights era, and the cultural nationalist school of the late 1960s. Washington's examination features the great African American writers beginning with Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen and continues through the decades with Richard Wright's "Native Son", Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man", James Baldwin and concluding with the controversial Amiri Baraka. This book is an extensive evaluation of whether these writers served the black American social consciousness, or ignored the social implications of their work. Not only does it create a thought provoking discourse, but it also gives the history of the social surroundings that shaped many of these authors as well as their writings.

About the Author
Robert E. Washington is professor of sociology at Bryn Mawr College.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Washington challenges the long-held assumption that African American literature aptly reflects black American social consciousness. Offering a novel sociological approach, Washington delineates the social and political forces that shaped the leading black literary works, and shows that deep divisions between political thinkers and writers prevailed throughout the 20th century. Successful black writers inevitably diluted their ideological constructions of African American life as they gained celebrity as part of the mainstream American literary establishment. Encompassing the tumultuous and often volatile decades of transition in American race relations from 1920 to 1970, the book analyzes the sociological origins and cultural implications of the ideological images of black America projected by the dominant black literary schools: the primitivist Harlem Renaissance school of the 1920s, the naturalistic protest school of the Depression years, the existentialist school of the Cold War era, the moral suasion of the civil rights era, and the cultural nationalist school of the late 1960s. Washington's examination features the great African American writers beginning with Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen and continues through the decades with Richard Wright's "Native Son", Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man", James Baldwin and concluding with the controversial Amiri Baraka. This book is an extensive evaluation of whether these writers served the black American social consciousness, or ignored the social implications of their work. Not only does it create a thought provoking discourse, but it also gives the history of the social surroundings that shaped many of theseauthors as well as their writings.