Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration NovelThe Great Migration--the exodus of more than six million blacks from their southern homes hoping for better lives in the North--is a defining event of post-emancipation African-American life and a central feature of twentieth-century black literature. Lawrence Rodgers explores the historical and literary significance of this event and in the process identifies the Great Migration novel as a literary form that intertwines geography and identity. Drawing on a wide range of major literary voices, including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, as well as lesser-known writers such as William Attaway (Blood on the Forge) and Dorothy West (The Living Is Easy), Rodgers conducts a kind of literary archaeology of the Great Migration. He mines the writers' biographical connections to migration and teases apart the ways in which individual novels relate to one another, to the historical situation of black America, and to African-American literature as a whole. In reading migration novels in relation to African-American literary texts such as slave narratives, folk tales, and urban fiction, Rodgers affirms the southern folk roots of African-American culture and argues for a need to stem the erosion of southern memory. |
Contents
The Early Migration Novel | 39 |
Migration and the Harlem Renaissance | 70 |
The Fugitive Migrant Novels Critique of Ascent | 97 |
The Communal Migrants Recuperation of Immersion | 132 |
Notes | 187 |
205 | |
225 | |
Other editions - View all
Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel Lawrence Richard Rodgers No preview available - 1997 |
Common terms and phrases
African African-American Afro-American American artistic ascent Attaway Attaway's Autobiography Big Mat Bigger black population black southerners blues Bois Cane challenge characterization characters Chesnutt Chicago Cleo color consciousness critical culture Despite Dunbar economic environment exodus Exodusters experience forced freedom fugitive migrant geography Gillis Harlem Renaissance Hurston identity immersion Invisible James Weldon James Weldon Johnson Johnson journey labor land Larsen liminality literary literature Living Is Easy lynching migration fiction migration novel migration novel form migration's move movement narrator narrator's Native Negro Nella Larsen northern novelists offers Oklahoma oppression plantation postmigration protagonist quest Quicksand race racial Ralph Ellison Reprint Richard Wright role roots rural satire scene Shadow and Act sharecroppers slave narratives slavery social South southern black Sport Stepto story symbolic tion Toomer tradition urban north W. E. B. Du Bois West West's women York Zora Neale Hurston
Popular passages
Page 34 - There was not, after all, a great difference between the world of the North and that of the South which she had fled; there was only this difference: the North promised more. And this similarity: what it promised it did not give, and what it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other.
References to this book
Whispered Consolations: Law and Narrative in African American Life Jon-Christian Suggs Limited preview - 2009 |