Almost all African American literature carries with it the history of the race: how black people from different parts of Africa survived slavery. And through their literature we can also see what the history of slavery, the Civil War…and so on, really looked like.

Next, the themes often appear in African-American literature. The themes of African American literature are different in different historical periods. We can roughly divide it into five stages of development to look at the themes of African American literature

In the 18th and 19th centuries, African American literature was a cry for the survival of the race and a struggle for black people to be an equal in American society. The literature of this period was dominated by black stories and autobiographies, and the life experiences of slaves who had escaped from captivity and made it to the top aroused wide interest. Phyllis Wheatley is the representative writer of this period. She is regarded as the mother of African American literature

In the early 20th century, with the death of the black leaders who had grown up during the struggle to abolish slavery, a new generation of black leaders continued to fight against racial discrimination and for racial equality in the South where race relations were severe after the Civil War. Black writing in this period reflects two opposing views on the future of black people -- whether to self-admit that black people are inferior to white people: Booker Washington's popular autobiography, Rising from Slavery, did not describe the miserable lives of slaves. Instead, it said slavery was a "school" from which blacks could develop their willpower and skills. At the other end of the spectrum was Du Bois, who argued that black people should not give up their rights.

The period from 1919 to 1940 was a brilliant 20 years for African American literature. A large number of young writers emerged, thus forming the climax in the history of black literature. As a large number of writers concentrated in Harlem, New York, this historical period was called the Harlem Renaissance. People with unprecedented breadth and diversity of writing: the older generation of black writers mostly focused on reflecting the demands of the middle class, trying to fight for the equal civil rights of blacks in the existing society; The new generation of black writers, like the "lost generation" of young writers in the United States at that time, abandoned traditional values and did not conform.

The history moves on to the 1950s and 1960s, when the Black Rights movement broke out in the US and African American literature became more of a protest. This is because after World War II, black soldiers returned from war only to find that they did not have the same employment rights as whites. This period is best represented in Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison). In Ellison's novels, he wants to express that the more aware a person is of his personal and racial cultural history, the more he can be truly free.

The last 30 years of the 20th century were the last 30 years of great development of black literature. Black postmodern writers are still very different from white postmodern writers -- they are black people living under the atmosphere of institutional racial di