Intro


Diasporic literature:
w Any literature, written or oral, of a dispersed people. Once commonly reserved for referejnce to Jews scattered outside Palestine after the Babylonian captivity, the term has come to refer to any poeple driven off, removed, or exiled from their home who nevertheless maintain elements of their native culture while residing within a dominant culture. The concept of the African diaspora emphasises what is shared, historically and culturally, among African-descended peoples worldwide, but the application of this term is not uncontested.
w Perhaps the most consistent connection of 'diaspora' with people of African descent has been its connection with slavery, suffering, and oppression. Also focus on the Atlantic slave trade - the experience of exportation and exile; plus people who never left the continent - series of invasions, colonisations, tribal persecutions, and national partitionings within Africa.
w Diasporic literature may be defines- as focusing upon one's African heritage or upon ethnic or racial experiences and issues such as slavery, race, colonization, or the color line; also, any literature created by an exiled or emigrated individual, because speech patterns, word choices, aesthetic patterns, and other cultural influences are never completely obliterated.
w Themes:
§ Atlantic slave trade - slavery and freedom, racial discrimination and segregation, ghettoization.
§ Bondage and freedom, self-representation and stereotypes.
§ Migration and immigration, exile and expatriatism, family and home.
w Genres:
1) Travel writing - Briton Hammon's A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man (1760), William Wells Brown's The American Fugitive in Europe (1850).
2) Slave narrative - experiences of enslaved Africans in North America, the Carribean, and parts of Europe. Slaves told stories and published autobiographies, created songs and poetry, and acted out in rituals, ceremonies, and other dramas their lives, histories and aspirations. Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789).
3) Crime fiction - Mike Phillips, Njami Simon
4) Speculative fiction - Charles R. Saunders, Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany

Poetry:
w African American poets created a body of poetry that grew out of folk roots; legitimised poetry as a performative, participatory activity; and succeeded in creating an aesthetic tradition defined by communal values, the primacy of musicality and improvisation, and inventive style.
w The idea of liberation permeated African American literary consciousness from slavery to the tumultuous 60s, when poets reflected widespread disenchantment with white middle-class values and embraced cultural values emanating from African and the African diaspora. African American poets have been creators and critics of social values as they envisioned a world of justice and equality.
w 20th century poets continued to rail against the status quo and protested attitudes and institutions that stood to impede the civil rights movement that changed the nature of American society (hmmm?).

Drama:
w Post-WW II decause was a period of growth and progress, during which the African American dramatist came of age professionally. The plays of this period were more mature in technique, theme, and character than any that had been hithero produced, and presented more realistic portrayals of the interracial relationships within the larger community. The problems of integration and desegregation, domestic problems, and the concerns of African American both of the past and present were explored. Langston Hughes's The Barrier (1950), Louis Peterson's Take a Giant Step (1953), Mrs. Patterson (1954), cowritten by Charles Sebree and white playwright Greer Johnson.
w Three portraits of African Amreican urban life in New York's Harlem and Chicago's South Side were given premiere productions and explored problems of the church, the community, and the family. The Amen Corner (1955) by James Baldwin dramatizzed the crisis of a woman preacher of a Harlem storefrunt church, whose congregation and church elders begin to question her spiritual leadership. Langston Hughes reached Broadway with the intimate portrait of a colorful Harlem character Jesse B. Semple, in his musical comedy Simply Heavenly (1957).
w Most successful play of the decade, and the first by an African American woman playwright on Broadway, was A Raisin in the Sun (1959) by Lorraine Hansberry. It presented the most realistic exploration of African American domestic life up to its time and revolved around the clash of dreams among members of a South Side Chicago family when they receive a large insurance settlement after the death of the father. Insights into the concerns of African Americans and dealt with such themes as the structure of the family; identity, power and pride, and the significance of the African heritage; the frustration or castration of the African American male; and the problems of integration versus separation.

Religion:
w Christianity - literature contains evidence of the power of religion in the lives of its characters, as well as evidence of religion's absence by its faillure to effect justice and love between God's white and black children. Christian African American literary characters also judge their own standards of appropriate behaviors as 'true' children of God, who know that God is good, requires absolute obedience, rewards the faithful who do good, and punishes evil doers, and does not excuse hypocrities (Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings).
w New belief systems, some of which have been inspired by charismatic leaders of movments or nationwide congregations such as Marcus Garvey and Father Divine - new prophets able to provide racial pride, political and economic visibility, and renewed spiritual hope, as well as relief from material want (e. g. Ras the Destroyer in Invisible Man, Bambara's Salt Eaters).
w Islam - Nation of Islam or Black Muslims. Word such as 'Allah' and 'jihad,' 'Elijah' and 'Mecca' - words used notably by poets Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Jayne Cortez.
w Ras Tafari or Rastafarianism - Jamaican-rooted belief that Ehiopian King Haile Selassie is God, whose chosen people are black peoples who will inherit the promised land of Ethiopia, defined as Africa.
w Hoodoo - denoting belief and practice of magic expressed in, for example, conjuring, sorcery, divination, relationships among spiritual forces, and the unusually effective use of herbs to cure, kill, control behaviour, etc., also called root-worker or root-doctor skills. (David, the Prophet in Ann Petry's The Street, root workers in Bontemp's Black Thunder, Bambara's The Salt Eaters, Naylor's Mama Day, Pilate Dead's root-working in Song of Solomon).
w Santeria - literally means the worship of saints, in particular, Catholic saints who have become identified as the pantheon of deitis or orishas created by the Yoruba god Oloddumare as manifestations of his will, expressions of his essence in nature, and as humankind's guides and protectors.

Place:
w Like the broader culture of black Americans, black writer's literature has tempered the historic experience of dislocation, slavery, and discrimination by seeking terms with which to root their lives in the African diaspora. A characteristic vocabulary of place has become an imagery of belonging in America. Since the discourse of African American culture is disposed to transform literal spaces into topical spaces for rhetorical and figurative purposes, literary critics of African descent have addressed the ways in which landscapes become symbolic in order to study the cultural practice of evoking places of the spirit in critical and textual terms.
w Slavery - the plantation of white literature was appropriated and reconfigures as a house of bondage in an array of literary texts of African American authors ranging from the antebellum fugitive slaves themselves to the postmodern feminists imagining slavery in the aftermath of the struggle for civil rights. Downriver, the all-enconmpassing term for the dreaded places in the lower South to which slaves were sold off, was the only alternative to the plantation allowed by the system of slavery, but various safe havens and sites of resistance to bondage were improvised within the domain of the plantation itself; woods, riverside, swamps, the wilderness - were put to use as setting for meditation, rebelliion, and disorder in Nat Turner's Confessions (1831), Douglass's 'The Heroic Slave' (1853).
w Harlem - the site for the 20th century repudiation of unacceptable inherited notions of racial identity. Harlem motif as an icon of racial being, consolidating the status of the black enclave as a key location of the spirit. In the 60s a primary setting and symbol of the Black Arts movement.
w Some writers have chosen typically to turn literal and historical settings to figural and fictional purposes by embracing the versimilitude of their chosen settings, such as the Mississippi river of Alice Walker and Richard Wright, andt he Chicago of Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks.



Crossroads


The modernist novel:
▪ Is experimental and innovatory in form
▪ Foreground the subconscious and unconscious regions of the human mind
▪ Frequently breaks the linearity of plot
▪ Often makes use of 'new' strategied of point of such, such as the technique of 'stream-of-consciousness'
▪ Nevertheless, it usuallly compensates for such breaches of conventional mimetic writing by trying to establish unity, closure, identity, etc. on another level of discourse.

Postmodern novel is much more radical in these respects:
▪ Above all, it denies or subverts such compensatory measures
▪ For example, it asserts the freedom and autonomy of the literary text while at the same time foregrounding the author's play with language,
▪ It presents two-dimensional characters which are then given extremely variable functions, something they could never perform in 'real' life (or death),
▪ It inverts generic plots such as those of crime fiction or the love triangle,
▪ Destabilises the function of the narrator to the extent that he himself becomes a pawn in the game.

The postmodernist novel is essentially antimimetic:
▪ It frequently questions the linearity of plot structure,
▪ confuses time sequences,
▪ blends levels of reality and fictionality,
▪ fragments characters,
▪ looks at events through several focalising lenses arranged one behind the other,
▪ enjoys unreliable narrators,
▪ falls short of expectations, breaks rules, undermines conventions, sometimes resists interpretation
▪ with an excessive blending of wit, irony, and paradox.
▪ In short, it favors experimental, avant-garde, progressive literary techniques and approaches.
▪ Fictions that predominantly undercat mimesis (the reproduction of external reality), ideology, and 'truth', collapse surface and depth, or tend to doubt the foundations of their own existence.

Postmodernism as a condition:
▪ Lyotard: postmodernism refers to the general state of knowledge in times of information technology and the absence of a master narrative
▪ Jameson: relates it to the cultural logic of late capitalism and the loss of historical consciousness
▪ Baudrillard: it has to do with the cultural production of a 'semiurgic society' and the substitution of the simulacrum for the real

Clarence Major (b. 1936) - born into an African-Cherokee family and community in Atlanta, Georgia.
▪ Two of his novels, Such Was the Season (1987) and Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar (1988), and one book of poetry, Some Observations of a Stranger at Zuni in the Latter Part of the Century (1989), offer substantial discussion of African-Native American identity. Such focuses on an African-Cherokee family and community. Painted Turtle explores the struggle for cultural definition, the oscillations between insider and outsider. In Some Observations, Major uses both Zuni and English languages. He also writer about a 'liberal' who wants to make a film about Gatumlati, an African-Cherokee woman, until the filmmaker discovers that she was not the 'pure' Cherokee on which his 'Cherokee' film insists. Major, along with many other African-Native American writers, struggles with the same issues while fashioning an identity in his writing and must negotiate the fixed racial/cultural boundaries that often do not allow a Cherokee to be part African American or even an African American to be part Cherokee. Their writing is a clear articulation of the cultural negotiations that take place within an African-Native American and demands an analysis from scholar of both African American and Native American literatures.
▪ Reflex and Bone Structure (1975):
§ A detective novel of sorts, it plays with the possibilities of the genre and unercuts any rational attempts to establish a relationship of cause and effect by scrambling the fragments of the two stories of a murder and its investigation and by offering different version of the first and diverging developments of the second.
§ Besides juggling with time levels and plot sequences, such as offering alternative version's of Cora's life, the narrator problematizes his own function as an author by admitting his inability to create round characters, by doing his best to control his figures yet running the risk of being manipulated by them in turn, thus revealing his own disorientation in the metafictional clinch.
§ The author's preoccupation with the self is a concern with himself as an author, with the need to create his own reality, the need to churn out, again and again, his own veresion of death - and life.

Ishmael Reed's specialty satirical parody: of genres, ideologies, aesthetic programs, even of religions.
Mumbo Jumbo (1972) - parodies the detective novel, the Harlem Renaissance, the Jazz Age, Western Culture, and Christianity, propagating the Neo-American Hoo-Doo Church as a contemporary version of the traditional Haitian religoin of Voodoo. Though parody, Reed satirises almost everything under the sun, including racial, cultural, and gender issues. Use of the vernacular, exuberant verbal wit, successful blending of folklore and caricature, inventive use of metafictional strategies, deconstruction of history.

William Melvin Kelley:
▪ His innovative potential enxompasses forays into the realms of fantasy, myth, and dream as well as the linguistic experiments used to represent them.
▪ dem (1967) - surrealistic treatment of a white family's disintegration under the spell of black retributive action. Its protagonist risks disappearing into the fantasy world of TV soap opera, and there are early attempts to represent his dreams in language experiments making frequent use of paranomasia (the use of words that sound alike but differ in meaning).
▪ Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970) - surrealist satire that blends white-dominated intertextuality with African heritage to present the African American as a dream-construction. At surface level, the novel tells an unending tale consisting of two separate plots with two different protagonists, partly presented in alternating fragments: a spoof on segregation combined with an account of a clandestine contemporary Mddle Passage and a burlesque of a Harlem hustler's maneuvering against the Black Bourgeoisie. Additional depth and actual excitement are provided by a third story, which consists of ironic-prophetic dream-like sequences, in which the two protagonists are offered a possibility to come together and reconstruct the shattered self of the black man, thereby escaping the dismal condition of a spiritually unbalanced world and a hyphothetical collectiev myth of a utopian black American nation, which is, however, treated ironically.

John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing (1996):
▪ Wideman's brand of historiographic metafiction relates issues of history and prophecy with the theme of storytelling, but his stories and their tellers, by means of fragmentation, anachornism, and the permeability of characters, are made to wreak havoc on the identitarian discourses practiced by some of his more modernist-minded contemporaries. Mental disturbance is no issue here; the forces assailing the artist's perception of the self and others are social, moral, and spiritual.
▪ Masquerade, disguise, and deception dominate most of the tales told in this novel, whose characters need them to survive in an increasingly chaotic world.
▪ In typically postmodern fashion, contradictory concepts of time inform the complex arrangement of event and flashback; history, story and the writer's life permeate each other and the characters, so that the process of representation must constantly be renegotiated by the writer.

Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle (1996): a satirical novel
▪ The surface linearity of Beatty's spoof on the black Bildungs- and Künstlerroman cover up the fissures and cracks in the life of a pitch-black Californian whiz kid, whose brainpower, sophistication, and creative talent are matched only by his sarcasm, insolence, and occasional cynicism: attitudes that he needs to survive in his new surrounding when his mother moves the family from a white middle-class neighborhood to inner-city LA. Gunnar Kaufmann hails from a clan of self-reliant yet accommodationist folk who exaggerate racial and cultural stereotypes for economic and psychic survival.
▪ Entropic and apocalyptic echoes together with references to suicidal thematics help create a brand of postmodernist satire full of absurd wit and sarcasm while still enforcing a higly ethical stance.



Coming of age


'Coming of age in the African American novel' by Claudine Raynaud

Works include:
▪ Not Without Laughter (1930) by Langston Hughes
▪ Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston
▪ Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright
▪ Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) by James Baldwin
▪ Song of Solomon (1978) by Toni Morrison
▪ Push (1996) by Sapphire

Bildungsroman - if defined in its classical terms as a narrative of the spiritual, psychological, and social development of a young person to a point of integration into society and culture, its relationship to African American fiction is higly problematic. Presenation of a black self that must emerge in the context of a dominant society that denies the validity of black identity. Variations of Bildungsroman - they emphasize a critique of the larger society through calls for reform, validation of African American culture as an alternative, escape, ambiguity about the protagonist's achievement, or failed integration.

Coming of age - reaching the age of 'maturity' or 'discretion' - is variously a process, a moment, or a scene in African American narratives. The discovery of American's society's racism is the major event in the protagonist's development and in their 'education'. Emphasis is placed upon being an African American in America, where ownership, beloinging, and their negation, and dispossession, are central to the notion of identity. How can one own one's identity - be self-determined - when one does not own oneself and faces an irrevocable loss? The recognition of belonging takes place within the narrower circles of the family and of the black community, while society as a whole is often viewed as a threat, if not as the enemy.

Genres coming of age narratives incorporate:
▪ Bildungsroman - a critique of coming of age: leads to subversion and negation of the American dream in terms of race relations. In order to reach 'adulthood' the child has to know and muster the mechanisms of racism, to understand the workins of their oppression.
▪ The picaresque novel
▪ The sentimental novel
▪ The slave narrative

Lines to cross:
▪ Black-white relationships (Clover by Dori Sanders, Morrison's Paradise ?)
▪ Class lines - Ntozake Shange's Betsey Brown (1985): a meditation on the difficulty of integration fo black children who found themselves a minority in white colleges. The black middle class has integrated the values of white America and the American dream of bettering oneself. Class and race as it impact black children.
▪ Homosexuality (desire) - Baldwin, Morrison's Sula.

Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) -How can the black child constuct a self in America?
The first person narrator tells the explosion of the body, the disarray of the senses, the desire for death at the center of the young girl's psychic make-up. As she grow up in the violence of the South of the 50s, rape, fear of lack of feminity, too many journeys back and forth across the country, must gradually be countered by a determination not to let the internalization of racism inflict its deadly wound. Maya learns from her grandmother, mother, brother's experiences, that she must be whole and gather the fragments, overcome self-depreciation. Ressurance that maternal and daugherly love, together with the hope of future generations, heals and teaches.

Alice Walker's The Colour Purple (1982):
Raped by her father, Celie gives birth to two children from this incestuous relation. Her coming of age, however, is the gradual understanding, through the help of other protagonists (Sofia, Shug Avery, Nettie) that she can claim her own beauty, her own self. She ultimately wins back her husband's love and starts her own business. If she is much older than might be expected, this trait is common to a lot of the heroes and heroines of the black novel. The deferral into adulthood of achievement and accomplishment is in direct relation to the weight of the burdens.




Ellison and Baldwin

'Finding commong ground: Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin' by Herman Beavers

Similarities: Their fictions treat men who are injured by their circumstances and thus are forced to find ways to give narrative shape and breadth to the damage done them. Their characters are engaged in attempts to fashion for themselves adequate narrative space, to become agents, actors, and subjects. At the level of plot, their characters must contend with the fact that their injuries often leave them isolated and alone, incapable of articulating the extent and nature of their injuries, or conversely, so aware of their wounds that they ponder them to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes they are prone to acts of forgetting, of trying to distance themselves from injury; to view it as an aberration rather than as a consequence of their embattled presence. Both writers depict call for testimony, if only because the act of testifying is the only way their characters can make their way to sanity and wholeness.

Variances in how they approach 'the wound':
Ellison: the wound becomes something the hero must embrace wholeheartedly, prompting the story of how he received it, as well as how he has come to understand it as the symbolic capital intrinsic to a life lived free of illusion. The wound is part of the ritual of becoming.
Baldwin: the wound is the only readily available sign that pain is meaningful. Narration in his fiction seeks to achieve a moral legibility that will allow his characters to understand their problems as outgrowths of toxicity and contamination. He values the wound for its diagnostic potential.

'Common ground': both wanted to expand our sense of what constituted the human potential for self-recovery. Ellison insisted that black life, even at its most downttrodden, is maked by a resilience and style that can best be understood through the blues. Baldwin, while seeking to understand American racial injustice, wrote fiction that argued for the ways morality is rendered legible through the ability to love.

Ralph Ellison:
▪ Suffering is rendered in tragicomic terms.
▪ Believing in the liberating potential of mythopoetic chaos, his novels embrace the idea of death and rebith, often beginning with the Gothic construct of being buried alive and investing that construct with an irony that turns it on its head. Death functions to shift the reader's attention away from the sense that it involves finality and toward the notion that death involves the transgression of boundaries; these boundaries must be transgressed if we are to emerge on the other side and thus enter into a new level of consciousness. Pain is necessary to the process because it maks the ritual process the hero must endure in order to achieve insight.

Invisible Man (1952):
§ narrator is living underground in a basement of an apartment on the edge of Harlem. Rather than making this death-in-life symbol of his protagonist's demise, Ellisone instead refashions it into hibernation.
§ The novel begins with a Prologue and ends with an Epilogue. These sections constitute the novel's 'narrative presents'. The 25 chapters are related as an extended flashback that chronicles twenty years in the protagonist's life. This structural delineation is important because it allows us to account for the novel's radical tonal shifts. In the Prologue and epilogue, Ellison employs a rhetorical playfulness. The chapters adopt a more varied tone, one moment reflecting a surrealism that renders all rhetorical surfaces suspect, enacting the maneuvers necessary to convey a tonemore rollicking, able to contain circumstances both absurd and tragic, the next moment, a tone beset by pathos and anger.
§ A South-to-North, Dixie-to-Harlem journey that recalls the movement of black Americans from the postbellum South to the Northern cities. Also - a kind of fantasia, a 'dream' history, which serves as both the narrator's past and that of most of his black American cocitizenry. In the prologue, he promises to 'irradiate' his own story and that of the larger American black-white enounter; the touchstones involve slavery, Reconstruction, the Jazz Age, the Depression, and interwar Harlem, with hints of the coming 60s Civil Rights and Black Power movement.
§ 'I carried my sickness and though for a long time I tried to place it in the outside world, the attempt to write it down shows me that at least half of it lay within me.' Insisting that the blues offered a way to understand that self-recovery lies in the act of metaphorising trouble; to do so is an act of self-realisation that has the power to transform a nation.
§ Mix of such diverse elements as realism, surrealism, folklore and myth; African-American music - jazz composition, storytelling with all the feints and improvisational riffs, all the same time all the overall discipline. The book fuses its 'high' references with those of black, vernacular culture, verban and musical, its seriousness of purpose with a winning talent for humor and well-taken irony.

Juneteenth (1999):
§ revisits the territory covered in Invisible Man, making use of African American folktales, the blues, the dozens, the swing and the velocity of jazz.
§ Talks about the responsibilities that come with freedom as well as the posturing that accompanies a life in politics. Also, a novel that ruminates on the vagaries of race in American culture, including a serious treatment of what it means to 'pass' from black to white in light of the fact that blacks and whites share a past neither wishes to claim. Also, a novel that explores the struggle on the part of the son to break free of the influence of the father.


James Baldwin:
▪ Characters whose suffering can take both spiritual and physical forms. In Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone and Just Above My Head protagonists suffer heart attacks that signify that these are men who have suffered psychic wounds that take on physical manifestations, and that they are mortal, no matter how heroic they may be, they cannot trascend their physical limitations. In Go Tell It on the Mountain and Another Country the very air the protagonists (Rufus and John) breathe serves as a constant reminder of how their lives are beset by hatred and bitterness.
▪ Important theme: sexuality and power. The problem of American identity in terms of both sexuality and race. Sexuality is used to map the contours of power, as an index of his characters' ability to love, and as a way to alter the terms upon which we base notions of racial progress.

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) - Fuses the Bildungsroman and the spiritual conversion narrative.
§ Setting maturation and aspiration against salvation, John Grimes is a young boy entering puberty at the same time that he feels pressured to become Saved. John undergoes a spiritual journey that leads him to accept a judgmental and punishing Christianity as the price of belonging. The novel marks the passage of the protagonist from sin to salvation or from guilt to redemption.
§ Limited narrator, whose omniscience we must depends upon to understand the characters' motivation apart from their declaratons of religious devotion
§ Baldwin's effort to subvert the impulse so deeply entrenched in African American fiction by male writers, that black men should look within the race (and gender!!) for models of behaviour. Baldwin articulates the manner in which he advocated an alternative strategy for the formation of a black male subjectivity that eschews the notion that masculinity and femininity are mutually exclusive sites in favor of a consciousness that seeks to manifest the best characteristics of both.

Giovanni (1956):
§ David's life is makred by his inability to give or receive love. As he ponders marriage to a woman he does not love, his gay lover is being executed for murder. His suffering denotes the 'life in death' he endures within the realm of social death; he is caught up in a web of criminality and guilt that threatens to destroy him. David's 'innocence' is destructive to those who try to care for him. His self-absorption leads him to hurt people because he is lacking in anything resembling emapthy for the suffering of others (how white scapegoate blacks).
§ The novel has depicted David's homosexual relationship with Giovanni in order to suggest the ways that socially constructed categories like 'gay', 'straight', 'man', 'woman' ultimately undermine human beings' ability to reach outside themselves. Without the capacity to love there is little chance of escape, which means fragments of the past stay with us in spite of our best effort to escape them.

Another Country (1962) - intersection between race and sex.
§ Portrayal of characters who come together across lines of race, lcass, and sexual preference (Baldwin's purpose to explore as many variations in racial, social, geographical, and sexual perspective as can be credibly presented in a single novel). The novel demonstrates that it is possible for individuals to love and care for one another, irrespective of their background. But Baldwin's intention is to suggest that love happens in the world, and thus it is jeopardised by the fragility of the human spirit and the human propensity for disloyalty.
§ Themes/motifs/central issues: racism, sex and sexist attitudes, poverty, alienation from family and especially men from their fathers, hostile environment, and bisexual relationships between men.
§ Core - the issue of integrity and the struggle to maintain it in the face of the constant assaults directed at those who dare to love. The novel suggests that who we are as individuals, our ability to construct a unified sense of self, is reliant on the ability to love unvonditionally, which makes it possible to place what we have on the line. What each character, save Eric (?), fails to understand is that there is no safe haven; love cannot provide a refuge from a hostile world. Love is doomed when it adheres to the categorical boundaries imposed by American society. Baldwin's belief that the invalid categories that grow out of race and sexuality are the sign of the nation's inability to come to grips with its history; the destructive potential denial and dishonesty can unleash. The historical relationship of the sexes in a patriarchial society is at the root of many of the prolbems that bedevil the characters (using sex to dominate women, possessing women with sex, etc., except Vivaldo and Eric's 'relationship' that acts as a catharsis for Eric and allows Eric finally to accept his preference for men.)
§ Richard is rigidly bound by middle-class American bourgeois values, biases, and stereotypes! The only character who is not involved in 'this sexual game of musical chairs.'
§ (Oxford Comp) Through interleocking events and episodes, the book critiques a 'moral' and 'democratic' America that fosters prejudice based on race, class, and sexuality. Redemption occurs only when one exorcises their demons, often roted in the oppositions of gay/straight, black/white, man/woman, rich/poor. Baldwin resists facile categories of 'good and 'bad' characters: black and whites can alternatively be victims and victimizers. Only through pain, sufferinc, and acceptance can one enter another country - a metaphoric utopia that eliminates artificial, socially constructed distinctions.
§ 'Another country' as a metaphorical haven where love can exist (when crossing and undermining society's restrictions like Vivaldo).

The Fire Next Time (1963) - consists of two essays.
§ The first, 'My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundreth Anniversary of the Emancipation' was written on the occasion of the 14th birthday of Baldwin's nephew. Second one, 'Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind' recounts Baldwin's experiences growing up in New York, including his unpleasant encounters with the police, his attracction to and rejection of Christianity, his awareness of sexual pitfalls in Harlem, and his later encouter with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
§ Baldwin uses the volume for his own political commentary. Baldwin discusses the position of black people in US and asserts that the country can never be a nation until it solves its color problem. If it doesn not, he predicts destructive consequences in the image of 'the fire next time.'

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), Just Above My Head (1979) - both allow the reader to consider the role of the black artist in contemporary society. The latter - Baldwin suggests that male bonding is the way to liberation; sexuality as the means for black men to discover the true substance of their humanity.

If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) - explores the pressures a racist society places on black men and women trying to love one another. The antagonist of the novel is the American legal system. Sociological problems to be found in the black community and Baldwin's constant assertion that love is the only weaponn that can withstand the assault.



Vernacular


'Vernacular modernism in the novels of John Edgar Wideman and Leon Forrest' by Keith Byerman

They both have expicitly positioned themselves as modernists, at least in some aspets of their work. It is therefore useful to explore that identity as one means of grasping their connection to black postmodernism.

Modernism - often associated with a specific period, a set of ideas and values, a collection of artistic practices and products, or a list of names. Some characteristics instead a strick definition of the movement:
} The recurrent act of fragmenting unities (unities of character or plot or pictorial space or lyric form),
} the use of mythic paradigms,
} the refusal of norms of beauty,
} the willingness to make radical linguistic experiment,
} all often inspired by the resolve to startle and disturb the public.
} (Michael Levenson, Cambridge Companion to Modernism).

Vernacular:
} Origins in discussions of language use, as in Dante's choice to write in Italian rather than latin, 'the language or dialect native to a region or country.'
} In folklore studies, it has more general connotations, 'a style of artistic or technical and esp. architectural expression employing the commonest forms, materials, and decorations of a place, period, or group.'
} Withing African American culture, the cernacular incudes the conventional genres of folklore (tales, songs, beliefs, material culture) as well as perfomative aspect of storytelling, call-and-response, verbal contests, and religious practices. These mostly oral forms and practices are generally understood as constituting the basis of African American culture, considering that, for most of US history, black have been legally or socially forced into a situation of illiteracy and thus had to rely on oral tradition to sustain and nurture their culture. The vernacular serves as counter-memory to the narratives of the dominant order.
} Vernacular expression focuses on process more than product. It is the style of storytelling, sermonising, or blues singing that is crucial, in part because the content is already known to the audience. Technique is central to establishing the authority of the artist, as in modernism. Because the materials of folk art are always old, the vernacular artist must 'make it new' by signifying on the work of other artists. Such acknowledgment can take the form of parody, of renaming, of homage, or of direct borrowing.

Leon Forrest (1937-1997):
} Taking Joyce and Faulkner as two of his models, he sees in their methods a means of rendering ccultural experience that is rich and complex, often bordering on chaos. Given his understanding of African American life and history, realistic representation would simply not work. He embraces experimentation as the best way to tell his stories.
} His work is characterised by its richness of voices and storytelling. In all of his fictions, stories are embedded within stories and narrative voices recreate the voices of other speakers in endless play. Stylistically, he makes use of stream of consciousness, dream sequences, vision, monologues, song lyrics, repetition, elements of epic, and the fragmentation of time. He generates his own world through interconnected narratives across novels.
} While Forrest is very much aware of the social deprivation that blacks have suffered in American history, he is primarily concerned with demonstrating the resources that they bring to that situation. Most of his characters are orphans, but out of that condition they manage to engender communities bult on the possibilities of the vernacular.
} In recording this history of the Reed and Witherspoon families, Forrest makes use of a range of vernacular devices, including sermons, spirituals, call-and-response, folktales, and beliefs about curses, conjuration, and healing in this sense, he roots the story in everyday Southern culture. In doing so he creates a sense of a shared humanity against which to measure both the inhumanity of racial and gender oppression and the deep fallibility of human beings.
} The essence of his vernacular modernism: artistic creation is a form of call-and-response in which the artist is neither identical with the audience (or world) nor separate from it. All of the cultural materials are available to be used, but they must be used in a way that sustains and nurtures the relationship.
} Themes: historical and cultural disruption, orphanhood as a metaphor for the African American - and human- condition, quest for redemption.

} There is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden (1973):
§ Describes the coming of age of Nathaniel Witherspoon.Nathaniel is a son lost in the world without immediately apparant familial or cultura resources. While he must experience loss and come close to despair, he never reaches a point of complete isolation. From the beginning of the novel, he is presented with options, from the family, the community, and the culture.
§ While the present time of the story is only a day, it moves through three generations of his family, dating back to slavery. The novel is structured in five parts (sixth added in 1988) that are linked by theme and imagery much more than plot.
▫ The first, 'Lives', we are given the biographies of some of the characters who will appear in the book, but these are less factual accounts than they are complex narratives that blend documents, legends, personal statements, and passages of prose-poetry. The point is not to provide information, but rather to suggest the range of reponses available to a young black man. These include open resistance to oppression, religion, drug addiction, or some form of endurance that occasionally required acts of deception. By espousing the legitimacy of a spectrum of life choices and of all the cultural possibilities for one who is both black and American, the author sets up a dialectic for his protagonist in which there is simultaneously too much and too little to choose from in shaping his identity. The biographies show both the potential and the danger of each choice for one seeking black manhood.
▫ The next to sections are structured as call-and-response, in which Nathaniel first envisions himself as a fallen angel, with linked narratives of African American men who have had to struggle alone in a racist society. This 'Nightmare' section is followed by 'The Dream,' in which the religious faith of Hattie Breedlove shows how the lost individual can be sustained by the community. But here, too, the path is one of struggle: belief does not eliminate suffering nor justify it; rather it makes it possible to endure.
▫ 'The Vision' links that personal suffering to a national narrative of racism. In a surreal, apocalyptic allegory, Nathaniel sees a black man crucified and dismembered as a sacrifice for the society. The result is not healing but the end of time.
▫ The original final part, 'Wakefulness,' bring Nathaniel face to face with his responsibility for himself. He is able to grieve for what he has lost, but also to go forward. But going forward, in a gesture that combines modernist and vernacular perceptions, does not mean taking on a unitary identity, but rather becoming one capable of endless change

} The Bloodworth Orphans (1997):
§ It is a compex of narratives about a family and a community that draws on myth and epix to construct and problematize identity and origins. Nathaniel Witherspoon, now a collector of the stories of other, discovers that the quest for identity, especially for African Americans, is doomed as long as it is a search for origins.
§ Since the 'Bloodworth' refers to a Southern slaveholding family that produced a number of unacknowledges mixed-race children, the novel is a metaphor of the racial history of the US. Thus, for the characcters, to discover one's origins in fact would be to discover one's illegitimacy; this situation leads to the repeated use of the spiritual 'Scandalize My Name' in reference to these figures. Through religion, artistic expression, or sheer personal power, they attempt to come to terms with what might best be calld their blues conditions. Their obsession with origins leads to disaster, not matter how good or beautiful they might be. Incest, murder, rape, mob violence, and apocalyptic riot run through the text as the outcome of their quests. The only solution offered is one similar to that of There Is a Tree; as Nathaniel and one of the older black Bloodworth orphans escape the riot, they pick up an abandoned baby. By doing so, they constitute themselves as a family of the 'lost-found,' those seeking not origins but a new beginning. Identity again is not recovered but invented within history and by making use of the cultural elements of African American ife.
§ (It is governing characteristics of Forrest's fiction is excess: of genres, styles, imagery, tales, experiences, relationships, etc. The novel's numerous characters, moist of whom perceive themselves as orphans, in their quest for identity desperatey try to sound the depths of their family history, only to come up with painful evidence of incest, miscegenation, racism, rape, bloodshed, suicide, and crime of all hues and shade,s to a large extent stemming from an almost mythological curse of the Bloodworth family. However, in contrast to classical procedure, this curse finds its own illogical path among the generations of descendants in ever-renewed repeated, but also dislocated revelations of impropriety, illegitimacy, and guilt. Quite a few characters crack under the burden of such disclosures; other overreact in ways close to 'insanity'. It is as if the plethore of celebrations and outrages, performed as an amoral leveling of acclamations and denunciations, functioned to compensate the last (lost) generation of Bloodworth children for their enormous sense of deprivation. - from Gysin)

} Two Wings to Veil My Face (1983):
§ The frame situation is that Nathaniel has been called to the bedside of his grandmother, Sweetie Reed, presumably to learn why she refures to attend her husband's funeral years earlier. The narrative quickly takes another direction. First, she insists that her grandwon write down everything that she says. The moment marks a movement from the oral to the written tradition. It shifts narrative from the vagaries and imperfection of vocal retelling to the permanence of the written word. Her tale is a tale of many voices, in different time periods. It is also a tale of unreliability, in which she recreates the voices of her untrustworthy father and husband. To validate her own version of reality, she must capture their 'lying tongues' with precision and must make her telling the final one.
§ Family history, which Nathaniel had taken as the one stable element of his life, turn out to be a narrative of deceit, illegitimacy, and orphanhood. But this very deprivation becomes possibility, for now Nathaniel has a more complex view of the grandfather he idolized, a greater respect for the woman he believed to be his grandmother, an awareness of the variety of ways African Americans (and whites) engaged the nation's history, and a more sophisticated sense of human fate and responsibility.

} Divine Days (1992) - focuses on everyday life in Chicago; the author claims all of American and world culture as the context for his fictional creation. His narrator's speech and though is filled with acknowledges and unacknowledged literary and cultural references. It offers its own mythic figures, which emerge from, and are connected to, the black community. It employs a wide range of artistic and intellectual characters, from trickster preachers to black nationalist painters to Shakespearean scholar-barbers to journalists to barstool racounteurs, and they are shown to have a wide knowledge of Western, Eastern, and black vernacular cultures.

} Meteor in the Madhouse (2003) - a posthumous collecetion of novellas. Most of the informations is communicated through stories told in various voices, though filtered through Joubert Jones's consciousness. Fragmentation of narrative found in the novels is apparent even within individual novellas. This final works suggests that the telling of tales is endless; there are always new versions and additional layers. What brings order out of this apparent chaos is not a prevonceived structure that contains the material, but rather the skill of a master storyteller who, like the fol artist, has and communicates a sense of the organic form through which he works.

J ohn Edgar Wideman:
} In contrast to Forrest, Wideman has a much darker vision and has seen the relationship between modernism and the vernacular as much more vexed. The relationship is almost exclusionary: connection to modernism means disconnection from black tradition and its expressive forms.
} Wideman spent his first three novels creating himself as a modernist, with a special emphasis on alienation as a theme; after a break of several years that involved educating himself in black culture, he began writing a very different fiction, one devoted to depicting families and communities and to challenging the dominant social order. What this model overlooks is his continued practice of modernist technique and his ongoing critique of the cultural failings of American society.
} His fiction retains may of the earlier qualities, including wasteland and apocalypse imagery, narrative experimentation, the unreliability of memory and historical representation, and a thematics of the relationship between artist-intellectual and community. At the same time, the vernacular is present in his work from the beginning and is sometimes, but not always, central to the later work. His texts frequently trangress genre boundaries, especially between fiction, history, and autobiogrpahy, meaning thta folk expression operates within an experimental context.

} First three novels - A Glance Away (1967), Hurry Home (1969), the Lynchers (1973) - are clearly written within a modenrist mode in their use of stream of consciousness, frequent literary allusion, and an atmosphere of despair, impotence, and violence. In each, central characters are highly self-conscious and even intellectual figures alienated from the world around them. And while the novels are set in African Americna communities, there is relatively little engagement with the ordianry life of that world. Wideman's technique in these works includes unclear shifts between exterior and interior worlds, making it often impossible to distinguish between fantasy and reality. He also changes narrative persepectives without clear markers, thereby momentarily diorienting readers. The little hope apparent in the texts comes through vernacular expression.

} Homewood trilogy - Hiding Place (1981), Damballah (1981), Sent for you Yesterday (1983).
§ He created a family history very similar to that of the Widemans and the Frences from whom he descended. The narrative foregrounds storytelling as the principal method by which the history is kept alive. Pieces of stories are repeated in different contexts, or the same tory is told from different perspectives. Folk expressions, religious beliefs, secular and sacred music, legends, and street language are present throughout the narratives.
§ The world of Homewood is a dangerous, deterioating space. Work is hard to find, building are decaying, alcoholism and drug addiction are common, racism and violence are rampant, and there is little hope for escape. What the vernacular culture does is create a 'blues' environment; that is, it enables the characters to see the world for what it is, but to believe that the resources - of family, history, cultural expression - can enable survival. It does not guarantee survival, and these fiction are not significantly more optimistic than the earlier ones. What becomes clear is the shared humanity of the characters. One hope in these works is the black artist-intellectual, who has a prominent role in gathering up the stories. He is the one who listens to the narratives and uses them to reassure others that survival is possible. He is invested in preserving not only the stories but also the voices through which they are told.

} Reuben (1987) - emphasis on storytelling, but the stories are those of troubled individuals with little interest in communal resources.
} Philadelphia Fire (1990) - wasteland i magery as it depicts the literal holocaust that was the city's 1985 response to a radical black organisation. Emphasis on collecting and making sense of the community's stories (Cudjoe?).
} The Cattle Killing (1996) - another outsider narrator, but one who refuses to be alienated despite the attitude of others. Again a theme of storytelling, the writer as a colletor and reteller of tales. Art sowing the human reality of ordinary experience without sacrificing it, which does not mean that art has much power in the world.
} Two Cities (1998) - a narrataive of mourning: death and its effect on the living is one of the central themes. Also a claim for the restorative possibilities of art, when all the vernacular options fail. The church, the music, clubs, the basketbal games, and the family stories can offer little more than temporary respite from the pain of everyday life. Mallory and photography - a 'blues' art, because he finds both life's troubles and the power to endure them through it. In a sense, this is a return to high modernism, in that it is only the artist who can make us of cultural materials to give whatever meaning might be found in the wasteland that is contemporary society.



Writers



Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000): poet, novelist and children's writer.
} Born in Topeka, Kansas, but she's 'a Chicagoan.'
} Street in Bronzeville (1945) - her first book of poetry, second one Annie Allen (1949). Books - Maud Martha (1953), Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956), In the Mecca (1968).
} In 1969 decided to become more involved in the Black Arts movement. Elements of protest had always been present in her writing and her awareness of social issues did not result in diatribes at the expense of her clear commitment to aesthetic principles.
} Her poetry moves from traditional forms including ballads, sonnets, variations of the Chaucerian and Spencerian stanzas as well as the rhythm of the blue to the most unrestricted free verse. There is a strong sense of experimentation as she juxtaposes lyric, narrative, and dramatic poetic forms. In her lyrics there is an affirmation of life that rises above the stench of urban kitchenette buildings. In her narrative poetry the stories are simple but usually transcend the restrictions of place. In her dramatic poetry, the characters are often memorable not because of any heroism on their part, but merely because they are trying to survive from day to day.
} Like many urban writers, Brooks has recorded the impact of city life. Just as there is not a strong naturalistic sense of victimization (the city as responsible for what happens to people), neither are there great plans for an unpromised future nor is there some great divine spirit that will rescue them. Brooks is content to describe a moment in the lives of very ordinary people whose only goal is to exist from day to day and perhaps have a nice funeral when they die. Sometimes these ordinary people seem to have a control that is out of keeping with their own insignificance.
} Maud Martha (1953) - an examination of the effect of color upon characters. Maud's dark skin becomes a defining characteristic for her - she thinks she is 'ugly' because she doesn't fit a standard accepted by both black and white communitites. The novel also explores the changing role sof a woman as she moves through various stages from being primarily a daughter to becoming a white and mother. It presents succinctly the kinds of conflicts that prevail within the black community.

E.Lynn Harris (1955-2009) - novelist.
w Recreates the images of black males and gay males in his literatures and refuses to disrespect or devalue black women in his novels by conceiving of them as failures or victims.
w His writing represents complete honesty about black male sexuality for heterosexual and homosexual men. He regards these men as complex and more fearful of showing their feelings than other groups. He does not classify black male sexuality as an issue because men want to be sensitive and honest with their feelings but they do not know how.
w He draws upon W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness to represent the realistic fear of black men to reveal and live their gay lifestyles.
w Invisible Life (1991) - a coming of age story of Raymond, who defies the invisible ties of sexuality by growing to accept and embrace his own sexual preference. Harris is careful to avoid stereotyping his characters based on the media's interpretation of gay men; instead, he presents a man who is realistic and timeless.
w Just As I Am (1994) - explores several interpersonal relationships. Harris continues to testify with honesty and conviction by broadening the representation of homosexuality and AIDS in black communities. The second novel represents a complex journey of all its characters who face realistic and timeless dilemmas in a world that is quickly changing.
w And This Too Shall Pass (1996) - completes the trilogy.

Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011) - poet, composer, pianist, vocalist, and lyricist.
w His chosen form of creative production is a combination of oral poetry and jazz. Songs and poems offering commentary on the world's injustices have made him widely recognised as a voice for social change. He has become a inspiration for contemporary rap and hip-hop artists. Scott-Heron speaks with rage and hope about the difficulty of creating social change in a funky mixture of blues, jazz, and poetry. He has produced 17 recordings.
w He has used music to address wide-ranging issues, including urban black experience (Winter in America, 1973), alcoholism (The Bottle, 1975), South African apartheid (Johannesburg, 1975), violent social change (The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, 1975), and spiritual sustenance and recovering (Spirits, 1994). His first published book, The Vulture (1970) - a novel concerned with the destructive impact of drugs and American corruption on black communitites.

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (b. 1934) - poet, playwright, essayist, activist, lecturer, novelist, editor, anthologist, and director.
w Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961) - most representative of the literature produced by the more characteristic Beat writers. Reflecting scorn for convention, pretence, and materialism, the poems share also the brooding, self-deprecating tone of these artists.
w Home: Social Essays - he shows in these essays an intense disaffection for liberalism, the gradualism of the civil rights movement, all manifestations of cultural shame, and assimilationist behavior by African Americans.
w The Dead Lecturer (1964) - the poems represents Baraka's farewell to the closed, apolitical circle of Beat peers. Marked by an ever-increasing preoccupation with racial converns, these lyrics envince the artist's crystallisation of his commitment to revolutionary action and his disavowal of what he perceives to be the apolitical decadence of former compatriots. He shows impatience with the life of reflection and dead-end intellectualism.
w The poems in Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961-197 (1969), It's Nation Time (1970), and In Our Terribleness (1970) are typical of the verse produced by cultural nationalist, poet/priest Baraka. An increase in the use of the language of the streets and black oral modes.