Emigration, Nationalism, and Pragmatism in Post-Reconstruction African American Literature

FAIN: HB-50032-11

Michael Clay Hooper
Prairie View A & M University (Prairie View, TX 77445-6850)

With NEH funding, I will produce two studies--one on Frederick Douglass and the other on African American novelist, Sutton Griggs--to submit to peer-reviewed journals and include as chapters within an academic manuscript. The manuscript traces the emergence of black pragmatism through debates over emigration and nationalism as responses to Jim Crow-era racial oppression. As part of a current effort among literary critics, historians, and philosophers to rethink and reevaluate the history of black pragmatism, the manuscript demonstrates that black pragmatists theorized power and resistance in ways that have made classic philosophical pragmatism relevant within past and current efforts to think through the problems and possibilities of democracy. In doing so, the manuscript argues that black pragmatism is a central component of African American (and therefore all American) identities as they have been and continue to be negotiated within complex social, cultural, and political contexts.