The apocalypse in African-American fiction

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Amy K. Levin

Traces the continuing influence of West African women's traditions and societies on late-20th-century literature by African-American women. The first half of the book focuses on how these influences permeate both theme and imagery in novels by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, and Gloria Naylor. The second half focuses on recent neo-slave narratives as works that sprang from the African experience rather than merely paralleling the original slave narratives. [publisher web site].

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Evie Shockley

Beginning with a deceptively simple question—What do we mean when we designate behaviors, values, or forms of expression as “black”?—Evie Shockley’s <em>Renegade Poetics</em> separates what we think we know about black aesthetics from the more complex and nuanced possibilities the concept has long encompassed. The study reminds us, first, that even among the radicalized young poets and theorists who associated themselves with the Black Arts Movement that began in the mid-1960s, the contours of black aesthetics were deeply contested and, second, that debates about the relationship between aesthetics and politics for African American artists continue into the twenty-first century. Shockley argues that a rigid notion of black aesthetics commonly circulates that is little more than a caricature of the concept. She sees the Black Aesthetic as influencing not only African American poets and their poetic production, but also, through its shaping of criteria and values, the reception of their work. Taking as its starting point the young BAM artists’ and activists’ insistence upon the interconnectedness of culture and politics, this study delineates how African American poets—in particular, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Harryette Mullen, Anne Spencer, Ed Roberson, and Will Alexander—generate formally innovative responses to their various historical and cultural contexts. Out of her readings, Shockley eloquently builds a case for redefining black aesthetics descriptively, to account for nearly a century of efforts by African American poets and critics to name and tackle issues of racial identity and self-determination. In the process, she resituates innovative poetry that has been dismissed, marginalized, or misread because its experiments were not “recognizably black”—or, in relation to the avant-garde tradition, because they <em>were</em>.

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Ashraf H.A. Rushdy

"Slavery is America's family secret, a partially hidden phantom that continues to haunt our national imagination. Remembering Generations explores how three contemporary African American writers artistically represent this notion in novels about the enduring effects of slavery on the descendants of slaves in the post-civil rights era." "Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Ashraf Rushdy begins by situating these works in their cultural moment of production and highlighting the ways in which they respond to contemporary debates about race and family, which assumed new levels of importance in the 1970s with the waning of the Black Power movement and the release of the Moynihan Report. He then shows how each novel, in its own way, traces the historical origins of race to the practices of American slavery; comments on how racialized slavery causes deviations in the treatment of such traditional literary themes as desire, death, and kinship; and constructs new ways of conceiving of the interrelationship of race and family in America. Following the evolution of this literary form into the 1990s, Rushdy looks at such works as Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family (1998) and Macky Alston's Family Name (1997), in which descendants of slaveholders expose the family secrets of their ancestors." "Remembering Generations examines the questions of how cultural works contribute to social debates, how a particular representational form emerges out of a specific historical epoch, and how some contemporary intellectuals meditate on the issue of historical responsibility - of recognizing that the slave past continues to exert an influence on contemporary American society."--Jacket.

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Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo

"The Haitian Revolution of 1804 was significant because it not only brought into being the first Black republic in the Americas but also encouraged new visions of the interrelatedness of peoples of the African Diaspora. Black Cosmopolitanism looks to the aftermath of this historical moment to examine the disparities and similarities between the approaches to identity articulated by people of African descent in the United States, Cuba, and the British West Indies during the nineteenth century." "Through readings of slave narratives, fiction, poetry, newspaper editorials, and government documents that include texts by Frederick Douglass, the freed West Indian slave Mary Prince, and the Cuban poets Placido and Juan Francisco Manzano, Nwankwo explicates this growing self-consciousness about publicly engaging other people of African descent. Ultimately, she contends, they configured their identities specifically to counter not only the Atlantic power structure's negation of their potential for transnational identity but also its simultaneous denial of their humanity and worthiness for national citizenship."--Jacket.