391 p., Argues for a revisionist periodization of neo-slave literature as well as a reorientation away from a US-based literary history that has been dominated by the mode of realism and toward a more comparative view defined by the geography, history, and aesthetics of the Caribbean. The canon of slave narratives was first dominated by the assumption both of narrative as the major and sometimes only genre of slave writing and of a linear temporality emplotting the journey from slavery to an attenuated freedom. In contrast, most twentieth-century neo-slave narratives rethink the genre from the twin standpoints of temporality and narratology: how both the "neo" and "narrative" descriptors have produced an entrenched and unnecessarily restrictive view of this evolving archive.
Within sectors of North America's African-American community, the colloquial expression "being touched by the brush" describes a multi-ethnic individual that possesses subtle Negroid physical features which are only detectable by close inspection by a "trained eye." Here, Edison discusses the historical factors in Puerto Rico and Panama that make up the foundation upon which Francisco Arrivi's "Los Vejigantes" and Carlos Guillermo Wilson's "Chombo" were constructed.;
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);
241 p., Explores the power children realize in the past, present, and future from their real or imagined connections to their absent mothers in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African diasporic women's fiction, science fiction, and film. Much of the existing scholarship on the diasporic mother focuses on her place in history, yet texts by Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Gayl Jones, Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Sheree Renée Thomas, Nisi Shawl, and Julie Dash suggest through their depictions of the lasting links children create with their mothers that the power of the diasporic mother and, by proxy, the black family and community extends into the future.
204 p., This dissertation examines the roles played by jazz and blues in African American fiction of the post-World War II era. The author contends that scholars of jazz and blues fiction generally discuss the authors' treatment of the music in terms of how it shows up, is alluded to, or is played; however, few address performative elements that are central to much African American literature. Their performances, whether as narratives or geosocial movements, often draw upon forms of flight as defining actions that send them into new territories and necessitate acts of improvisation. Forms of flight manifest themselves as improvised solos in numerous ways, including in this dissertation the path of Ellison's narrator going north and ultimately underground in Invisible Man , brothers leaving their Harlem pasts and coming together while on ever-divergent paths in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," Milkman Dead discovering the secret of literal flight by improvising through a journey to his familial past in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon , or the members of Macon Street's "flesh-and-blood triangle" choosing the expatriate route of Paris instead of America in Paule Marshall's The Fisher King.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
330 p., Explores the impact of the great Orishas (Yoruba: "deities") of the crossroads, Eshu-Elegguá , on the thriving literary and visual arts of the African diaspora. Eshu-Elegguá are multiple figures who work between physical and spiritual realms, open possibilities, and embody unpredictability and chance. Analyzes the texts Mumbo Jumbo (Ismael Reed, 1972), Sortilégio: Mistério Negro (Abdias do Nasicmento, 1951), Chago de Guisa (Gerardo Fulleda León, 1988), Brown Girl in the Ring (Nalo Hopkinson, 1998), Midnight Robber (Nalo Hopkinson, 2000), and Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966). The objective is to explore the aesthetic codes and philosophies that the figures of Eshu-Elegguá carry into the texts; trace their voices across multiple forms of cultural expression; and navigate the dialogues that these intermediary figures open between a group of literary texts that have not yet been studied together.
Focuses on African American and Afro-Hispanic literature and folklore. Employs Fernando Ortiz's theory of transculturation. Ortiz makes the case that a new Afro-Cuban identity is created with the intermingling of African, Spanish and native inhabitants of Cuba. Using Ortiz's critical framework as the foundation of this study, critiques of Zora Neale Hurston's portrayal of African American identity. Examines the parallel between her work and that of Lydia Cabrera, a Cuban ethnographer whose work represents Afro-Cuban identity as a transcultural one.
