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The 'Color-Line' Criticism: Literary Fiction, Historical Facts, and the Critical Controversies about William Styron’s "The Confessions of Nat Turner"

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Kamionowski J.

Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies

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2014

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vol. 7

EN

This article analyses critical responses to William Styron’s "The Confessions of Nat Turner", claiming that the reception of the novel was strongly determined by the question of race and the different perception-and-interpretation of a “common” history by black and white Americans. I demonstrate that the polemics about Styron’s novel resulted not only from an entirely different understanding by white and black critics of the question as to what literature is essentially and what social role it has to perform, but also from the incompatible implementation of historiography, in the realm of which both sides placed the novel. I argue that, as a result, the critical controversies about "The Confessions" were drawn along the so-called “color line”, a category which traditionally defined Americans according to their race.

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“Superreal images for superreal people”. Black self-representation as self-invention in poetry and visual art of the black arts movement: the wall of respect

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Kamionowski J.

IDEA. Studia nad strukturą i rozwojem pojęć filozoficznych

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2016

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vol. 28/2

210-232

EN

The article entitled “'Superreal images for SUPERREAL People.' Black Self-Representation as Self-Invention in Poetry and Visual Art of the Black Arts Movement: The Wall of Respect” provides an analysis of the representation of African Americans by Black Arts Movement poets and visual artists involved in making the Wall of Respect, the most famous Black Power mural. Resisting, challenging and rejecting the controlling white gaze, through their verbal and visual acts of self-representation, they made an attempt to achieve a “better and truer self” for American blacks, which resulted in black myth-making and self-invention. That phenomenon is explored here through an examination of the history, legend and aesthetics of the mural, which is approached as a multimedia Poem of the People, whose interplay of various artistic forms of expression is aimed at liberation from the oppressiveness of white cultural hegemony, achieving “visibility,” and practicing “truly black” image-making. More specifically, special attention is given to its literary component – Amiri Baraka's poem “SOS,” which is embedded in the mural, and two poems entitled “The Wall,” written for that occasion by Haki Madhubuti and Gwendolyn Brooks, the latter poem read at the opening ceremony by its author. Detailed reading of the poems demonstrates how the written/spoken word assisted and enhanced visual black self-invention and projected-cum-generated a sense of togetherness and collective identification by creating an ultra-positive image of “new blacks,” and stigmatizing “negro toms” who stood for old-fashioned integrationism. Also, through condensed references to theories pertaining to the nature of image, visual representation and the power of the gaze (by Plato, Heidegger, Sartre and Lacan), put together with concepts of African American culture and expression (Houston Baker Jr.'s “the Black (W)hole” and Robert Stepto's “immersion”), philosophical aspects of the Black Arts Movement's artistic strategy of black self-invention as well as its limitations are explored.

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„Seks czarnuchów dla każdego”. Czarny intruz w przestrzeni białego dyskursu w powieści amerykańskiego mainstreamu przełomu lat 60. i 70.

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Kamionowski J.

Białostockie Studia Literaturoznawcze

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2015

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vol. 6

EN

The article describes the intrusion of the previously “invisible” black Stranger into the “white” discursive space. It further shows how this phenomenon was represented in the mainstream American novel of the 1960s and 1970s. The author analyses three works: Mr. Sammler’s Planet by S. Bellow, The Tenants by B. Malamud, and Rabbit, Redux by J. Updike. Here, the black intrusion into the “white language” is observed in threes spheres: symbolic, aesthetic, and ideological. This contamination of white discourse causes fear and rejection, but, at the same time, it brings fascination with Afro-American – a dangerous Stranger. Eventually, the novels confirm the reflection by Toni Morrison: since American literature is unmistakably a product of the dominant culture of whites, it therefore, becomes invariably connected with Afro-American presence in the United States.

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1 Białostockie Studia Literaturoznawcze

1 Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies

1 IDEA. Studia nad strukturą i rozwojem pojęć filozoficznych

3 Kamionowski J.

1 2016

1 2015

1 2014

The 'Color-Line' Criticism: Literary Fiction, Historical Facts, and the Critical Controversies about William Styron’s "The Confessions of Nat Turner"

“Superreal images for superreal people”. Black self-representation as self-invention in poetry and visual art of the black arts movement: the wall of respect

„Seks czarnuchów dla każdego”. Czarny intruz w przestrzeni białego dyskursu w powieści amerykańskiego mainstreamu przełomu lat 60. i 70.