The empire abroad and the empire at home : African American literature and the era of overseas expansion

Resource Information

The work The empire abroad and the empire at home : African American literature and the era of overseas expansion represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The empire abroad and the empire at home : African American literature and the era of overseas expansion

Title remainder

African American literature and the era of overseas expansion

Statement of responsibility

John Cullen Gruesser

Title variation

African American literature and the era of overseas expansion

Creator

• Gruesser, John Cullen, 1959-

Author

• Gruesser, John Cullen, 1959-

Subject

• African Americans -- Intellectual life
• American literature -- African American authors | History and criticism | Theory, etc
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Electronic books
• Imperialism in literature
• Imperialism in literature
• Imperialismus
• Kolonialismus
• LITERARY CRITICISM -- American | General
• Literatur
• Literature and globalization
• Literature and globalization
• Schwarze
• USA
• LITERARY CRITICISM -- American | African American
• African Americans -- Intellectual life

Genre

• Electronic books
• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

"In The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home, John Cullen Gruesser establishes that African American writers at the turn of the twentieth century responded extensively and idiosyncratically to overseas expansion and its implications for domestic race relations. He contends that the work of these writers significantly informs not only African American literary studies but also U.S. political history. Focusing on authors who explicitly connect the empire abroad and the empire at home (James Weldon Johnson, Sutton Griggs, Pauline E. Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others), Gruesser examines U.S. black participation in, support for, and resistance to expansion. Race consistently trumped empire for African American writers, who adopted positions based on the effects they believed expansion would have on blacks at home. Given the complexity of the debates over empire and rapidity with which events in the Caribbean and the Pacific changed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it should come as no surprise that these authors often did not maintain fixed positions on imperialism. Their stances depended on several factors, including the foreign location, the presence or absence of African American soldiers within a particular text, the stage of the author's career, and a given text's relationship to specific generic and literary traditions. No matter what their disposition was toward imperialism, the fact of U.S. expansion allowed and in many cases compelled black writers to grapple with empire. They often used texts about expansion to address the situation facing blacks at home during a period in which their citizenship rights, and their very existence, were increasingly in jeopardy."--Project Muse

Member of

• Ebook Central Academic Complete

Cataloging source

CDX

Dewey number

810.9/896073

Government publication

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

Index

index present

LC call number

PS153.N5

LC item number

G785 2012eb

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

• dictionaries
• bibliography