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Many African diasporic novelists and poets allude to or cite archival documents in their writings, foregrounding the elements of archival research and data in their literary texts, and revising the material remnants of the archive. This book reads black historical novels and poetry in an interdisciplinary context, to examine the multiple archives that have produced our historical consciousness. In the history of African diaspora literature, black writers and intellectuals have led the way for an...

Leon Forrest (1937-1997) was among the most innovative and ambitious African American fiction writers of the twentieth century. His books-which include novels There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, Divine Days, The Bloodworth Orphans, and Two Wings to Veil My Face, and the posthumously published novella Meteor in the Madhouse-fused classical mythology, realism, and African American history and culture. Largely set in his native Chicago, Forrest's novels comprise an oeuvre of powerful urban mode...

In this visionary book, Murray takes an audacious new look at black music and, in the process, succeeds in changing the way one reads literature. Murray's subject is the previously unacknowledged kinship between fiction and the blues. Both, he argues, are virtuoso performances that impart information, wisdom, and moral guidance to their audiences; both place a high value on improvisation; and both fiction and the blues create a delicate balance between the holy and the obscene, essential human v...

Essays deal with Black American art, popular heroes, literature, music, and Mardi Gras.

This study demonstrates that African-American women view cultural products in a unique way. Interviews describe the specific reactions of various women to films and literature, such as Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple and Julie Dash's independent film Daughters of the Dust.

The Freedom to Remember examines contemporary literary revisions of slavery in the United States by black women writers. The narratives at the center of this book include: Octavia E. Butler's Kindred, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison's Beloved, J. California Cooper's Family, and Lorene Cary's The Price of a Child. Recent studies have investigated these works only from the standpoint of victimization. Angelyn Mitchell changes the conceptualization of these narratives, focusing on...

The Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars chronicles the profound shift in geographic imaginings that occurred in African American culture as the United States evolved into a bioceanic global power. The author examines the narrative of the "black Pacific" the literary and cultural production of African American narratives in the face of America's efforts to internationalize the Pacific and to institute a "Pacific Community," reflecting a vision...

During his career as a writer-intellectual, John Edgar Wideman in his personal life has overcome feelings of alienation from the black community and has reoriented himself as a participant in black culture. In his fiction Wideman has affected a similar shift, using modernism and postmodernism to bring his intellectual characters out of their isolation and into contact with the needs, concerns, and traditions of black people. Before he could write about this shift, Wideman had to inform himself a...

"Get your "A" in gear! They're today's most popular study guides-with everything you need to succeed in school. Written by Harvard students for students, since its inception "SparkNotes(TM) has developed a loyal community of dedicated users and become a major education brand. Consumer demand has been so strong that the guides have expanded to over 150 titles. "SparkNotes'(TM) motto is "Smarter, Better, Faster because: - They feature the most current ideas and themes, written by experts.- They're...

 The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom brings together more than two decades of literary criticism and political thought about gender, race, sexuality, power, and social change. As one of the first writers in the United States to claim black feminism for black women, Barbara Smith has done groundbreaking work in defining black women’s literary traditions and in making connections between race, class, sexuality, and gender. Smith’s essay “Toward a Black Feminist Crit...

February 1, 2002 marks the 100th birthday of Langston Hughes. To commemorate the centennial of his birth, Arnold Rampersad has contributed new Afterwords to both volumes of his highly-praised biography of this most extraordinary and prolific American writer. The second volume in this masterful biography finds Hughes rooting himself in Harlem, receiving stimulation from his rich cultural surroundings. Here he rethought his view of art and radicalism, and cultivated relationships with younge...

This work brings together essays by archaeologists, anthropologists, biologists and palaeontologists which together provide a portrait of what is currently known about the evolution of our species. It aims to provide an accurate and accessible introduction to the scientific study of human evolution. The book explains how new ideas and new information are being incorporated into an ever more detailed account of the emergence of the hominids from the world of the apes. Later chapters consider the...

A literary and intellectual history of early black Christians who evangelized for freedom, this study focuses on the role of early African American Christianity in the formation of American egalitarian religion and politics. It also provides a new context for understanding how black Christianity and evangelism developed, spread, and interacted with transatlantic religious cultures of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Cedrick May looks at the work of a group of pivotal African Americ...