Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter One Whatever Happened to the Epic? : [Introduction to the fate of epic in the past three centuries and the influence of Milton]
- Chapter Two Leaving Paradise: [The final books of Paradise Lost and the end of an epic tradition]
- Chapter Three An Epic Told in Letters: [The migration of epic to the novel in Richardson’s Clarissa]
- Chapter Four Prospects and Living Pictures: [Epic history-writing in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]
- Chapter Five Analyzing a Soul: [Wordsworth’s Prelude and Autobiographical Epic]
- Chapter Six Epic Heroinism: [The Icelandic Völsunga Saga and Wagner’s Ring]
- Chapter Seven Cinematic Spectacle and the Hero: [The epic in film: Hollywood in the 1960s, and Abel Gance’s silent Napoléon]
- Chapter Eight Paradise Sought: The African American Odyssey: [The Great Migration in memoir, poetry, fiction and Jacob Lawrence’s paintings]
- Chapter Nine Imaginary History and Epic Fantasy: [Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion]
- Chapter Ten The Epic in Future Tense: [Frederick Turner’s three epic poems: The New World, Genesis and Apocalypse]
- Chapter Eleven Heaven and Hell Reimagined: [Tony Kushner’s Angels in America]
- Chapter Twelve Translating and Recentering Old Epics: [Contemporary translations of ancient epics and fictional adaptations by Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Madeline Miller, Maria Dahvana Headley]
- Index
Chapter Eight - Paradise Sought: The African American Odyssey: [The Great Migration in memoir, poetry, fiction and Jacob Lawrence’s paintings]
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 November 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter One Whatever Happened to the Epic? : [Introduction to the fate of epic in the past three centuries and the influence of Milton]
- Chapter Two Leaving Paradise: [The final books of Paradise Lost and the end of an epic tradition]
- Chapter Three An Epic Told in Letters: [The migration of epic to the novel in Richardson’s Clarissa]
- Chapter Four Prospects and Living Pictures: [Epic history-writing in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]
- Chapter Five Analyzing a Soul: [Wordsworth’s Prelude and Autobiographical Epic]
- Chapter Six Epic Heroinism: [The Icelandic Völsunga Saga and Wagner’s Ring]
- Chapter Seven Cinematic Spectacle and the Hero: [The epic in film: Hollywood in the 1960s, and Abel Gance’s silent Napoléon]
- Chapter Eight Paradise Sought: The African American Odyssey: [The Great Migration in memoir, poetry, fiction and Jacob Lawrence’s paintings]
- Chapter Nine Imaginary History and Epic Fantasy: [Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion]
- Chapter Ten The Epic in Future Tense: [Frederick Turner’s three epic poems: The New World, Genesis and Apocalypse]
- Chapter Eleven Heaven and Hell Reimagined: [Tony Kushner’s Angels in America]
- Chapter Twelve Translating and Recentering Old Epics: [Contemporary translations of ancient epics and fictional adaptations by Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Madeline Miller, Maria Dahvana Headley]
- Index
Summary
“Cast of thousands.” That Hollywood tag, often flourishing an exclamation point or two, adorned movie theater posters and newspaper ads for the visual fictions of the 1960s being promoted as epic spectacles. But the actual Great Migration of African Americans from the south to the north and west has often and much more accurately been described as an epic venture. And this epic had a cast of multimillions. Its origin can readily be determined, from the time the United States entered World War I in 1916 when the labor force was suddenly depleted and mostly rural black southerners were lured north by smooth-talking recruiters who side-stepped white plantation owners and promised their black workers a freer and better-paid life. The migration accelerated in the 1920s and 1930s aided, ironically, by the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 which closed the door to Asians and severely limited the quotas for eastern and southern Europeans. The legislation, intended to favor white immigrants from northern and western Europe, opened up jobs that few others wanted to African Americans moving to the cities. The end of the Great Migration is less precisely dated but the boundary-line is generally fixed about 1970 after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the gradual (though often partial) dismantling of the barriers of Jim Crow segregation. The epic nature of this national and cultural realignment can be seen, piecemeal, in passages of poetry, fiction and memoir. But the central representations of the migration in this chapter will come from a cultural historian, Isabel Wilkerson, and a visual artist, Jacob Lawrence. Each of them, in different forms, captures both the big picture and the individual experiences of this massive twentieth-century odyssey.
The 60-year quest of southern African Americans for a home of their own is an epic story with no single hero. It was not an orderly process. Unlike the ancient literary epics, this one had no visible structure, no groups whose movements could be neatly catalogued like Homer's ships of Achaeans organized by region and household on their way to Troy. African American families went north, in the words of the narrator of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, “in shifts, lots, batches” as money and circumstances allowed.
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- Epic Ambitions in Modern TimesFrom Paradise Lost to the New Millennium, pp. 117 - 142Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2022