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Percival Everett (b. 1956) writes novels, short stories, poetry, and essays and is one of the most prolific, acclaimed, yet under-examined African American writers working today. Although to date Everett has published eighteen novels, three collections of short fiction, three poetry collections, and one children's book, his work has not garnered the critical attention that it deserves. Perhaps one of the most vexing problems scholars have had in trying to situate Everett's work is that they have...

Why did African-American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the nineteenth century, during a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like apolitical fantasies to contemporary readers. This is the question at the centre of Tate's examination of the novels of Pauline Hopkins, Emma Kelley, Amelia Johnson, Katherine Tillman, and Frances Harper. D...

This is an anthology of stories, personal observations and historic legends. It reflects the author's fascination with Africa's people and their history as well as her identification with individuals and their conflicting emotions.

We live in a world of talk. Yet Race Sounds argues that we need to listen more-not just hear things, but actively listen-particularly in relation to how we engage race, gender, and class differences. Forging new ideas about the relationship between race and sound, Furlonge explores how black artists-including well-known figures such as writers Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, and singers Bettye LaVette and Aretha Franklin, among others-imagine listening. Drawing from a multimedia archive, F...

What constitutes "blackness" in American culture? And who gets to define whether or not someone is truly African American? Is a struggling hip-hop artist more "authentic" than a conservative Supreme Court justice? In Authentic Blackness J. Martin Favor looks to the New Negro Movement-also known as the Harlem Renaissance-to explore early challenges to the idea that race is a static category.Authentic Blackness looks at the place of the "folk"-those African Americans "furthest down," in the words...

The Nation of Islam and Black Consciousness: The Works of Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Other Writers engages in the scholarly discussions about the origins and formation of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which rarely give credit to the role of the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) teachings in the emergence of the movement and in shaping the subjects and themes of its literary works. This book reevaluates the common belief that Malcolm X is the most appealing black historical figure i...

Carole Anne Taylor explores the network of cultural relations that links tragic and comic theory to views of what can or cannot be known or felt and what can or cannot be done. Reconceiving tragic and comic resistance through readings of works by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, and South African-born Bessie Head, she demonstrates how these writers elaborate the interconnections between a comedy that affirms wholesome normalcy in the face of terror and a tragedy tha...

-- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights -- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers

Since the publication of "The Color Purple" in 1983, Alice Walker has gained a reputation as one of the most popular and most controversial writers in the African American literary tradition. In this study of Walker's novels to appear in Britain, the author explains Walker's project as a "womanist" and cultural/political activist and traces the continuity of her concerns with child abuse, spirituality, sexuality, diaspora and African American history through the essays and novels.

Since 1922, the Newbery Medal of Honor has been awarded to distinguished works of literature for children. Although African and African American characters appeared in children's books well before the establishment of the Newbery award, such depictions were limited, with characters often only appearing as slaves or servants. However, over the last several decades, there has been much progress, and Black characters have played a much more integral role in many highly regarded novels. In African a...

"A charming, provocative novel in which Mr. Flowers seamlessly blends the rich rythms of the blues and a Deep South patois in a lyrical, literate style." - THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWIt's Beale Street in Memphis in the age when jazz was spelled "jass" and ragtime was just a glint in Scott Joplin's eye. Lucas Bodeen is the bluesman, and Melvira Dupree is the conjure woman he loves. But pitted against them are all the forces of nature, the clashing of their own stubborn wills, and a society mir...

In 1941 Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke copyrighted "Epistrophy," one of the best-known compositions of the bebop era. The song's title refers to a literary device-the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses-that is echoed in the construction of the melody. Written two decades later, Amiri Baraka's poem "Epistrophe" alludes slyly to Monk's tune. Whether it is composers finding formal inspiration in verse or a poet invoking the sound of music, hearing across media is the...

This work expands the scope of Morrison’s project to examine the ways and means of memory in the preservation of belief systems passed down from the earliest civilizations (both the Classical Greek and the Ancient Egyptian) as a challenge to the sterility of modernity. Moreover, this research explores the author’s specific use of Foucauldian theory as a vehicle for her narrative, which reclaims the very origins of civilization’s primal concerns with life, procreation and regeneration, springing...

Standard literary criticism tends to either ignore or downplay the unorthodox tradition of black experimental writing that emerged in the wake of protests against colonization and Jim Crow-era segregation. Histories of African American literature likewise have a hard time accounting for the distinctiveness of experimental writing, which is part of a general shift in emphasis among black writers away from appeals for social recognition or raising consciousness. In Freedom Time, Anthony Reed offe...

In Afro-Atlantic Flight Michelle D. Commander traces how post-civil rights Black American artists, intellectuals, and travelers envision literal and figurative flight back to Africa as a means by which to heal the dispossession caused by the slave trade. Through ethnographic, historical, literary, and filmic analyses, Commander shows the ways that cultural producers such as Octavia Butler, Thomas Allen Harris, and Saidiya Hartman engage with speculative thought about slavery, the spiritual realm...

Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS.  ("You have to read them.") From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Dana’s torment begins whe...

As Bill Clinton said in his second inaugural address, "The divide of race has been America's constant curse." In Honor Bound, David Leverenz explores the past to the present of that divide. he argues that in the United states, the rise and decline of white people's racial shaming reflect the rise and decline of white honour. "White skin" and "black skin" are fictions of honour and shame. Americans have lived those fictions for over four hundred years. To make his argument, Leverenz casts an unu...