Book contents
- The Cambridge History of the American Essay
- The Cambridge History of the American Essay
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I The Emergence of the American Essay (1710–1865)
- Part II Voicing the American Experiment (1865–1945)
- Part III Postwar Essays and Essayism (1945–2000)
- Part IV Toward the Contemporary American Essay (2000–2020)
- 31 The American Essay Film: A Neglected Genre
- 32 Literary Theory, Criticism, and the Essay
- 33 Gender, Queerness, and the American Essay
- 34 Disability and the American Essay
- 35 The Radical Hybridity of the Lyric Essay
- 36 Writing Migration: Multiculturalism, Democracy, and the Essay Form
- 37 Latinx Culture and the Essay
- 38 Black Experience through the Essay
- 39 The Essay and the Anthropocene
- Recommendations for Further Reading
- Index
38 - Black Experience through the Essay
from Part IV - Toward the Contemporary American Essay (2000–2020)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2024
- The Cambridge History of the American Essay
- The Cambridge History of the American Essay
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I The Emergence of the American Essay (1710–1865)
- Part II Voicing the American Experiment (1865–1945)
- Part III Postwar Essays and Essayism (1945–2000)
- Part IV Toward the Contemporary American Essay (2000–2020)
- 31 The American Essay Film: A Neglected Genre
- 32 Literary Theory, Criticism, and the Essay
- 33 Gender, Queerness, and the American Essay
- 34 Disability and the American Essay
- 35 The Radical Hybridity of the Lyric Essay
- 36 Writing Migration: Multiculturalism, Democracy, and the Essay Form
- 37 Latinx Culture and the Essay
- 38 Black Experience through the Essay
- 39 The Essay and the Anthropocene
- Recommendations for Further Reading
- Index
Summary
Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter traces some of the aesthetic choices that Black writers have made in order to demonstrate the essay’s capacious formal dimensions for imagining and practicing freedom. Rather than think of freedom as a destination, African American essayists have revised and restructured the form in ways that allow them to document how freedom is practiced continually. In the essays of writers as varied as Anna Julia Cooper, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, John Edgar Wideman, Ta-Nahesi Coates, and Ross Gay, reflections on joy, justice, life as art, and self-care unfold freely. From defiance to mournfulness, from exuberance to acrimony, this chapter explores the various moods and modes of Black essayistic writing, identifying certain tendencies that belong to the genealogy of Black writing in the United States.
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- The Cambridge History of the American Essay , pp. 643 - 667Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023