African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
318 p., In the late 20th century, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison reclaim and revise cultural nationalism. The author devotes a chapter to each author. Organizing, formally on the page and thematically in the story, heals the fractured single and communal bodies in Bambara's 1980 novel The Salt Eaters. On the islands of Tatem and Carriacou, Marshall's Avey Johnson dances a cultural nation dependent on diasporic connections in Praisesong for the Widow (1983). Naylor's Willow Springs proves fertile island ground in Mama Day (1988) for women's work to map nation, unearth an archive, and mother the next generation. Shange's recipe-laden novel Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982) and later cookbook if I can Cook/you Know God can (1998) posit cooking as theory and practice of community. In Morrison's Paradise (1997), women write and paint records of their individual and collective histories. This group of writers uses Africa, the Sea Islands, the Caribbean, the American South, the kitchen, the dance floor, and the garden as spaces that help define a distinctly African American collectivity practiced in highly local, concrete work for fashioning self and community. In these practices, cultural nationalism comes to rely not on the imagined and far away, but on the lived and local.
Glassman,Steve (Editor) and Seidel,Kathryn Lee (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
1991
Published:
Orlando, FL: University of Central Florida Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
197 p, Zora in Florida focuses on the place that nurtured and inspired her work, the frontier wilderness of central Florida and the all-black town of Eatonville. Two chapters are devoted to her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, set almost entirely in Florida. Includes Barbara Speisman's "Voodoo as symbol in Jonah's gourd vine." Also treats Hurston's lesser-known works such as Tell My Horse, her first-person account of fieldwork in Haiti.
