New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers The State University of New Jersey
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
319 p., Argues that despite the inherent racist implications of classical and modern formulations of the heroic, the hero remains a site of struggle and resistance for writers of and in the African Diaspora. This project considers a genealogy of writers beginning with Ralph Ellison whose novel, Invisible Man and short story, "Flying Home," engage with classic and then contemporary forms of the heroic and seek to carve out a space for the African American heroic. Considers novels and short stories produced by the next generation of writers, specifically the work of Charles Johnson and Toni Cade Bambara, who inherit Ellison's legacy of engagement with aesthetic and political implications of social and popular cultural movements and history. Argues that these writers come to very different conclusions as to the efficacy of the "hero." Concludes the dissertation with the work of Michelle Cliff and Patricia Powell, whose work take us to the Anglo Caribbean and enables me to think through the movement of this figure through conduits of colonial and global capital and the resiliency of contemporary struggles, political and aesthetic, with this figure as a site of resistance and revolution.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
187 p., Traces the development of the writer’s Afrocentric vision showing how Marshall’s creative sensibility has evolved—from American to African-American, African-Caribbean, and, finally, Pan-African—and how her distinctive literary style combines Western forms with elements from the African oral tradition.
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.
