Intro to Africana Studies

1. Artistic Currents
By Grace Soto

2. • In the last two decades of the 20th century blacks made much
progress in artistic expression.
• Well into the 1980s, post-World War II African American
writers like Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, continued to
win over audiences.
• In 1986, Ralph Ellison published essays and short stories such
as Going to the Territory.
• In the same year James Balwin, “maintained his popularity and
his influence with the publication of Evidence of Things Not
Seen.”
• Albert Murray- Trainwhistle Guitar (1974), The Spyglass Tree
(1991), and The Seven League Boots (1996)- traced the
coming to maturity of a black artist in the 20th century
America. Gripping novels and essays by John Edgar Wideman
revealed the costs of a racial identity.
• Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, won the National Book
Award. (A historical reconstruction of slavery.)

3. Women Writers
• In the last two decades of the 20th century, the rise of African
American women writers marked the most significant trend in
literature. Many built on the gender- conscious writings of the 1960s
and 1970s.
• Rita Dove, a poet, won the Pulitzer Prize for her volume of poetry
Thomas and Beulah (1966), and in 1993 became the youngest
United States poet laureate.
• One of the most widely read and influential black women writers in
the 1980s was Alice Walker, with her novel The Color
Purple, which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1982. (Also made into a
film)
• The pre-eminent African American author in the 1990s, was an
editor at Random House, Toni Morrison. Essays and novels that
addressed issues of race and gender, the legacy of slavery, and the
construction of black identity and culture.
• 1987 she won the Pulitzer Prize- Beloved, and in 1993 became the
first African American recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

4. Playwrights, Comedians, Filmmakers,
Actors
• August Wilson emerged as the premier African American
playwright in the last decade of the 20th century.
• He won two Pulitzer Prizes and many awards with three of his
powerful dramas- Fences (1986), The Piano Lesson
(1990), and Two Trains Running (1993).
• He became a controversial figure in 1996 when he made an
appeal to save “black theater institutions.”
• Popularity of African American comedians began to rise in
1980s. Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy…
• Murphy, perhaps one of the most popular black actors in the
1980s- Trading Places & two Beverly Hills Cop films (with
his stereotypically hip black character uses humor to bridge the
cultural gap between with the film’s unhip white characters.)

5. Blacks on Television
• Black visibility on television expanded in the 1980s and
1990s, initially in interracial context.
• During this period blacks also began to appear on
commercials.
• 1980 African American entrepreneur Robert L. Johnson
founded the cable network Black Entertainment Television, but
the most effective and most important in expanding the black
presence on television was talk shows.
• The Oprah Winfrey Show (1985), this show made her the first
female African American billionaire. She began on ABC’s
Baltimore affiliate and moved into the talk show medium.
• Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, television dramas and
comedies featured increasing numbers of black characters who
represented social mobility and middle class statues.

6. Artist
• By 1990s Museums devoted to African American art were
located in most major cities; MartinPuryear, Glen Ligon, Fred
Wilson, Betye Saar, Eugene J. Martin, Richard Mayhew… and
many others.
• The most innovated and controversial black artist form to
emerge in the last quarter of the 20th century was rap music, a
style rooted in African American traditions such as disco, funk,
and boasting or “rapping” and in black immigrant traditions
such as Jamaican “toasting” and sound system culture.

7. Hip Hop Rising
• Hip Hop refers to the cultural movement that started in the
1970s in the bronx, New York, and developed into a way of
life for most black and Latino urban youth.
• By 1970s Hip Hop came to define not only a musical genre but
also a style of dress, communication, and aesthetics that
reflected the experiences and sentiments of urban youth born
after 1965.
Hip Hope Begins!