Reviews a novel about the lives of a mixed-race British/American family living in the United States. In its depiction of African Americans, White Americans, Britons, and Caribbean immigrants, the book demonstrates Americans' obsession with race. In addition to the contrast between desires for racial authenticity and class mobility, Smith’s novel exposes the variability of Black America, and especially the intersection between class and race.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
331 p., Partly autobiographical, this novel looks at the racial politics of the 1950s and 1960s. Ramsay Tull is witness to the black racial discontents and the desire for national independence that are threatening the old colonial order; but when a chance comes to study at Oxford University, he becomes immersed in European literary culture and Marxism. On his return to Jamaica, Ramsay becomes actively involved in radical nationalist politics and begins his second journey, away from his middle-class origins and back to a true appreciation of the Jamaican people.
Gafaïti,Hafid (Author), Lorcin,Patricia M. E. (Author), and Troyansky,David G. (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
460 p, Includes Joseph Militello's "Madwoman in the Senegalese Muslim attic: reading Myriam Warner-Vieyra's Juletane and Mariama Bâ's Un chant écarlate"
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
150 p., Contents: Postcolonial Caribbean women's fiction : a revisionist discourse
Caribbean women's literature in the post independence era Beka Lamb : a look at "befo' time Crick crack, monkey : "when monkey caan see'e own tail" Angel : "light the way for us!" Traversing thresholds.
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.
