" It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley."
Analyzing the impact of non-fiction works such as slave narratives, biographies, and essays on African American literature.
Slavery and the African American Experience: This topic explores the history of slavery in America, including the experiences of African Americans during this time, and how slavery has impacted the African American community today.
Civil Rights Movement: This topic delves into the history of the African American Civil Rights Movement and the leaders who played pivotal roles in this movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks.
Black Lives Matter Movement: This topic looks at the contemporary movement advocating for justice and equality for black individuals in America, examining the history of the movement and the role it currently plays in social justice discourse.
African American Identity: This topic explores the complexities of African American identity, including its cultural, social, and political dimensions.
Diaspora: This topic examines the dispersion of African peoples throughout the world, including their experiences in America and their wider cultural contributions.
African American Feminism: This topic delves into the feminist movement as it pertains specifically to African American women, examining their unique challenges, contributions, and successes.
Hip-Hop: This topic explores the cultural significance of hip-hop music in the African American community, examining the origins of the genre and its impact on popular culture.
Critical Race Theory: This topic examines the intersections of race, power, and law in America, including the ways in which racial oppression is embedded in legal institutions.
Black Intellectual Thought: This topic examines the body of intellectual work produced by African American thinkers across various fields, from literature to philosophy to science.
African American Art: This topic explores the diverse range of artistic expression within the African American community, including music, visual art, and literature, among others.
Autobiography: Autobiography is a type of non-fiction African American literature that tells the life story of a person written by that individual.
Biography: A biography tells the life story of someone else, rather than the author.
Essay: An essay is a piece of non-fiction writing that expresses the writer's personal and often passionate beliefs or ideas about a particular topic.
Slave narratives: Slave narratives are autobiographical accounts of the lives of African American slaves, often written or dictated by the slaves themselves.
Speeches: African Americans have a rich history of delivering powerful speeches, often centered on their experiences of racism, inequality, and injustice.
Memoirs: Memoirs are personal accounts that typically cover a shorter time period than an autobiography and often focus on a particular theme or experience.
Historical accounts: This type of literature focuses on historical events and figures important to the African American experience.
Critical analyses: Critical analyses of African American literature discuss and analyze the themes, characters, and writing styles found in various works of Non-Fiction African American Literature.
Documentary photography: This type of literature uses photographs as a way of telling stories and sharing experiences; photographs can provide visual documentation of important events, figures, and experiences in African American history.
Journals and diaries: Journals and diaries are personal records that chronicle the writer's thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
"Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives."
"The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives."
"The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands."
"The Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993."
"Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality."
"African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap."
"As African Americans' place in American society has changed over the centuries, so has the focus of African-American literature."
"There was an early distinction between the literature of freed slaves and the literature of free blacks born in the North. Free blacks expressed their oppression in a different narrative form."
"During the Civil Rights Movement, authors such as Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about issues of racial segregation and black nationalism."
"Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker, which won the Pulitzer Prize; and Beloved by Toni Morrison."
"In broad terms, African-American literature can be defined as writings by people of African descent living in the United States."
"African-American literature has generally focused on the role of African Americans within the larger American society and what it means to be an American."
"African American literature explores the issues of freedom and equality long denied to Blacks in the United States, along with further themes such as African-American culture, racism, religion, enslavement, a sense of home, segregation, migration, feminism, and more."
"African-American literature presents experience from an African-American point of view."
"Thus, an early theme of African-American literature was, like other American writings, what it meant to be a citizen in post-Revolutionary America."
"all African-American literary study 'speaks to the deeper meaning of the African-American presence in this nation. This presence has always been a test case of the nation's claims to freedom, democracy, equality, the inclusiveness of all.'"
"They often tried to exercise their political and social autonomy in the face of resistance from the white public."
"The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives."
"writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands."