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1 results

  • Chapter 1 - Black Excesses and Deprivations in Literature and Photography of the 1930s

  • from Part I - Productive Precarity and Literary Realism
  • Edited by Eve Dunbar, Vassar College, New York, Ayesha K. Hardison, University of Kansas
  • Book:
    African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940
    Published online:
    25 March 2022
    Print publication:
    07 April 2022, pp 33-58

  • Summary

    The decade of the 1930s reflects transitions in African American literary and photographic texts because of an emphasis on topics such as marriage, courtship, migration, childhood, as well as home in relationship to impoverishment and affluence. Discourse on aesthetics in African American literature also serves as a context for exploring representations of Black people in the 1930s. The chapter examines writings by authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and Marita Bonner, as well as other Black writers. Photographers James Van Der Zee and Carl Van Vechten depict Black people as prosperous, while Work Projects Administration and Farm Security Administration photographers portray Black people facing deprivation. Additionally, the chapter analyzes excess and deprivation in 1800s African American literature by Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and Frederick Douglass and post-1950 twentieth-century African American literature by Lorraine Hansberry as well as Toni Cade Bambara.