Words matter. These are the best Darryl Pinckney Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I know black kids who don’t even know any other black kids except their cousins. And that’s enough. You wouldn’t look at these kids and say that they are Uncle Toms or self-hating or fleeing or trying to be white, given the culture in which they live, which is very natural to them as kids.
Ellison was prominent on the lecture circuit even in the Black Aesthetic days of the Sixties when his defiantly pro-American and prickly-proud intellectual act met with some hostility.
If the sensitive washout has no taste for extreme gestures, total self-destruction, then his hope for singularity rests in his voice. Tone is everything.
Paule Marshall does not let the black women in her fiction lose. While they lose friends, lovers, husbands, homes, or jobs, they always find themselves.
I grew up in Indianapolis, Ind., then a conservative, provincial city. Anglophilia was the first foreign language I was exposed to. Or maybe it was a way of one-upping the local white people. Or maybe it was an early manifestation of homohood.
For a long time, Nella Larsen was the mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance. In the late 1920s, she published two sophisticated novels, ‘Quicksand’ and ‘Passing,’ and then her writing life came to an end. She died in obscurity in 1964.
Eventually, I gave up my sublet in Berlin and stayed in England for a long time – for about 20 years.
The novel and the film of ‘The Color Purple’ are both works of the imagination that make claim to historical truth.
I wrote ‘Black Deutschland’ very quickly one summer, probably because I had a lot of it in pieces and fragments sitting around over the years as false starts or notes.
The history of blacks is complicated, fragmented, disturbing to contemplate – not a neat trail of challenges met or of felled trees blocking the path to the mountain top.
‘Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto’ is a surprise and a fresh way of looking at Harlem, connecting the black district with the architecture of its historical past.
I’d waste a holiday trying to set a story in this new place I’d visit, whereas I would never write a story about Indianapolis.
New York’s various undergrounds can make for a disciplined apprenticeship, and Gaga takes pride in her earliest fan base of art, fashion and music students.
Harlem exists in retrospect, in the memory of grandparents or elderly cousins, those ‘old-timers’ ever ready with their geysers of remembered scenes. The legends of ‘Black Mecca’ are preserved in the glossy musicals of Times Square and in texts of virtually every kind.
Identity is made up of lots of different things now. Different colors and patterns stand out at different times. Different instruments in the symphony of being are more distinct than others at different times.
Baldwin gave expression to the longings of blacks in exalted prose. He was embraced, in the tradition of Negro Firsterism, even by those who never sat down with a book, as our preeminent literary spokesman, whether he liked it or not. Neither athlete nor entertainer, but nevertheless a star.
Once upon a time, I was morbidly sensitive about the impertinence born of sociology. Taxi drivers would not stop for me after dark; white girls jogged to keep ahead of my shadow thrown at their heels by the amber street lamps. Part of me didn’t blame them, but most of me was hurt.
I never read lying down.
None of the black abolitionist newspapers, the first of which appeared in 1827, was in existence after the Civil War.
Novels set in distant places give us expectations not unlike those we have of travel writing, and often the distinctions are blurred, as in, say, the way the low life of Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward is depicted in John David Morley’s recent ‘Pictures from the Water Trade.’
When writing on black life, whites have often been unwelcome, usually called upon to give witness or hauled in as the accused.
Black America has always felt itself divided into two classes: the mucky-mucks and the folk.
After Reconstruction, black newspapers evolved from being a propaganda arm into a kind of opposition press, because even the friends of former slaves had their fears.
‘High Cotton’ is more conscious of class than ‘Black Deutschland.’
‘Invisible Man’ holds such an honored place in African-American literature that Ralph Ellison didn’t have to write anything else to break bread with the remembered dead. But he did try to go on, because if a writer has done one great thing, then the pressures to do another are intense.
I had a lot of notes and fragments and observations that never amounted to anything. After the Wall had gone down, so many people were writing about Berlin, I didn’t have the same urgency or feel enough authority.
Steven Spielberg’s ‘The Color Purple’ might as well have been about a bunch of dancing eggplants for all it has to say about black history.
The nameless loser in Jay McInerney’s ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ is going to the dogs like a gentleman. He is too smart to blame anyone for the impasse he has come to, hip enough to know he does not know enough, too sophisticated to masquerade as an anti-hero.
The history of black people in Manhattan is a story of people getting pushed farther uptown as land acquires new uses and increases in value.
In the years after World War I, blacks began to migrate to the North and its imagined freedoms in great numbers – ‘Russian’ came to mean a black who had rushed from the South.
