The revisionings proposed by Sultana Afroz regarding the pervasiveness of the African Islamic presence in plantation Jamaica are contested, on grounds of her falsification of demographic data and of contemporary historical sources, non-differentiation in the treatment of historical processes in West Africa, unsubstantiated or inadequate proof of claims, attribution of causality and relatedness to parallel phenomena, questionable etymological assertions, unfamiliarity with African cultural history, and a general tendency to make exaggerated and dogmatic statements. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
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.
Wynter,Sylvia (Author), Bogues,Anthony (Author), and Eudell,Demetrius Lynn (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
Kingston ; Miami: I. Randle
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Originally published: London : J. Cape, 1962., 340 p., Written in the late 1950s on the cusp of Jamaica's independence from Britain, The Hills of Hebron tells the story of a group of formerly enslaved Jamaicans as they attempt to create a new life and assert themselves against the colonial power.
