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Baldwin, James (b. 1924, Harlem, New York City; d. 1987, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France) James Baldwin is one of the giants of twentieth-century African American literature. Prior to the era covered in the present volume, Baldwin was one of a scant few African American authors—Ralph Ellison, Frederick Douglass, and Langston Hughes were usually the others—taught in American literature courses at elite universities in the United States. Baldwin’s inclusion was based largely upon the achievements of his early essays, especially “Notes of a Native Son” and “Many Thousands Gone”; the early novels Go Tell It on the Mountain (1954), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Another Country (1962); the extended, deeply personal essay The Fire Next Time (1963); the militant play “Blues for Mr. Charlie” (1964); and his political activism during the Civil Rights movement.

The subsequent Black Arts Movement and the concomitant Black Aesthetics developed within it, however, were less kind to Baldwin in the 1960s and early 1970s. Black Arts Movement artists and intellectuals criticized Baldwin because of his homosexuality, the rhetorical distance from fellow African Americans that Baldwin’s first-person-plural essay voice seemed to indicate, earlier criticism of his mentor Richard Wright, his expatriate status, and his vigorous defense of the Civil Rights movement’s goals of freedom and equality for African Americans and reconciliation of the “races,” the last of which Baldwin saw as essential for the nation’s survival. For example, author and future Black Panther Party Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver condemned Baldwin in his landmark best seller Soul on Ice (1968) for the “racial death wish” of homosexuality and for suggesting in Giovanni’s Room that a white homosexual male could be “an instrument for social change.”^* Therefore, despite the fact that “Blues for Mr. Charlie” was, by Amiri Baraka’s own admission, the catalyst and a major inspiration for the Black Arts Movement, and despite Baldwin’s being appreciated by such Black Nationalists as Malcolm X,^* Baldwin found himself virtually irrelevant to the younger African American literary scene of the early 1970s. Some, including Cleaver and Baraka, went so far as to imply that Baldwin was sycophantic towards whites, antiblack, and generally passé.^*

These criticisms and accusations alienated Baldwin, yet he continued to produce notable fiction from the 1970s until his death in 1987. Two semiautobiographical novels, in fact, came out of this period of relative isolation: If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Baldwin’s last novel, Just Above My Head (1979). The former concerns the struggles of a young pregnant woman, Clementine “Tish” Rivers, to free her unborn child’s father, Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt, from an undeserved prison sentence. The novel is a sound condemnation of the American criminal justice system, particularly the way it and its agents have aided in the destruction of black families and communities. To the extent that Fonny’s own deeply religious family ignores or undermines his efforts to obtain his freedom, the novel is also an indictment of the black bourgeoisie or, more accurately, the bourgeois adherence to Christian churches as institutions, rather than as guideposts to social uplift and personal liberation. Just Above My Head, on the other hand, is a complex, extended meditation upon the themes that captivated Baldwin most often: family, sexuality, religion, and the expatriate experience that Baldwin knew so well. It is the story of gospel singer Arthur Montana’s tense relationship with his brother Hall, the novel’s narrator, which stems from Hall’s attempts to deal with his brother’s homosexuality and celebrity. Equally important, the novel explores the delicate, intricate relationships between Arthur, his lover Crunch, and Crunch’s paramour Julia—a close friend of Hall and Arthur—and her brother Jimmy. Through his narration, Hall attempts to understand his brother and his eventual death, in much the same way that the narrator of Baldwin’s classic story “Sonny’s Blues” tries to come to terms with his own brother’s demons. Many conflicts in the novel resemble events and tensions within Baldwin’s own life, to say nothing of themes explored in his earlier novels and plays. Hall Montana, for example, closely resembles both David Baldwin, James’s brother, and Baldwin himself, while Arthur closely reflects Baldwin’s own situation: an artist, a celebrity, and a gay man, who struggles with the stresses each of these identities brings to his life as they conflict with his own staunchly religious upbringing. These correspondences led Baldwin to comment that Just Above My Head brought him “full circle” and was the concatenation of his experiences.^*

The critical reviews of Baldwin’s later fiction followed the patterns of the reviews of his earlier work. They were generally positive but lacked enthusiasm. Most held considerable reservations about Baldwin’s ability to convey the complexities of his settings, although he received extensive admiration for his skilled investigation of his characters’ innermost psyches. Some of the criticism focused on Baldwin’s continued experiments in including homosexual characters in his novels, which was still daring in the 1970s.

The scholarly literature on Baldwin is both extensive and rich. As a general introduction to Baldwin, his life, and his work, David Leeming’s James Baldwin: A Biography (1994) is the first and best source to investigate, as Leeming was one of Baldwin’s close friends and confidantes. Louis H. Pratt’s James Baldwin (1978) is less detailed in terms of biographical detail than Leeming’s book but takes a careful critical look at Baldwin’s oeuvre, albeit obviously without covering Baldwin’s last years. Therman B. O’Daniel’s collection, James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation (1981), contains essays drawn primarily from CLA Journal and Negro American Literature Forum (now African American Review) and covers all genres and periods of his career. It also has an extensive bibliography of works on Baldwin to date. Pratt’s Conversations with James Baldwin (1989) fills in some of the gaps left by the earlier volume, as do Fred Standley and Nancy Standley’s bibliography, James Baldwin: A Reference Guide (1980), and their anthology, Critical Essays on James Baldwin (1981).

The journals African American Review and Callaloo have published many essays on Baldwin’s works. One of the latest and best is Robert Tomlinson’s “‘Payin’ One’s Dues’: Expatriation as Personal Experience and Paradigm in the Works of James Baldwin” (AAR, spring 1999), which discusses many of Baldwin’s major fictional and nonfictional works and functions as a solid review of the concepts and themes that define much of Baldwin’s fiction. D. Quentin Miller’s Re-Viewing James Baldwin (2000) comprises essays that take somewhat unusual approaches to Baldwin’s career, including foci upon gender, film, masculinity, domestic spaces, and photography; its preface is by Baldwin biographer David Leeming. Readers more interested in Baldwin’s later works are advised to seek out Lynn Orilla Scott’s James Baldwin’s Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey (2002), which is perhaps the most extensive book-length treatment of this segment of his career. Finally, two recent documentaries of Baldwin’s life and literary career, James Baldwin, Author (1994) and James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket (1989) are available; the latter is more widely acclaimed.

Bambara, Toni Cade (b. Miltona Mirkin Cade, New York City, March 25, 1939; d. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 9, 1995) Few African American authors of recent years have achieved the degree of critical acclaim that has attended Toni Cade Bambara. The attention afforded Bambara becomes more impressive when we consider the complexity and difficulty of some of her greatest works, especially her masterpiece, The Salt Eaters (1980), and her best-known short-story collection, Gorilla, My Love (1972). Bambara was also one-third of the triumvirate of major women authors to emerge at the beginning of the contemporary period; the others are Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, the latter of whom was also instrumental in publishing Gorilla, My Love. Bambara’s place in this group has as much to do with other roles she has played, including her work as a community activist and social worker in Harlem and Philadelphia; as a political activist in such countries as Brazil, Cuba, India, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados, Laos, and VietNam; as a documentary filmmaker (The Bombing of Osage Avenue, 1986); and as the editor of The Black Woman (1970), the first major anthology to tap into the growing demand for African American women’s writing. In this last role, Bambara fulfilled one of the ideological goals of many African American women writers in the early 1970s: recovering and representing lost or ignored voices within the individual’s community.

Bambara’s style, in fact, is deeply immersed in these very same voices, most of which draw frequently on a subtle mix of African American folk culture and womanist goals of giving form to women’s voices in a male-dominated milieu. When The Salt Eaters was published, in fact, Bambara received immense praise for her careful use of African Americans’ “dialect,” which she found puzzling. Bambara recounts that she “felt like a fraud” when such praise emerged, as the stories in her book “didn’t have anything to do with a political stance. I just thought people lived and moved around in this particular language system.… It just seemed polite to handle the characters in this mode.”^* Bambara’s attentiveness to the nuances of African Americans’ language systems and the ways they link communities combines with more radical experiments with point of view in all of her major fictional works. Beyond Gorilla, My Love and The Salt Eaters, these include Tales and Short Stories for Black Folks (1971; as editor and contributor of one story) and The Seabirds Are Still Alive (1977).

Gorilla, My Love is largely autobiographical fiction comprising a preface and fifteen stories in a loosely woven cycle. Through the course of these stories, Bambara paints a portrait of African American communities in the South and North (Bambara’s old Brooklyn neighborhood) as sites in which individuals from different generations learn how to negotiate tensions regarding definitions of black identity, gender, and ideology. Most notable of all is the stories’ overarching argument in favor of support among black women in the face of sexism within the community and racism from the society at large. Bambara’s second collection of short stories, The Seabirds Are Still Alive, is drawn from her experiences traveling to and within the countries of Cuba, Kenya, and Vietnam from 1973 through 1975. These travels altered Bambara both politically and ideologically as a feminist and Black Nationalist, which is manifested in the intense focus on issues of justice for women and children within the stories, as well as symbolic and direct criticisms of white supremacy.

Bambara’s masterpiece is The Salt Eaters, whose experiments with form and narration make it one of the more challenging works to emerge in the latter portion of the twentieth century. It is the story of Velma Henry and the community whence she comes, which is populated by many characters who weave in and out of the nonlinear plot at a stunning rate. Both Velma Henry and her community seek types of healing, with Velma’s coming from healer Minnie Ransom, and the community’s in the appreciation of its own richness and diversity. As Ann Folwell Stepford argues, Velma serves as an answer to the eponymous narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) to the extent that she is placed in the forefront of the reader’s vision, rather than rendered invisible.^* Like the Invisible Man, Velma achieves wisdom by returning to and embracing the mother-wit of her youth, which had been long suppressed in her memories. The complexity, cleverness, and rich experimentation of The Salt Eaters won it the American Book and Langston Hughes Society awards in 1981 and led to a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Grant (1981). In 1986, the novel was granted the Medallion and Zora Neale Hurston Society awards.

Those Bones Are Not My Child (2000) is Bambara’s last novel, published and edited posthumously via Bambara’s friend, Toni Morrison. It is a fictional account of life in and around Atlanta, Georgia, at the time of the Atlanta child murders from 1979 to 1982, in which forty African American children and young men were brutally slain. Bambara takes to task official agencies’ rush to find both a guilty party and a nonracial explanation for the crimes and links them symbolically to the history of lynching that still haunts Georgia. Reviews of this last magnum opus were mixed; its daunting size—over 600 pages—led such reviewers as Shanna Benjamin to declare that the narrative loses some thrust when Bambara incorporates her extensive research and that it was in need of further editing.^*

Arguably, the single best introduction to Bambara’s life and interests would be Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions (1996), also completed posthumously by Morrison. The first third of the anthology comprises six of Bambara’s last stories, which stand up well when compared to the best of her work. The remainder of the volume consists of essays, reviews, and an extremely candid and insightful interview, “How She Came by Her Name,” conducted by Bambara’s friend Louis Massiah shortly before her death. Scholarly books on Bambara’s fiction include: Elliott Butler-Evans, Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (1989); Komla Messan Nubukpo, Through Their Sisters’ Eyes: The Representation of Black Men in the Novels of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara (1987); and Gay Wilentz, Healing Narratives: Women Writers Curing Cultural Dis-ease (2000). Notable scholarly journal articles include: Derek Alwes, “The Burden of Liberty: Choice in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters,” AAR 30, no. 3 (Autumn 1996); Margot Anne Kelley,“‘Damballah is the First Law of Thermodynamics’: Modes of Access to Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters,” AAR 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1993); Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Toni Cade Bambara: Free to Be Anywhere in the Universe,” Callaloo 19, no. 2 (Spring 1996); Janelle Collins, “Generating Power: Fission, Fusion, and Postmodern Politics in Bambara’s The Salt Eaters,” MELUS 21, no. 2 (Summer 1996); Ann Folwell Stanford, “He Speaks for Whom?: Inscription and Reinscription of Women in Invisible Man and The Salt Eaters,” MELUS 18, no. 2 (Summer 1993); Imani L. B. Fryar, “Literary Aesthetics and the Black Woman Writer,” Journal of Black Studies 20, no. 4 (June 1990); George E. Kent, “Outstanding Works in Black Literature in 1972,” Phylon 34, no. 4 (fourth quarter, 1973).

Beatty, Paul (b. 1962, Los Angeles, California) One of the sharpest wits among of the younger generation of African American writers, poet and novelist Paul Beatty has won virtually universal praise for his hilarious first novel, The White Boy Shuffle (1996) and favorable, albeit mixed reviews for his second novel, Tuff (2000). A native of Los Angeles, Beatty earned his M.A. in psychology at Boston University and his M.F.A. at Brooklyn College, where his work under the direction of preeminent Beat poet Allen Ginsberg led to the publication of two volumes of poetry, Big Bank Take Little Bank (1991) and Joker Joker Deuce (1994). The Village Voice chose the former as one of the best books of 1991. These two books alone earned Beatty a place among a new group of poets who used the rhythms and topical content of rap or hip-hop as the bases for their work.

With his poetic work alone, Beatty had already marked a significant place for himself in African American literature by the mid-1990s, having been featured in numerous profiles and collections. With his satirical Künstlerroman, The White Boy Shuffle, Beatty created a semiautobiographical, irreverent indictment of the stale, shallow character of 1990s political activism, insincere forms of multiculturalism, and the gross commodification of African American culture. Tuff, which fills a similar thematic scope, is a nihilistic, picaresque romp through New York’s cultural and political firestorms. Both novels explode innumerable myths about African Americans’ alleged pathologies that are too seldom challenged. They have also placed Beatty on the cusp of literary stardom. Where he goes from this point will depend largely upon the quality of his next work.

Given the brevity of Beatty’s career thus far, no book-length studies of his work exist. Most critical study consists of book reviews in major newspapers and magazines. This author, however, has written about Beatty’s two novels in African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (2001). One of Beatty’s early short stories, “What Set You From, Fool?” has been collected in Next: Young American Writers on the New Generation (1994), edited by Eric Liu. Excerpts from The White Boy Shuffle were also published in Kevin Powell’s Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature (2000), a massive, essential anthology.

Before Columbus Foundation The Before Columbus Foundation is a nonprofit educational and service organization cofounded in 1976 by authors Ishmael Reed, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Shawn Wong, and Rudolfo Anaya to promote and disseminate contemporary American multicultural literature. Since 1978, the foundation has recognized the literary achievements of American authors of all backgrounds, primarily through its annual American Book Awards, which are marked by their egalitarian outlook and purpose.

The foundation and its mission are clearly responses to the often controversial decisions that emerge from the National Book, PEN/Faulkner, Pulitzer, and other award committees, whom Reed and other African American authors have accused of elitism, racism, and gender discrimination. The Before Columbus Foundation’s recognized books are not designated as the “best” books in a given year; that would connote an elite ranking. Rather, each of the entries named receives an award without any further designation of quality, gender, race, or other characteristic, save for the subcategories of “Children’s Book,” “Editor,” “Journalism,” “Special Publishing,” and “Lifetime Achievement” awards. The foundation welcomes entries regardless of the author’s background or the type, size, and reputation of the publisher.

Past winners of the American Book Award have included Toni Cade Bambara, Derrick Bell, Sandra Cisneros, J. California Cooper, Edwidge Danticat, Angela Y. Davis, Thulani Davis, Don DeLillo, Andrea Dworkin, Trey Ellis, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nelson George, Sandra M. Gilbert, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Chester Himes, Paule Marshall, Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Al Young. In 1992, the foundation also published two major anthologies: The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards, 1980–1990, edited by Ishmael Reed, Kathryn Trueblood, and Shawn Wong; and The Before Columbus Foundation Poetry Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards, 1980–1990, edited by J. J. Phillips, Ishmael Reed, Gundars Strads, and Shawn Wong.

Beloved Toni Morrison’s famed 1987 novel stands as perhaps the most celebrated and widely studied contemporary African American novel. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988 and in all likelihood paved the way for Morrison’s being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. It was also made into an eponymous motion picture in 1998, although that film received only modest critical and commercial success. That it did so is not surprising, since Beloved is also Morrison’s most complex novel and the one that least lends itself to the limits of the film medium. Nonetheless, the novel remains extremely popular, especially on college and university campuses, and has generated dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and entire books. Although many of these discuss the novel in conjunction with other works, quite a few are devoted to the novel alone.

Beloved is based upon the case of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who slew her infant daughter and attempted to kill her young sons in 1856. The novel centers upon Sethe Suggs who, like Garner, escaped while pregnant into Ohio from brutal, humiliating enslavement on a Kentucky farm, giving birth on the way. She obtains freedom but is pursued and discovered by her former slaveholder, “Schoolteacher.” Again, like her model, Sethe slays her infant daughter and attempts to kill her sons, who are saved by her husband’s mother; Sethe is jailed for her offense.

In all other respects, the connections between Sethe’s and Margaret Garner’s cases diverge considerably. Whereas Garner was reenslaved and died an ignoble death (see Steven Weisenburger’s Modern Medea [1998], which offers a detailed account of Garner’s life and the effect it had on the abolitionist movement), Sethe is eventually freed from her physical prison, only to be confined to a psychological one kept by the ghost of her slain daughter. This spirit haunts Sethe’s house, 124 Bluestone Road, her family (her sons run away from home, while her daughter, Denver, withdraws from the public), and her conscious and unconscious mind, eventually taking on physical form in the person of “Beloved.” As a physical familiar, “Beloved” manipulates Sethe into devoting all of her attentions to futile attempts at making amends with her daughter. This effort slowly devours Sethe until the townsfolk help drive the spirit away.

Beloved may justifiably be cast among other famous ghost stories by American authors, especially Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” primarily for its ambiguity. One of the crucial controversies within and surrounding the novel centers upon whether “Beloved” is real or, more likely, a multivalent metaphor for several issues that may haunt African Americans collectively: the legacy of slavery; generational conflicts; the difficulty of progress; the intractability of racism; self-hatred; the silencing of African American voices; women’s struggles within the larger African American community; and the struggle to create new possibilities in the face of all of these adversities. The novel may also be read as Morrison’s apocalyptic fictional meditation upon the successes and failures of either postbellum black America or of the Civil Rights/Black Power era , to the extent that each period was a crossing point for African Americans, rife with ambiguity and ambivalence. Similarly, each of the novel’s characters wishes to confront and overcome the horrors of the past and present yet struggles with her or his desire to nurse pain and hatred, even if it is self-destructive.

These readings are hardly exhaustive, of course, and students of this work are fortunate to have a wealth of secondary materials to supplement or alter them. In fact, except for Song of Solomon, no other novel by Morrison has received so much attention from so many different quarters. Steven Weisenburger’s aforementioned Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South (1998) provides an extensive history of Beloved’s historical background that opens up new ways of interpreting the novel, although the book is not about Beloved per se. A rather perceptive sampling of essays on the novel may be found in Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism (1997), edited by David Middleton. The outstanding essays are Susan Bowers’ “Beloved and the New Apocalypse,” David Lawrence’s “Fleshly Ghosts and Ghostly Flesh: The Word and the Body in Beloved, and Ed Guerrero’s “Tracing ‘The Look’ in the Novels of Toni Morrison”; each explores some of the major ideas that have captivated Morrison scholars. Barbara K. Solomon’s anthology, Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1998), stands with Lawrence’s edition as one of the most up to date books on Morrison’s masterpiece. Its best quality is the inclusion of both reviews and critical essays, including some dissenting voices, such as Stanley Crouch’s “Aunt Medea,” that take more skeptical looks at the novel’s purposes and artistry. Finally, Kathleen Marks’s recent Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination (2002) brilliantly discusses the way apotropaic acts and rituals—those designed to ward off evil—actually bring on the evil they are meant to negate. Marks applies this notion to Sethe’s murder of her infant daughter, of course, and in the process reveals another connection to mythology contained within the text.

Bennett, George Harold (Hal) (b. April 21, 1930, Buckingham, Virginia) Hal Bennett published a series of five well-received novels in the late 1960s and early 1970s that stand among some of the most daring of the Black Arts Movement era. Bennett has also published a novel under the nom de plume Harriet Janeway and five action novels as John D. Revere. Under his own name, Bennett has won a fiction fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (1966), the PEN/Faulkner Award (1973), and he was selected most promising new writer by Playboy magazine in 1970 for his story “Dotson Gerber Resurrected.”^* Bennett’s first two novels, A Wilderness of Vines (1966) and The Black Wine (1968) received generally positive reviews upon their publication. Each builds upon the other and forms the thematic foundation for his later, more mature work, with some characters finding their way into the novels of the 1970s. The early novels also introduce the Southern community of Burnside (based upon Buckingham, Virginia), whence most of Bennett’s major characters come. Bennett combines this Faulknerian intertextuality—he has repeatedly cited Faulkner as one of his major influences—with foci upon historical legacies, anxieties about black males’ masculinity and sexuality, and the often tortuously complex nature of African American identities, to discover ways for African Americans to extract themselves from the trap of self-hatred.

Each early novel contains a noticeable satirical bent, with 1970’s Lord of Dark Places the most caustic and artistically accomplished. Bennett’s work highlights the ways in which America has simultaneously worshipped and reviled African American sexuality. In particular, Bennett argues strenuously that black males and their phalluses are icons whose presence is undeniable in popular culture, yet they are hated for their ubiquity. Each of his early novels posit the notion that black males must be fully aware of their sexuality within the American milieu if they wish to be liberated. Although Bennett’s novels are written in the same picaresque mode as the works of such Black Arts–era authors as Cecil Brown and William Melvin Kelley, they also disregard the Black Arts era’s nationalistic image of manhood. His male characters defy any easy sexual categorization, and he regards America as the product of the incestuous confluence of humanity’s streams, with the barriers between black/white, North/South, male/female, “queer”/“sissy”/”manly,” sacred/profane, formal/vernacular, and normal/taboo constantly in flux throughout the nation’s history. While all of his novels explore this ambiguous terrain, it is Lord of Dark Places that is most successful in detailing what Bennett describes as “the black American’s obsession with filth” that makes African Americans “feel unclean and impure and unworthy and inferior.”^* In this respect, Lord of Dark Places essentially revises Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, without Ellison’s continuous nods to modernism or the same degree of ambivalence regarding the promises of American democracy that ends Ellison’s own masterwork. Bennett’s work tells the story of Joe Market, whose incestuous father Titus turns Joe into a Christ figure for the sake of a sham traveling religion in which Joe’s body—especially his penis—is worshiped. After Titus is raped and murdered by a Southern police squad, Joe begins a quest to find his identity independent of his father. In the process, Joe engages in endless sexual exploits with women and men, fights in Vietnam, becomes a father, satirizes the Civil Rights movement and the policies of the Nixon administration, and symbolically becomes a master of all that is profane, yet he never quite finds redemption.

In Wait Until the Evening (1974), protagonist Kevin Brittain, a resident of the black community of Cousinsville, New Jersey (introduced in Lord of Dark Places), becomes obsessed with death under the belief that murder is the only way that those who possess no sense of identity or self-worth—meaning, in Bennett’s corpus, African Americans as a whole—can find meaning and redemption. He strives to become the most horrifying manifestation of white America’s fears about African American males possible, a sort of Bigger Thomas writ large. In a particularly Freudian twist, Brittain also attempts to murder his father in Burnside for the ultimate form of redemption.

Seventh Heaven (1976) features protagonist Bill Kelsey, also of Cousinsville, where he finds himself stifled by the limitations placed upon African Americans by both those within the community and the larger society. Like Joe Market, Bill Kelsey explores all that society considers profane, except he takes his psychological sustenance from being a sexual slave or gigolo. He rejects both the Black Nationalism and the colorism of the day as other limitations African Americans place upon one another that destroy whatever sense of self-worth is not already decimated by living in a racist society. Similar to the protagonists of the earlier novels, Kelsey tries to understand himself vis-à-vis his ancestors, the quirks of his community, and by standing on the brink of madness.

Bennett’s short story collection, Insanity Runs in Our Family (1977), gathers fiction Bennett wrote or published from the late 1960s until the book’s appearance. The subject matter is diverse, ranging from “The Day My Sister Hid the Ham,” a tale of a sister emasculating her brother, to the award-winning “Dotson Gerber Resurrected,” an allegorical fable in which an African American man attempts to gain recognition for his murder of a white man. As in his novels, Bennett is interested in seeing the extremes to which African Americans are pushed by their search for redemption. His blunt assessments of African Americans’ collective self-esteem, to say nothing of the sexually explicit content of all his novels, might help account for Bennett’s remarkably challenging and difficult novels’ long disappearance from print. Until 1997, when Lord of Dark Places was reprinted, his early novels could not be found in print anywhere;^* by the end of the millennium, even Lord of Dark Places had disappeared from circulation yet again. None of Bennett’s other novels have returned to print in the interim in any form.

The almost total absence of Bennett’s novels—and of the author himself—from the literary scene, as well as their intense focus on male sexuality, may explain why only a few studies of Bennett’s work have emerged in thirty years. Save for the occasional brief mention in various articles and book chapters and short reviews of the reprint of Lord of Dark Places, the entire body of critical work on Bennett consists of Ronald Walcott’s two-part review of Bennett’s novels in Black World magazine (1974);^* a subsection in Bernard W. Bell’s The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition; Walcott’s entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (1985), which reproduces much of his Black World review; Katherine Newman’s remarkable interview, “An Evening with Hal Bennett” (1987); and this writer’s own subsection in African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (2001).

Black Aesthetic, The (1971) Addison Gayle’s 1971 anthology was a landmark of the Black Arts Movement for its militant attempt to collect in one place seminal essays establishing new ways of reading African American literature. The critical essays contained therein were concerned with establishing aesthetic standards that neither depended upon nor paid obeisance to rules for writing and reading based in white or European cultures. Most of the essays within The Black Aesthetic had been published in various magazines and journals in the preceding five years, but the volume deftly made it easier for scholars and casual readers to gain familiarity with the diversity of critical views emerging at the time. It also comprised some of the foundational essays for the development of African American literature and art in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, as well as for the study of literature from the 1970s until the present. Although structuralist and poststructuralist theories had begun to gain in popularity among academics by the end of the 1970s, The Black Aesthetic’s overarching premise underscores African American literary study to the present: African Americans need to create their own aesthetic standards for the appreciation and study of their art and, subsequently, maintain control over these standards.

The essays within The Black Aesthetic are divided into five sections: “Theory,” “Music,” “Poetry,” “Drama,” and “Fiction.” Several essays in the first section are among the most frequently anthologized and quoted: Hoyt Fuller’s “Introduction: Towards a Black Aesthetic,” Larry Neal’s “Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic,” Addison Gayle Jr.’s “Cultural Strangulation: Black Literature and the White Aesthetic,” and Darwin T. Turner’s “Afro-American Literary Critics: An Introduction.” These essays generally agree on several principles: African American literature has been judged by unfair and inappropriate standards developed almost exclusively by white critics; few, if any, white critics have sufficient insight into African American culture to be able to evaluate it as well as African American critics; far more African American critics who possess and read through a black aesthetic are desperately needed to give the literature its due. Not all of the essays in this or other sections are in complete concordance; Julian Mayfield’s “You Touch My Black Aesthetic and I’ll Touch Yours” is a note of dissent from totalizing or essentialist definitions of a Black Aesthetic. Mayfield argues instead for loose, contingent, and inclusive definitions, if any. Other authors included in this section are Alain Locke, Ron Karenga, and John O’Neal. Of these, Karenga’s essay, “Black Cultural Nationalism,” is the most controversial. Karenga dismisses the cultural and political significance of the blues, arguing that the blues “teach resignation” and “acceptance of reality,” whereas artists should be educated and dedicated to producing art that is “functional” and “collective.”^*

The second section, “Music,” comprises landmark essays by Jimmy Stewart, W. E. B. Du Bois, LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), J. A. Rogers, Ron Wellburn, and Ortiz M. Walton. Of these, Du Bois’s essay, “Of the Sorrow Songs,” taken from his classic The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and Jones’s essay, “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” are the more famous and definitive, to the extent that they analyze the social and political content of African American musical forms sympathetically.

The third section, “Poetry,” traces the development of African American literature from the nineteenth century forward. Except for Sarah Webster Fabio’s “Tripping with Black Writing,” which surveys African American literature’s development over many decades, each essay in this section specifies a particular decade or decades as its subject. Langston Hughes’s famous work, “The Negro Artist in the Racial Mountain” (1927), is a firsthand argument for a Negro Art in the 1920s and 1930s. In “The Black Aesthetic in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties,” Dudley Randall studies how earlier Black Aesthetics had developed under various pressures. “Toward a Definition: Black Poetry of the Sixties,” by Don L. Lee (later known as Haki Madhubuti), outlines trends in that decade. James A. Emanuel’s “Blackness Can: A Quest for Aesthetics” surveys twentieth-century African American literary developments but focuses on the 1970s. W. Keoraptse Kgositsile’s “Paths to the Future” offers a prescriptive view of African American poetics for the 1970s and beyond. The fourth section, “Drama,” consists of essays by Alain Locke, Larry Neal, Loften Mitchell, Ronald Milner, and Clayton Riley. Standouts in this section include Alain Locke’s essay, “The Negro and the American Theatre,” one of the earliest landmark essays on the subject, while Larry Neal’s contribution, “The Black Arts Movement,” is one of the best contemporary histories of that artistic period.

The fifth and final section, “Fiction,” contains some of the best essays in the book, including Richard Wright’s hugely influential—and controversial—1937 essay, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” which argues for an African American aesthetic that defies bourgeois values and serves a collective purpose. “The New Black Literature: Protest or Affirmation,” by Hoyt W. Fuller, and “The Black Writer and His Role,” by Carolyn F. Gerald, both assert that while much of the writing and art emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s may be “crude,” the nationalistic outlook and attempts by young black artists to move away from Western artistic standards should be applauded.^* Each of the subsequent essays, by John Oliver Killens, Adam David Miller, Ishmael Reed, and especially Addison Gayle Jr., are once again prescriptive; they argue that African Americans must change, first, their view of themselves based upon their own cultural standards, and then the rest of the nation via literature that reflects a more positive view of African Americans’ experiences, which will counterbalance the many extant negative stereotypes. Gayle’s essay is remarkable for its strong call for African American authors to eschew a white/black binary that assumes that white is superior and black inherently inferior, thereby requiring African Americans to become the same as whites.

While The Black Aesthetic has certainly been immensely influential, two flaws marked its achievements: the dearth of women critics (two) contributing to the volume, and the lack of dissenting points of view, leading inevitably to redundancy when the essays are taken together. Nevertheless, the collective effort offers a strong basis for taking calls for a Black Aesthetic seriously, and it inarguably provided the undergirding for the black studies movement in academia via the essays’ calls for a new crop of African American literary critics.

Black American Literature Forum. See African American Review.

Black Arts Movement/Black Aesthetic The Black Arts Movement and its concomitant Black Aesthetic were the products of debates and struggles in the 1960s regarding Black Nationalism, which was concerned with the control African Americans should have over their economic, political, cultural, and social lives. To participants in these debates, the questions of black control were not simply matters of rhetorical or ideological posturing; the answers were inextricably linked to the well-being of most African Americans. To that extent, they were debated at all levels of black society in the 1960s. In the writings and work of black artists in particular, though, the debate centered on questions of images, social value, and aesthetics; more specifically, they were “about the business of destroying those images and myths that have crippled and degraded black people, and the institution of new images and myths that will liberate them.”^* The premise behind this particular belief and practice was that white Americans’ traditional considerations of the cultural value of black people were poisonous if black people themselves ingested such ideas or tried to practice them. The notion that black culture and aesthetics (when black people were granted that much credit by their critics) were forever inferior to or dependent upon European-derived aesthetics would inevitably lead to practices that would cause black people to detest, and perhaps even destroy, themselves. According to critics like Addison Gayle, Maulana Ron Karenga, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), and Larry Neal, the responsibility of the black artist was to use the word, to use language as a tool invested with the power to transform ideas generated by black people into action, especially revolutionary action. Karenga argues in his 1968 essay “Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function,” that it “becomes very important … that art plays the role it should play in Black survival and not bog itself down in the meaningless madness of the Western world wasted. In order to avoid this madness, black artists and those who wish to be artists must accept that what is needed is an aesthetic” that would allow for a more balanced assessment of the validity and beauty of black art. Furthermore, “art must expose the enemy, praise the people and support the revolution”; it should be “collective,” with the individualism of the artist being a commodity that is “nonexistent,” something that African Americans “cannot afford” given the necessity of “committing … to revolution and change” on a mass level.^* Put in Amiri Baraka’s terms, the “Black Artist’s role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it” and pursue a “correct” realism that would show America as it is and then guide the reader to the means of destroying it.^*

While subscribers to the Black Aesthetic were by no means uniform in their views, as we shall see below, the commonalities among their critical enterprises in the late 1960s and early 1970s certainly had a substantial impact upon contemporary trends and continue to affect current African American literature. Two notes from Larry Neal’s informative reading of the Black Aesthetic at the time provide a particularly illuminating view: “[In African American literature, the] Word is perceived as energy or force”; “More concerned with the vibrations of the Word, than with the Word itself.”^* In other words, the artist and critic should focus less on wordcraft than on effect, and be devoted to elevating the most valuable and cherished aspects of the African American while criticizing those who would stand in the way of black progress and empowerment. In essence, then, the advocates of the new Black Aesthetic perceived the black artist’s role as that of a direct advocate of the black masses and a staunch adversary of any agency that upheld oppressive stereotypes, whether that agency originated within or outside of black communities.

Subsequently, Black Aestheticians found some of the more dangerous agents were white critics, even those who were somewhat sympathetic to black causes. This skepticism toward whites was a direct result of the tenets of various Black Nationalisms, such as this passage from Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power (1967), wherein they quote Lewis Killian and Charles Grigg: “Most white Americans, even those white leaders who attempt to communicate and cooperate with their Negro counterparts, do not see racial inequality in the same way that the Negro does.” Carmichael and Hamilton conclude “that no matter how ‘liberal’ a white person might be, he cannot ultimately escape the overpowering influence—on himself and on black people—of his whiteness in a racist society.”^* Hoyt W. Fuller similarly takes white critics to task by arguing that “central to the problem of the irreconcilable conflict between the black writer and the white critic is the failure of recognition of a fundamental and obvious truth of American life—that the two races are residents of two separate and naturally antagonistic worlds.”^* Fuller is essentially rephrasing a common tenet of Black Nationalist belief: all whites, even the most well-meaning ones, are irredeemably tainted by a racist culture, which places them in direct opposition to the wants and needs of black Americans, whether they are conscious of this opposition or not. In a hostile white’s eyes, this taint will result in the complete disregard for the value of black literature and culture. A more sympathetic white critic may find some value in black literature but may dismiss any literature that does not appeal to a “universal” aesthetic. The conclusion of the Black Aesthetic, therefore, is that only black artists are capable of creating and judging literature that represents black communities, a literature that would replace negative myths about African Americans with new narratives that extolled the virtues within the community that those outside the community had previously classified as vices.

The move toward making a new aesthetic for African American literature in the 1960s proved, however, to be far more convoluted than its explicators had hoped, leading to marked disagreements between thinkers and writers originally on the same ideological page. Though proponents of Black Nationalism and the Black Aesthetic rightly advocated a revaluation of African American literature and culture, their political rigidity potentially precluded dissent from the definitions of progressive black art outlined above. Specifically, Karenga and Baraka’s arguments for revolutionary and lucid writing, positive portrayal of African Americans, and an accent on cultural and political collectivism within the black community was driven just as strongly by Marxist influences as they were by concerns for black progress. These unities could only be obtained by subsuming divergent approaches beneath an overdetermined aesthetic.

In contrast, Hoyt W. Fuller’s qualifying statement that “the black writers themselves are well aware of the possibility that what they seek is, after all, beyond codifying” and his acknowledgment that black writers “are fully aware of the dual nature of their heritage, and of the subtleties and complexities” while being “even more aware of the terrible reality of their outsideness, of their political and economic powerlessness, and of the desperate racial need for unity” does not fit the sort of dogmatic position Baraka and Karenga advocate. While Fuller agreed with their imperative need to establish some type of “unity” and “indoctrination of black art and culture,” he also understood that some ambivalence in artists’ thinking was unavoidable, but it should not be the focus of black art. The focus should instead be on the form and goal of urban realism, which emphasizes the effects of the stifling urban environment upon the psyche, and on creating art that foments revolutionary thought and action.

Although the ideology, rhetoric, and aims of the Black Arts Movement and the Black Aesthetic were highly controversial and remain so (see this volume’s “Overview” for a summary of this controversy), they inarguably had a profound impact upon the artistic direction and content of African American literature since 1970, even in works that explicitly or implicitly eschew its precepts. Objections to Black Aesthetic prescriptions led to two significant outcomes: the eventual rejection of narrow forms of Black Nationalism by the same intellectuals who once embraced them (Nathan Hare, Amiri Baraka, and even Hoyt Fuller; see separate entry on Negro Digest/Black World), and the development of the New Black Aesthetic, or “New Fiction” (see separate entries), of the late 1970s through the 1990s, both of which acknowledged their debts to the theorizing of the Black Aesthetic critics of the 1960s and 1970s yet eschewed their more prescriptive gestures in favor of opening up African American fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism to newer, more diverse voices.

The overwhelming majority of scholarly work since the early 1970s that studies works of the period either makes some mention of or directly addresses the precepts of the Black Arts Movement and Black Aesthetics. Therefore, this volume’s bibliography is a de facto partial bibliography of works on the subject. A few books beyond those named above and in the bibliography offer particularly close reviews of the movements and their legacies: Winston Napier, ed., African American Literary Theory (2000); Kenneth Mostern, Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America (1999); W. Lawrence Hogue, Race, Modernity, Postmodernity: A Look at the History and the Literatures of People of Color since the 1960s (1996); Joyce Ann Joyce, Warriors, Conjurers, and Priests: Defining African-Centered Literary Criticism (1994); Madhu Dubey, Black Women Novelists and the Black Aesthetic (1994); Houston A. Baker Jr. and Patricia Redmond, eds., Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s (1989); Reginald Martin, Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics (1988); Charles Johnson, Being and Race (1985).

Black-Eyed Susans/Midnight Birds: Stories by and About Black Women Edited by Mary Helen Washington, Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories by and About Black Women (1975) was one of the first anthologies of African American women’s fiction published in the contemporary era. It was also easily the first major publication of its kind, as African American women’s writing had been largely ignored as a category worthy of scholarly attention. Anthologies of African American women’s fiction considered as a discrete subfield were, therefore, virtually unknown. All of the stories contained therein were published after 1960 and often speak to contemporary events and issues. As the subtitle indicates, the stories were particularly concerned with portraying African American women and their greatest concerns, especially in the wake of modern feminism, or what Alice Walker later called “womanism” (see separate entry). Washington later edited another collection, Midnight Birds: Stories by Contemporary Black Women Writers (1980); in 1990, both anthologies were combined in a single volume, Black-Eyed Susans/Midnight Birds. The twenty stories in the combined volume are written by such authors as Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Sherley Anne Williams, Alexis DeVeaux, and Paulette Childress White. It is especially valuable for Washington’s excellent introduction, which places the earlier anthologies within their historical contexts, thereby making a strong case for their essential role in transforming African American literary studies in the 1970s and 1980s.

Black Feminism. See Womanism.

Black Literature and Literary Theory Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984), edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sunday Ogbonna Anozie, is one of the landmark texts of African American literary criticism of the 1980s, containing essays that helped to create a modern canon of sorts for African American literature, for better or worse. The authors within were heavily influenced by structuralist and poststructuralist poetics as well as the Black Aesthetic of the two previous decades. The volume’s purpose, according to Gates’s introduction, was to bring contemporary literary to bear upon texts that had been read through primarily political lenses.

Perhaps most important, Black Literature and Literary Theory helped serve notice that African American literary studies could no longer be “ghettoized” to the purely political, that they could be subjected to many different kinds of literary criticism. This led in turn to the expansion of African American literary studies’ capabilities and repertoire. If the volume has any single major flaw, though, it is the fact that most of the essays weigh in on canonical texts almost exclusively, with Toni Morrison being the only author featured who started publishing after 1970.

Black Nationalism Nationalistic feelings, organizations, and movements among, for, and by African Americans have existed virtually since Africans were captured, imported, and enslaved for the purpose of building a nation that has but reluctantly accepted their descendants. Each form that Black Nationalism has taken in North America over three centuries would take a chapter to define and describe, so it might appear foolish to offer an overarching definition here. Nonetheless, a generic definition might look like this: Black Nationalism in the United States of America is the philosophy that African Americans should be both self-defining and self-determined vis-à-vis the remainder of American society. The forms that such self-definition and self-determination should take are where different types of Black Nationalism diverge wildly, but as with other nationalisms, they might include “demands for territorial cession, political empowerment, or increased cultural autonomy … based on a common historical background or cultural heritage.”^*

In the 1960s, Black Nationalism was popularly defined by such groups as the Nation of Islam (especially its onetime national spokesman, Malcolm X, or its spiritual leader, Elijah Muhammad); the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, at least after 1965; the Congress of Racial Equality (again, in the late 1960s, after Floyd McKissick became its leader); and to a lesser degree, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which never considered itself a Black Nationalist organization, despite the fact that many of its members’ openly admired Malcolm X. In addition, Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga’s US Organization (the “name US actually stands for Black people … ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them,’ the white oppressors”),^* founded in Los Angeles in 1966, began as a Black Nationalist self-help group similar in outlook to the Black Panther Party. Through US, Karenga developed his Kawaida theory (taken from a Kiswahili term connoting tradition and reason), with its seven principles of Nguzo Saba (Umoja, or unity; Kujichagulia, or self-determination; Ujima, or collective work and responsibility; Ujamaa, or cooperative economics; Nia, or purpose; Kuumba, or creativity; and Imani, or faith); these principles formed the basis of the African American holiday Kwanzaa, which Karenga also invented in 1966. Via Kawaida, Kwanzaa, and various critical essays and books, including Introduction to Black Studies (1982), Karenga has been one of the leading progenitors of black cultural nationalism since the 1960s.

Black Nationalism in the 1960s had its most obvious effect in two areas: literary criticism, which saw the rise of a class of African American intellectuals that slowly both complemented and supplanted the dominant voice of white critics in the ongoing struggle to define and describe the literature; and in the craft and content of African American fiction, drama, and poetry. More detailed discussions of these effects may be found in the entries on the Black Aesthetic and the Artists and Communities in this volume, but it would be fair to summarize them as African American authors’ and critics’ renewed emphases upon the possibilities of black unity and community, economic independence, and cultural richness.

Many writers and critics influenced by Black Nationalism want, on the one hand, to indict America for the gross sins of its past and present with regard to the African Diaspora and its descendants (including those members of the Diaspora who willingly aided and abetted slavery, segregation, and their inimical brutalities), while showing how African Americans might transcend these pasts and form communities defined and determined by their members, rather than by their oppressors.

As with any nationalism, Black Nationalism from the 1960s to the present has been fraught with intense controversy, depending upon the way in which an author, work, or figure defines African Americans, what they should do, and to whom they should do it, especially if “it” means to pursue economic and cultural independence from all things “white,” “European,” “Western,” or whichever term may signify the oppressor. The normal questions that arise regarding such pursuits often ask, first, whether it is possible to sever such ties to the oppressor completely. If so, the question then becomes whether it is either necessary or desirable to do so. Most forms of Black Nationalism take a fairly pragmatic view of these questions; rather than arguing for a complete separation from the oppressor, the goal becomes to create African American–run institutions, organizations, and programs that have as few ties to “white” or governmental obligations as possible, in order for African Americans to see what they can produce of their own volition and according to their specific communal needs.

In the 1960s and 1970s in particular, certain African American authors found some solace in the idea of Black Nationalism and tried to shape their art according to a Black Aesthetic.

The most common expression of Black Nationalist thought in popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s could be found in feature films, R&B music, and hip-hop music and culture. The latter, especially, was the site in which black artists could be most openly critical of white hegemony. Such artists as Run-DMC, Public Enemy, Sister Souljah, Tupac Shakur, Brand Nubians, X-Clan, Professor X, Lauryn Hill, N.W.A., Paris, Mos Def, KRS-ONE/Boogie Down Productions, and Queen Latifah produced albums and CDs that frequently quoted, cited, or were clearly influenced by Black Nationalists new and old: Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, Marcus Garvey, the Nation of Islam (and its subsidiary organizations), the Five Percent Nation of Islam, Minister Louis Farrakhan, Carter G. Woodson, among others.

To the degree that hip-hop culture was a major influence upon those African American authors born after the early 1960s, Black Nationalism was a nearly unavoidable philosophy, regardless of whether some, such as Paul Beatty, Danzy Senna, Trey Ellis, or Darius James, were critical of it. Few younger artists seem to accept 1960s-style Black Nationalism uncritically, but the dearth of authors coming forward to endorse an explicitly or unequivocally nationalist position does not mean that they do not hold to or reveal beliefs in African American cultural or economic independence in their works.

Black Panther Party for Self-Defense When the founders of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (popularly known as the Black Panthers) established their organization in Oakland, California, in 1966, they were responding directly to several crucial events in 1960s African American politics: the assassination of Malcolm X; the civil unrest of the “long, hot summers” of 1964 and 1965 and the way they revealed the degree to which economics played a central role in racist oppression; everyday police brutality in black communities; and the rising tide of Black Nationalist sentiment. On this last point, it is important to note that the Black Panthers claimed, credibly, not to be nationalist in either their membership or their goals. It would be more accurate to say that they subscribed to a radical, revolutionary socialism that sought to improve the material conditions in black communities by direct provision of vital services and education. Nevertheless, the original support and admiration they enjoyed—as well as some of the fear and revulsion they endured—came primarily from African Americans. Later, the Black Panthers would receive substantial financial and logistical support from white philanthropists, but their program of grassroots activism for impoverished African Americans remained at the party’s core.

The Black Panther Party’s founders were Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who met at Oakland’s Merritt College in 1966 and found a common cause in their discontent with both the state of activism on their campus and the inefficacy of the Civil Rights movement with regard to many of Oakland’s problems, and in their interest in the idea of Black Power (see separate entry) that Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had recently extolled. Newton and Seale wrote a “Ten Point Platform and Program” for their new organization, named after the political party that Carmichael had recently started in Alabama. The platform took its impetus from the basic black nationalistic tenet that African Americans should create and control the economy and civic conduct of their own communities, but it also took after self-defense organizations Newton had observed while growing up in Louisiana, with the ideology supplied by a careful reading of Marxist philosophy.

The Black Panther Party immediately found controversy and the enmity of law enforcement officials for its open, albeit then-legal armed patrols of Oakland’s streets. As it grew and established chapters in other major U.S. cities, including Sacramento, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, it also attracted the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which infiltrated and helped destroy the organization via its clandestine Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). The Black Panthers gained in popularity among many African Americans in chapter cities both for its highly public image and the free programs it started, including school breakfasts and ambulance services, but due to internal strife and external harassment, the party was essentially defunct by 1976. Another markedly different organization bearing the same name, founded by ousted Nation of Islam minister Khalid Muhammad in 1998, bears no other relationship to the original Black Panther Party; in fact, the first Black Panther Party’s surviving leaders have publicly and vehemently denounced the new organization.

As with the 1971 Attica uprising, the Black Panther Party was an inspirational image for many African American writers and intellectuals. Most of this influence may be seen in literary characters based upon Black Panther Party members and some of the ideals they championed. Mentions and traces of the Black Panthers or their philosophy may be found in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, but the best source of information would be the biographies of former members, especially Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power (1992).

Black Power movement The Black Power movement is, depending upon the historian’s or critic’s point of view, either the successor to the modern Civil Rights movement or part of it. In either case, Black Power was the form that Black Nationalism took in reaction to the failures and blind spots of the Civil Rights movement. The term itself predates most events of the Civil Rights movement; Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, Richard Wright’s 1954 report on Ghana’s independence movement and the anticolonialist mood on the African continent, is the first major literary use of the term. NAACP activist Robert Williams also began using the term to describe the growing need for self-empowerment for African Americans in the late 1950s.

The commonly accepted understanding of the term, however, may be traced to a crucial June 16, 1966, speech by newly elected Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) National Chairman Stokely Carmichael at a rally stop in Greenwood, Mississippi, during the March Against Fear. Carmichael and other young Civil Rights activists were incensed by what they saw as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s capitulation during and after the events on “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama, and the nation’s resistance to Civil Rights legislation in general. Carmichael’s speech culminated in a strident chant—“We want Black Power!”—that he later revised into a political, economic, and cultural credo. The most complete version of Carmichael’s ideals were published in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967), which he coauthored with Charles V. Hamilton.

In simplest terms, adherents to Black Power rejected the integrationist program of the mainstream Civil Rights movement in favor of a form of Black Nationalism that would give African Americans control over their communities’ politics, economics, and cultural apparatuses. As Carmichael and Hamilton write, “we [African Americans] must first redefine ourselves” and “reclaim our history and our identity from what must be called cultural terrorism, from the depredation of self-justifying white guilt.”^*The issue, then, was one of controlling the ways in which African Americans were perceived and understood, especially by themselves, or “full participation in the decision-making processes affecting the lives of black people.”^* Most notably, this included a form of cultural nationalism expressed in one portion of SNCC’s position paper on Black Power, published shortly after Carmichael’s speech:

Too long have we allowed white people to interpret the importance and meaning of the cultural aspects of our society. We have allowed them to tell us what was good about our Afro-American music, art, and literature. How many black critics do we have on the “jazz” scene? How can a white person who is not part of the black psyche (except in the oppressor’s role) interpret the meaning of the blues to us who are manifestations of the song themselves?^*

The ideas expressed here are directly linked to those found in the manifestoes of the Black Arts Movement, especially Hoyt Fuller’s essay “Towards a Black Aesthetic” (1970), which argued that African Americans should develop their own aesthetics to evaluate art produced by other African Americans. For this reason, Fuller, Larry Neal, and other Black Arts critics stressed that the Black Arts Movement should be considered the cultural arm of the Black Power movement, and therefore inseparable in its conceptual outlook. To understand the Black Power movement, then, is to understand the impetuses behind the calls for Black Aesthetics and most African American fiction of the 1970s and 1980s.

As a consequence, literature and scholarship on Black Power are legion. Like the Black Arts Movement and the Black Aesthetic, discussions of the political aspects of post-1970 African American literature routinely make some mention of the Black Power movement and its effects. Several books, however, are crucial foundational texts: Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967); Lewis M. Killian, The Impossible Revolution: Black Power and the American Dream (1968); Richard Newman, Black Power: A Bibliography (1969); Dora F. Pantell and Edwin Greenidge, If Not Now, When? The Many Meanings of Black Power (1969); James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (1969); Robert Lee Scott, The Rhetoric of Black Power (1969); James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook (1973); James McEvoy, Black Power and Student Rebellion (1969); Thomas Wagstaff, Black Power: The Radical Response to White America (1969); August Meier, ed., Black Protest in the Sixties (1970).

Black studies Black studies refers to the systematic study of the history, cultures, and literature of Africa, African America, or other peoples of the African Diaspora. A very young discipline, virtually all of the black, Afro-American or African American studies programs and departments that presently exist at American universities today may trace their origins to student activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Prior to 1968, no such program existed at any four-year college or university, although a handful of colleges had individual courses, many of which were popular yet embattled. The students and faculty who began fighting for these programs were heavily influenced by the ideas and leaders of the Black Power and Black Arts movements, which called for African Americans to define and determine their own destinies.

The first such department was founded at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) in 1968 after numerous student protests and petitions of the campus administration. The same pattern followed soon thereafter at many other historically white institutions, such as the University of California’s campuses at Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara; campuses of the universities of Illinois, Georgia, Pittsburgh, and Massachusetts; Columbia, Duke, Harvard, New York, Ohio State, Pennsylvania State, Princeton, Stanford, Temple, Tulane, and Yale universities; and many others. A substantial number of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) also added black studies programs and departments to their curricula, as no such programs existed on those campuses either, despite the makeup of their student populations. By the end of the 1970s, however, dozens of black studies programs and their faculty had been either dissolved or integrated into other departments on their respective campuses. The relative few that remain still struggle for everything from simple respect to their very existence.

Most of the scholars who formed the core faculties of the first black studies programs and departments included students and intellectuals trained in other disciplines, such as anthropology, history, English, and sociology, who were interested not only in researching African Americans and the African Diaspora but also in transforming their home disciplines. Many still teach black studies courses today, although it has become more common for faculty to reside wholly in traditional departments and teach cross-listed courses. Scholars who have made a significant impact upon black studies, whether directly or indirectly, include: Houston A. Baker Jr.; Molefi K. Asante; Keneth Kinnamon; Richard Barksdale; Toni Cade Bambara; Haki Madhubuti (né Don L. Lee); Henry Louis Gates Jr.; Charles V. Hamilton; Barbara Smith; Elliott Butler-Evans; Hortense Spillers; Hoyt Fuller; Larry Neal; and Maulana Ron Karenga. The latter’s book, Introduction to Black Studies (1982), is a significant early textbook in the field, along with Barksdale and Kinnamon’s Black Writers of America (1972).

Several foundational journals of literature and criticism arose directly out of the black studies, Black Power, and Black Arts movements; most of them are still active. These include the Journal of Black Studies (bimonthly; 1970–present); African American Review (quarterly; 1967–present); Callaloo (quarterly; 1976–present); The Western Journal of Black Studies (quarterly; 1977–present). Although it was founded in 1940, decades prior to the Black Arts Movement, Atlanta University’s Phylon (quarterly; 1940–present) is an excellent source of scholarly information about African American history and culture. It regularly features essays about fiction and other forms of literature by African Americans in nearly every issue. Most essays, however, concern literature written prior to 1970.

Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology When Richard Barksdale and Kenneth Kinnamon published Black Writers of America in 1972, they did more than add a new anthology to the hundreds of collections of African American literature that have emerged since the nineteenth century; they presented what may rightly be called the first major anthology to make it possible to teach African American literature survey courses without assigning multiple texts. As its preface notes, it is “inclusive enough to satisfy the needs of a two-semester survey course, but its selections … could constitute a semester’s or a quarter’s work”^* In other words, the claim to comprehensiveness in the anthology’s subtitle is quite supportable. Its publication was especially timely, as hundreds of black studies programs and departments were being created in the early 1970s.

Black Writers of America was originally modeled on the 1941 anthology Negro Caravan, edited by Sterling Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee, which Barksdale and Kinnamon had originally planned to update. They soon decided, however, to create an original anthology that extended the breadth and depth of previous anthologies, some of which did not recognize or acknowledge any African American literature prior to the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar.^* As a result, Barksdale and Kinnamon played a significant role in redefining the term “African American literature” so that folklore, song lyrics, and oratory—all products of the oral tradition in African American culture—would be included. This had an irreversible and positive effect upon attempts to create an African American canon over the next thirty years.

Black Writers of America thus collects representative work from sixty-six authors, as well as dozens of folktales, spirituals, work songs, prison songs, blues lyrics, breakdowns, gospel songs, and so on. It is divided into six major periods, beginning in the eighteenth century and ending with the post-WWII generation. Each period is further divided; it begins with “major writers,” followed by generic divisions: history, autobiography, poetry, “race politics,” folk literature, oral accounts, and several others.

From its publication until 1996, when the Norton Anthology of African American Literature emerged, Black Writers of America was the only major comprehensive anthology available. It was not easily available, though, as the clothbound volume cost about $60.00 by the 1990s. A $39.00 paperback version was not issued until 1997, certainly long after it was needed, and after the publication of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, which inarguably made Black Writers of America obsolete, if time had not already done so. In addition, Macmillan Publishing Company, the original publisher, did not permit Barksdale and Kinnamon to update the anthology to accommodate new authors and perspectives. Naturally, the anthology became as outdated as its predecessors.

One could very well argue, however, that even before the appearance of the Norton Anthology, Black Writers of America was simply dated. It is clearly a product of a specific political and social epoch in African American history, as signified by several elements. The volume foregrounds the fact that it was created during the late 1960s’ and early 1970s’ strong, male-centered Black Nationalism. Beyond the title—the authors are Black, not Negro, writers of America—each author is pointedly identified as Black with a capital B, a bold assertion of the then-new importance given to “Blackness.” White Americans are “the white man.” One major section is entitled “The Black Man in the Civil War: 1861–1865” and contains a subsection, “Two Black Women Serve and Observe,” that effectively minimizes the presence and role of African American women in that particular struggle. The final subsection contains speeches and writings from three “Racial Spokesmen,” Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Eldridge Cleaver, whose essay “To All Black Women, From All Black Men” serves as the only significant acknowledgement of women’s role in African American history and culture in this subsection. Perhaps most troubling, of the sixty-six writers collected, only fifteen are women, excluding the probability that some of the anonymous authors of the folk literature included in each section were women.

Many of the author biographies also filter that author’s achievements through a lens that focuses upon his or her ability to come to terms with a somewhat anachronistic African American identity. Generally, Barksdale and Kinnamon applaud authors and other figures for their capacity to stand up to or defy “the white man” or otherwise aid in African American liberation, “revolution,” and expression of a monolithic “Black Experience.” Authors who express some ambivalence about their identity, such as Countee Cullen, are chided for not “approaching the rhetoric of Blackness.”^*

The criticisms noted here are not mere matters of outmoded terminology. While it would be fair to say that Black Writers of America’s oversights reflect the inevitable problems of canon building in general and anthologies in particular—differing and historically specific criteria for inclusion and exclusion of authors—they also reflect blind spots in African American cultural nationalism that affected the way the literature has been received and perceived. As Calvin Hernton has noted, regarding the issue of women’s place in assessments of African American literary history, many contemporary male African American critics consider it “an offense” for black women “to struggle on their own, let alone achieve something of their own,” whereas black men are allowed and expected to do precisely that.^* This view seems to color Black Writers of America’s organization and editorial policy.

Another issue kept this anthology from reaching its full potential: the publisher forbade the editors to revise their own anthology.^* If Barksdale and Kinnamon’s landmark text still reflects the tenor of its time, whether to its credit or detriment, the editors cannot be blamed in this regard. Instead, they should be credited for assembling a groundbreaking, if inevitably flawed, insight into the whole of African American literature.

Bluest Eye, The Toni Morrison’s first novel (1970) is also one of the most frequently assigned and discussed of her six published to date. It is also one of the most frequently banned books in the United States, most likely due to its horrifying depiction of a young African American girl molested by her father. That girl, Pecola Breedlove, lives a life of psychological misery as she sees how frequently her parents and other elders, but especially her mother, pay homage to the idea of white supremacy, often in unconscious ways. The actions of the adults in Pecola’s world are shaped by encounters with racism that damage, even break their spirits. Eventually, the pain stemming from both this hatred and a general absence of love and meaningful human connections leads Pecola’s father, Cholly, to molest her, which in turns drives Pecola insane, as she wishes for blue eyes and whiteness to save her from her own psychological hell.

The Bluest Eye marks not only the beginning of Toni Morrison’s career as a published author but also the inauguration of numerous themes and approaches that would occupy many African American authors from the 1970s onward: a focus on the black family’s troubled history; the power of racial stereotypes that devalue African Americans’ beauty and feelings of self-worth; the degree to which many African Americans ironically subscribe to these stereotypes, consciously and unconsciously; the power and danger of African American sexuality in the popular mind and among African American communities; and the complicated nature of black women’s relations with black men and white women and men.

The literature on The Bluest Eye is quite extensive. Most scholarly studies may be found in books on Morrison’s corpus as a whole; see separate entry on Morrison. The following are among the most notable essays focusing primarily or largely on the novel:

Barbara Christian, “Community and Nature: The Novels of Toni Morrison,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 7, no. 4 (Winter 1980); Patrice Cormier-Hamilton, “Black Naturalism and Toni Morrison: The Journey Away from Self-Love in The Bluest Eye” MELUS 19, no. 4 (Winter 1994); John Duvall, “Naming Invisible Authority: Toni Morrison’s Covert Letter to Ralph Ellison,” Studies in American Fiction 25, no. 2 (Autumn 1997); Phyllis R. Klotman, “Duck and Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in The Bluest Eye,” Black American Literature Forum 13, no. 4 (Winter 1979); Jane Kuenz, “The Bluest Eye: Notes on History, Community, and Black Female Subjectivity,” AAR 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1993); Rafael Pérez-Torres, “Tracing and Erasing: Race and Pedagogy in The Bluest Eye,” in Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison, ed. Nellie Y. McKay (New York: Modern Language Association, 1997).

Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory Often mentioned in conjunction with The Signifying Monkey, by Henry Louis Gates Jr.(1988), Houston A. Baker’s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (1984) is one of the crucial books of African American literary criticism to be published in the 1980s. Baker’s positing of the blues as a foundational form that informs much of African American literature was a logical outgrowth of his critical positions of the early 1970s, which were deeply influenced by the Black Arts Movement and the Black Aesthetic that were its theoretical underpinning. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, however, took Baker’s criticism in new directions with its conscious incorporation of poststructuralist literary theory in conjunction with affirmative analyses of the blues, with the former often serving to help validate the latter. This move and the book as a whole were quite controversial at the time, as they went against one of the precepts of the very Black Aesthetic of which Baker was a champion in the early 1970s. That is to say, the Black Arts Movement and its Black Aesthetic eschewed any appeals to European or Euro-American standards, arguing instead for the validity of African American and African Diasporic cultures on their own terms. Moreover, the Black Aesthetic demanded that African American texts be accessible to African Americans in terms of both their language and cultural grounding. By drawing heavily upon the theories of Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Frederic Jameson, Clifford Geertz, and several others, Baker broke with these major precepts while arguing strenuously and convincingly for the sophistication and complexity of the blues form in ways that satisfy the demands of both African American cultural theories and, ironically, the strictures of frequently biased European traditions. Baker also assailed the formalist bases of such peers as Gates and Robert Stepto as inadequate to explore the nuances of African American literature and culture.

Despite the controversy, Baker’s book has remained one of the foundational theoretical texts of the contemporary period. Several contemporary reviews and articles stand out for their careful reading of the book and its importance: Arnold Rampersad, “The Literary Blues Tradition,” Callaloo 24 (Spring-Summer 1985); Joe Weixlmann, “The Way We Were, the Way We Are, the Way We Hope to Be,” BALF 20, nos. 1/2 (Spring-Summer 1986); and R. Baxter Miller, “Baptized Infidel: Play and Critical Legacy,” BALF 21, no. 4 (Winter 1987). Most important of all, however, would be the great debate held in the pages of New Literary History between Baker, Gates, and Joyce Ann Joyce over the role of critical theory and the authenticity of contemporary African American critics and criticism in NLH 18, no. 2 (Winter 1987), which immediately galvanized scholars in African American literary studies. Two excellent responses to the debate are Joyce’s “The Problems with Silence and Exclusiveness in the African American Literary Community,” Black Books Bulletin: WordsWork 16 (Winter 1993–94) and Theodore O. Mason’s “Between the Populist and the Scientist: Ideology and Power in Recent Afro-American Literary Criticism, or, ‘The Dozens’ as Scholarship,” Callaloo 36 (Summer 1988). The NLH articles are also collected in Winston Napier’s anthology, African American Literary Theory (2000).

Bradley, David (b. September 1950, Bedford, Pennsylvania) Novelist and short story author David Bradley authored two of the finest works in the contemporary era in the 1970s and early 1980s. The first, South Street (1975), is set in Philadelphia’s black community. It features Adlai Stevenson Brown, a young black poet who moves to the titular South Street and becomes involved in the community’s life via the three major set pieces, Lightnin’ Ed’s Bar, the Elysium Hotel, and the Word of Life storefront church. The characters that populate the community and Brown’s shifting relationships with them provide the crux of the novel’s plot; it is primarily a novel about the street and its quirkier denizens, all of whom weave in and out of one another’s lives and stories. The details of their lives and stories, combined with Bradley’s lyricism and cadence, provide one of the more remarkable works of the mid-1970s. Between the publication of South Street and his second novel, Bradley also published a number of short stories: “The Happiness of the Long Distance Runner,” The Village Voice (August 1976); “Assignment No. 4: The Business Letter,” Tracks (Spring 1977); “Eye Witness News,” Tracks (Spring 1978); and “City of the Big Sleep,” Signature (August 1979).

In the main, though, Bradley’s reputation rests almost entirely upon his classic second novel, The Chaneysville Incident (1981), a historical work that fits perfectly into the neo–slave narrative genre (see separate entry). It won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1982 and became a Book-of-the-Month Club Alternate Selection. The incident mentioned in the title is one based upon an actual event in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, in which thirteen escaped slaves, once caught, asked to be killed rather than taken back into slavery; their request was granted. Bradley turns this event, remembered by many African Americans in the community yet forgotten in the official history, into the mystery at the heart of the novel. Protagonist John Washington wishes to discover who the slaves were, how they came to that spot in Bedford County, who killed them and why (beyond their request), what occurred afterwards, and why this history has been hidden for so long. The novel’s perspective shifts into the past at many points to provide the slaves’ perspective and therefore to create a slave narrative for them, one including the sorts of details frequently excluded from classic, traditional narratives. Inasmuch as the novel is based upon an incident with which Bradley was personally familiar—his mother kept and wrote records of it, and Bradley was of that community and possibly descended from the slaves at its center—it blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. This is, in fact, Bradley’s clear intent, as the novel questions how official history, which often excludes African American perspectives or simply lies about them, is formed and made official in the first place.

Since 1981, Bradley has been working on the follow-up to The Chaneysville Incident, but it has yet to appear, although Bradley has published many book reviews and a number of nonfiction essays. He also edited a reference work, The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America (1998). The scholarship on Bradley and especially Chaneysville, on the other hand, has been deservedly extensive, resulting in close studies in at least two books and dozens of scholarly articles. The extant books include: Kamau Kemayo, Emerging African Survivals: An Afrocentric Critical Theory (2003), and Martin J. Gliserman, Psychoanalysis, Language, and the Body of the Text (1996). Significant journal articles include: Jay Clayton, “The Narrative Turn in Recent African American Fiction,” American Literary History, 2, no. 3 (Autumn 1990); Charles Johnson, “Whole Sight: Notes on New Black Fiction,” Callaloo 22 (Autumn 1984); Susan L. Blake and James A. Miller, “The Business of Writing: An Interview With David Bradley,” Callaloo 21 (Spring-Summer 1984); Klaus Ensslen, “Fictionalizing History: David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident,” Callaloo 35 (Spring 1988); Matthew Wilson, “The African American Historian: David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident,” AAR 29, no. 1 (Spring 1995); Edward Pavlic, “Syndetic Redemption: Above-Underground Emergence in David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident,” AAR 30, no. 2 (Summer 1996); Philip J. Egan, “Unraveling Misogyny and Forging the New Self: Mother, Lover, and Storyteller in The Chaneysville Incident” Papers on Language and Literature 33, no. 3 (Summer 1997); Missy Dehn Kubitschek, “‘So You Want a History, Do You?’: Epistemologies and The Chaneysville Incident” The Mississippi Quarterly 49, no. 4 (Fall 1996); Helen Lock, “‘Building Up from Fragments: The Oral Memory Process in Some Recent African-American Written Narratives,” College Literature 22, no. 3 (October 1995); Cathy Brigham, “Identity, Masculinity, and Desire in David Bradley’s Fiction,” Contemporary Literature 36, no. 2 (Summer 1995); W. Lawrence Hogue, “Problematizing History: David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident” CLA Journal 38, no. 4 (June 1995); and Martin J. Gliserman,“David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident: The Belly of the Text,” American Imago 43, no. 97 (Summer 1986).

Briscoe, Connie (b. December 31, 1952) Novelist Connie Briscoe stands among the better writers to emerge in and benefit from the strong wave of interest in African American fiction that arose in the early 1990s after the publication of Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale (1992). Her first novel, Sisters and Lovers (1994), for example, sold nearly 500,000 copies in cloth and paperback combined in its first two years, while her second, Big Girls Don’t Cry (1996), had an initial print run of 100,000 in cloth.^* Briscoe is not, however, a mere imitator of McMillan in either style or content. Although her novels primarily discuss African American women’s concerns with romantic relationships, careers, and family, Briscoe makes highly topical threads about contemporary racial politics inextricable parts of her plots, which are peopled with far more realistic characters than may be found in many other post-McMillan works.

Sisters and Lovers, for example, tells of three sisters, Beverly, Charmaine, and Evelyn, who spend a great deal of time ruminating over their relationships with their spouses and partners but also have considerable problems that arise from sexism, despite being otherwise fairly successful in their careers, and from everyday life in Washington, D.C., and environs. Big Girls Don’t Cry (1996) is even more topical; it is set during the early 1960s, which was a crucial time in the Civil Rights era. Middle-class protagonist Naomi Jefferson becomes interested in African Americans’ greater concerns after her brother dies working for the movement. Naomi’s problematic romantic encounters in college parallel some of her later struggles with workplace discrimination, which allow Briscoe to delve into the importance of the Civil Rights movement and affirmative action as a policy. The historical novel A Long Way from Home (1999) is based upon Briscoe’s own genealogy. Set during slavery, the novel revolves around the young house slave Clara, who works in the home of former president James Madison. In a plot that recalls the life of Harriet Jacobs,^* Clara finds her own life and those of her half-white children—especially daughter Susan—thrown into chaos after Madison dies. The novel chronicles Susan’s search for her own genealogy and identity as someone who can pass for white yet is all too aware of her heritage. Briscoe has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and a NAACP Image Award (2000).

Brown, Cecil (b. July 3, 1943, Bolton, North Carolina) Author, poet, critic, and essayist Cecil Brown is best known for The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (1969), a rollicking, picaresque satire of American attitudes toward black male sexuality as well as its lack of appreciation of African American literature. Since the publication of Life and Loves, however, Brown’s output as a fiction writer has been frustratingly sparse, with but two novels and a handful of short stories to his credit. Most of Brown’s published work has consisted of literary criticism, book reviews, and nonfiction during his long tenure as a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley and Merritt College in Oakland, California.

The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger is a picaresque novel and satirical bildungsroman that examines the exploits of George Washington, a young African American expatriate living in Copenhagen, as he fulfills and explodes the stereotype of the “black stud” or “bad nigger” who defies the accepted racial order despite the dangers of doing so. Not only is Washington “the cussinges’ man ever born,” full of lusts, obscenities and lies, but his modus operandi is to be a “jiveass nigger,” which means to superficially honor the authorities and social mores that guided the early part of his life while subtly subverting them through trickery and deceit. This behavior is an extension of Washington’s singular personality; he possesses “the almost fanatical ability to remain different against all odds,” to be able to walk in both high- and low-brow worlds.^* The novel switches between scenes from Washington’s youth and events in Copenhagen, where he continually hustles money and women for his own benefit, to feed both himself and his cynicism regarding absolute truths and stabilities. His exploits also give him many opportunities to pontificate on the limits facing African American authors.

Brown spent most of the 1970s writing short stories, essays, criticism, and screenplays. The best known of the latter is the Richard Pryor comedy Which Way is Up? (1977), cowritten with Carl Gottlieb, Lina Wertmüller, and Sonny Gordon. Brown’s experiences in Hollywood provided the background of his next novel, Days Without Weather (1983), which features the exploits of Jonah Drinkwater, a cantankerous, failed comedian working in Los Angeles. One of Drinkwater’s uncles is a hack writer in Hollywood who ekes out a living by compromising, and therefore destroying, any script by African American writers that is too militant. Brown also published his memoir, Coming Up Down Home: A Memoir of a Southern Childhood, in 1993, and he continues to write essays. His history of the legend of African American folk hero Stagolee, Stagolee Shot Billy, was published in 2003.

Despite the notoriety engendered by his first novel, scholarship on Brown is quite sparse, with most information on his work consisting of the inevitable book reviews and mentions in retrospectives of African American literature of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This writer devotes part of a chapter of African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (2001) to The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger.

Bunkley, Anita Richmond (b. September 29, 1944, Columbus, Ohio) Anita Richmond Bunkley is one of the better-known names in the subfield of African American romance fiction to achieve prominence in the latter half of the 1990s. Like her peer, detective-fiction author Walter Mosley, Bunkley imbues her chosen genre with cautionary tales and social realities that allow her to be simultaneously true to generic conventions yet topical. The results are works that are highly entertaining yet historically informative and ultimately provocative. They have in common an interest in African American history and heritage, including current events that resonate with Bunkley’s large, loyal audience.

Between 1989 and 2000, Bunkley published five novels, coauthored two short-story collections, and authored one nonfiction book, Steppin Out with Attitude: Sister, Sell Your Dream! (1998). The anthologies, Sisters (1996) and Girlfriends (1999), comprise short stories about the friendships and bonds among groups of African American women authored by Bunkley and writers Sandra Kitt and Eva Rutland. Emily, the Yellow Rose (1989) tells the story of Emily West, the former slave whose romantic saga inspired the popular song, “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” In her 1997 article, “‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’: A Different Cultural View,” scholar Trudier Harris credits Bunkley’s novel with placing West’s life within its proper historical context, showing how the heroine helped the United States achieve victory in the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848).^*

Black Gold (1994), also set in Texas, tells of the jealousies, romances, and conflicts between two rival African American families. Wild Embers (1996), set during World War II, follows the story of Janelle Roy, an African American nurse who endures a series of crises due to the vagaries of racism. She eventually becomes an Army nurse working with the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, the highly decorated all-black flying unit, and falls in love with one of its more handsome members. Starlight Passage (1997) tells of doctoral student Kiana Sheridan’s quest for her heritage, which leads the text into an exploration of the case for reparations for slavery. Balancing Act (1998) veers a bit from Bunkley’s normal fare, as it sidesteps the romantic plot elements in favor of an indictment of environmental racism. The novel tracks black media professional Elise Jeffries’s dilemmas as she is torn between the demands of her marriage, her desire to protect her community, and being an effective employee of the firm whose actions threaten that community’s existence.

Butler, Octavia Estelle (b. June 22, 1947, Pasadena, California) Speculative (or science) fiction author Octavia E. Butler is, along with Samuel R. Delany, one of the premiere African American writers in the genre. For that matter, she is one of a very small handful of African Americans, and even fewer African American women, in a field that has historically been dominated by white males. Her achievements, of course, extend beyond her identity; Butler is widely acknowledged as a major writer in speculative/science fiction, to say nothing of African American literature. Her novels and novellas have earned her extensive and consistent acclaim, resulting in science fiction’s top honors, including the 1984 and 1985 Hugo Awards for the short story “Speech Sounds” (1983) and for the novella “Bloodchild” (1984), respectively, and the 1984 Nebula Award, also for “Bloodchild.” Butler also received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 1995.

Butler’s fiction is linked and united by a number of common themes, characters, and metaphors. She is concerned primarily with exploring the origins of dystopian societies that function via hierarchies defined by ethnicity or race, economic class, ability, gender, sexuality, or other qualities. Butler takes an intense look in particular at the way such hierarchies inevitably devolve into forms of oppression or slavery for those others who either lack the preferred characteristics or who are paradoxically connected to the elite through blood or genetic ties. These themes are most apparent in her earliest works, the “Patternist” series, which comprises six novels or novellas published between 1976 and 1984. They are Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Kindred (1979), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay’s Ark (1984). The series chronicles a civilization governed by elite telepaths attempting to engineer a supreme race and enslave those who lack their abilities. The best known of these (that is, outside of science fiction circles) is Kindred, a powerful meditation on slavery, miscegenation, and cultural development and mixing. Wild Seed follows in the same vein, concentrating primarily on the way slavery operates both physically and psychologically.

Clay’s Ark serves as a somewhat transitional work between the Patternist series and the Xenogenesis Trilogy, which comprises Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989). These novels construct metaphors of addiction, with the trilogy in particular presenting a postapocalyptic vision of humanity in which an alien species integrates itself with homo sapiens for its further destruction. The only way humanity can hope to survive is by cooperation and the elimination of hierarchies, but its genetic programming and addictions make this nearly impossible. Parable of the Sower (1993) is also concerned with slavery to drugs, but it emphasizes the way drugs oblige the addict to become a slave in both the economic and spiritual realms. Its protagonist, Lauren Olamina, leads a religious sect whose Earthseed philosophy is meant to show its followers how to live in the world in a way that is ethically sensitive to the individual’s body, environment, society, and world in practice. For their beliefs, Olamina and her followers are persecuted and, in 1998’s Parable of the Talents, cast into concentration camps. Other works by Butler include “Bloodchild” and Other Stories (1995), which contains Butler’s best short fiction, while Lilith’s Brood (2000) collects the Xenogenesis Trilogy in one volume.

As might be expected, Butler’s fiction has been discussed extensively in journals and magazines devoted to science fiction and fantasy, but she has also won a permanent place in scholarly publications. Butler is frequently classed as the author of neo–slave narratives, since so many of her novels reconfigure slavery’s meaning in new contexts, allegorically comparing the peculiar institution to contemporary conditions in which African Americans and other groups live. She is also considered a key figure in contemporary feminist fiction to the extent that her novels probe the boundaries of gender definitions and the meaning of sexual orientations. Several journals, in fact, have devoted all or part of discrete issues to Butler’s work. The winter 2003 issue of Utopian Studies (14, no. 1), a special issue on “Afrofuturism,” features two articles on Butler, while BALF’s Science Fiction Issue (18, no. 2, summer 1984) includes three articles, including a bibliography. Maria Holmgren Troy’s In the First Person and in the House: The House Chronotope in Four Works by American Women Writers (1999) places Butler in the company of Harriet Jacobs, Marilynn Robinson, and Elizabeth Stoddard.

* Andrew Shin and Barbara Judson, “Beneath the Black Aesthetic: James Baldwin’s Primer of Black American Masculinity,” AAR 32, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 250.

* Alex Haley notes that Malcolm X commented that Baldwin was “so brilliant he confuses the white man with words on paper,” and that he had “upset the white man more than anybody except The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 401.

* David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Holt, 1994), 304.

* Mel Watkins, “James Baldwin Writing and Talking,” New York Times Book Review, September 23, 1979, 3.

* Toni Cade Bambara, “How She Came by Her Name,” in Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations (New York: Pantheon, 1996), 232.

* Ann Folwell Stanford, “He Speaks for Whom? Inscription and Reinscription of Women in Invisible Man and The Salt Eaters,” MELUS18, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 17.

* Shanna Greene Benjamin, review of Those Bones Are Not My Child, by Toni Cade Bambara, African American Review 35, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 338.

* James A. Miller, “Bennett, Hal,” The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 33; Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 324.

* Katherine Newman, “An Evening with Hal Bennett: An Interview,” BALF 21, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 358–59.

* Newman, “An Evening with Hal Bennett,” 378.

* Ronald Walcott, “The Novels of Hall Bennett, Part I.” Black World 23, no. 8 (June 1974): 36–48, 89–97;“The Novels of Hall Bennett, Part II.” Black World 23, no. 9 (July 1974): 78–96.

* Ron Karenga, “Black Cultural Nationalism,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle Jr. (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1971), 38, 33, 34.

* Hoyt W. Fuller, “The New Black Literature: Protest or Affirmation,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle Jr. (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1971), 346.

* Hoyt W. Fuller, “The New Black Literature: Protest or Affirmation,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle Jr. (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1971), 346.

* Maulana Ron Karenga, “Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function,” in New Black Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Afro-American Literature, ed. Abraham Chapman (New York: Mentor, 1972), 477–78, 479–90.

* Imamu Amiri Baraka,“State/meant” (1965), in The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), 169–70.

* Larry Neal,“Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle Jr. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 14–15. Neal describes his outline as “a rough overview of some categories and elements that constituted a ‘Black Aesthetic’ outlook,” to be further elaborated in a later essay. The outline is apparently designed to provide a cursory history of the mythologies created by African Diasporic peoples and those mythologies’ cultural manifestations, both of which led to the Black Aesthetic. Some of the most famous African mythological figures, such as Legba, Urzulie, and shamans, find a place here alongside the cultural figures or phenomena inspiring the Black Aesthetic’s ideology in a column on the left (entitled “History as Unitary Myth”), while the basic beliefs of the Aesthetic itself lie in the right-hand column. This article, while somewhat fragmented, provides an excellent summary of what primary cultural forces the Black Aesthetic was intended to embody and push forward to transform not only African American arts but also African American communities in general.

* Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, 61.

* Hoyt W. Fuller, “Introduction: Towards a Black Aesthetic,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle Jr. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 7.

* William L. Van DeBurg, Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 2.

* Scot Brown, Fighting for Us: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 2.

* Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New York: Grove, 1967), 34–35.

* Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power, 47.

* Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Papers, 1959–72 (Sanford, N.C.: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1982), reel 57, item 10, p. 3.

* Richard Barksdale and Keneth Kinnamon, Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology (New York: Macmillan., 1972), xi.

* Dolan Hubbard, “An Interview with Richard K. Barksdale,” BALF 19, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 140.

* Barksdale and Kinnamon, Black Writers, 529.

* Calvin Hernton, “The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers,” BALF18, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 142.

* Chester J. Fontenot Jr., review of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature and Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, CLA Journal 41, no. 4 (June 1998): 483.

* Malcolm Jones Jr., “Successful Sisters: Faux Terry Is Better Than No Terry,” Newsweek, April 29, 1996, 79.

* Harriet Jacobs (writing as Linda Brent), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (1861; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).

* Cecil Brown, The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1969), 12; italics in the original.

* Trudier Harris,“‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’: A Different Cultural View,” Callaloo 20, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 8–19.