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This article examines a small selection of children's books by Julius Lester, a black power activist, considering them in the context of the black power movement. Lester is frequently cited for his activism and polemical works on black power but no study of his works for children has yet been published. The works considered in this article provide an example of how children's books during this period reflected aspects of black power ideology, language and imagery. Whilst books for black children in the USA had a long history of trying to instil racial pride and knowledge of African American history, these efforts were nevertheless restricted for various reasons. This article argues that it was the black power movement that provided a context in which books directed at black children could flourish. Librarians, activists, educators and publishers now engaged in providing literature for black children in a more comprehensive and directed way than before. Within this context, authors like Julius Lester could write books that celebrated African American history and folklore and could at the same time address issues of racial tension and white cultural hegemony.
This article examines a small selection of children's books by Julius Lester, a black power activist, considering them in the context of the black power movement. Lester is frequently cited for his activism and polemical works on black power but no study of his works for children has yet been published. The works considered in this article provide an example of how children's books during this period reflected aspects of black power ideology, language and imagery. Whilst books for black children in the USA had a long history of trying to instil racial pride and knowledge of African American history, these efforts were nevertheless restricted for various reasons. This article argues that it was the black power movement that provided a context in which books directed at black children could flourish. Librarians, activists, educators and publishers now engaged in providing literature for black children in a more comprehensive and directed way than before. Within this context, authors like Julius Lester could write books that celebrated African American history and folklore and could at the same time address issues of racial tension and white cultural hegemony.
The connection between Brer Rabbit and the story of the Jewish community after 70 CE is that both are recorded in literatures of exile. As a result, they share a significant quality—the double voice—deployed as one of many literary strategies for survival under oppression. Using passages from Brer Rabbit and Lamentations Rabba, this article focuses on riddles and trickster tales because they present an especially striking witness of the double voice as expounded within African-American literary theory. These genres appear in the folklore of most cultures, but their encoding enables a unique inversion of cultural meaning for subaltern and dispersed peoples, which gives the tales remarkable power to fashion and sustain identities, and to articulate the complexity of their experience. They absorb the imagery and language of the dominant culture, yet re-signify their meaning in the process of assimilation. Both elements of this voice—the adoption and the inversion—are essential representations of the authors or redactors. Separated by time, space, language, culture, and context, the tales of Brer Rabbit and the Palestinian rabbinic midrash speak to each other through this strategic polyphony.
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