THE RACE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO AUTHOR: TOWARD A REEXAMINATION OF AN ORTHODOX CRITICAL CONCEPT.

AFRICAN American authors; RACE relations; AUTHORS; CREATIVE ability; ETHNOLOGY; LITERATURE

The article focuses on the creative literature of African American writers in the United States. For purposes of literary criticism, the race consciousness of the African American authors in the U.S. is the crux of the evaluative problem. An examination of the voluminous critical opinion provoked by the African American authors reveals that, using race consciousness as a point of departure, certain individual critics and schools of criticism proceed unerringly to opposing conclusions. Certain critics have declared that racial incendiarism expresses the race consciousness of the African American authors, while others assert that their brand of race consciousness has made African American authors conservative. The fact that the social experiences of the author are the gears which often activate the creative process is by now a critical platitude, and objectors to the race consciousness of the African American authors do not hesitate to validate the work of the white sociological novelists.