The Emergence of African American Literacy Traditions
Title | The Emergence of African American Literacy Traditions PDF eBook |
Author | Phyllis M. Belt-Beyan |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing USA |
Pages | 224 |
Release | 2004-10-30 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0313053103 |
The ways in which the African American community learned to be proficient readers and writers during the 19th century were diverse, however, the greatest impact on literacy acquisition came from family and community efforts. African American arts, churches, benevolent societies, newspapers, literacy societies, and formal and informal schools supported literacy growth, and literacy growth in turn gave rise to national and international African American literacy traditions. The underlying motivations that gave shape to the nature of their literacy behaviors and events within family and community contexts and within national and global context are examined in detail here. The beginnings of African American literacy traditions would have failed had there not been intrinsic motivations, opportunities, and a need to use all of the language arts, reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing to maintain and protect what mattered most to them as a people. The institutionalization of these traditions into family and community rituals, including songs, prayers, letters, story telling, and the like gave a visibility to the African American in ways no other cultural knowledge could. Belt-Beyan traces the development of these literacy traditions, noting the parallel progression and transformation of Africans into African Americans, slaves into freepersons, and noncitizens into citizens.
The Development of African American Literacy Traditions
Title | The Development of African American Literacy Traditions PDF eBook |
Author | Phyllis M. Belt-Beyan |
Publisher | |
Pages | 279 |
Release | 1999 |
Genre | African American families |
ISBN |
Self-Taught
Title | Self-Taught PDF eBook |
Author | Heather Andrea Williams |
Publisher | Univ of North Carolina Press |
Pages | 321 |
Release | 2009-11-20 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0807888974 |
In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to literacy during slavery, during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom. Self-Taught traces the historical antecedents to freedpeople's intense desire to become literate and demonstrates how the visions of enslaved African Americans emerged into plans and action once slavery ended. Enslaved people, Williams contends, placed great value in the practical power of literacy, whether it was to enable them to read the Bible for themselves or to keep informed of the abolition movement and later the progress of the Civil War. Some slaves devised creative and subversive means to acquire literacy, and when slavery ended, they became the first teachers of other freedpeople. Soon overwhelmed by the demands for education, they called on northern missionaries to come to their aid. Williams argues that by teaching, building schools, supporting teachers, resisting violence, and claiming education as a civil right, African Americans transformed the face of education in the South to the great benefit of both black and white southerners.
Forgotten Readers
Title | Forgotten Readers PDF eBook |
Author | Elizabeth McHenry |
Publisher | Duke University Press |
Pages | 444 |
Release | 2002-10-31 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN | 9780822329954 |
DIVRecovers the history of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American reading societies./div
Literacy in African American Communities
Title | Literacy in African American Communities PDF eBook |
Author | Joyce L. Harris |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 346 |
Release | 2014-04-08 |
Genre | Education |
ISBN | 1135664730 |
This volume explores the unique sociocultural contexts of literacy development, values, and practices in African American communities. African Americans--young and old--are frequently the focus of public discourse about literacy. In a society that values a rather sophisticated level of literacy, they are among those who are most disadvantaged by low literacy achievement. Literacy in African American Communities contributes a fresh perspective by revealing how social history and cultural values converge to influence African Americans' literacy values and practices, acknowledging that literacy issues pertaining to this group are as unique and complex as this group's collective history. Existing literature on literacy in African American communities is typically segmented by age or academic discipline. This fragmentation obscures the cyclical, life-span effects of this population's legacy of low literacy. In contrast, this book brings together in a single-source volume personal, historical, developmental, and cross-disciplinary vantage points to look at both developmental and adult literacy from the perspectives of education, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and communication sciences and disorders. As a whole, it provides important evidence that the negative cycle of low literacy can be broken by drawing on the literacy experiences found within African American communities.
Toward a Literacy of Promise
Title | Toward a Literacy of Promise PDF eBook |
Author | Linda A. Spears-Bunton |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 226 |
Release | 2009 |
Genre | Education |
ISBN | 0805845364 |
Bringing together theoretical perspectives on critical theory, literacy theory, and history, and analyses of qualitative data and qualitative research data from classroom research, this book examines popular assumptions about literacy and challenges readers to question how it has been used historically both to empower and to oppress. It offers an alternative view of literacy - a "literacy of promise" - that charts an emancipatory agenda for literacy instructional practices in schools.
African American Literary Theory
Title | African American Literary Theory PDF eBook |
Author | Winston Napier |
Publisher | NYU Press |
Pages | 745 |
Release | 2000-07 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0814758096 |
Fifty-one essays by writers such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as critics and academics such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. examine the central texts and arguments in African American literary theory from the 1920s through the present. Contributions are organized chronologically beginning with the rise of a black aesthetic criticism, through the Black Arts Movement, feminism, structuralism and poststructuralism, queer theory, and cultural studies. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR