Consciousness,Choice And Dilemma

Herbert Aptheker is a famous American Marxist historian in the 20 th century who emphasized that historical studies should serve for the struggle of reality,and serving for the reality is the starting point and end-result of his historical studies.Given his status in the African-American literature in the 20 th century,this paper is based on his representative works American Negro Slave Revolts,The American Revolution Colonial Period and The American Revolution are selected to explore his writing ethics.The analysis and comparison of Herbert Aptheker's works not only help to better understand the writer's creative intention and actual achievements,but also help to establish an objective and accurate way of reading.This paper is under the perspective of ethical literary criticism,tracing the main line "African-American struggle history" to analyze Herbert Aptheker's ethical consciousness,ethical choice and writing dilemma in the African-American historical writing and to find out his writing ethics in historical writing.It is different from other researchers who combed for his life and thought before.Secondly,the reason why Herbert Aptheker,as a white writer,shouted for black people,will be found out and be illustrated from the text.Finally,the construction of Herbert Aptheker's historical criticism will be explored in this paper.This paper is divided into the following three parts:The introduction part introduces the author,his works,the methodology and literature review.This part analyzes the influence of social background and cultural background on the author.Herbert Aptheker focuses on the historical issues of African-Americans,so his works were all about the history of African-American in the U.S.A.At the same time,this part carries on the methodology which analyzes the connection among consciousness,choice and dilemma,and elaborates how to combine the ethical theory with the text.The literature review part summarizes relevant literature and tries to find the research gaps in this field.Although Herbert Aptheker is an important figure in the history of African-American literature,his recognition by historians is always conditional.Few scholars have conducted corresponding researches on him,especially from the perspective of ethics.The second part includes three chapter which is the main body.The first chapter studies the historical writing driven by ethical consciousness and analyzes the reasons why Herbert Aptheker shouted for African-American in the white dominated society.Through analysis,I found that Herbert Aptheker,unlike other mainstream historians,sticks to the principle of distinguishing good from evil,which derived from his ethical consciousness.As a historian of trans-utilitarianism,what he did was to show the real African-American image in the American history,which is an important key for Americans to understand their own history.The second chapter studies Herbert Aptheker's difficult ethical choices,this chapter,from the aspect of good and evil in the humanity,analyzes the ethical choices Herbert Aptheker made and his double ethical identity.As an "As It Actually Happened" historian,Herbert Aptheker followed the moral constraints of his social ethical identity and established a correct ethical identity.In the last chapter Herbert Aptheker's writing dilemma was analyzed,and Herbert Aptheker,is not only the "other" in the group of white mainstream historians,is also "the other" in African-Americans.Because of his double "the other" identity,he got into a kind of writing dilemma which mainly embodied in the moral dilemma and identity-recognition dilemma.After overcoming these difficulties,Herbert Aptheker adhered to his writing ethics--“As It Actually Happened” and “Poetic Justice” and established a new ethical identity and set up his historian position.Based on the analysis above,this paper comes to the following conclusion: as a white historian,Herbert Aptheker strongly refuted Ulrich·B·Philips and his school that dominated African-American history and spread bad effects in this field long-term in the early twentieth century.Adhering to his writing ethics--“As It Actually Happened” and “Poetic Justice”,he is from the objective angle to review the history and analyze or interpret the events,but his works had its limitations to some degree,such as "Radical Ideas as a Leftist" and "Narrative One-Sidedness",so we all readers must have our own understanding to this kind of "limitation" instead of blindly following with others.