Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Special Commissioned Essay on African-American Folklore and Literature, Barbara J. Wilcots - The Study Of African-American Literature And Folklore

THE STUDY OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE AND FOLKLORE

Who are your people, your family, your community? What are your traditions, your history, your values? And why don't your words come more spontaneously and palpably from the grain of your experience?

—John F. Callahan, “Who You For?: Voice and the African-American Fiction of Democratic Identity”

“LITERATURE OF NECESSITY”: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

At the turn into the twentieth century, Charles W. Chesnutt asserted that his writing was a “literature of necessity,” provoked into being by the need for African Americans to refute the fictions written about them by white writers. Similarly, folklorists assert that African-American folk culture arises out of and responds to the needs of its community, urged into being not only as contradiction but also as celebration, as education, and as cultural expression. African-American folk culture answers the...

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