Introduction
African American literature acts as a creative umpire that offers possibilities for blacks in the United States to mediate their general aspirations and desires. As a body of literature, black writing started in the 18th century as the medium that provides African Americans the platform to interrogate the dynamics of the African American identity, community and experience within America. According to Abah (2008) “the culture of African American writing is traceable to the middle of the 18th century, although the issues at the front-burner of this literature extend beyond two hundred years. In truth the life of bondage and enslavement became the necessary materials which were to translate into black writing”(7). Abah's contention brings to the fore the root and origin of African American literature and its relationship with the social context of America.
Commenting on the destabilizing nature of the life of bondage in America, Kenneth Stampp (1956) observes that African Americans were seen as slaves who were “deemed, held, taken, reputed and adjudged in law to be chattel slaves, in the hands of their captors, owners, possessors, executors, and administrators, to all intents, constructions and purposes whatsoever” (97). This debate suggests that the tragedy of blacks in America did not begin with the ordeal of Reconstruction, or with the agony of the civil war, but with the growth of what Kenneth Stampp sees as a “peculiar institution”, that is, the institution of slavery in the ante-bellum days. Thus, “the engendering impulse of African American literature is resistance to human tyranny and the dedication to black dignity and identity” (Gates et al 2003). In other words, the struggles against the institution of slavery in America formed the fabric for black writing and subsequently the impetus for its development.
In his review of Frederick Douglass‟ Narrative of the life in 1845, Lucius Matlock as cited in Gates and Mckay (1997), notes that: The soil of slavery itself − and the demands for its abolition − turned out to be an ironically fertile ground for the creation of a new literature, a literature indicting oppression, a literature created by the oppressed: “from the soil of slavery sprung forth some of the most brilliant productions, whose logical levers will ultimately upheave and overthrow the system (xxvii). From Matlock's view it is evident that the context of the emergence of black writing falls within the purview of an unbearable social environment of slavery in America. Thus, Jonathan Earle (2004) posits that “the abolition of slavery further created the environment for the thriving of African American literature” (4). Evidently, Earle is of the view that the elimination of slavery paved way for a more suitable platform for the development of black writing. It is in the light of this therefore that African American writers employed literature as a medium to express the plights and hopes of black people in America.
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