Cliffsnotes on Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Mary Robinson
Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom (Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction)
by Eugenia C. Delamotte
Alice Walker has described the Barbadian American novelist Paule Marshall as "unequaled in intelligence, vision, craft, by anyone of her generation, to put her contributions to our literature modestly." Such praise has echoed through reviews and analyses of Marshall's work since the 1959 publication of Brown Girl, Brownstones, a novel followed by The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), Praisesong for the Widow (1984), and Daughters (1991). Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom is the firs...
"Professor Baker offers the richest analysis we have of black literature in its full cultural context. A superb literary critic, a sophisticated student of culture and society, Baker is himself a very talented writer, deeply engaged in the literary-cultural 'journey' he describes. The result is a major work of interdisciplinary scholarship and humanistic criticism which will remain for years to come an authoritative treatment of the subject. The Journey Back is a landmark not only in the study o...
Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways (The New Southern Studies)
by Keith Cartwright
"We're seeing people that we didn't know exist," the director of FEMA acknowledged in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways offers a corrective to some of America's institutionalised invisibilities by delving into the submerged networks of ritual performance, writing, intercultural history and migration that have linked the coastal U.S. South with the Caribbean and the wider Atlantic world. This interdisciplinary study slips beneath the bar of rigid national and literary...
Award-winning African-American playwright August Wilson has created a cultural chronicle of black America through such works as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, and Two Trains Running. The authentic ring of wit, anecdote, homily, and plaint has proved that a self-educated Pittsburgh ghetto native can grow into a revered conduit for a century of black achievement. He forces readers and audiences to examine the despair generated by poverty and racism,...
This remarkable exploration of the underbelly of New York City life from 1880 to 1930 takes readers through the city's inexhaustible variety of distinctive neighborhood cultures. Slumming in New York samples a number of New York "slumming" narratives--including Stephen Crane's Bowery tales, Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods, Hutchins Hapgood's The Spirit of the Ghetto, Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, and Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven--to characterize and examine the relation...
Domestic Abuse in the Novels of African American Women
by Heather Duerre Humann
The literary tradition begun by Zora Neale Hurston in the 1930s has since flourished and taken new directions with a diverse body of fiction by more contemporary African-American women writers. This book examines the treatment of domestic violence in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Love, Terry McMillan's Mama and A Day Late...
Close Kin and Distant Relatives (American Literatures Initiative)
by Susana M. Morris
The ""black family"" in the United States and the Caribbean often holds contradictory and competing meanings in public discourse: on the one hand, it is a site of love, strength, and support; on the other hand, it is a site of pathology, brokenness, and dysfunction that has frequently called forth an emphasis on conventional respectability if stability and social approval are to be achieved. Looking at the ways in which contemporary African American and black Caribbean women writers conceptualiz...
The Marrow of Tradition (Belt Revivals) (Modern Library)
by Charles W Chesnutt
The Marrow of Tradition is a compressed epic and a political thriller. It spans two generations of whites and blacks whose blood and fortunes are entwined. The author surrounds these families with characters who are constantly negotiating their positions on the racial, social, and moral scales. In addition to a romantic subplot, there are moments of grisly comedy that make you feel you are witnessing a minstrel show from hell. The novel leaves questions which today remain unanswered.
Maya Angelou
by Marcia Ann Gillespie, Rosa Johnson Butler, and Richard A. Long
In this first book of essays devoted entirely to Nathaniel Mackey's work, prominent critics respond to a major oeuvre that is at once affirmative and utopic, negational and dystopic. Drawing on multiple genealogies and traditions, primarily from African and African diaspora histories and cultures, Mackey's work envisions cultural creation as cross-cultural, based in the damaging relationships of Africans brought against their will to the Americas and the resulting innovations of New World Africa...
From enslaved people who joined Washington's Continental Army and Buffalo Soldiers in the Indian Wars to the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II and black servicemen and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, African Americans have been an integral part of the country's armed forces - even while the nation questioned, challenged, and denied their rights, and oftentimes their humanity. These Truly Are the Brave collects poems, stories, plays, songs, essays, pamphlets, newspaper articles, speeches, o...
Classified as historical fiction, gothic horror story, and bildungsroman, this novel tells the story of a woman who murders her daughter to protect her from the living hell of slavery. Told in flashbacks, memories, and nightmares, the story is difficult but rewarding. This concise supplement to Toni Morrison's Beloved helps students understand the overall structure of the novel, actions and motivations of the characters, and the social and cultural perspectives of the author.
Once Upon a Time in a Different World (Children's Literature and Culture)
by Neal A. Lester
Once Upon a Time in a Different World, a unique addition to the celebrated Children's Literature and Culture series, seeks to move discussions and treatments of ideas in African America Children's literature from the margins to the forefront of literary discourse. Looking at a variety of topics, including the moralities of heterosexism, the veneration of literacy, and the "politics of hair," Neal A. Lester provides a scholarly and accessible compilation of essays that will serve as an invaluable...
Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature
by Trudier Harris
African American writers have incorporated Martin Luther King Jr. into their work since he rose to prominence in the mid-1950s. Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature is a study by award-winning author Trudier Harris of King's character and persona as captured and reflected in works of African American literature continue to evolve. One of the most revered figures in American history, King stands above most as a hero. His heroism, argues Harris, is informed by African...
Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks (Literary Conversations)
Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks features sparkling interviews with one of America's most valued poets. Throughout this book, which spans three decades, Brooks (1917-2000) speaks with simplicity, depth, candor, and passion about the making of a poem and about the position of the poet in humane society. A poem, she believed, comes from the heart. In each interview, she speaks from the heart and wins over the reader. The interviews took place in various settings-in radio recording studios and...
I Am Because We Are
First published in 1995, I Am Because We Are has been recognized as a major, canon-defining anthology and adopted as a text in a wide variety of college and university courses. Bringing together writings by prominent black thinkers from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, Fred Lee Hord and Jonathan Scott Lee made the case for a tradition of ""relational humanism"" distinct from the philosophical preoccupations of the West. Over the past twenty years, however, new scholarly research has un...
In this groundbreaking work, Raphael Comprone uses psychoanalysis to reinvigorate Harlem Renaissance studies. This book examines the works of notable Harlem Renaissance authors such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, Wallace Thurman, and Claude McKay. In detailed, focused sections, Poetry, Desire, and Fantasy in the Harlem Renaissance explores issues of white subjectivity in the works of Hughes and Hurston, the embrace of primitivism by C...
Idi, a Senegalese English translator, relates a group of stories that capture the black experience in a range of African and Afro-American voices, telling of adolescence, racism, and beliefs lost and found.
Interracialism, or marriage between members of different races, has formed, torn apart, defined and divided the American nation since its earliest history. This volume explores the primary texts of interracialism as a means of addressing core issues in American racial identity. Ranging from Hannah Arendt to George Schuyler and from Pace v. Alabama to Loving v. Virginia, it provides extraordinary resources for faculty and students in English, American and Ethnic Studies, as well as for general re...
This title reassesses Ralph Ellison and explores his writings and views on American culture through the lens of jazz music. Horace Porter's study addresses Ellison's jazz background, including his essays and comments about jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker. Porter further examines the influences of Ellington and Armstrong as sources of the writer's personal and artistic inspiration and highlights the significance of Ellison's camaraderie with two African...
August Wilson's Twentieth-Century Cycle Plays
by Sanford Sternlicht
A short literary guide to one of this country s greatest African American dramatists, August Wilson s Twentieth-Century Cycle Plays: A Reader s Companion will serve a wide range of students, teachers, theater professionals, and theater audiences. Beginning with an account of August Wilson s life, from his impoverished childhood in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to achieving national acclaim, the book introduces the ten-play cycleone for each decade of the twentieth centuryas a wh...