Réinvention de la mémoire noire étatsunienne dans les récits du Black Arts Movement

• Main Author: Yannick M. Blec
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université du Sud Toulon-Var 2019-12-01
• Series: Babel : Littératures Plurielles
• Subjects: self-determination; Black Arts Movement; existentialist writing; African American folklore; black identity; legends
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/babel/8168

The 1960s and 1970s are major periods in the reconstruction of African American identity. This recreation can be seen in the way such Black Arts Movement-era authors as Amiri Baraka, William Melvin Kelley and Ishmael Reed have reinvented the collective memory of the African American community. They did so either by destroying the facts previously established by the Whites or by manipulating them to make them correspond to their own ideas of self-determination and cultural pride. They used legends and legendification, heroization or again, empathy toward oppressed people to achieve their goal. Among the practices, there are also the subversion of stereotypes, the use of African and African American folklores, as well as the transfers of places and topoi to create an overlapping of the two continents to favor this identity reconstruction of the Black minority of the USA.