A–Z Guide to Contemporary
African American Fiction
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African American Review (formerly Negro American Literature Forum [1967–76] and Black American Literature Forum [1976–1991]) African American Review is the official publication of the Modern Language Association’s Division on African American Literature and Culture. It rivals Callaloo for the title of the top scholarly journal of African American literature. It was first published as a newsletter for public school and university teachers under the auspices of editor John F. Bayliss of Indiana State University in August 1967 as Negro American Literature Forum. It changed its name to Black American Literature Forum in 1976 and again to African American Review in 1992. It remained at Indiana State University for many years with Joe Weixlmann at the helm but is now at St. Louis University. African American Review is published quarterly and consists primarily of critical articles on major African American, Afro-Caribbean, and African texts and authors, in that order. Submissions for essays, interviews, poetry, fiction, and book reviews are accepted from scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences; affiliation with an institution of higher learning is not required. Most of the journal’s contents in a regular issue are devoted to essays, interviews, and book reviews.
The journal has also published a number of issues devoted to special topics or authors: Black South (spring–summer 1993); Black Theatre (winter–summer 1982–1983); Children’s and Young-Adult Literature (spring 1998); Contemporary Theatre (winter 1997); Fiction (summer 1989, autumn 1992); Folklore (autumn 1969); Charles Johnson (winter 1996); Literature of Jazz (autumn 1991); Clarence Major (spring 1994); Toni Morrison (summer 2001); Music (summer 1995); Poetry (autumns of 1986, 1987, 1989; summer 1992 [also a Theatre issue]); Protest and Propaganda Literature (autumn 1968); Science Fiction (summer 1984); Wole Soyinka (autumn–winter 1988); Twentieth-Century Autobiography (summer 1990); Women’s Culture (autumn 1993, summer 1994); Women Writers (winter 1986, spring 1988, winter 1990, spring 1992).
The journal’s original purpose was to help integrate African American literature into American public school and university curricula, in which it was not uncommon to find few or no black authors on students’ reading lists. This central purpose still guides the journal, even though its audience has shifted considerably toward the university instructor. African American Review has become a vehicle for new and established critics of African American literature to engage in some of their most sophisticated analyses and book reviews. The journal occasionally publishes poetry, short fiction, and excerpts from forthcoming novels. Virtually every major African American literary critic, including no small number of fiction writers, has published articles and reviews in the journal’s various permutations. An abbreviated list includes William L. Andrews, K. Anthony Appiah, Michael Awkward, Houston A. Baker Jr., Amiri Baraka, Richard Barksdale, Bernard W. Bell, Susan L. Blake, Joanne M. Braxton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert J. Butler, Keith Byerman, Hazel Carby, Wanda Coleman, Thadious M. Davis, Manthia Diawara, Tom Dent, Rita Dove, Frances Smith Foster, Robert E. Fox, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Addison Gayle Jr., Nikki Giovanni, Trudier Harris, William J. Harris, Calvin Hernton, bell hooks, Dolan Hubbard, Charles Johnson, Keneth Kinnamon, Phyllis R. Klotman, Etheridge Knight, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Missy D. Kubitschek, Clarence Major, Nellie Y. McKay, E. Ethelbert Miller, R. Baxter Miller, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Charles H. Nichols, Aldon L. Nielsen, Arnold Rampersad, Dudley Randall, Ishmael Reed, Kalamu ya Salaam, Valerie Smith, Wole Soyinka, Askia M. Touré, Claudia Tate, Natasha Tretheway, Alice Walker, Cheryl A. Wall, Michele Wallace, Jerry W. Ward Jr., John A. Williams, Richard Yarborough, and many others.
The quality of African American Review’s criticism is especially high; most of the essays from the late 1980s and after have either integrated contemporary literary criticism with close scrutiny of major and minor literary and historical texts or, on some occasions, challenged perceived critical hegemonies. To that extent, it is among the most sophisticated and, arguably, one of the most radical records of criticism of African American literature of the last thirty years. Inevitably, the journal itself displays some of its own biases in subject matter, if nowhere else, and they lean toward the more established authors in a de facto African American literary canon. The reader interested in Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Gloria Naylor, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Charles Johnson, James Baldwin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Ernest J. Gaines, Rita Dove, and others will rarely have to suffer an issue’s being published without essays devoted to at least a few of these august names. This is not necessarily a bad thing; few scholarly journals focusing mostly or exclusively on African American literature and culture remain in print, and prevailing opinions of these authors need to be discussed, questioned, and revised. Yet more obscure names do not receive the amount or frequency of attention they might deserve. This condition, however, is not exclusive to African American Review, and the journal remains a crowning jewel of contemporary criticism. One of the best articles about the journal’s history was penned by its longtime editor: Joe Weixlmann, “The Way We Were, the Way We Are, the Way We Hope to Be,” BALF 20, nos. 1/2 (Spring–Summer 1986).
Afrocentricity Afrocentricity, or Afrocentrism, is both a pedagogical method and an ideology first named and delineated by Molefi Kete Asante of Temple University in his books Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (1980, revised 1988) and The Afrocentric Idea (1989, revised 1998). Afrocentricity’s purpose is to examine history, politics, and social and cultural phenomena, including literature, from the perspectives and for the edification of sub-Saharan African cultures and the various peoples of the African Diaspora. As the name implies, then, Africa and black Africans are placed at the center of the world to posit a radical revaluation of each of the aforementioned categories. The descriptor “Afrocentric” has been applied to everything from clothing and lifestyles to sophisticated studies of African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American history and literature. After Asante published his first book on the subject, Afrocentricity grew in popularity among African Americans of different educational and class backgrounds. It has found particular favor in many black studies programs and departments, inasmuch as one of its goals is to persuade students and scholars to reorient their knowledge of history and culture to place the achievements of African peoples in the foreground and center, rather than at the margins.
Afrocentricity is a direct outgrowth of modern Black Nationalism, Negritude, Pan-Africanism, the Black Arts Movement, and the Black Aesthetic that emerged in the 1960s. Arguably, Afrocentricity reached its peak of influence and public attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but it remains, under various names, guises, and interpretations, a significant part of African American literary studies.
Asante defines Afrocentricity as “a perspective that involves locating [African American] students within the context of their own cultural references so that they can relate socially and psychologically to other cultural perspectives.”* In this respect, Afrocentricity is a crucial part of the movement towards multicultural education that arose in the early 1970s. It purports to counter the harmful effects of Eurocentric, or white supremacist, views of world history that either dismiss or minimize the presence of and crucial roles African peoples have played within the development of Western civilization, or entirely independent of it, from ancient times to the present.
Afrocentricity’s influence upon and importance to contemporary African American fiction and literary studies are substantially broader. In literary studies, Afrocentric critical approaches might include foci upon the artifacts of and references to sub-Saharan Africa within specific texts; criticism of the Eurocentrism of scholars of African American literature; criticism of Eurocentrism in the works of various fiction authors; comparisons of African Diasporic and sub-Saharan Africa concepts and cultural practices as found within some works; and so on. In contemporary African American fiction itself, Afrocentricity, Afrocentric perspectives and garb, and discussions of the same may be featured in some texts; this is especially true of the Post-Soul or New Black Aesthetic generation of authors. One is apt to find some reflections of Afrocentric thought in the works of such authors as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, or Ishmael Reed, all of whom have incorporated explicit references to African cultures, ancient and modern, in their most famous works.
Afrocentricity has also generated more than its fair share of controversy, despite the fact that its precise definition depends largely upon the perspective of the person asked to define it. Since it does have practical implications for primary and secondary education and has been influential in the multicultural education movement, it has been condemned as divisive and “Balkanizing” by its most ardent critics. These criticisms came to the fore primarily due to the publication of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s The Disuniting of America (1991), Mary Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (1996), and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991), to say nothing of such critical essays as Stanley Crouch’s “Do the Afrocentric Hustle,”* among many others. Afrocentricity’s critics tend not only to charge that the model amounts to little more than “cheerleading” for black students and their history but also to accuse Afrocentrists of sloppy, polemical scholarship (an accusation that, while occasionally justified, may apply equally to some of Afrocentricity’s critics).
Regardless of the controversy, though, Afrocentricity has undoubtedly offered African American literary studies one way to enliven discussions of the literature itself. It would not be inaccurate to say that Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (1987) and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988) owe as much to Afrocentricity’s approach as they do to contemporary poststructuralist theory. Moreover, the theory continues to capture the attention of new and old students of African American literature seeking critical perspectives that enhance our understanding of African American literature as a whole.
Allen, Jeffrey Renard (b. 1962, Chicago, Illinois) Rails Under My Back (2000), the first novel by poet and short-story author Jeffrey Renard Allen, attracted many positive notices upon its publication for its ambitious scope. As was true of many works authored by younger African American writers in the 1990s, Rails aspired to the sort of epic, picaresque attempts to capture African Americans’ collective condition found in the best works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman. As do those authors, Allen writes about the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the urban North that occurred from the early part of the twentieth century well into the 1960s, finding a metaphor for African Americans’ search for freedom, identity, education, and experience in the act of migration itself.
Rails Under My Back is the story of cousins Hatch and Jesus Jones—whose mothers and fathers are sisters and brothers to one another, respectively—and the closely knit Southern families whence they come. Each cousin represents the yin to the other’s yang; Hatch is the sensitive soul trying to transcend the restrictions of his homeland and family, while Jesus is righteously angry and bitter about their families’ lives. Each also tries to resist the dangers and temptations of growing up African American in the South and the vices of Chicago, with mixed results. In doing so, Hatch and Jesus also try to help keep their larger families’ ties and histories together as they face modernity via the city. Allen uses trains, the underground, and gravity as metaphors for these hazards and for the journeys to and from freedom that individual characters undertake. Allen’s novel reflects concerns common in many post–Civil Rights novels: What are the hazards or benefits of letting go of traditions that allowed African American individuals, families, and communities to survive generations of legal and customary oppression but that might endanger the identities of each if maintained without revision?
Most initial reviewers note that Allen’s ambitions within the novel are often beautifully realized through his poetic language, but some expressed reservations about the novel’s organization and cohesiveness. Christopher C. De Santis writes, for example, that Rails “contributes a unique and enduring voice” to a long tradition of novels with these themes, but also that it is “difficult” and does not always “weav[e] the many characters’ lives together through shifting time and geography in a seamless fashion.”*Robert Butler calls it “an impressive first novel announcing a fresh voice in African American fiction” and compares Allen’s work to that of Theodore Dreiser for its ability to revise the picture of the urban environment for a postmodern age with “extraordinary verbal energy.” Butler suggests that the novel could have benefited from editorial trimming and further development of some settings and scenes, but praises it overall.
All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies This outstanding 1982 anthology of black feminist essays was edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, three black feminist critics prominent from the 1970s through the 1990s. It ranks as one of the most influential volumes of contemporary feminist thought by women of color, arguably rivaled only by This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), edited by Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa. All the Women Are White received the Outstanding Women of Color and the Women Educator’s Curriculum Material awards, and it is commonly assigned, whether in its entirety or excerpted, in many African American studies and women’s studies courses.
Contributors include the editors and Martha H. Brown, the Combahee River Collective, Erlene Stetson, Alice Walker, Michele Wallace, Mary Helen Washington, Jean Fagan Yellin, and several others. Moreover, many of the foundational essays of contemporary black feminist thought are found here, and each has helped in its own way to shape the direction of African American literary studies from the 1980s onward. This is especially applicable to the numerous African American women authors that became prominent or were otherwise rediscovered in that period; in fact, some of the latter authors owe their renaissance directly to these essays.
While the entire volume is essential to the development of black feminist thought from the 1980s until the present, a few may be specifically mentioned if only because they are more widely known and read than the others. These include: the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement”; Barbara Smith’s “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” and “Racism and Women’s Studies”; Gloria T. Hull’s “Researching Alice Dunbar-Nelson: A Personal and Literary Perspective”; Michele Wallace’s “A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood”; Patricia Bell Scott’s “Debunking Sapphire: Toward a Non-Racist and Non-Sexist Social Stance” and “Selected Bibliography of Black Feminism”; Alice Walker’s “One Child of One’s Own: A Meaningful Digression Within the Work(s)—an Excerpt”; and Mary Helen Washington’s “Teaching Black-Eyed Susans: An Approach to the Study of Black Women Writers.”
Equally important are the teaching resources scattered throughout the volume. Besides Patricia Bell Scott’s black feminist bibliography, two collections of course syllabi, one for “General/Social Science/Interdisciplinary” and another for literature courses, provide clear examples of both theoretical and pedagogical strategies for the classroom. These elements are perfect illustrations of black feminism’s desire to address more practical concerns, to engage in the sort of work that would enable others to build upon their foundations.
Amistad Magazine Published by Random House in two issues from 1969 to 1971, Amistad stands as one of the better “little magazines” to emerge in the wake of the Black Arts Movement, despite its extremely short history. Named after the slave ship on which there was a famous revolt in 1839, Amistad, coedited by Charles Harris and fiction writer John A. Williams, was strongly nationalistic and artistically daring. In the spirit of the Amistad case, the anthology stood for “revolt, self-determination, justice and freedom,” and was meant to be used in “college courses in literature, history, sociology, psychology, education, political science and government, and the arts.”* In other words, Amistad was to address the emergence of black studies as a discipline in American universities and to counter “‘intellectual’ racism.”*
The resulting magazine featured essays and fiction, both new and old, by the most prominent African American authors of the Black Arts or Harlem Renaissance movements. Most of the contents consisted of essays by and about African American literature and history; the remainder—about a third—consisted of fiction or other features, such as a portfolio of the photographs of Carl Van Vechten, one of the white patrons of the Harlem Renaissance. Besides the editors themselves, the featured authors included (in alphabetical order): Imamu Amiri Baraka; Haywood Burns; Basil Davidson; George Davis; W. E. B. Du Bois; Addison Gayle; Paula Giddings; Paul Good; Verta Grosvenor; Vincent Harding; Calvin C. Hernton; Langston Hughes; Oliver Jackman; C. L. R. James; Gayl Jones; John Oliver Killens; Toni Morrison; Ishmael Reed; Sterling Stuckey; Carl Van Vechten; Mel Watkins; and Richard Wright. Save for those authors who were deceased—such as Du Bois, Hughes, Van Vechten, Wright—virtually all of these writers went on to become major authors or scholars of African American literature. Notable contributions are an excerpt from The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, which had been published the previous year; “D Hexorcism of Noxon D Awful,” by Ishmael Reed; “The Return: A Fantasy,” by Gayl Jones; and a previously unpublished, longer version of Richard Wright’s seminal essay, “Blueprint for Negro Writing.”
Angelou, Maya (b. Marguerite Johnson, 1928, St. Louis, Missouri) Maya Angelou remains one of African American literature’s major popular authors, renowned both for her powerful literary skills and her activism. Although Angelou’s greatest claims to fame are her six autobiographies, most notably the bestselling I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), her efforts in this area place her squarely within a tradition of stylized autobiography that helps define African American literature as a whole. While her autobiographies are not fictional in the strictest sense, some of them compare favorably to the earlier efforts of Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Angelou’s friend and contemporary, Malcolm X, to the extent that they include an autobiographical persona who functions largely as a fictional character would. Via this persona, the accomplished poet, dancer, singer, actor, choreographer, essayist, and activist frequently reveals a life that has lent itself to dramatic exploits that have involved some of the most illustrious figures in African American life in the latter part of the twentieth century.
Angelou’s work is often flamboyant and even controversial; despite its overwhelming popularity with many audiences, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings remains on lists of books banned in high schools for its sexual content and resounding and uncompromising condemnation of racism, particularly racist white Americans. The latter element may be attributed in part to Angelou’s first autobiography emerging at the crux of the Black Arts Movement, but it still resonates with new generations of readers, African American or otherwise. Angelou’s popularity led president-elect Bill Clinton to ask her to compose and read the inaugural poem, which was later published in On the Pulse of Morning (1993). Poet and critic Wanda Coleman also stirred considerable controversy in 2002 for openly criticizing Angelou’s reliance upon cliché and self-aggrandizement in her later memoirs and for her relatively simple poetic forms. Nonetheless, Angelou continues to inspire countless readers ranging from schoolchildren to accomplished academics. She writes and engages in her many activities while teaching at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Ansa, Tina McElroy (b. 1949, Macon, Georgia) Novelist Tina McElroy Ansa published several well-received and popular novels in the 1990s and 2000s. Her first novel, Baby of the Family (1989), attracted warm reviews and respectable sales, due to Ansa’s accessible, yet lyrical style. Baby of the Family is a bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel) revolving around Lena, who is, not coincidentally, born in a small Georgia town the same year as Ansa. Lena is also born with a caul on her face, which signifies her possession of healing powers in African American folk culture. Young Lena’s observations of her middle-class parents’ difficult relationship and her adventures within her town’s black community create a solid plot, one that has resonated with African American readers, especially those from the South.
Ansa gained significant attention after the publication of Ugly Ways (1993), which came in the wake of Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale and inarguably benefited from the publishing bonanza that novel engendered. Although better written and structured than McMillan’s commercial phenomenon, Ugly Ways nevertheless found itself classified and marketed in the same category as Waiting to Exhale and works by many other authors consciously capitalizing upon that book’s trend. Ugly Ways recounts the lives of three African American women who return to their small Georgia town of Mulberry after the death of their mother, Mudear, whose power as a matriarch belied the abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband, as her daughters discover in numerous flashbacks. Their conflicts and tensions with one another and their mother’s spirit—a major character in her own right—reveal the wittier side of Ansa’s writing with imaginative, tightly constructed dialogue. Although the tensions are resolved too easily, the novel succeeds at raising crucial issues regarding personal and familial relationships, which attracted many new readers to Ansa’s fiction, thereby giving new life to her earlier novel’s sales and her overall significance as a writer. The Hand I Fan With (1996), a sequel to Baby of the Family, depicts Lena as an adult and her town’s new healer and matriarch. Its major foci are the complex spirituality and folk wisdom that inform her community’s culture, and male-female relationships, although the male in this case is a spirit, Herman, who acts as a mentor to Lena as her powers come into their own.
Ansa has received some significant critical attention. E. Shelley Reid’s article “Beyond Morrison and Walker: Looking Good and Looking Forward in Contemporary Black Women’s Stories” (AAR 34, no. 2 [Summer 2000]) does not focus a great deal of attention on Ansa, but as she draws primarily upon The Hand I Fan With, Reid shows how Ansa’s work compares well to her contemporaries and such groundbreaking predecessors as the authors in the article’s title.
Artists and Communities Many authors in the Black Arts Movement made the question of their art’s place vis-à-vis the masses of African Americans central to their work. This question was not by any means a new one by the time African American artists posed it in the 1960s; authors of the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s debated frequently, both in person and in print, whether their art should address the needs or desires of African Americans in general or simply be an expression of the individual artistic sensibility, or “art for art’s sake.” One might also argue that such activists as David Walker raised the same issue during slavery when they condemned those who failed to use their talents and their words to support the cause of abolition.*
Black Arts Movement writers and intellectuals, however, took this debate into other directions as they attempted to create art—poetry, fiction, plays, paintings, sculpture, and so on—that could, on the one hand, reflect the realities of life in predominantly African American communities as those artists perceived them or, on the other hand, bring radical and revolutionary concepts and solutions to those same communities. This is the essence of Hoyt Fuller’s definition of a Black Aesthetic, which argues, following Frantz Fanon, that “in the time of revolutionary struggle, the traditional Western liberal ideals are not merely irrelevant but they must be assiduously opposed. The young writers of the black ghetto have set out in search of a black aesthetic, a system of isolating and evaluating the artistic works of black people which reflects the special character and imperatives of black experience.”* The goal of such an aesthetic, then, is to erase the boundary that has traditionally separated the artist from the person on the street, to eschew elitism in favor of art that is accessible to the proletariat. Thus Gwendolyn Brooks left her original publisher, Harper & Row, in favor of such smaller, black-owned publishers as Broadside Press and Third World Press so that her poetry—which had become more reflective of Black Nationalist ideas by the late 1960s—could be purchased at lower prices and therefore reach a larger black audience. Theatre companies such as Pennsylvania State University’s NOMMO Performing Arts Company and Chicago’s Organization of Black American Culture put on performances in smaller theatres; poets Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Don L. Lee, or Nikki Giovanni could very well be found reading their work as one of the opening acts to a music concert.
In contrast, some of the same writers of this era, while agreeing with the artist’s need to connect with or to be immersed in the community, took issue with the anti-intellectualism they saw in the community. As Alice Walker argues in her essay, “The Unglamorous but Worthwhile Duties of the Black Revolutionary Artist, or of the Black Writer Who Simply Works and Writes,”
much lip service has been given the role of the revolutionary black writer but now the words must be turned into work.… There are the old people … who need us to put into words for them the courage and dignity of their lives. There are the students who need guidance and direction. Real guidance and real direction, and support that doesn’t get out of town when the sun goes down.… The real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff.*
Walker speaks to a long-standing imperative among African Americans to contribute back to the community in much the same way as Fuller did before her, except that she is more concerned with concrete actions than with ideology. Artistic talent must be placed at the service of the community by addressing immediate needs rather than ideals. While this may seem a relatively conservative stance evocative of Booker T. Washington’s dicta in favor of utilitarian education and occupations for African Americans in his classic Up from Slavery (1901), it is also the epitome of the kind of nationalistic, communal thought that was common in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That is to say, black intellectuals frequently concluded that the Civil Rights movement’s primary flaw was its lesser emphasis on economic empowerment as it pressed for political enfranchisement.
Contemporary African American fiction does not always address this last issue, but it frequently probes the complexities of various black communities, largely, one may argue, out of individual authors’ wishes to remain closely associated to the very people who are their raisons d’être.
Attica The standoff at New York state’s Attica prison in September 1971 remains one of the more shocking events in recent American history. For many African Americans, including more than a few fiction writers, it was a metaphor for the way African Americans have disproportionately suffered abuse at the hands of the American justice system, and therefore the government.
The standoff began as a result of prisoner complaints filed several months earlier about inhumane conditions at the prison, including low pay, shoddy medical facilities and treatment, censorship, routine overt bigotry and brutality from prison guards, and religious intolerance. Most of the prisoners were African American and Puerto Rican, and most of the former were members of the Nation of Islam, who were frequently singled out for unfair treatment. On September 8, 1971, an altercation between two prisoners led to peaceful inmate protests and violent rioting. Three inmates and one guard were killed, and the riots eventually culminated in the inmates’ seizing control of the prison, including thirty hostages. For four days, inmates negotiated with state government officials, repeating their earlier complaints and demanding that they be given greater educational and rehabilitative opportunities, visits from religious leaders (especially such Nation of Islam officials as Minister Louis Farrakhan), inspections by doctors and reporters to certify the health of the hostages, and a visit by Governor Nelson E. Rockefeller. On September 13, however, Rockefeller ordered state troopers and prison guards to storm the prison. In the ensuing melee, twenty-nine inmates and ten hostages—some of whom were dressed in inmate uniforms—were killed, and eighty-five prisoners and three hostages were injured. Once the prison was back in the state’s hands, the surviving prisoners were brutalized by prison guards for months, regardless of whether they were directly involved in the revolt or not. In subsequent investigations, the state’s justifications for the raid, such as allegations of inmates’ torture of hostages, were found to be baseless. This led to the surviving inmates and their families filing a class action lawsuit, resulting in an $8 million settlement that later grew to $12 million.
The Attica standoff was a rallying point for many African American activists, who found the government’s conduct reprehensible and irresponsible. These activists included a number of authors, such as Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, and Amiri Baraka, who wrote essays about the incident and its aftermath and referred to it in their fiction; the prison scene in Morrison’s Beloved (1987), for example, evokes the torture of the prisoners that occurred after the uprising was quelled. The best sources on the uprising and its impact upon American racial politics would be the following: The Brothers of Attica (1973), by Richard X. Clark, edited by Leonard Levitt; Letters from Attica (1972) by Samuel Melville, which includes the inmates’ complete demands; and Attica Diary (1972) by William Coons.
Autobiography Although discussion of the autobiographical form would seem to be inappropriate in a volume discussing fiction, autobiography has been an indelible part of African American literature from its very inception, as African Americans have striven to bear witness to the innumerable trials and triumphs they have experienced individually. The autobiographical slave narrative was by far the most common form of written African American literature in the nineteenth century. In antebellum times, it was intended to help abolish slavery by making the world aware of slavery’s physical and psychological horrors. From the end of the Civil War to well into the twentieth century, when the last generation born into slavery passed away, their narratives strengthened already extensive documentation of the “peculiar institution” and its effects upon America and its democratic ideals.
African American autobiography, of course, extends well beyond the slave narrative. From religious testimonials, to oral histories, to book-length texts, autobiography is one of the cornerstones of African American literature. Autobiography’s appeal lies largely in its necessary assertion of authentic, usually unmediated experience and thoughtful reflection on that experience. Contemporary African American authors have frequently written first-person narratives using the autobiographical form’s generic conventions to help blur the line between fiction and history for at least one of two likely purposes: either to foreground the literary facet of all history and therefore show how history can be constructed; or to demonstrate the possibilities found within fiction, that fiction is but one form of history. This is one of the features of the neo–slave narrative and of postmodernism, both of which are discussed elsewhere in this guide. On a more obvious level, though, it is hardly unusual for authors to base their fiction, especially their earliest efforts, upon personal experiences. African American authors, however, have frequently merged the dual impulses of turning experience into fiction and testing generic boundaries to force their personal experiences simultaneously to transcend and to comment upon historical events.
These impulses may also be guided by the extraordinary influence that African American autobiographies have had in recent years. The autobiographies and memoirs of Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965), George Jackson (Soledad Brother, 1970), Elaine Brown (A Taste of Power, 1992), Eldridge Cleaver (Soul on Ice, 1968), Nathan McCall (Makes Me Wanna Holler, 1994) have all inspired both critical praise and controversy, but more important, they have been central texts of post–Civil Rights black politics, pushing contemporary audiences to reevaluate recent history through personal testimony.
The list of works and authors that have merged autobiography with fiction since 1970 would be long indeed, but the following is a short list of the better known and regarded among them. All of these texts have in common a protagonist who closely resemble the author or who is, for all intents and purposes, the author. They also use many of the conventions that one would normally expect from fiction or contain passages that either radically reconstruct or imagine the details missing from factual events.
James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979)
David Bradley, The Chaneysville Incident (1981)
Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994)
Randall Kenan, A Visitation of Spirits (1989)
Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John (1985) and Lucy (1990)
Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography (1982)
Ishmael Reed, Japanese by Spring (1993)
Sapphire, American Dreams (1994) and Push (1996)
Natasha Tarpley, Girl in the Mirror: Three Generations of Black Women in Motion (1999)
Alice Walker, Meridian (1976)
John Edgar Wideman, The Homewood Trilogy (1981–1983) and Brothers and Keepers (1984)
John A. Williams, Captain Blackman (1972), Mothersill and the Foxes (1975), The Junior Bachelor Society (1976), !Click Song (1982), The Berhama Account (1985), and Clifford’s Blues (1999)
* Molefi Kete Asante, “The Afrocentric Idea in Education,” The Journal of Negro Education 60, no. 2 (Spring 1991):171.
* Stanley Crouch, “Do the Afrocentric Hustle,” in The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It, 1990–1994 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), 33–44.
* Christopher C. De Santis, review of Rails Under My Back, by Jeffrey Renard Allen, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 22, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 169–70.
* Charles F. Harris and John A. Williams, introduction to Amistad 1 (1969): vii.
* Charles F. Harris and John A. Williams, introduction to Amistad 1 (1969): viii.
* David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (1830; New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), 28ff.
* Hoyt Fuller, “Introduction: Towards a Black Aesthetic,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle Jr. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 9.
* Alice Walker, “The Unglamorous but Worthwhile Duties of the Black Revolutionary Artist, or of the Black Writer Who Simply Works and Writes,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983), 130–38; quotations from 133, 135; emphasis in original.