African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
268 p., In an examination of the fiction of contemporary women writers of the African Diaspora, these writers engage important texts from writers in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, largely ignored by mainstream literary scholars. They employ fresh and poignant critical perspectives accessible to both scholars and students. Includes Carolyn Cooper's
"Sense make befoh book": Grenadian popular culture and the rhetoric of revolution in Merle Collins's Angel and the Colour of forgetting," Paula C. Barnes "Meditations on her/story: Maryse Conde's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and the slave narrative tradition," and Erna Brodber's "Guyana's historical sociology and the novels of Beryl Gilroy and Grace Nichols."
Cambridge [England] New York NY USA: Cambridge University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
313 p, "Discrepant Engagement addresses work by a number of authors not normally grouped under a common rubric--black writers from the United States and the Caribbean and the so-called Black Mountain poets. Nathaniel Mackey examines the ways in which the experimental aspects of their work advance a critique of the assumptions underlying conventional perceptions and practice." (Google);
This essay focuses on James Weldon Johnson's overlapping literary and diplomatic careers. Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, written while he worked as a US consul in Latin America, draws upon tropes of international representation to weigh in upon questions of aesthetic and racial representation. Tracing Johnson's transition from a US representative abroad to a race representative within the US, the essay argues that Johnson's case illustrates the importance of permitting the significant tradition of black work in the US's diplomatic program to inform the ways we approach African America's expressive and geopolitical engagements with the international world.
295 p., Focuses on the function of black vernacular myths and rituals in three primary women's texts of the Americas: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), Simone Schwartz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle (1972) and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983). My project codifies how the black vernacular expressions of mythology and ritual are used to negotiate power between the individual and their community. The author traces how the women in these texts used resources of the black vernacular tradition as social and cultural collateral to empower themselves within an alternative system of values that simultaneously validates self and communal worth.
