Intro


Black aesthetics:
▪ The Black Arts Movement - the key theorists of the Black Aesthetic were Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones), Larry Neal, Addison Gayle, Hoyt Fuller, and Maulana Ron Karenga. Fuller - 'black aethetic [is] a system of isolating and evaluating the artistic works of black people which reflect the special character and imperatives of black experience.' Black art is seen as a political weapon. The audience is envisioned as the black masses and black masses are envisioned as the brothers on the street, the urban black working class. Militant poets of the period were trying to incite the black masses to revolt.
▪ The new breed - 70s with Ismael Reed, Al Young, Cecil Brown, Quincy Thomas Trope, Jr., and other rebelled against the Black Aesthetic; this New Breed found the Black Aesthetic too prescriptive and narrowly political. Like the Black Aesthetic writers, they felt that the universalist aesthetic was simply a white aesthetic by another name. Their aesthetic was grounded in African American folk culture. They felt that the battleground was not the street but the mind; they wanted to dethrone the Western mind from the seat of intellectual power and prestige. The New Breed expanded the definition of ethnic aesthetic by claiming no tonly that black but that all cultures deserve to be celebrated.
▪ The Neo-Black Aesthetic- in the 80s and 90s a new literary generation appeareed who had been incfluenced by both the Black Aesthetic of the 60s and the New Breed folk aesthetic of the 70s. These writers rejected the earlier universalist monochromatic aesthetic. They self-consciously saw themselves writing out of Africna American tradition and black experience. They draw from both white and black culture, but they grounded in the black experience and would never give up their black heritage for white culture. They were apolitical even though they affirm a racial aesthetic.

Afrocentricity:
Philosophical and theoretical persepctive, as distinct from a system, whose conceptual origins are attributed to a trilogy of books by Molefi Kete Asante: Afrocentricity (1988), The Afrocentric Idea (1987) and Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge (1990); they form the essential core of the idea that literary interpretation can be based on location. Location takes several forms, including psychological, cultural, economic, and social positions. One is able to interpret a text, or locate a text by identifying the elements in it that reveal the author's personal location. The marking constituents of a textual, hence, personal location are found in the attitude, direction, and language of the text. It is possible to determine location, dislocation, and relocation by examining the text for centerdness, that is, the congruence between the writer's consciousness of agency and the display of that agency according to the marking constituents. In the Afrocentric view the problem of location takes precedence over the topic or the data under consideration. The argument is that Africans have been moved off of social, political, philosophical, and economic terms in most discourse in the West for half a millenium. Afrocentrists call for a recentering or a relocating of Africans in an agent position; to be centered is to located as an agent instead of as the Other. Negation of Eurocentrism (e.g. WW I only European war, from whose POV events are seen? Places discovered by whom? Columbus, Mungo Park as the discoverer of the Niger River, David Livingstone's naming of Musi wa Tunya as Victoria Falls, etc. etc.)

Cookbooks:
▪ The edible reconstruct a cultural heritage, grounds familial reminiscence, and authorizes personal narrative. In the hands of black writers, the cookbook becomes a vehicle with which to sustain a sense of culture. Like retelling a story, reproducing a recipe requires the engagement of community, the act of passing down a recipe from generation to generation providing an apt metaphor for the transfer of knowledge and the establishment of links between self, family, and nation - cooking as a metaphor for the reproduction of culture.
▪ Amiri Barak's essay 'Soul Food' (1962)VertaMae Smart'Grosvenor's Vibration Cooking, or The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970). Recipes affirm black pride as they critique the poverty of white culture. Jessica Harris's Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons (1989) - a format that emphasises the similarities between food preparation across the three continents in order to create a community that gaints its authority not from a sense of its rootedness, but from the very experience of disclocation.

Drama:
▪ Non-polemic playwrights of the 60s - the problems of interracial relations continued to be explored, and civil rights was a dominant theme, although these subjects were treated in a congenial, symbolic, and nonthreatening way. Ossie Davis's amicable satire of traditional white-created stereotypes, Purlie Victorious (1961), used laughter as a weapon against racism. Adrienne Kennedy, Douglas Turner Ward, Lonne Elder III, Alica Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, etc.
▪ Pioneers of the Black Theater Movement - a Black Theater movement, growing out of the civil rights struggle, a new wave of black critics began to articulate the need for more positive images in plays by black playwrights and to advocate the use of drama as a weapon in the Black Power struggle. The spokesman was Amiri Baraka, most important plays include Dutchman (1964), about the seduction and murder of a young African American man by a sexy white blond abroad a subway train; The Slave (1964), in which a 'black militant' tries to exorcise all that is white in his past by murdering his white wife and their children; The Toilet (1964), a shocking metaphor of race relations, in which a white homosexual is brutally beaten by a gang of black youths in a school restroom because he sent a love letter to their leader. Also, Ed Bullins, whose dramatic technique was at first characterised less by violence than by 'street theater' or 'agitprop' style of realism; Clara's Ole Man (1965), The Electronic Nigger (1968), The Fabulous Miss Marie (1971), The Taking of Miss Janie (1975).



Carribean

'Carribean migration, ex-isles, and the New World novel' by Giselle Liza Anatol

The African-Carribean presence in the US can be read as a paradox of discrimination: 'first, an invisibility because the blackness of their skin color, which relegates them to classification as Afro Americans, which leaves their special needs as immigrant relatively unnattended; and second, a double visibility - as black to whites, and as foreigners to native blacks.' A schism of children from immigrant families - they feel as if they belong partly to both societies, but fully to neither - a fragmentation even more pronounced if they are rejected by, or encouraged by their parents to reject, the US African Ametican community.

Separatism and historical antagonisms between Carribean migrants and African Americans: Carribean migrants avoided identification with African Americans, whom they wree socialised by US mainstream culture and European colonialism to see as lower-class and less ambitious; they recognised that they had greater rights as foreigners than African Americans had as citizens.

Paule Marshall (b. 1929) - journalist, short fiction writer, novelist, essayist, lecturer, and educator.
▪ She is the daughter of second-generation Barbadian immigrant parents. She herself was born in Brooklyn, but is influenced by her West Indian ancestry: her narratives remain rooted in the spaces of contact between US and Carribean communities.
Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959):
▪ A coming of age novel. The protagonists (Selina Boyce, a Barbadian-American girl born and raised in Brooklyn) torn between allegiances to her father and mother; to Barbados and the US. Selina has a sense of racial cultural alienation in the land of her birth. Her 'home' is not Barbados (as she is led to believe) where she has never been - she will be viewed as a stranger and a foreigner there. Also, personal and social alienation; as a black woman, being invisible, a lack of identity, always struggling to prove her humanity.
▪ highlights the diversity of Barbadian immigrant opinion regarding the native African American population. Whiteness is associated with power and luxury. Some character's goals: joining the white American, not the black American, community, and succuming to US individualism and the capitalist ethos - in order to rise in socio-economic status. Another member of the Brooklyn Barbadian Association calls for replacing Barbadian with Negro.
Daughters (1991):
▪ a complicated situation where the question of home is set up. Protagonist is born in US, but was raised on a fictional Carribean island of Triunion before being sent back to US. What is her true home? She feels as if Triunion is her home, but her suppoesd homeland is US. Her mom cannot return to US, feels that is not her home anymore. Both face problems as foreigners. A realisation - 'home' of complete security and comfort is a mythological figment; there is no 'perfect' space.

Jamaica Kincaid (b. 1949) - short story writer, essayist, and novelist.
▪ A leading West Indian writer, born on the island of Antigua, went to the US at 16.
▪ Themes: mother-daugher relationships, the social constraints felt by a young girl coming of age, a sense of listlessness and dissatisfaction despite surroundings of great beauty, sexual fluidity, questions of identity, and the merging of real and imaginary worlds.
▪ Her work often prioritizes "impressions and feelings over plot development" and often features conflict with both a strong maternal figure and colonial and neocolonial influences.
▪ Annie John (1985) - an episodic bildungroman. Follows the path of an angry and alienated, yet exceptionally bright, 10 year old girl as she matures. Annie John puzzles as much over her place in the world as she does over the quesiton of what world it is that she inhabits.

Elizabeth Nunez - Beyond the Limbo Silence (1998):
▪ the decelopment of a young Trinidadian immigrant to the US.
▪ She experiences invisibility/hypervisibility paradigm, while there are also intraracial cultural barriers - African Americans disbelief that Sara could identify with the Civil Rights. But Sara begins to see the ties between the oppression of African peoples throughout the Americas (Carribean students opporunity to go to a British university each year, the environmental exploitation of the island, and the psychological destruction of those who have lost their true identities by accepting the discrimination of colonialism as a natural state of being).
▪ The migration scenario provides fertile ground to interrogate the viability of a pan-African identity at the same time they recognise and celebrate ethnic differences.

Edwidge Danticat - migrated from Haiti to the States at the age of 12.
Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994):
▪ the protagonist Sophie comes to view New York as 'a place where you can lose yourself'' - both in the literal sense of getting physically lost among the buildings, traffic, and crowds of people, and in the metaphorical sense of forgetting one's roots, culture, and identity, despite the fact that places fior connection and reconnetiong exist.
▪ Sophie feels a pull between the Carribean, the home of the 'soul and the memory, and US, the home of the physical body and everyday life. Sense of discolation and conflicting ideas of 'home' seen integrally connected to the protagonist's relationship with her mothers. Sophie constructs Haiti as a place to which she nedes to return in order to remember; she uses Haiti as place to flee her sexual phobias, marital troubles, and her plagued relationship with her mother: a hiding place from her relationships.
▪ Danticat's description of various aspects of Haitian culture resonate with particular African American traditions and point to a common diasporic culture and its connections to Africa (a strong communal base of the rural village from which the family comes, the trauma of rape and childbirth that exist as a legacy of slavery, the importance of the black family).
▪ Sexuality - a legacies of sexual abuse for black women of her novel (Sophie's mother's nighmaters, her mother's mumbles at night). The narrativef calls into question the double standard by which sexually active, unmarried men are viewed as experienced while women are comparaby perceived as 'dirty', unattractive, and defective (Sophie traumatized by the practice of testing).



Neo-slave lit

'Neo-slave narrative' by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy

Works include:
▪ Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
▪ Roots (1976) by Alex Haley
▪ Flight to Canada (1976) by Ishmael Reed
▪ Kindred (1979) by Octavia E. Butler
▪ The River Where Blood Is Born (1998) by Sandra Jackson-Opoku
▪ Dessa Rose (1986) Sherley Anne Williams
▪ Sally Hemins (1979) by Barbara Chase-Riboud

Social, intellectual, and institutional transformations during and since the mid-60s:
▪ Civil Rights Movement forced historians undertaking studies of the American slave past to revise their views. New historical studies of slavery emerged that took seriously the agency and self-representation of the slaves, their community and culture-building energies, and the forms of resistance they exhibited.
▪ The Black Power Movement opposed represenations of slavery they found demeaning and uninformed by the new revisionist energies. Black Power Movement empowered people of African descent. It provided writers the pride and perspective necessary to pierce the myths and lies that had grown up around the antebellum period.
▪ Black Studies programs were created.
▪ The American publishing industry responded to these changes listed above by commissioning new books, series, anthologies, collections, textbooks; also seeking out new and promising writers.

The work these novels do:
▪ Reclamation of blackness as a political category and an ethnic idenity necessitated this return in the past. To know what the post-Civil Rights black subject would be, it was essential to recall the complexity of what the first black American subject had been, not merely to use names inherited from slavery as terms of abuse for those who appeared unresistant to the social order, but to disccover the covert and overt acts of resistance that permitted those earlier generations to ensure the survival and birth of this one.
▪ The means of recovery, in each sense of that term. Memory is how the past is recalled, memory is also how we heal from that past. It is by sharing those stories and that history with their readers that neo-slave narrative authors perhaps hope to heal a nation that in many ways still denies its original wound

The authors of neo-slave narratives employ these major forms:
1) historical novel - third person story of slavery that took as its subject the personal and political transition from slavery to freedom - Jubilee, Morrison's Beloved, Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings, and Echo of Lions, etc.
2) the pseudo-autobiographical slave narrative - life story of the slave in their own words, replaying the motifs of the antebellum slave narrative and freeing the voice of the former slave to tell her own story - Miss Jane Pittman, also Ismael Reed's Flight to Canada, Chase-Reboud's The President's Daughter.
3) the novel of remembered generations - continuing traumatic legacy of slavery and its ongoing effects on later generations. A contemporary African American subject describes modern social relations that are directly conditioned or affected by an incident, event, or narrative from the time of slavery. Sometimes these novels are premised on a contemporary subject's dealing with the discovery of an ancestor's narrative, while in other cases these novels edal with the destructive effects of a n individual's or a community's attempts to forget a slave past. (Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Butler's Kindred, Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills and Mama Day, especcially relevant - Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, she utilised it in new and important ways in Praisesong for the Widow and Daughters)
4) Genealogies or epics of location - slavery is part of the larger narrative (Alex Haley's Roots (1976), Leon Forrest's 'Forrest County' trilogy).

Themes:
▪ What the black and commodified body of the slave meant to American culture. The theme of how miscegenation reveals the hidden desires of despotic white men and exposes the hidden familial bonds of black and white Americans. Slave's being 'linked by blood' to the master class, but 'tied to slavery by a black mother' (Walker).
▪ The question of how one reconciles an oppressive past
▪ Physical appropriation of the slaves body, the slave's body abuse and commodification. The ways in which the women's bodies were subject to and marked by the torture of enslavement. Showing in painful detail the ways that black women's bodies were scarred and dismembered by slavery, and then salvaged and remembered in the acts of free love (Sethe's scarred back, Baby Suggs - love your flesh).

Orality and textuality/writings:
▪ A tension between the oral and literate traditions, between the authority of the archives and the authenticity of the slaves' voices and memories. (Gaines's Miss Jane Pittman - Gaines's wish to be free of the constraints of writing because it was a mode that was inherently limited for caputring the nuances and rhythms of the spoken word; Corregidora - written records of Brazilian slavery destroyed, women producing their own tales to ensure the survival of their story).
▪ Pointing out the dangers of writing for the integrity of the slave. Writing - official writing sanction by the government - a metaphor for who gets to control definitions of identity and who gets ascribed the authority to report on the American past - Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally 'Hemings; writing associated with misrepresentation - Beloved.
▪ Anser - to subvert writing with oral performances. Slaves in all these stories respond by positing their memory as a crucial documentary force in history, their voice as a power equal to the written texts they contest. Their own stories in order to ensure the safety, the integrity, and the authenticity of the tale told.
▪ Interplay between literate sources and oral tales.

Margaret Walker - Jubilee (1966) - a narrative that joins the historical novel to the 'Negro folk literature'
▪ Draws on the actual life experiences of ensalved Americans. Marks its idebtedness to the oral tales of slave life told to its author - Walker bases her novel on the liviing account of her great-grandmother, which had been transmitted to her mother.
▪ Tells the story from the viewpoint of the slaves who suffered and also fomented insurrections, fled plantations, and created cibrant cultural and religious traditions. Emphasis on the rebelliosness and survival strategies of the slaves.
▪ Conclusion - meditating on the forgiveness necessary to forge a ciable nation future out of the ruins of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Ernest J. Gaines - The Autobriography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971):
▪ A story about the century between the end of slavery and the beginning of formal legal equality
▪ A story about the importance of affirming one's own voice, about responding to the voices and books in the library that denied her existence and her humanity, is told in the voice of a former slave.

Gayl Jones (b. 1949)- novelist, poet, playwright, professor, and literary critic.
▪ Two plays, four novels, a collection of short fiction, three books of poetry, and a scholarly work examining the intersections between African American oral traditions and African American fiction.
▪ Qualities of her work: grimness, vivid delineation the physical details of sexual desire, and a deliberate implementation of black oral forms stemming from communal speech patterns, folklore, sermons, jazz, and the blues.
Corregidora (1975):
§ The narrator Ursa is the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Brazilian slave women who pass on the story of their incestuous raping at the hands of their master to each generation so that 'we'd never forget.'
§ Major action takes place between 1947-69. Ursa's attempts to discover to what extent her life is governed by what happened to these enslaved women in the past and to what extent she is able to transcend their suffering while nonetheless finding a means of passing their story on so it would not be forgotten.
§ Slavery is the historical force that continues to dictate contemporary racial politics. The way slavery's effects can be traced through the generational and familial patterns than through the larger social ones.
§ (from modernism to postmodernism; on origins and madness) the book problematises black identity formation by revealing the distortions caused by multiple narrators and focalizers of traumatic tales. Ursa's relentless rendering of the Corregidora family's history of sexual assault allows her to attempt partial psychic recovery from her own mutilation by learning how to question the various constricting functions of ancestral reports and by becoming aware of the slave women's practice of power during and throughout the enforced sexual act. Her final decision to opt for love, expressed in a blues duet, has been interpreted as a perfomance that allows her to reclaim her own desire.
§ Use of African American oral traditions: the frequent call-and-response pattern of Jones's dialogue, the spiraling refrains of the blues, the improvisations of jazz, the echoes of black dialects, the emphasis on perfomance as part of black folklore.
§ Her depiction of female African American singer relates to themes in contemporary black women's writing about the searach for a voice and the defiance of a rigid, imposed, and usually sexual identity.
Eva's Man: Eva murders Davis, bites off his penis, and then calls the police.
§ Explores African American woman's formation of her identity in a culture that devalues her race and her gender. Eva experiences sexual abuse in her encounters with men who assume that she is sexually willing. Brought up to believe that women cannot control their own bodies, Eva continually alternates her silent passivity with unexpected moment of violence. Objectification of black women, stereotypes that characterise them as faithless or as sexually insatiable. Eva's behaviour as rebellion against the racist, sexist structures that posit black women as whores.
§ Themes, etc.: male-female relationships, trust and betrayal, victimization and complicity, stunted or 'crippled' personalities, repressed sexual identities, unrequited love, and obsessive love.
§ Adaption of African American folklore, the communal voice that Eva hears while growing up, which teaches her about ancestral duties and the fatal power of women's sexuality.

Octavia E. Butler - Kindred (1979):
▪ A meditation on the impact of public education, popular media, and family lore upon our conceptions of shared legacies, future prospects, and present positions. The book explores the grim realities and legacies of antebellum slavery, and speculates upon future possibilities for human equality.
▪ Genres: neo-slave narrative, realistic science fiction, grim fantasy, and initiation novel - the book evades genre labeling.
▪ Butler juxtapositioning of life in 19th century and 20th century US deliberately suggest complicated comparisons.
▪ During her travels into the past, Dana comes to understand slavery as a psychological as well as aphysical danger, and she also learns how inadequate the average 20th century education is for knowing one's historical past or for surviving without technological aid. She develops a new understanding of heroism and perdify, of human potential and human limitation.



Popular culture

Works include:
▪ Frank Yerby
▪ Samuel R. Delany - The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Dhalgren
▪ Charles R. Saunders's trilogy - Imaro (1981), The Quest of Cush (1984), The Trail of Bohu (1985)
▪ Steve Barnes - Lion's Blood (2002)
▪ Tananarive Due - The Between (1996), The Living Blood (2001)
▪ Jewelle Gomez - The Gilda Stories (1991)
▪ Nalo Hopkinson - Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), Skin Folk (2001)
▪ Walter Mosley - Blue Light (1998)
▪ E.Lynn Harris - Invisible Life (1991)
▪ Terry McMillan - Waiting to Exhale (1992)

• In the fields of literary criticism and the teaching of African American literature, scholars and critics alike have restricted their efforts to reviewing, promoting, and canonizing only those texts that fit the prevailing aesthetic and literary standards. A rigid division between high and low, or elite and mass culture, an emphasis on invention over convention, and a distinction between literary and commercial forms of literature that have shaped literary scholarship and reading practices to this day.
• According to the New Criticism and the practices of literary appreciation it has established, the only iterature that deserves merit is independently created and does not respond to the demands of the literary marketplace or the audience, as does much of popular fiction.
• For popular ficiton to work, to be successful and to attract and maintain a body of devoted readers, it has to embody elements of recognition and indentification. The works serve as a powerful vehicle of critique, often explicitly indicting the social and political forces that create and maintain racial inequalities.

Popular fiction: the number of copies a book sells, its genre or formulaic nature, its success as a commodity in the literary marketplace (a book that starts a series of spin-off books e.g.), or its success amongst its intended audience, and the ways in which a book gains momentum (sales), through word-of-mouth?

Genres:
▪ The detective novel - used by some authors to comment on and critique race and race relations, subversive representations of the detective figure (Pauline E. Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter, Chester Himes, Walter Mosely's Easy Rawlins series; womanist perspective - Valerie Wilson Wesley, Nikki Baker, Barbara Neely)
▪ Pulp fiction - written in an easily comprehensible style and language, novels follow a simple formula and a linear and chronological patterns, language is descriptive and the dialogue often graphic. The pulp fiction of Holloway House - crime and violence are used to realistically describe the lives of young, urban males whose only charce at success often lies in crime; social protest - the hustler (for example) is a product of his enivronment where poverty leads to crime, and hopelessness to violence. (Donald Goines, )
1) Ghetto realism or cautionary tales modeled after formulaic gangster fiction (Iceberg Slim, Trick Baby)
2) Standard pulp fiction such as political action thrillers, mysteries, and detective stories
3) Romances, middle-class family sagas, and historical novels, primarily aimed at female readers.
▪ Romance (Sandra Kitt) and 'sister-girl', 'brotherman novels' (cover the ups, downs and sexual politics of romantic relationship from either a female or male perspective).
▪ Science fiction - Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) uses Afro-Carribean folklore and magic in a futuristic setting; Midnight Robber (2000), Skin Folk (2001) engage Carribean-inspired themes and magic in the context of other worlds. Tananarive Due's African Immortals series - My Soul to Keep (1997), The living Blood (2001) - urban fantasy?.

Speculative fiction:
▪ Umbrella genre that shelters the subgenres of fantasy, science fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, supernatural fiction, urban fantasy, and what has come to be called by some fabulative fiction or fabulation. Each subgenre shares the basic premise underlying speculative fiction - the presentation of a changed, distorted, alternative reality from the reality readers know.
§ Fantasy - presents stories that could not happen in the real world of the past or the present; stories of this type rely upon the irrational, the magical or mythical, the occult or supernatural, the 'quasi-scientific' explanation.
§ Science fiction - literature of change, the literature that deliberately evokes a sense of wonder and illustrates the responses of humanity to discoveries in the sciences and advances in technology. Science fiction extrapolates or projects from known data or experience and seeks to convince the reader that the alternate world presented, be it past, present, or future, is possible.

Samuel R. Delany:
▪ novelist, short story writer, poet, critic, editor, essayist, educator, director, former folk singer, lecturer, script writer for comic books, and winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction
▪ moves from space opera to fantasy fiction, from sword and sorcery tales to science fiction theory.
▪ His earlier novels can be called 'space opera' - while creating his original tales in far more 'literary language' than was typical, and weaving into his plots heroic artists/outcasts as protagonists who were frequently black and/or women, the stories also adopted many of the conventions associated with formulaic science fiction. The settings were exotic, the action occured in the distant future, and the accent fell on technology: spaceships, computers, aliens, intergalactic battle. His later novels - The Tides of Lust (1973), Dhalgren (1975), Triton (1976) - were more complext, more challenging, more anthropologically grounded with a more sophisticated narrative structure, a more theoretical underpinning, and a much greater allusive poetic density.
▪ Issues of race, gender, freedom, desire, language, mythology, sexuality, semiotics, signs, slavery, psychology, and power persisted in his fictions. Also at issue in virtually all of his stories is his fascination with both literary and linguistic theory and historical linguistics.
▪ 'The constant and insistent experience I have had as a black man, as a gay man, as a science fiction writer in racist, sexist, homophobic America, with its carefully maintained tradition of high art and low, colors and contours every sentence I write' - 'Toto, We're Back', a 1986 interview.

Octavia E. Butler: short fiction writer, novelist, and science fiction writer.
▪ She has helped to enrich the ever-expanding genre of speculative fiction by adding to it a previously excluded ecperience: the African American woman's. She makes a way out of no way by drawing on her experiences growing up in one of America's most culturally diverse states.
▪ First African American woman to publish in the field of science fiction
▪ In some of her novels Butler reworks the issue of slavery - the power one human, extraterrestrial, or organism holds over another, whether through overt force, physical superiority, or mind control (Kindred, Wildseed, 'patternist' series). Her leaders or protagonists are almost exclusively black women who transcend slavery - mentally and physically - and who move on to create community and generations.
▪ Butler's emphasis on slavery and its implications (the mixing of races and cultures) predominates from her science fiction to her critically acclaimed Kindred (1979). Her characters try to free themselves from some system of bondage. This leitmotif of bondage situates her firmly in the African American literary tradition, which is infused with the racial memories of slavery. Several subthemes from slavery, like survival of the fitters, patterns of control and organization, sexual propagation or biological order, and allusions to African traditions.
▪ In Patternmaster (1976) these subthemes situate themselves in a tier of societies based on the refinement, or lack thereof, of telepathic ability, and this pattern develops through an intricate process of breeding to evolve to a state of linked minds governed by the strongest telepath. Butler inadvertently suggest how it is ironic that the human mind can evolve and unify, and yet still rely on a slave system to maintain order.
▪ Parable of the Sower (1993), Parable of the Talents (1998) - deal with the establishment of new social orders and communities based on equality, social justice, and religious freedom.

Steven Barnes - preferences are science fiction, a ction adventure/suspense, and fantasy.
▪ Dream Park and its sequels The Barsoom Project (1989) and California Voodoo Game (1992) - build upon a fascination with interactive video computer gaming, virtual reality, murder mystery, and superb technological wizardy in an extrapolation from a futuresque, highly advanced Disney-style theme park.
▪ Aubry Knight books - a larger than life black hero, a superbly developed martial arts expert who must learn what it is to becom ehuman in a grim, violent, and dystopian near future. These books allow Barnes to work with several of his favorite themes: the centralify of family, the martial arts, human evolution or development, and the value of the myth.



Ishmael Reed

'American Neo-HooDooism: the novels of Ishmael Reed' by Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure

Works:
▪ The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967)
▪ Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969)
▪ Mumbo Jumbo (1972)
▪ Flight to Canada (1976)
▪ The Terrible Twos (1982)
▪ Reckless Eyeballing (1986)
▪ The Terrible Threes (1989)
▪ The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974)
▪ Japanese by Spring (1993)

Ishmael Reed (b. 1938) - poet, novelist, essayist, teacher, anthologist, publisher, and cultural activist.
▪ In Reed's view, the black element reveals the permeable nature of American experience and identity, but he also acknowledges the permeable nature of blackness. Thus Reed actually belongs in the company of those for whom notions of 'mainstrea' and 'margins' are falsely dichotomous.
▪ He is engaged in a project of emancipating an artistic heritage from predictable or predetermined forms and norms imposed by those who fail to fully comprehend the depth and complexity of that heritage, including its fokish inventiveness, hilarious undercurrents, and seasoned extravagances. Reed, in short, uses tradition to illuminate and reinvigorate tradition, combining continuity and improvisation in a cultural dynamic that has been dubbed 'the changing same.'

Features:
▪ Underlying postcolonial discourse,
▪ African Diaspora reconnection,
▪ Multicultural poetics,
▪ Multiplicity of allusions; intertexutality (in his novels, poems, plays, essays),
▪ Improvisation of scenes and characters, an improvisation the essence of which Reed finds in jazz musical forms such as Be-Bop,
▪ Employing humour as a weapon in the very serious enterprise of exposing human excesses and absurdities, and to remind us of the dangers of taking ourselves and our cherished opinions too seriously.

Neo-HooDooism - Reed's multicultural and global writing style that developed from the traditions outlined below.
▪ 'ancient Afro-American oral literature' - folklores and stories from Vodoun/Vodoo and HooDoo religious systems (from Africa and the African Diaspora), the dozens, the toasts of the Signifying Monkey (in which the monkey subverts the power of the lion and the elephant) as well as Native American myths, Asian, and other world oral traditions. HooDoo as a North American version of Dahomean and Haitian Voodoo.
▪ Voodo is the 'perfect metaphor for the multiculture', because it 'comes out of the fact that all these different tribes and cultures were brought from Africa to Haiti' with 'all their mythologies, knowledges, and herbal medicines, their folklores, jelled' (Shrovetide in Old New Orleans [1979]).
▪ His work seems to be concerned with de-centering Judeo-Christianity in order to affirm African-based identities, doing that wihin a global perspective made possible by his Neo-HooDooism. Creating a multicultural space for all cultures and modes of being and thinking.
▪ Neo-Hoodoism theorised in poems: 'The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic', 'Catechism of a Neoamerican HooDoo church', 'Neo-HooDoo Manifesto'. Central to Neo-HooDoosim is the belief that 'every man is an artist and every artist / a priest,' and people can bring their 'own creative ideals to / Neo-HooDoo.'
▪ Reed's Neo-HooDooism encouragtes characters to 'reckless eyeball' other cultures as a means of surviving in an increasingly multicultural and multiethnic American society and global world. Suggestion that Americans can overcome (neo-)colonialism, monoculturalism, and bigotry by not only learning about other cultures, but also by learning an extra language in addition to English.

The decolonization process hinges not only on appropriating the language of the master but also on liberating his writing by both forging his writing tyle out of ancient African-based traditions and enmeshing them with those found in the 'New World'. Black characters who are endowed with the knowledge of these ancient African-based traditions and the cultural interdependence that exists between the latter and the American traditions are those who survive and are positively portrayed in Reed's fiction. On the other hand, those characters who lack the historical knowledge of slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism, tend to become colonial collaborators.

Language:
▪ Language is central to any colonial, postcolonial, or neo-colonial experience - every colonial or imperial oppression begins by controlling language as a medium of communication. Reed and his characters understand taht it is through language that 'a hierarchial structure of power is perpetuated, and the edium through which conceptions of "truth", "order", and "reality" become established.'
▪ Reed's writing demonstrated that the liberation of any oppressed people begins by recovering the language of communication just as the liberation of the so-called minority or colonized writer starts with tampering with the Word. Reed's writing re-places the language and the text of the master and it also elaborates its own theory of writing whereby it achieves its liberation: Neo-HooDooism.

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969):
▪ Well-documented concept of HooDoo as a North American version of Dahomean and Haitian Voodoo. Transforms an oral form of Voodoo folklore into a written form of a HooDoo Be-Bop Western novel. That is, it illustrates Neo-HooDoosim and its application to the cultural character of the American West and the Western genre.
▪ Reappropriating and reinventing the American West and the Western through Loop Garoo Kid, as black HooDoo cowboy and hougan (Voodoo priest), as a hero of the Western. He is represented as a demonic figure and the apocryphal twin of the Christ, and as a HooDoo houngan who is botht he lord of the last and the master of conjuration. He epitomizes good, order, compromise, and a sort of harmony among races, genders, cultures, and religions. The law and order that Drag Gibson (the antagonist) represents are nothing but oppresson, repressoin, and corruption.
▪ With the Pope ub tge bivek, Reed theorizes how, despite the Catholics' effort to wipe out Voodoo and other African traditional religions, the latter have survived in the African diaspora by mixing with Catholic saints and Native American mythologies.
▪ Includes criticism against critics' prescriptive rules about writing.

Mumbo Jumbo (1972):
▪ Reed's dissertation about the manifold aspect of Voodoo and HooDoo and the role of African and Haiti in the origins of African American literature and culture. Considerable amount of research on Haitian history, Voodoo, and HooDoo, psychology, Western history, Christianity and its link to colonization, world history, the history of dance, and American history, to name a few.
▪ 'polyphonic novel' - a collage of detective fiction, prose, poetry, drawings, ads, footnoes, photographs, a partial bibliography of 104 titles, the Harlem Renaissance, Egyptian and Greek mythologies, European myths, The Conjure-Man Dies, and De Mayor of Harlem.
▪ The main action takes place in the 20s, the Jazz Age and the time of the Harlem Renaissance when the Negro was 'in cogue,' but also the age of Prohibition.
▪ Reed adopts Nietzsche's vision of human history as a pendulum movement between opposin tendencies symbolised by the Greek gods Apollo (reason) and Dionysus (emotion), but Reed traces this polarity back to ancien tEgypt and the conflict between Osiris (Egyptian Dionysus) and his brother/adversary Set, whom Reed sees as unnatural and obsessed with control. Jes Grew clearly is Osirian/Dionysian, while Set/Apollo are the progenitors of Jew Grew's eternal enemy, Atonism (named after the monotheism of the pharaoh Akhenaton), which in the novel represents rigid singularity of vision and belief, hostility to Nature, and a relentless drive to dominate. The struggle, as Reed portryas it, is one of puritanism versus paganism, knowledge versus 'mumbo jumbo,' the self-styled 'universalism' of Western civilization versus the supposedly parochial cultures of the 'underdeveloped' peoples of the world.

The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974):
▪ The investigation of the murder of Ed Yellings, an Osiris-type HooDoo therapist, who strives to redress the psychological effects of slvery and colonialism as represented by Louisiana Reed, and is killed for that. Through Ed Yellings, Reed explored the psychological effect of slavery/colonization on the slave/colonized and tackles black male-black female relationships.

The Terrible Twos and The Terrible Threes:
▪ Reed appropriates also Rastafarianism and Calypso, aesthetics borrowed from the Carribean traditions into his Neo-HooDooism to make a social commentary on the plight of minorities in the US and American foreign policies towards the Global South.
▪ Reed uses Christmas as metaphor to explore cultural oppression, social and economic inequalities, and how the US government and big corporations coalesce to monopolize Christmas to benefit the rich who can afford it.



Toni Morrison

'Spaces for readers: the novels of Toni Morrison' by Marilyn Mobley McKenzie

To assess the significance of Morrison's novels, it is critical to interrogate how her narrative aesthetic and cultural politics have shaped spaces for readers to enter her texts and how an ever larger, diverse body of interpretations have emerged from the community of readers than she might have even anticipated. An examination of the seven novels published between 1970 and 1998 reveals that the narrative and literal spaces of her texts are a window into her narrative poetics, her culturla politics, and many of her ideas on the meaning of life itself.

Non-fiction works:
▪ Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) - her first book of literary criticism. She argues that canonical text in US literature are long overdue for an analysis of how they are structured in subtle and not so subtle ways by their anthithesis to blackness.
▪ Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (1992) - a book she edited. She offers insightful social commentary on the race and gender politics

The Bluest Eye (1970):
▪ Focuses the reader on domestic space as represented in an elementary school primer. The story told through the narrative voice of Claudia MacTeer.
▪ The elementary primer suggests the schoolhouse as the space second to home where language takes on meaning, where a child must connect the signs and symbols with what they mean for her life. The house has some particular meanings that foreshadow the story inside the body of the novel:
1) it frames the story of how racial difference affect the social dynamics of the community where the MacTeers and Breedloves live. The novel can be read as an exploration of the psychic consequences of being marginalized in their everyday lives both inside and outside school. The domestic space of their hoe, therefore, was a possible refuge, unless the inhabitants of the household had internalized the racist views of the larger society, as the Breedlovers did.
2) The reference to house and home in the opening passage inscribe, through the literal spacing of words on the page, the ways in which language shapes, mirrors, and defies reality.
3) References to house and home in the novel focus on the space in which a black girl's identity first comes into manifestation.
▪ Domestic spaces where economic depravity dictates when and how people love, whre taboos of rape and incest traumatize and sabotage black girlhood, where racism in the larger world shapes and constrains the options men and women have to imagine themselves as whole, acceptable uhman beings, and where people both in and outside the community exploit the most vurnerable.
▪ Pecole Breedlove descent into 'madness' after she endures incest, rape, pregnancy, and the belief that blue eyes will make her beautiful. The community's complicity in the demise of Pecole. 'Racial self-loathing' (Morrison).
▪ Criticism of black family of its acceptance of a racist color hierarchy. The Breedlove family is complicit in this novel with the racist hierarchy of the larger community and thus participates in the destruction of the self-worth of their youngest family member.

Sula (1973):
▪ A different kind of time and space: Morrison leaves the world of children, literay, and the complications that racism and poverty create for young people, and moves on to the adult world of female friendship.
▪ Begins with an aesthetically riveting description of Bottom and illustrates how space gets racialized and shapes our understanding of our identity and the options available to us. The social space that has transformed a black neighborhood into an exclusive country club; (re)gentrification, relocations.
▪ At the centre is the story of a friendship gone awry, gender politics both in and out of marriage, and of the consequences of life decision.
The protagonists, great friends, Nel and Sula. Both had discovered early that they were neither white nor men, and that all freedom and triumph were forbidden to them, so they had set about creating something else to be.
▪ Morrison reveals how familiar intimate spaces such as home, marriage, and even friendship can estrange one from oneself and from others. By rendering such familiar spaces unfamiliar through a pariah figure such as Sula, Morrison challenges the readers' notions of right and wrong, good and evil, even love and hate.

Song of Solomon (1977):
▪ The story of the search for black male identity in which an exceptional woman serves as a guide for the journey
▪ Moves literally and metaphorically in and out of space and time. Morrison deftly weaves multiple stories into one grand narrative, moving in and out of the past and present, illustrating that a mature sense of identity requires an understanding of the interdepence of both.
▪ With the folktale of flying African and the history of one family's connecetion to that folktale at the center of the novel, Morrison constructs several spaces for the reader to come into a narrative of African and African American history and culture.
▪ Hostile spaces to which black people had become accustomed; and how they subverted the power of racist practices through the linguistic practices of renaming hostile spaces (Doctor Street - Not Doctor Street; Mercy Hospital - No Mercy Hospital) to document how they had been excluded. Story of how intimate spaces can contain names with history, lives full of secret and misunderstandings, and communities replete with that Morrison refers to as 'unspeakable things unspoken.' The various and sundry ways black people have survived oppressive spaces and unjust treatment through language, music, and cultural practices.

Tar Baby (1981):
▪ Using a contemporary settining the Caribbean with a young woman with an almost postmodern sense of her racial identity, Morrison again disrupts familiar ideas about race, class, identity, and culture to provide some new ways of reading them.
▪ Lush Caribbean setting; how colonial powers disrupted the serenity of this place by importing slaves, using them to clear the land and to reconstruct a man-made paradise; kidnapping of African people throughout the diaspora and the ways in which black bodies have been redered into service for colonial powers.
▪ The novel invites readers to consider the claims of capitalism as it manifests itself in colonialist practices thta keep the colonized in poverty even after the colonizers have departed. The unpaid and poorly paid labor that hsa made the island paradise possible. The dynamics from US might in a different place (Carribean) remain the same.

Beloved (1987): excess of motherly love.
▪ Based on the story of Margaret Garner, a slave who in circumstances similar to Sethe's killed one child and tried to kill her three others.
▪ Moving baack and forth in time, narrating the novel through the aesthetics of memory rather than the chronology of linear time, the reader enters into the emotional past of slavery without denying the reality of its more familiar brutal dimensions. As a result, the novel enables readers to consider enslavement from a new perspective of how black peopl were able to endure, to survive, when they did not own their bodies, their children, or anything but their own minds.
▪ She also talked about "rememory". She talked about characters trying to block memory, "keeping it out", and about how when it finally breaks through, they have to learn to do something with the memories. So "rememory" is not just memory or remembering, but the process of learning what to do once you've remembered.

Jazz (1992): excess of romantic love.
▪ The story of Violet and Joe Trace, whose marriage crisis results in his affair, the murder of his teenage lover, and Violet's attempt to deface the corpse of her husband's lover at the funeral.

Paradise (1998): excess of religion or the love of God.
▪ Story of an all-black town that attempts to murder the women who have turned to a convent outside town for solace and female community.
▪ Black people who had once been excluded from white towns move weet and form all-black towns, only to give in to a form of exclusionary practive of their own on the basis of an intraracial color line. The novel exposes the various ways in which this all-black paradise unravels because of the ways in which their religious and gendered otrhodoxies break down into violent arguments about everything from the history of the town, to the meaning of the oven, its central edifice, to the character of the women who seek refuge in the convent on the outskirts of town.



Alice Walker

'African American womanism: from Zora Neale Hurston to Alice Walker' by Lovalerie King

Womanist from Alice Walker. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, preface.
▪ 1. From womanish. (Opp. of 'girlish,' i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, 'You acting womanis,' i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered 'good' for one. Intrested in grown-up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: 'You trying to be grown.' Responsible. In charge. Serious.
▪ 2. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalace of laughter), and women's strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health. Traditionally universalist, as in 'Mama, why are we bron, pink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige, and black?'Ans.: '"Well, you know the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented.' traditionally capable, as in: 'Mama, I'm walking to Canada and I'm taking you and a buch of other slaves with me.' Reply: 'It wouldn't be the first time.'

Alice Walker (b. 1944):
▪ Alice Walker one of the many contemporary African-American writers; in much of her published work, she has developed her African-Cherokee identity. In Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982), and Living by the Word (1988), Walker discusses both the existence of Africna-Cherokee culture and the reasons for its denial. She cites Black Elk Speaks, explores the relationship of African American to Native American culture, and discusses African-Cherokee folklore.
▪ Commitment to reclaiming and valorizing the rural Southern black vernacular, specifically that of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. Novels set primarily (though not exclusively) in the South.

▪ In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) - honors feminism (?) as a historic survival tactic.
▪ Madhu Dubey - 'Walker's womanist ideology affirms a psychological wholeness that is communally oriented and is explicitly opposed to the self-sufficient individuality of bourgeois humanist ideology'. Walker's womanist is in touch with her own fluid sexuality, which she shares at her discretion and pleasure with other men and/or men. The womanist embraces and openly expresses her sexuality in relationships with others.
▪ Her womanist aesthetic describes the womanist vis-a-vis her relationships with others and with herself, stresses connectedness over separatism, encourages an acceptance of a collective past as it is exhibited in the many hues of the African diaspora, and celebrates a legacy of resistance to oppression.
▪ Womanist is pro-woman, not anti-man. Against a binary world view, Walker uses her novels to resist the implication of Western dualism that man should dominate all of nature, including woman. Ultimately, she constructs a womanist cosmology. The communal relationships she depicts transcend time, space, the physical realm, and even the species we call human - which includes its own subcategories.
▪ Themes:
§ quest for personal and communal wholeness - motifs of the spiritual journey or questing self, rebirth and transformation, the universality of pain and suffering, and a holistic view of life that brings her idea of connectedness into full relief.
§ At issue is the condition of the soul, and it is not simply a matter of the individual soul. She or he who achieves wholeness, or who aspired to achieve wholeness, bears the responsibility for showing others the way, for lifting as they climb. One imagines a chain, or continuum, of humanity with each leading the next. She illustrates through plot, theme, and narration how harmful acts become part of the individual or collective psyche and come to bear on ensuing generations. The focus is on healing, rather than blame. Healing begins with accepting responsibility.

The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) - Set in rural Georgia, the novel spans some sixty years from the early 1900s to 60s. Grange's journey comes packaged in three phases: he lives his first 'life' as a tragic sharecropper turned brute, his second 'life' as a southern migrant in the hostile North, and his third 'life' as the somewhat enlightened and regenerated wordly guide for his granddaughter, Ruth. Offers a scathing analysis of how children and wives become the immediate in-house victims of racism that is outwardly directed toward black men.

Meridian (1976) - Meridian Hill's womanist resolve led her easily into the Civil Rights Movement, though when the Movement began to move away from nonviolence, she found it difficult to embrace the idea of killing for the revolution without first contemplating the implications to her soul.

The Colour Purple (1982):
▪ Shug Avery - depiction of the womanist approach to life in her character. She is comfortable choosing an alternative to mothering; she leaves her children to pursue a career as a blues singer, an act considered scandalous by many. She expresses a free, open, fluid sexuality that is not bound by prefixes, which serves as further evidence of her willful, audacious, and even courageous approach to life. She celebrates the sensual and treats the world to music that comes directly from her soul. Her music invites dancing, and it is important to remember thta Shug's concept of God/Goddess is consistent with her healthy embrace of all the sensual pleasures.
▪ Walker points out the possibility of black women becoming self-empowering and being able to transform their own lives without the aid of men.

The Temple of My Familiar (1989):
▪ Lissie is Walker's neologism made flesh. She is living history, exemplifying the womanist spirit of knowledge. She is Shug Avery magnified, responsible, outrageous, audacious, contrary, and whole. She embodies the womanist attitude as a result of having acquired the wisdom that comes with experiencing life from a variety of perspectives through multiple incarnations through time.

Posessing the Secrets of Joy (1992): has raised the consciousness of the Western world concerning ritual clitoridectomy.
The novel indites the centuries-old African tradition for its role in the torture, enslavement, and destruction of women.

By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998):
▪ A family of fake missionaries in Mexico to live among a group of natural Indians (?). Mr. and Mrs. Robinson - upwardly mobile, black middle-class, agnostic anthropologists. Their daughter, Magdalena, a budding womanist, attempts at control by his father by beating her severely.
▪ thorough enactment of that part of Walker's womanist aesthetic concerned with embracing sensual pleasuure and expressing love for self, others, and all things, unconditionally.



Women writers

Maya Angelou (b. 1928):
▪ autobiographer, poet, playwright, director, producer, perfomance artist, educatior, and winner of the Horatio Alger Award. Started her career as a singer, actress, and dancer, but became one of America's most famous poets when she stood before the nation to deliver her poem 'On the Pulse of Morning' at Clinton's inaugaraton in 1993.
▪ The poem reflects a theme that is common to all of her works: that human beings are more alike than different, and that a message of hope and inclusion is a most inspiring dream and ideal, something to be savored at such a moment of political change. She writes of the triumph of the human spirit over hardship and adversity. Her voice speaks of healing and reconciliation.
▪ In the 60s, Angelou was active in the civil rights movement in the US and abroad.
▪ Her autobiographical fictions include I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), Gather Together in My Name (1974) and Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), which received moderate critical praise; and The Heart of a Woman (1981) and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), which were acclaimed as important works covering exciting periods in African American and African history, the civil rights marches, and the era of decolonization.. These narratives survey the difficulties and personal triumphs of a remarkable woman with a keen understanding of the power of language to affect change, and the role of 'image making' in the self-representation of groups who have been historically oppressed.


Nikki Giovanni (b. 1943): poet, essayist, lecturer, and educator.
▪ One of the most prominent young poets to emerge from the Black Arts movement of the late 60s and early 70s. Her initial achievement of national recognition gew out of the militant, revolutionary poems included in her first two volumes, Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968) and Black Judgement (1969). Also, Re: Creation, My House (1972).
▪ She confronts questions concerning female identity and female autonomy. She rejects the male constructions of female identity that have led to the double oppressoin of African American women and asserts instead the right and the necessity for African American women to shape their own identities.
▪ In My House she insists on the poet's right to decide the meaning of 'revolution,' her right to decide the appropriate subject matter of her poetry, and ultimately, her right to create her own identity.


Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934) - poet, playwright, essayist, and educator.
▪ Her early work respond to political and personal upheavals of the 60s with radical experiments in form, style, and theme. She disrupts normal typography, word shapes, and the use of space to convey both emotion and clues to performance.
▪ Return to blackness, rejection of white values - a return to Black speech and rhythms, idioms (dozens, rap), and music (jazz, blues) in a poetry as personal and confessional as it is insurgent.
▪ 'Assassin poems' and 'lyrical confessionals' dominate Homecoming (1969) and We a BadddDDD People (1970). Sanchez targets the enemies - murdering 'wite americans,' cops, sanctimonious Black puritans, and revolutionary poseurs.
▪ Plays: The Bronx Is Next (1968) with a plot to burn down a Harlem ghetto, Sister Sonja (1969) portraying the journey of a sister who is 'moving consciously black,' despairs, and is reborn. Other plays focus on Malcolm X, Black male and female relationships, and political allegory.
▪ 1970s mark a different tone - Sanchez as a spiritual visonary.
▪ Love Poems (1973) - pastoral lyrics, depict moving moments in Sanxhez's life, memories of love's ecstasy and despair. A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1973) - express growing allegiance to Elijah Muhammad, heralding her conversion to Islam. Her spiritual autobiography in five parts. Homegirls and Handgrenades (1984) - 'grenades' are words that explore people's deluding myths about themselves and the world; four sections documenting the lives and longings of people who have loved or betrayed, disappointed or inspired her.


Angela Davis (b. 1944) - social activist, revolutionary, philosopher, and educator.
▪ Known initially for her political activities and Marxist philosophy, Angela Yvonne Davis is a strong supporter of human and civil rights of all people, especially women. Throughout the 60s she joined protest groups and participated in radical politics; she became an active militant in the civil rights and women's liberation movements. She took up teaching and writing to denounce the inequalities of the 'caste system' in the US; she developed courses in Black Studies that emphasised the role of poverty in the black community and its devastating effect on the development and growth of black youth.
▪ She wrote numerous essays on political and judicial reform, the rights of women, sexism, violence against women, the rights of prisoners, and mental health patients. Her book If They Come in the Morning (1971) and Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974) provide insight into her life and ideas. In Women, Race, and Class (1982) and Women, Culture, and Politics (1988) she leaves the reader with an understanding of the economic, racial, and class situations in which women must struggle. She has extensively written about the sociology of poverty.
▪ Davies takes an active role in fighting povery, prejudice, racism, sexism, and class consciousness, while her literary counterparts develop meaningful novels, short stories, plays, and poems on these issues. Davies describes the victimization of the black domestic worker since her arrival in the US during slavery. She interprets the woman's place in industrial capitalism historically and attacks the collusion of traditions and practices that work against women. Her polemics also expose the reader to the dilemma of the black woman's acceptance of self-hatred and need for self-liberation and self-acceptance.
▪ Davies contributes to an analysis of the sexual violence against the black woman in the US in a chapter in Women, Race, and Class. From a historical perspective, she lists a litany of cruel actions of the male against the female. She is concerned about the myth of the black rapist and exposes the consequences of this myth. She advocated the right to privacy, the right to make personal decisions, the right to be in any location at any time, the right to do what one desires, the right to one one's own natural appearance and weight, and the right to birth control and to control one's reproductive system.


Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995): novelist, short fiction writer, essayist, filmmaker, lecturer, and educator.
▪ She always insisted that social commitment is inseperable from the production of art. Her early years as a social worker and commitments as a community organiser influencer her work from its earliest beginnings.
▪ She maintained that underlying all of her writing is the concern that the best traditions of her people be nurtured and and called forth to build a strong interior life that is always at the service of social change. She sought to articulate ways the political, artistic, and metaphysical join together.

▪ She refused to separate the struggle for civil rights from a commitment to women's struggle for freedom. In 1970 she published The Black Woman, an anthology that made connections between civil rights and the women's movement and included ficction, nonfiction, and poetry (Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Bambara). It focused on images of women and the connection of those im ages to women's oppression, but singular because it was firmly rooted in the diverse experience of black women, both celebrating that experience and critiquing popular stereotypes.
▪ Gorilla, my Love (1972) - her most famous collection of short stories. Set in the rural South as well as the North, most of the stories look at relationships. A major theme centers on the way black women could (and must) participate in supporting and nuturing each other, and healing each other's inner wounds. Portraits of black life that focusedo n black love and created memorable characters.
▪ The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977) - the stories stress the need for people to pull together and organize, as well as to keep their spiritual connections, themes that became increasingly imortant to her writing.

▪ The Salt Eaters (1980):
▫ focuses on the relationships among such issues as social activism, individual mental and physical health, community well-being, and personal and collective history, as well as the many roots and branches of a spirituality necessary to hold together what Bambara considers to be the primarily dissipated and fractures energies of the 70s social change movements. Velma's fractured psyche serves as a trope for the splinterings and fractures of the community, whre fundamental values (like connections with the best of people's traditions and attention to spiritual well-being) have been left behind in the wake of the civil right smovement.
▫ Deals with the gender oppression that African American women experienced before, during, and after civil rights. Focuses on spiritual and metaphysical power attained from women drawing on female ancestral connections.
▫ The book integrates African and Afro-Carribean spiritual and healing traditions with those from Western religion and other spiritual practices.
▫ Bambara tends to avoid linear plot, structuring her work in what one critic characterises as concentric circles. With a dizzying array of characters and settings, the novel employs nearly seamless shifts of time and place to trace the journey of the main character and her entire community, toward healing and wholeness.


Ntozake Shange (b. 1948) - poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist.
▪ In all of her works, Shange suggests that black women should rely on themselves, and not on black men, for completeness and wholeness. She speaks for women of every race who see themselves as disinherited and disposessed.
▪ In an essay 'It is not so good to be born a girl' Shange discusses the disadvantages and restrictions that hinder a fulfilled life for African Americna women, noting thta women all over th ewolrd and throughout history have been victimized and exploited sexually and emotionally from birth. Only through finding 'god inside themselves and finding meaning and aself satisfaction in their own lives - that only by defining and living out their own destinies unsubjected to the whims of the oppressors, no matter their race or sex, can women become whole, self-sustaining humans.'
▪ Language - nonconcentional use of English - unorthodox capitalization, punctuation, and spelling, and the use of African American idioms, dialect, slang, and rhythms.
▪ For colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf - first perfomed in 1974
▫ a feminist drama with unique origins. Called choreopoem by Shange, the twenty-poem drama tells the stories of the joy, pain, suffering, abuse, strength, and resilience of African American women. Its seven female characters dress in colors representing the rainbow plus brown. Each speaks individual poems and is intermittently aided and joined by other characters in collective poems, producing a choral effect.
▫ The poems may be grouped into five categories, based on theme and subject: 1) youth and love; 2) feelings of tension, pain, and rebellion; 3) poems with historicla, social, and political themes, references, and images; 4) 'no mor elove poems'; 5/6) restoration and affirmation
▫ The women have no names for they represent all oppressed women of color. Shange demonstrates and defines the assertiveness thta opressed women of color must possess in order to fulfill themselves. Her characters begin as fragmented voices but end as supported ones as their isolation diminishes through the support and consolation they give one another
▫ In various cafes, bars, and poetry houses in California and New York, Shange performed and presented the poems that eventually became a dramatic unit. Music, dancing, and lighting are used with creative significance in for colored girls. There are no props, scenery, or furniture, so lighting is used to emphasise or isolate particular characters as needed. Throughout the performance, women move in and out of the spotlight and on and off the stage. These dramatic techniques place the burden of interpretation on the actresses, who must assume different narrative personas, and require the audience members to use their imaginations.
▪ Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo (1982):The novel tells about three sisters - Sassafras is a weaver, Cypress a dancer, and Indigo a midwife - all seeking to find themselves as creative people with a purpose. By the end of the novel they return home to their mother, but the reader doubts whether they can remain because of their need to pursue their own identities and freedom


Audre Lorde (1934-1992) - poet, essayist, autobiographer, novelist, and nonfiction writer. 'a black feminist lesbian mother poet' because her identity is based on the relationship of many divergent perspectives once perceives as incompatible.
▪ She expresses or explores pride, love, anger, fear, racial and sexual oppression, urban neglect, and personal survival. She eschews a hope for a better humanity by revealing truth in her poetry.
▪ From a Land Where Other People Live (1973) - a collection of poetry. Adresses concerns such as the complexities surrounding her existence as an African American and as a woman, mother, lover, and friend. Anger, terror, loneliness, and impatiance illuminate the pages.
▪ The Black Unicorn (1978) - Lorde spans three centuries of the black diaspora to reclaim African mythology as the basis for her themes about women, racial pride, motherhood, and spirituality.
▪ Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) - autobiographical narrative; a fictionalised account of Lorde's life as a child to a young adult.
▪ Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984) - nonfiction collection. The subject matter of these essays is remarkably varied, yet homogeneous. Unity is made possible by Lorde's emphasis on differences as a source of strength rather than divisiveness - the unity of difference.
▫ Lorde explores the fear and hatred existing between African American men and women, feminists, or lesbians and the challenge between African American women and white women to find common ground. Also, the isolation found among African American women and their subsequent rejection of each other's trust, friendship, and gifts.


bell hooks (b. 1955) - writer, teacher, and cultural critic.
▪ Her political perspective was explicitly forged in a consciousness of their marginality to the Black Power, civil rights movement, and feminist movement of the 60s. She saw black women's special historical situation as relevant both for a feminist movement that had stumbled over its implicit class and race biases, and for a black liberation movement that remained committed to the patriarchal values of the racist society it denounces.
▪ hooks explores questions conercing black style and commodity culture, the pedagogical implications of multicultural classrooms, and the development of African American artists and of critical methods proper to their work.
▪ Concern with the ethics of criticismm. Hooks interrogates her own position as a black woman from a working-class background writing and teaching within a professional academic context. She appeals to a popular and professionalised readership to become responsible members of a common intellectual community.
▪ Her works vigorously engages the complicated spheres of power within the domains of race, class, and feminist thought and in many ways is a disciplinary standard and touchstone for contemporary cultural studies.
▪ Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) - conversations about black people 'tend to be about black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.'
▪ Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (1984) - a conversation about radical social and political change that obligated a confrontation with intersecting dyamics of gender constructions and cultural identity.


Gloria Naylor (b. 1959) - novelist, essayist, screenplay writer, columnist, and educator.
▪ The Women of Brewster Place (1982):
Naylor exposes weaknesses in black family relationships including child abuse, homophobia, classism, and neglect. Themes: the appreciation for women's space, women's relationships with other women, and women's supportive communities. Interrelated tales of seven black women who all end up on a dead-end street in a northern ghetto. These characters have often suffered greatly because of the insensitive behavior of men.
▪ Mama Day (1988) - Naylor creates a magical world set against a background of family history and unique geography.