|
Jennifer Ryan-BryantProfessor of English
and Coordinator of the English M.A. Program, SUNY – Buffalo State |
Radical Sonnets in African-American Literature
Since the seventeenth century, African-American writers have both acknowledged the Western literary traditions that preceded them and invented new approaches to writing that challenge or transform those traditions. Several periods and genres confirm this double-voiced perspective, including early poetry by Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon, slave narratives that rely upon sentimental tropes, Harlem Renaissance fiction and poetry, and Black Arts writings. These challenges to tradition are almost always motivated by political critique.
The sonnet is marked by both a clearly recognizable form and a particularly rich history of authorial adaptation. Several twentieth- and twenty-first-century black writers, including Claude McKay, Gwendolyn Bennett, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, Terrance Hayes, and Patricia Smith, employ the sonnet form in order to make arguments on behalf of social justice. In some cases, writers composed individual sonnets that advance social critiques within the confines of the traditional form, as in McKay’s “The Lynching” and Smith’s five “Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure” pieces. Others have created more loosely defined cycles that narrate specific periods in black history, such as Wanda Coleman’s three-volume American Sonnets sequence, Natasha Trethewey’s “Native Guard” sequence, and Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin collection. In this paper, I assess the different formal and thematic approaches to the sonnet that mark three periods in postbellum black literature: the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and recent writers who combine formal experimentation with political statement. I note the specific historical conditions and events that inspired many of these pieces, including Jim Crow segregation, the murder of Emmett Till, police brutality, “black male hysteria” (Hayes), and America’s vast economic disparities. I conclude by tying these variations to the post-Reconstruction emergence of black radical literature.
The sonnet is marked by both a clearly recognizable form and a particularly rich history of authorial adaptation. Several twentieth- and twenty-first-century black writers, including Claude McKay, Gwendolyn Bennett, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, Terrance Hayes, and Patricia Smith, employ the sonnet form in order to make arguments on behalf of social justice. In some cases, writers composed individual sonnets that advance social critiques within the confines of the traditional form, as in McKay’s “The Lynching” and Smith’s five “Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure” pieces. Others have created more loosely defined cycles that narrate specific periods in black history, such as Wanda Coleman’s three-volume American Sonnets sequence, Natasha Trethewey’s “Native Guard” sequence, and Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin collection. In this paper, I assess the different formal and thematic approaches to the sonnet that mark three periods in postbellum black literature: the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and recent writers who combine formal experimentation with political statement. I note the specific historical conditions and events that inspired many of these pieces, including Jim Crow segregation, the murder of Emmett Till, police brutality, “black male hysteria” (Hayes), and America’s vast economic disparities. I conclude by tying these variations to the post-Reconstruction emergence of black radical literature.
Jennifer Ryan-Bryant is professor of English and Coordinator of the English M.A. Program at SUNY – Buffalo State. She is the author of Post-Jazz Poetics: A Social History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Writing Between Them: Turning the Table (Lexington Books, 2021), and a book in progress entitled Who Is the Human in This Place? The Literatures of Lynching.