Overview

From enslaved people who joined Washington’s Continental Army and Buffalo Soldiers in the Indian Wars to the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II and black servicemen and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, African Americans have been an integral part of the country’s armed forces - even while the nation questioned, challenged, and denied their rights, and oftentimes their humanity. These Truly Are the Brave collects poems, stories, plays, songs, essays, pamphlets, newspaper articles, speeches, oral histories, letters, and political commentaries, richly contextualizing them within their specific historical moments. This volume offers perspectives onwar, national loyalty, and freedom from a sweeping range of writers that includes Phillis Wheatley, James Weldon Johnson, Natasha Trethewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, Michael S. Harper, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many more. Some selectionshere present African Americans embracing wartime service as a way to express citizenship; other selections show black people remaining steadfast in quiet civilian work. Wrestling with their disputed place in American democracy, the courageous writers in this anthology expose and reexamine the foundations of U.S. citizenship.

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9780813060224

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Reviews

These primary source documents--poems, pamphlets, oral histories--speak to the black experience of war and citizenship. --Library Journal [An] impressive array of readings. . . . This is a volume for anyone seeking to understand the wide diversity of responses to war and citizenship in African American literary history. --Choice This anthology is the first of its kind, assembling an impressive array of African American voices on war and citizenship from the colonial period to the present. . . . No other anthology provides such a comprehensive insight into the crucial nexus between war, race, and nation in black history and literature. --American Literary History Provides a ready and accessible means to access the frustrations of African Americans trying to reconcile war, American values, and their own place within a racial hierarchy. The expanse of the anthology's selections attests to the pervasive nature of the issue in African American thought. --H-Net

Author Information

A. Y. Jimoh is professor of African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA and the author of Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction. Françoise N. Hamlin is associate professor of Africana Studies and History at Brown University, USA and the author of Crossroads at Clarksdale.

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