The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction

Cain, George M. (b. 1943, New York, New York) Harlem author George M. Cain is known for his one book, Blueschild Baby (1971), a heavily autobiographical novel—the protagonist’s name is George Cain—that tells of the harrowing nature of drug addiction and racism. Due to its focus on the path to freedom from slavery, it is a revision of the slave narrative form and therefore merits classification as a neo–slave narrative as well. Blueschild Baby’s complex portrait of Harlem life made it stand out from many African American–authored novels of the early 1970s. Harlem is more than a symbol; it is a real community, with many different groups and classes making it a living, breathing space amidst its problems.

Callaloo (1976–present) Callaloo is one of two major journals of African American literature and criticism to emerge in the wake of the Black Arts Movement; the other is the African American Review. It was founded in 1976 by Charles Henry Rowell in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Its primary goal is, according to Rowell, is to publish “literature and literary and cultural studies of the African diaspora … in addition to printing pieces of visual art, interviews, and articles dealing with cultural politics.”^* In practice, this means that Callaloo’s editorial policy has been to include writers of African descent from all parts of the globe, although the majority of contributors to and subjects discussed within the journal have been African American. It also means that a reader is more likely to find fiction, poetry, and author interviews in Callaloo than in its rival and contemporary, African American Review, which reserves more of its space for literary studies. Both, however, have contributed significantly and indispensably to the development of recent scholarship on African Diasporic literatures.

In pursuit of its primary goal, Callaloo has published many articles written in the original languages of its contributors. It has also published a number of special issues devoted entirely to the literature of Haiti (spring and summer 1992); the literature of Guadeloupe and Martinique (winter 1992), Native America literatures (winter 1994); Puerto Rican women writers (summer 1994), African-Brazilian literature (fall 1995); Eric Williams and the postcolonial Caribbean (fall 1997); Caribbean literature from Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, and the Netherlands (summer 1998); and the literature and culture of the Dominican Republic (summer 2000).

The fiction writers published in Callaloo between 1976 and 2000 are some of the best that contemporary African American and African Diasporic literatures have had to offer. They include: Octavia Butler, Edwidge Danticat, Samuel R. Delany, Rita Dove, Trey Ellis, Ralph Ellison, Percival Everett, Leon Forrest, Thomas Glave, Wilson Harris, Charles Johnson, Gayl Jones, Randall Kenan, Helen Elaine Lee, Nathaniel Mackey, John McCluskey, Terry McMillan, Caryl Phillips, and John Edgar Wideman. Some of these authors were published for the first time in Callaloo or premiered excerpts from major works in the journal’s pages. In addition, a number of special issues have been dedicated to the work of emerging or younger authors: fiction (autumn 1984); emerging women writers (spring 1996); and two special issues on emerging male writers (winter and spring 1998).

Other special issues include numbers on Ernest J. Gaines (May 1978), women poets (February 1979), Jay Wright (autumn 1983), Larry Neal (winter 1985), recent essays from Europe (autumn 1985), Richard Wright (summer 1986), Nicholas Guillen (spring 1987), “Post-Colonial Discourse” (autumn 1993), Maryse Condé (summer 1995), Sterling A. Brown (fall 1998), the European response to John Edgar Wideman (summer 1999), Nathaniel Mackey (spring 2000), and a memorial to Melvin Dixon and Audre Lorde (winter 2000).

Besides the original issues of the journal itself, readers interested in contemporary African American fiction may find Callaloo’s twenty-fifth anniversary anthology, Making Callaloo: Twenty-five Years of Black Literature (2002) the best introduction to the fiction and poetry published in that time. Scholars should also note that through 1989 and issue 41, Callaloo was numbered sequentially; since 1990 and with volume 13, it has been divided into yearly volumes, with quarterly issues within each volume receiving their own numbers, 1 through 4.

Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition Although Call and Response (1998) was in production around the same time as the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, it was published some months after its competitor entered the market, which led to its being overshadowed. Like its rival, though, Call and Response represents a significant leap forward for anthologies of African American literature targeted for the academic-textbook market and is in some ways superior in terms of its production values, organization, pedagogical uses, and editorial outlook. General editor Patrician Liggins Hill, along with her editors, Bernard W. Bell, Trudier Harris, William J. Harris, R. Baxter Miller, Sondra A. O’Neale, and Horace Porter, explicitly chose to present African American literature “according to the Black Aesthetic, a criteria for black art developed by Americans of African descent,” which means that “African American literature is a distinct tradition, one originating in the African and African American cultural heritages and in the experience of enslavement in the United States and kept alive beyond slavery through song, sermon, and other spoken and written forms.” The editorial policy, then,“enables [the editors] to give equal place to the oral and written dimensions of African American literature” via “poetry, fiction, drama, essays, speeches, letters, autobiographies, sermons, criticism, journals, and folk literature from secular songs to rap.” Their goal, therefore, is greater inclusiveness.^*

The editors not only assembled what is arguably a more diverse set of texts but also concentrated their efforts less on classifying authors temporally (although they certainly do so) and more on scholarly, yet accessible discussions of authors’ significance to African American literary traditions and to their chosen genres. For example, in the case of such African and African American folk genres as slave songs, secular work songs, and gospel music, the editors opted to write headnotes that show in intricate detail how these forms are structured in terms of their cadences and rhythms. For other modes and genres, the scholarship is no less meticulous. A typical section header includes a title (e.g., “Tell Ole Pharaoh, Let My People Go”), a temporal classification (“African American History and Culture, 1808–1865), and two subtitles indicating the general direction of literature and conditions for African Americans during that period (“The Explanations of the Desire for Freedom”; “Repression and Racial Response”). Each author receives a headnote with a short biography and a broad generic classification; the head-notes for genres and subgenres define each, with examples. The anthology also includes a CD with musical and poetic selections and speeches by authors included in the book.

Reviews of Call and Response have not, unfortunately, been as common as its better-known competitor, but one of the best is Julia Eichelberger’s, published in Mississippi Quarterly’s winter 1999 issue. Eichelberger notes, quite accurately, that “each [anthology] is governed by a different story. One, the Norton, is the story of American adaptation and subversion, of ‘signifying’ upon the social and aesthetic ideals of the Enlightenment and the American experiment in democracy. The other, Call and Response, is a story of survival and revival, of an African diaspora that refused to disappear, and of this diaspora’s growing consciousness of its own distinctive voice and vision.” Eichelberger goes on to trace the ways in which the anthologies are indeed complementary in their organization, outlook, and selections.^* Chester Fontenot’s review in the June 1998 issue of CLA Journal is certainly the equal of Eichelberger’s. Fontenot questions the very project of canon formation and traces the history of African American literary anthologies and their stated missions; he then offers a thorough comparison of the anthologies’ strengths (e.g., full-length works in the case of the Norton; better bibliographies and more hard-to-find works in Call and Response). Fontenot also criticizes both texts for failing to pay enough attention to hip-hop and rap’s diversity but finally concludes that although each anthology is problematic in its own way, they inarguably “fill the void created by the lack of a comprehensive collection since the publication of [Keneth Kinnamon and Richard Barksdale’s] Black Writers of America [1972].”^*

Campbell, Bebe Moore (b. 1950, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) Although she began successfully writing and publishing in the late 1980s, novelist Bebe Moore Campbell has become associated with the wave of writers who entered the literary world in the wake of Terry McMillan’s runaway bestseller, Waiting to Exhale (1992). This is largely due to the fact that her first novel, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (1992) was published the same year as McMillan’s breakthrough. This association is also somewhat unfortunate, as the quality of Campbell’s work generally exceeds that of many later writers in terms of its sophistication and overall quality. The only significant connection between Campbell and these authors is the broad subject of interpersonal relationships between African American men and women. Unlike many of her peers, however, Campbell frequently experiments with storytelling techniques and points of view and has a greater range of affect. She is nonetheless an extremely popular author who has benefited from both the quality of her art and strong promotion especially—and ironically—after McMillan.

Although Campbell’s first two books, Successful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the Two-Career Marriage (1987), and Sweet Summer: Growing up with and Without My Dad (1989) are nonfiction, they presage many of the characteristics of Campbell’s fiction, to the extent that both reflect upon the changes in African American communities and communal bonds both during and after the Civil Rights movement. This concern is illustrated equally well in Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, a semiautobiographical narrative offering a witty and frequently startling story about the way that “race” and African Americans’ roles in American society have changed dramatically in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is set in both rural Mississippi and urban Chicago in part to help highlight the tensions and conflicts among African Americans but also to show the degree to which racism is still very much part of American society. It tells of the murder of a young Chicagoan African American, Armstrong Todd, who is accused of flirting with a young white woman while in Mississippi. His case is clearly based upon that of Emmett Till, whose brutal murder in 1955 outraged African Americans and a good portion of the American public. Via Todd’s fate, Campbell ponders how the Till case would be handled in post-Civil Rights America, with devastating results.

Brothers and Sisters (1994) is set in 1992 Los Angeles after the April 29 acquittal of the four white officers accused of brutalizing black motorist Rodney King, when the city exploded in the largest urban uprising since the Watts Riot of 1965. The protagonist is Esther Jackson, a middle manager at the novel’s main location, a local bank where members of the city’s diverse communities converge to discuss the many tensions across the lines of neighborhood, ethnicity, gender, and class that led to the verdict and its aftermath. Campbell’s fiction has also been included in such anthologies as New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in America (2001), Wild Women (1997), Streetlights: Illuminating Tales of the Urban Black Experience (1996), and Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Fiction (1990).

Campbell’s fiction has garnered a respectable amount of scholarly attention in addition to critical accolades and popular sales. Not only are her books are regularly reviewed in key literary journals dedicated to African American or ethnic American literature (African American Review, Callaloo, MELUS), but Campbell is also an accomplished reviewer and critic herself, having published dozens of reviews for the New York Times and made regular appearances on National Public Radio as a commentator. Campbell was interviewed in the fall 1999 issue of Callaloo (22, no. 4), and has been profiled in Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 227: American Novelists Since World War II (2000). In addition, three scholarly articles have appeared that feature close analyses of Campbell’s fiction: E. Shelley Reid’s “Beyond Morrison and Walker: Looking Good and Looking Forward in Contemporary Black Women’s Stories,” in AAR 34, no. 2 (summer 2000); and Christopher Metress’s “‘No Justice, No Peace’: The Figure of Emmett Till in African American Literature,” in MELUS 28, no. 1 (spring 2003).

Canon formation M. H. Abrams defines the most commonly accepted meaning of the term “literary canon” to be “those authors who, by a cumulative consensus of critics, scholars, and teachers, have come to be widely recognized as ‘major,’ and to have written works often hailed as literary classics. The literary works by canonical authors are the ones which, at a given time, are most kept in print, most frequently and fully discussed by literary critics and historians, and most likely to be included in anthologies and in the syllabi of college courses.”^* Abrams’s definition has been applied to African American literature since the 1970s for the purpose of creating a standard list—the Greek word “kanon” means measuring rod—of significant African American writers who could be upheld as signs of continuous achievement and excellence.

Perhaps more important, such a standard could enable teachers of African American literature to cite, and therefore teach, a litany of greats via literary anthologies. This last desire led to the publication of several successful major anthologies—Black Writers of America, the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition—whose implicit and explicit purposes were to help form canons.

Forming a canon of any particular type of literature is inherently problematic, for the simple reason that any criteria used to determine what should belong in a particular canon are inevitably subjective and the product of a particular historical moment, regardless of the number of thoughtful scholars who contribute their opinions. As a result, it is all too common for deserving texts to be excluded from such lists, even as less deserving texts accompany the accepted and cherished classics. In literary studies, then, the act of canon formation is nothing if not at least a little controversial in any era. In recent decades, as scholarly definitions of “classic” or merely great literature have opened up to be more inclusive, with women and people of color being the main—and intentional—beneficiaries, this process has become even more difficult, as critics and scholars have collectively struggled to expand different canons while not completely discarding their mainstays. The acrimony that resulted from often fierce disagreements about what great literature is developed into what is now known as the “Culture Wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, which pitted the avatars of a more European- and male-centered canon against proponents of various types of multiculturalism. While this binary opposition is somewhat oversimplified, it describes in general terms where the dividing lines were drawn. In the United States, the stakes were ultimately about control, but not simply of long book lists; rather, the issue may be fairly described as one of control of cultural capital itself, of the hearts and minds of an educated populace still coming to terms with the transformations that the politics of the 1960s initiated in the academy. One of these transformations, of course, was the creation of black studies courses, programs, and departments, many of which had to struggle for their very existence, particularly at some of the nation’s more prestigious public universities.

Part of this struggle was directly tied to a problem that had vexed African American scholars since the nineteenth century. That is to say, one means by which African Americans might hope to achieve social, economic, and political equality in the United States is to dispel the common racist myth that African Americans, due to their alleged intellectual inferiority, have not written great literature and therefore cannot ever become part of the American cultural mainstream. Put another way, the myth argues that African Americans have contributed nothing to American or world civilization.

Such early African American intellectuals as David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass, Frances E. W. Harper, Martin R. Delaney, Booker T. Washington and, most prominently, W. E. B. Du Bois did much to refute this myth, citing the greatness of ancient and modern figures from the African Diaspora. As the modern academy developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so did various types of pseudo-scientific racism that informed educators’ views of African Americans and therefore led to their exclusion, both as students and as professors, from all but a scant few of the most prestigious campuses. Consequently, early scholars’ attempts to extol the past accomplishments of the African Diaspora and to encourage future ones found few outlets. This exclusion, incidentally, was linked to the emphasis on vocational, rather than liberal arts education for African Americans that Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute advocated, despite Washington’s own efforts to bring black accomplishments to the forefront of the public’s mind. The relative dearth of African American fiction writers published by major presses was simultaneously a symptom and product of racist exclusion.

By the time the Harlem Renaissance began producing a coterie of talented young artists, though, it was quite possible for such major anthologies as James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) and V. F. Calverton’s Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929) to be compiled and produced. Each of these anthologies, as have all others that followed them, have either implied or asserted that “the world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art,” and that “no people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior,” as Johnson does in the preface to his landmark volume.^*

Nonetheless, deciding what “great literature and art” are for African Americans has been fraught with contention. The most vigorous debates have centered upon questions regarding both form and content. To be more specific, critics have frequently asked whether African American artists should aspire to emulate and improve upon acknowledged European and American masters or incorporate expressions of the rich folk heritage the African Diaspora has produced. As far as content is concerned, the divisions are more complicated; most have to do with the black artist’s responsibility to African Americans as a whole, as well as his or her obligation to adhere to any particular artistic or political standard. During the Harlem Renaissance and the pre-WWII years, these questions dogged virtually every major African American intellectual and artist from W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and George S. Schuyler to Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Sterling Brown, and many others. After the war, James Baldwin, John Oliver Killens, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, and Harold Cruse developed into some of the more vocal participants in the process of canon formation, debating the very purpose of African American literature and therefore which texts should be held up as the standards.

Since the mid-1960s, the question of canon formation has been inextricably tied to the Black Arts Movement, its concomitant Black Aesthetic, and the subsequent creation of black studies programs, whose scholars became the de facto creators and defenders of a new, loosely defined, and ever-shifting literary canon. With the publication of Keneth Kinnamon and Richard C Barksdale’s Black Writers of America (1972), the idea of canon formation was transformed considerably. As Chester J. Fontenot Jr. writes, Black Writers of America “exploded the process of canon formation in challenging the ‘literariness’ of all cultural texts. [It] included … a balanced mixture of consciously and unconsciously literary texts from the African American tradition,” with a “healthy portion of poems, plays, short stories, excerpts from novels, critical essays, political speeches, discursive writings, folklore, sacred and secular songs, and sermons” that demanded that “the African American literary tradition [be] judged … from within its own dialogic system.”^* In other words, Black Writers of America ensured that no anthologies published since 1970 that claimed to be comprehensive could exclude any the genres that Barksdale and Kinnamon included. It forced editors to relinquish the idea that African American literature mattered only to the extent that African Americans produced literature acceptable according to European-derived definitions of “literature” and canonicity.

The example that Black Writers of America set, in fact, was the basis for the two major comprehensive anthologies of the 1990s: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997) and Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998) (see separate entries for each anthology.) Both anthologies were meant to update Black Writers of America, whose publisher prevented the editors from revising their own anthology.^* Both succeeded in that role, albeit in different ways, based upon different editorial outlooks stemming from debates regarding African American literary study that captivated the field in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of these debates often revolved around questions of gender or, more specifically, the degree to which women were included in or excluded from both canons and the process of creating them. More often , though, one of the central debates in African American literary studies concerned the place of contemporary literary theories and whether they fostered elitism. The many facets of this broad debate are too complex to outline in detail here, but a series of exchanges in 1989 in American Literature between critics Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston A. Baker Jr., on the one hand, and Joyce Ann Joyce on the other represent the essence of the discussion. The exchanges and many ancillary debates may be found in Winston Napier’s excellent collection, African American Literary Theory: A Reader (2000). Inarguably, however, as a greater number of African American authors publish popular fiction, the question of canon formation is sure to remain a contentious one.

Cary, Lorene (b. November 29, 1956, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) The three novels of memoirist and novelist Lorene Cary stand among the best of those to emerge in the 1990s, in terms of both the quality of Cary’s writing and attention to the concerns of the Post-Soul generation of African Americans. Prior to her matriculation at the University of Pennsylvania (B.A., 1977; M.A., 1978) and the University of Sussex (M.A., 1979), Cary attended the predominantly white St. Paul’s preparatory school in New Hampshire, an experience that formed the basis of her first book, the memoir Black Ice (1991). At St. Paul’s, Cary found herself confronting racism and sexism alike in a supposedly integrated institution, prompting her to turn those experiences into a subtle, clever narrative that stands in a class with such creative memoirs as John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers (1984) and The Woman Warrior (1975), by Asian American Maxine Hong Kingston. Along the way, Cary uncovers the ambivalence that many middle-class African Americans feel toward the goal of integration itself. Black Ice emphasizes Cary’s desire for her generation and those to follow to embrace their identities as African Americans even as they improve their lot in life. In short, Cary’s memoir updates W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 definition of double-consciousness (first delineated in The Souls of Black Folk) for the 1990s. Much of Cary’s reputation as an author rests upon Black Ice. It has received numerous glowing reviews and is frequently mentioned as an exemplar of contemporary African American fiction. In 1992, the American Library Association designated it a Notable Book, while Colby College bestowed an honorary doctorate upon her the same year.

Cary’s first novel, The Price of a Child (1995) is a neo–slave narrative that both adopts and revises the conventions of the slave narrative genre that dominated African American literature’s first century. The Price of a Child is based upon the true story of Jane Johnson, a woman who escaped from enslavement the same way as protagonist Virginia Pryor, by being rescued by abolitionists while traveling with her master aboard a ferry. The novel’s richness arises from Cary’s crisp prose and simultaneous attention to historical accuracy (particularly in her portrayal of the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad) and the slave narrative’s conventions (the physical brutality of slavery; the enslaved’s dark moment of the soul that precipitates the quest for freedom; and an emphasis upon the slave’s genius). Cary also creates slaveholders who are both horrifying and human, thereby building a degree of sympathy that ironically makes them even more horrific. Virginia’s attempts to be a mother in the face of a brutal institution recalls Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), just as her doubts about the meaning of freedom compare to those of Raven Quickskill in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976) or Cary’s own Black Ice.

Cary’s third novel, Pride (1998) is a more straightforward and accessible contemporary novel in the vein of Terry McMillan or Eric Jerome Dickey, focusing on the tight-knit friendship shared by four middle-class African American women. As they search for greater meaning and affirmation in their lives, their bonds are put to the test by disease, death, and personal betrayals in their romantic relationships. Although not as artistically accomplished as her earlier works, Pride is Cary’s most commercially successful novel. Although Cary has not yet been the subject of a detailed critical article, the high regard her first two books have earned virtually guarantees that such careful studies are forthcoming.

Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship This anthology (1979) edited by poet-critic Michael S. Harper and scholar Robert B Stepto is, after Barksdale and Kinnamon’s Black Writers of America (1972), one of the best anthologies of African American literature and criticism of the 1970s. It both capped the decade’s burgeoning developments in professional African American literary criticism and presaged what was to come in the 1980s. As the subtitle indicates, Chant of Saints blends primary literature, some art and photography, and rigorous scholarship, including essays and interviews. The literary selections include poetry and fiction by Chinua Achebe, Ralph Ellison, Leon Forrest, Ernest J. Gaines, Harper, Robert Hayden, Gayl Jones, James Alan McPherson, Toni Morrison, John Stewart, Frederick Turner, Derek Walcott, Alice Walker, Sherley A. Williams, and Jay Wright. The volume’s collages and paintings are by Romare Bearden (who is also the subject of an essay by Ralph Ellison) and Richard Yarde, respectively; its photographs are by Lawrence Sykes; the sculptures are by Richard Hunt. Personal and critical essayists include Kimberly W. Benston, Mary F. Berry and John W. Blassingame, Sterling A. Brown (to whom the entire volume is dedicated), John F. Callahan, Melvin Dixon, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Stepto, Robert Farris Thompson, Alice Walker, Sherley A. Williams, and Wilburn Williams Jr. Interviewees include Leon Forrest, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, and Derek Walcott.

Chase-Riboud, Barbara (b. June 26, 1939, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) Novelist, poet, and sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud began her career in fiction writing relatively late but sparked great interest and controversy from the start. Her first novel, Sally Hemings (1979), drew heavily upon historical records to imagine the life and circumstances of the real Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who had a romantic relationship with Thomas Jefferson and likely bore several of his children. The novel foregrounded the fact that miscegenation has always been part of American history, up to and including one of the most revered Founding Fathers. It also offered an alternate view of ambivalent, yet ultimately racist remarks Jefferson had made about African Americans and slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) and helped encourage the efforts of Jefferson’s African American descendants to be recognized fully as part of the family. It was the quality of Chase-Riboud’s writing, however, that won Sally Hemings the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Best Historical Novel by an American Woman in 1979, which in turn helped inspire Chase-Riboud to write a sequel, The President’s Daughter (1994), about Harriet Hemings. This novel reignited controversy over the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings, albeit not to the same degree as in 1979. Chase-Riboud started another sequel in the saga, but it has yet to appear.

The stature of Chase-Riboud’s accomplishments as a writer parallels that of her efforts in poetry and sculpture. In the latter art, Chase-Riboud was a major figure in Europe before Toni Morrison edited and helped publish her first book of poems (From Memphis and Peking) in 1974. In all three fields, Chase-Riboud possesses a passionate interest in discovering historical figures—usually women and men of African descent—and events that have been long ignored, obscured, or silenced precisely because they trouble the way Americans and the West think of themselves. For this reason, Chase-Riboud is normally counted as one of the more prominent authors of neo–slave narratives (see separate entry), akin to her mentor Morrison, David Bradley, Gayl Jones, Sherley Anne Williams, and Ishmael Reed. In all of these novels Chase-Riboud’s attention to the details of historical documents, language, and context allows them to compare well to the standard histories they parallel, while her desire to provide her subjects’ perspectives distinguishes them to the same degree. For example, Chase-Riboud’s second novel, Valide: A Novel of the Harem (1986) contains many parallels to Sally Hemings; it tells the story of a Martinican women sold into slavery in the Ottoman Empire, eventually becoming part of the harem of Sultan Abdulhamid I and rising to the rank of valide, thereby becoming the most powerful woman in the country while still a slave. In her latest novel, Hottentot Venus (2003) Chase-Riboud recovers the history of Sarah Baartmann, a South African woman who was lured from her homeland and put on display, naked, in a freak show in London’s Piccadilly Circus and later had her genitalia dissected and preserved as signs of African ugliness. Echo of Lions (1989) recounts the famous Amistad incident in 1839, in which a group of Africans, led by Sengbe (a.k.a. Joseph Cinqué) rebelled against the crew of the Spanish slave ship en route to bondage, steered to Long Island, and eventually won their freedom in a case that went to the Supreme Court. When dancer Debbie Allen and Steven Spielberg produced and directed the film Amistad in 1997, Chase-Riboud sued the production for copyright infringement, attracting considerable media attention and controversy among scholars about the ownership and depiction of African Americans and their history, which rivaled the furor over the film version of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple. Chase-Riboud, however, later dropped the charges, finding that the producers committed no wrongdoing.

Most appreciations of Chase-Riboud’s work consist of contemporary reviews, but several key journal articles and books have emerged as well, although the latter discuss her sculpture, rather than her fiction. The better journal articles include Ashraf H. Rushdy, “Representing the Constitution: Embodiments of America in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Echo of Lions,” Critique 36, no. 4 (Summer 1995), 258–81; and “‘I Write in Tongues’: The Supplement of Voice in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings,” Contemporary Literature 35, no. 1 (Spring 1994), 100–136.

Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present This 1995 collection, edited by novelist Gloria Naylor, is one of the most carefully edited and organized collection of short fiction to emerge in the 1990s. It represents Naylor’s desire to place the range of African American experiences in a revelatory context in which those experiences may be seen in an affirmative light. This goal is revealed both in Naylor’s preface and the four thematic sections: “Remembering …,” “Affirming …,” “Revealing the Self Divided …,” and “Moving On.…” The subject matter ranges from pieces that examine slavery’s effects upon the African American body and psyche to lyrical analyses of the inner self, classism, colorism, the meaning of African heritage, community diversity and unity, and so on. The collection is remarkable for its ability to capture the range and gist of African American short fiction over a quarter century without either being too dogmatic or too diffuse.

Virtually every major African American author published since 1967 is represented in this collection. These include: Samuel R. Delany, Sherley Anne Williams, John Edgar Wideman, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, James Baldwin, Terry McMillan, Clarence Major, Edwidge Danticat, James Alan McPherson, Charles Johnson, Alice Walker, and Ralph Ellison. A handful of newer or lesser-known authors are also present.

Childress, Alice (b. October 12, 1920, Charleston, South Carolina; d. August 14, 1994, Long Island, New York) Actor, playwright, essayist, and novelist Alice Childress was one of the most influential dramatists in African American history. Her many plays stand as provocative monuments to the richness, complexity, and diversity of African American life and demonstrate Childress’s nearly unrivalled command of language. Although Childress’s works of fiction were not quite as popular as her well-known and highly acclaimed plays, they were also highly significant contributions to the African American literature in the postwar era, especially in the 1970s, and won many awards. Childress’s works are generally written for a young-adult audience but resonate with adults as well. Her first novel of the contemporary period, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich (1973), was popular enough to be made into a film starring Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield. It is the gritty tale of Benjie, a thirteen-year-old heroin addict, who forces the adults in his community—especially Butler, his stepfather—to pay closer and earlier attention to the needs of the younger generation of African Americans, rather than providing models of behavior after the world has begun taking its toll. It won the Jane Addams Peace Association and Lewis Carroll Shelf Awards, a National Book Award nomination, and Outstanding Book of the Year and Best Young Adult Book citations from the New York Times and American Library Association, respectively. A Short Walk (1979), an adult novel, uses the life of protagonist Cora James to review the difficulties of African American life from the beginning of the twentieth century, through the Harlem Renaissance, ending in the Civil Rights movement. Rainbow Jordan (1981), another novel for young adults, is somewhat similar to the earlier Hero; it is a coming-of-age story in which the girl Rainbow finds herself drawing upon many different mother figures to help her form her identity. Those Other People (1989) is the story of Jonathan Barnett, a seventeen-year-old gay high school computer instructor who attempts to intervene on behalf of his school’s two black students, only to be confronted by homophobia and pressure from those in power above him. Childress’s other general awards include the Radcliffe Graduate Society Medal (1984) and the Harlem School of the Arts Humanitarian Award. (1987).

Most of the extant scholarship on Childress is concerned with her plays rather than her fiction. A handful of books and articles discussing her career and individual works, however, are valuable studies of her oeuvre: La Vinia Delois Jennings, Alice Childress (1995); Christy Gavin, African American Women Playwrights: A Research Guide (1999). Relevant articles: Olga Duncan, “Telling the Truth: Alice Childress as Theorist and Playwright,” The Journal of African American History 81, nos. 1–4 (1996); Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, “Alice Childress: A Pioneering Spirit,” SAGE 4 (Spring 1987); Mary Helen Washington, “New Lives and New Letters: Black Women Writers at the End of the Seventies,” College English 43, no. 1 (January 1981); Judy Richardson, “Black Children’s Books: An Overview,” The Journal of Negro Education 43, no. 3 (Summer 1974).

Cleage, Pearl (b. December 7, 1948, Springfield, Massachusetts) Playwright, essayist, and novelist Pearl Cleage is best known for her prolific and award-winning plays and provocative essays, all of which take incisive looks at social issues from personal and proudly womanist perspectives. Her debut novel, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (1997) received immense attention due to being one of the first books by a non-canonical African American author featured in Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. The novel’s protagonist, Ava Johnson, returns to her Michigan home from Atlanta and finds herself helping members of her family heal from various hurts and abusive relationships. Despite the subject matter, Cleage’s novel approaches serious issues with wit and humor. In 2001, Cleage published her second novel, I Wish I Had a Red Dress, about social worker Joyce Mitchell, sister to What Looks Like Crazy’s Ava Johnson. Through Joyce’s work and personal search for love and passion, the novel confronts a number of the issues facing African American communities and particularly black women at the turn of the twenty-first century, including domestic violence, drugs, and a lack of real love in a cold world. Some Things I Never Thought I’d Do (2003) is the story of Regina Burns, a recovering addict who tries to reconnect to the fuller, richer life she formerly enjoyed before her last relationship ended and addiction consumed her. Regina’s search for fulfillment requires faith in herself as a woman first, one who can be loved by the man she desires, Blue Hamilton, be responsible for her destiny again, and become a significant player in her community.

Virtually all scholarly attention given to Cleage has examined her plays not her fiction. Cleage and her plays have been reviewed and examined many times in AAR and Callaloo, but such publications rarely even mention her fictional works. The extant criticism of Cleage’s drama, however, is excellent. The winter 1997 issue of AAR (31, no. 4) reviews and discusses several of Cleage’s plays among those of many other playwrights, as does that journal’s winter 2003 issue.

College Language Association The College Language Association (CLA) is a professional organization founded in 1937 at LeMoyne College in Memphis, Tennessee by ten scholars at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The College Language Association was intended as a racially integrated response to the Modern Language Association of America, which did not welcome African American members at that time. Its membership presently comprises independent scholars, faculty, and graduate students in English and foreign languages at HBCUs and predominantly white institutions.

The CLA’s mission is to promote scholarship and professional standards among and its members, publish essay collections and bibliographies, support creative writing, and maintain directories of its members, past and present.^* The association sponsors annual contests in creative and scholarly writing for students at the institutions where members teach; publishes the CLA Journal, a quarterly featuring members’ critical articles and book reviews; and holds an annual convention open to all members. The convention’s location changes from year to year, but it generally remains in cities in the American South and therefore closer to most HBCUs. Information about the organization may be found at http://www.clascholars.org.

CLA Journal (1957–present) CLA Journal is the quarterly organ of the College Language Association, first published in 1957. It features members’ and subscribers’ critical articles and book reviews. Since publication in CLA Journal is limited to members of the organization, it does not possess quite the same cachet as such competing journals as African American Review or Callaloo, but it has served and continues to serve as an important and high-quality forum for new and established scholars. The journal publishes articles on language and literature, book reviews and literary criticism, and news and reports pertaining to the association. It places no restrictions on the type of subjects its contributors write, but since many of its members are interested in African American literature, a subscriber will find many articles on texts from the African Diaspora. See also College Language Association.

Color Purple, The Alice Walker’s third and most famous novel (1982) is inarguably one of the greatest works of American fiction in the late twentieth century, and perhaps one of the most controversial. It is written in an epistolary format, in which the protagonist and narrator, Celie, writes to God and, later, her sister Nettie about her travails. Celie is raped by her purported father and bears two children by him, both of whom he sends away for adoption. Celie is eventually married off to Mr.———(whose name is eventually revealed as Albert) when Nettie refuses Mr.———’s advances. This marriage of convenience becomes entirely miserable for Celie after Nettie runs away to escape Mr.———’s overtures. Celie eventually finds spiritual and sexual sustenance in her husband’s former lover, Shug Avery, who helps her discover her sexuality, her voice, her identity, and therefore her will to leave Albert, start her own business, and, much later, reunite with Nettie and her long-lost children. The novel’s engaging and innovative quality is a product of the way Walker turns the epistolary form into a subtle, sensitive, and moving analysis of gender issues among African Americans. Its discovery and indictment of community secrets, including spousal abuse, incest, and homosexuality between African American women led to the controversy. The novel’s critics have frequently condemned it for its alleged disloyalty to the premises of black aesthetics, specifically the idea that black art should celebrate the beauties of African American history and culture rather than emphasize the ways in which they fail to meet ideals. In other words, Walker has been accused of betraying African Americans, and African American males in particular, with this novel. It must be emphasized, however, that two major factors contributed to these criticisms.

First, Walker’s novel was a runaway bestseller and recipient of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award, and many other honors. It therefore found great national and international popularity, which meant that Walker’s portrayal of African Americans, including Celie’s occasionally harsh, albeit understandable, criticisms of specific African American males—chiefly Mr.——, her husband—became popular among a predominantly white audience. To such critics as Ishmael Reed, whose novel Reckless Eyeballing mercilessly and transparently satirizes The Color Purple, this amounted to a betrayal of African American males and their contributions to literature (including, naturally, Reed’s).

Second, much of the criticism that arose regarding the novel resulted from its conversion into the 1985 motion picture of the same name, directed and coproduced by famed director Steven Spielberg. The film departed from the novel in a number of crucial aspects, in part because the treatment Walker wrote for the screen was never used. The film minimized Celie and Shug’s deeply intimate, sexual relationship, excluded Celie’s reconciliation with Mr.——, deemphasized his ultimate redemption, and contained an idyllic scene of Shug’s rapprochement with her estranged father that was never part of the novel and again minimized the essential importance of the bonds between the women in the novel. Moreover, Spielberg’s depiction of African Americans occasionally bordered on common stereotypes that evoked many African American’s memories of Hollywood’s earlier days. In The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996), her memoir of the experience of collaborating on the film, Walker writes that

it was said that I hated men, black men in particular; that my work was injurious to black male and female relationships; that my ideas of equality and tolerance were harmful, even destructive to the black community. That my success, and that of other black women writers in publishing our work, was at the expense of black male writers who were not being published sufficiently. I was “accused” of being a lesbian, as if respecting and honoring women automatically discredited anything a woman might say. I was the object of literary stalking: one black male writer attacked me obsessively in lecture, interview and book for over a decade, to the point where I was concerned about his sanity and my safety. (22)

The film clearly had a cultural impact that extended far beyond the book; the question of whether works in any medium that cover ground similar to The Color Purple are “harmful” still echoes in critical circles. Walker has astutely noted, however, that the most curious quality of the novel’s harshest critics is that they tend to ignore the suffering of the novel’s women and children for the sake of vilifying Walker’s alleged disdain for its men. Based upon Walker’s own ruminations, it is clear that the novel’s goal, ultimately, is to show how rich, complex, and loving the bonds between women can be, must be, when males attempt to silence their voices and ignore their feelings or identities.

Criticism of The Color Purple notwithstanding, analyses of the book have been fittingly rich and complex. Several splendid critical books and dissertations have been devoted to Walker’s work as a whole and may be found in the entry under her name; most of the extant material devoted solely to The Color Purple may be found in critical journal articles. One book, Walker’s aforementioned The Same River Twice, is an especially helpful tome that not only provides an account of the process that went into making the film version but also reveals what Walker wanted the characters to represent. Walker has much to say about the controversy that surrounded the book and the film and refutes many of her harshest critics. In addition, her essay collection, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1984), surveys the political thought that informs The Color Purple and, most important, contains the essay “Writing The Color Purple.” Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. Anthony Appiah’s Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993) is not only one of the first places to look for reviews and essays on Walker in general, but also a compendium of some of the more insightful essays on The Color Purple alone. Michele Wallace’s Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (1991) contains her essay “Blues for Mr. Spielberg,” which contrasts the print and film versions of the novel. Wallace creates a careful critique of the novel’s virtues as a feminist/womanist text, as well as its flaws as a prescriptive for African Americans’ concerns, gendered or otherwise.

Colter, Cyrus (b. January 8, 1910, Noblesville, Indiana; d. May 2002, Evanston, Illinois) Novelist, short-story writer, and poet Cyrus Colter started writing rather late in his life—1970—but produced a number of novels and short stories in the next quarter-century that stand among the most respectable of the period. Due to his reliance upon dense prose at a time when the Black Arts Movement and its Black Aesthetics were demanding that African American authors write with clarity, Colter did not receive as much attention for his work as he deserved. Nevertheless, the Northwestern University professor emeritus continued to write until his death in 2002 and to serve as a member of the Illinois Commerce Commission.

Many of Colter’s works are set in Chicago and, like the works of earlier Chicago author Richard Wright, fall into the realm of naturalist, social-realist fiction. Colter’s first book, The Beach Umbrella (1970), comprises fourteen stories set in Chicago in which the characters try to find love and self-worth through material possessions rather than self-examination, ultimately leading them to disappointment and despair. It was chosen for publication after it won the first Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction in 1970. It also won awards from the Chicago Friends of Literature and the Society of Midland Authors.^* Colter’s first novel, The River of Eros (1972) is the story of Clotilda Pilgrim, who owns a boardinghouse and takes care of her grandchildren, Lester and Addie. Through Clotilda’s encounters with her grandchildren and boarders, she discovers that her difficulties in life are due to her unwillingness to confront her past, in which she had an illicit affair that eventually produced her daughter and grandchildren. As with the characters in The Beach Umbrella, Clotilda is undone by her lack of self-examination.

The Hippodrome (1973) is an allegorical novel that compares the nature of sexuality and the structure of religion, specifically their implicit complementarity. It is the story of Jackson Yeager, a writer of religious pamphlets and essays, who, while carrying his wife’s head in a sack and evading the police, is offered refuge by Bea, who runs a hippodrome in which African Americans hold sexual orgies for white onlookers. Yeager is forced to choose whether to become part of the spectacle or risk capture. He is eventually ejected from the hippodrome and forced to consider how much of his life and experience has been real and how much the product of fantasy and subconscious anxieties. Night Studies (1980), winner of the Carl Sandburg Award, focuses primarily upon John Calvin Knight, the leader of the Black People’s Congress; the wealthy black woman Mary Dee Adkins; and Griselda Graves, a young woman who is unknowingly passing for white. Their intertwined stories, which form a long section recounting African American history beginning with the Atlantic slave trade, reveal the interdependence of the “races” in the United States as well as the nation’s inability to escape its past with regard to racial issues.

A Chocolate Soldier (1988) resembles Night Studies to the extent that it attempts to discover why Africans were enslaved and scattered throughout the world. It is an experimental work, playing with narrative voices and time shifts as a way of matching the novel’s query into the collective African American past. It concerns “Cager” Lee, who kills a rich white woman and spends the rest of the novel seeking redemption for his anger and confusion as a black man. The Amoralists and Other Stories (1990) comprises eighteen stories set in Chicago and revolving around African Americans of different classes who must make crucial decisions that will either leave them free or trapped by their pasts. Colter won the Triquarterly Award in 1991, partly for his work in The Amoralists. City of Light (1993) is the story of Paul Kessey, a wealthy African American who travels to Paris to found the Coterie, a movement with Black Nationalist aims similar to those of the Négritude movement (see separate entry) and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) of the 1910s through 1930s. The novel criticizes Kessey’s dream as being guided by his sense of guilt and self-hatred.

Colter has been the subject of a few scholarly studies in major literary journals. A special section of the autumn 1991 issue of Callaloo was devoted to Colter’s extant fiction; it includes two analytical articles by Gilton Gregory Cross and Reginald Gibbons, a bibliography, and an excerpt from City of Light. Key articles include: Graham Clarke, “Beyond Realism: Recent Black Fiction and the Language of the ’Real Thing,’” BALF 16, no. 1 (spring 1982);

Combahee River Collective The Combahee River Collective was a group of black feminists who began meeting in 1974 to formulate ways of engaging in “political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements.”^* Some of their members include critics Barbara Smith, Sharon Page Ritchie, Cheryl Clarke, Margo Okizawa Rey, Gloria Akasha Hull, and Demita Frazier. Their foundational essay, “A Black Feminist Statement,” also known as the “Combahee River Collective Statement,” was first published in 1977 and has since been reprinted in many different womanist and feminist anthologies. It gained some of its best exposure in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), edited by one of its members, Barbara Smith. According to Duchess Harris, the Collective’s activities included generating support for Kenneth Edelin, a black doctor in Boston arrested for performing a legal abortion; defending Ella Ellison, a black woman wrongfully accused of murder; picketing the Third World Workers Coalition to see that black laborers would be hired to work on a high school in Boston’s black community; and bringing local and national attention to the murder of twelve African American women in the Boston area in 1979.^* The Collective eventually drifted apart largely due to personal differences and geographic distances that grew as the members’ careers evolved. Most of the former members continue the same sort of political work that the Collective initiated from academia.

The Collective’s statement is as much a declaration of political aims and goals as it is a response to the sexism and homophobia, both overt and covert, of the Black Power and Black Arts movements and the black middle class, as well as the racism and sexism of America in general. As the Collective succinctly put it, their politics defined them as “actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression.” They saw “as [their] particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking” and that black and other “Third World” women (that is, women of color) suffered from all of the major systems of oppression. To achieve these goals, the members of the collective wished to develop an antiracist politics to counter the racism within many white feminist organizations, and an antisexist politics to counter the sexism of black and white men. They wished to do so, however, without either the biological determinism or sexual separatism found within some radical lesbian feminist groups. Instead, the Collective wished to “struggle together with black men against racism, while … also struggl[ing] with black men about sexism” as they “examined the multilayered texture of black women’s lives.”^*

The Combahee River Collective’s statement has become one of the crucial texts in defining black feminism since 1970 and therefore stands as a major pillar of many contemporary African American writers’ and critics’ work, as Elliott Butler-Evans has demonstrated.^* The crucial links between sexism, racism, and homophobia that the Collective identified resonate in authors as different in style and scope as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Bebe Moore Campbell, Gloria Naylor, Sapphire, Ntozake Shange, April Sinclair, Tina McElroy Ansa, Audre Lorde, and Terry McMillan, among many others. Also see the separate entry on womanism.

Cooper, J. California (birthdate unknown, Berkeley, California) With her first short-story collection, A Piece of Mine (1984), playwright, short-story writer, and novelist J. (Joan) California Cooper immediately garnered attention as part of the New Black Renaissance (or “New Literature”) of the 1980s. Cooper has since split her energies largely between novels and short fiction, publishing five additional collections of the latter, although she also continues practicing her first love, writing plays. Cooper’s strength is the short story, although she has also published three novels, Family (1991), In Search of Satisfaction (1994), and The Wake of the Wind (1998). Cooper’s stories are folksy and intimate morality tales that compare favorably to the best work of such progenitors as Zora Neale Hurston and particularly such peers as Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman. Cooper’s narrators’ words should be read aloud; she carefully writes the cadences of her characters’ natural speech into the narrative, stripping it of layers of artifice. Cooper’s protagonists, usually women, struggle toward self-discovery in the face of extensive abuse from the men in their lives and the criticism of families and friends who fail to comprehend and appreciate the protagonists’ complex identities as women. It is only through processes of self-discovery, whether through religion and spirituality, sexuality, or physical removal from harmful environments and relationships, that her protagonists are able to overcome their situations.

A Piece of Mine comprises twelve stories set in a small town in which the characters, almost exclusively African American, overcome personal hardships by gaining a new moral compass. As in many of Cooper’s stories, the narrators are mature women in the community who act as its sources of wisdom and common sense. The collection Homemade Love (1986), which won a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award in 1989, comprises thirteen short stories. All of them focus upon the difficulties that the female protagonists encounter as they make the transition from adolescence into young womanhood, adulthood, then maturity. Each finds herself following a path similar to that taken by her own parents, with each generation losing a sense of its need for domestic and spiritual fulfillment. Some Soul to Keep (1987) consists of five stories set in the deep South. Each is written in the same vein and with the same themes as A Piece of Mine, with foci upon the centrality of family, a strong spiritual life, and a clear moral direction for the characters as they mature, marry, and experience loss and heartbreak and redemption.

Cooper’s first novel, Family (1991) follows this pattern as well, with a marked difference: it is a neo–slave narrative (see separate entry) that helps illustrate how slavery made the pursuit of all the typical goals of her stories’ characters—family, love, security, and spirituality—either extremely difficult or impossible. Simultaneously, Cooper reiterates that enslaved Africans were far from simple passive victims of slavery; they found innumerable ways of deceiving slaveholders so that they could survive and escape the institution’s physical and psychological holds. Cooper manages to incorporate elements from Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894; the plot device of switched white and black infants), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987; the theme of infanticide), and other novellas and novels about slavery, but in the most seamless way possible. As the novel’s title implies, family is all; it is narrated by the spirit of Clora, who escaped slavery by committing suicide and attempting to poison her children. Some of her half-black, half-white children escape slavery by passing; Always, who is too dark to pass, endures the physical and sexual horrors of being an enslaved woman. Eventually, Always bears children who grow up to enjoy freedom, only to find themselves in a nation that still embraces racism. The novel is more pessimistic than many of Cooper’s earlier and subsequent works, but it is also one of her best.

Cooper’s next two story collections, The Matter Is Life (1991) and Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime (1995), continue the work of her earlier short stories. The latter is arguably the stronger text, due to Cooper’s renewed focus upon romance in long-term relationships. Cooper’s second novel, In Search of Satisfaction (1994), is a moral allegory set in the fictional town of Yoville, New York, from the postbellum years through the 1920s. The children of Josephus Josephus, a former slave, and his rich white mistress seek their identities between the hedonistic and spiritually bankrupt world defined by the rich Krupt and Befoe families and the pursuit of God and salvation. Cooper’s third novel, The Wake of the Wind (1998), is another historical novel set in the postbellum era. Its protagonists, Mordecai and Lifee, are former slaves married under bondage, who find love in the postemancipation period and struggle to set up a stable homestead in the face of the brutalities of lynching and segregation during and after Reconstruction. The Future Has a Past (2000) is a story collection about women who battle low self-esteem as they seek love and fulfillment, despite having been told repeatedly that they are worthy of neither.

Scholarly attention to Cooper’s work has been extensive. She is the subject of the following books and book chapters: Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu, Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered (2000); Wolfgang Karrer and Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, eds., The African American Short Story 1970–1990: A Collection of Critical Essays (1997); Barbara J. Marshall, “Kitchen Table Talk: J. California Cooper’s Use of Nommo—Female Bonding and Transcendence,” in Language and Literature in the African American Imagination, ed. Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay (1992); a relevant journal article is E. Shelley Reid, “Beyond Morrison and Walker: Looking Good and Looking Forward in Contemporary Black Women’s Stories,” AAR 34, no. 2 (Summer 2000).

Corregidora Gayl Jones’s first novel, originally published in 1975, is frequently considered her best and most complex. It stands as one of the finest novels to emerge in the 1970s, and certainly among the best that African American women authors have produced in recent decades. Ashraf Rushdy classifies Corregidora as one of many neo–slave narratives (see separate entry) published in the wake of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), which many African American authors and critics condemned for its problematic and frequently racist depiction of a major figure in African American history. Aside from a number of declamations against the novel, many African American authors responded via fiction to foreground the degree to which whites have repeatedly mediated and subsumed African Americans’ voices and views.

Corregidora tells the story of blues singer Ursa Corregidora who, when she is but five years old, is pulled aside by her grandmother and told how Ursa’s grandmother and great-grandmother were raped and forced to act as concubines for the same slavemaster, Corregidora, the family’s namesake. Through his acts, Corregidora is both Ursa’s grandfather and great-grandfather. If the horror of this situation weren’t enough, Ursa discovers that many of the African American men she knows share some of Corregidora’s contempt for women, if not his precise transgressions. Both sets of knowledge and experience inform the blues and show, by extension, the breadth and depth of African Americans’ pain and the way it is passed on through the generations, usually by women, and often against their will.

Critical treatments of Corregidora are both plentiful and wonderfully sophisticated, with a flood of articles and critical essays published in the late 1990s and early 2000s alone, perhaps due to the publicity surrounding the death of Gayl’s husband in 1997. Most recent is Gil Zehava Hochberg’s “Mother, Memory, History: Maternal Genealogies in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle,” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 2 (Summer 2003), which uses Jones’s and Schwarz-Bart’s novels to show how mother-daughter relationships are foregrounded in contemporary African American and African women’s writing in general. Hochberg’s article is based in part on Madhu Dubey’s “Gayl Jones and the Matrilineal Metaphor of Tradition,” found in Signs 20, no. 2 (Winter 1995). Maryemma Graham’s “Living the Legacy: Pain, Desire and Narrative Time in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora” focuses upon Ursa’s association of sex with pain due to her ancestors’ experiences, while Ashraf H. A. Rushdy’s “‘Relate Sexual to Historical’: Race, Resistance, and Desire in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora,” AAR 24, no. 2 (Summer 2000), examines the way in which Ursa Corregidora becomes her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother—and how they become her—through hearing their stories, a common motif in Jones’s work. Innovative readings on the question of the (un)reliability of memory, testimonial, and silence in the making of history within the novel may be found in Elizabeth Yukins, “Bastard Daughters and the Possession of History in Corregidora and Paradise,” Signs 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2002); Adam McKible, “‘These Are the Facts of the Darky’s History’: Thinking History and Reading Names in Four African American Texts,” AAR 28, no. 2 (Summer 1994); Amy S. Gottfried, “Angry Arts: Silence, Speech, and Song in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora” AAR 28, no. 4 (Winter 1994); Richard Hardack, “Making Generations and Bearing Witness: Violence and Orality in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora” Prospects 24 (1999); and Jennifer Cognard-Black, “‘I Said Nothing’: The Rhetoric of Silence and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora” NWSA Journal 13, no. 1 (Spring 2001).

Crouch, Stanley (b. 1945, Los Angeles, California) Stanley Crouch is best known as an exceedingly intelligent, yet occasionally truculent critic of social issues, music—especially jazz—and literature. He is also one of the most influential and devoted aficionados and critics of jazz music to emerge in the last quarter of the twentieth century. A longtime contributor to New York’s Village Voice, the Los Angeles native has published three books that collect essays he has written for the Voice, the New York Daily News, and many other periodicals. These include Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979–1989 (1991); The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It, 1990–1994 (1997); and Always in Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives (1998). His social-issue and jazz criticism have earned him a number of awards, the most prominent being a MacArthur Fellowship (1993). Like Harlem Renaissance journalist, author, and critic George S. Schuyler before him, Crouch is nothing if not iconoclastic, provocative, and perpetually audacious, but he is neither boring nor pat.

Crouch’s famous contrariness began in the early 1970s, when he was among the many young artists influenced by the Black Arts Movement. His first volume of poetry, Ain’t No Ambulances for No Nigguhs Tonight (1972), is full of complex verses that demonstrate the influence of modernism’s avant-garde. Some of the verses fit the militant mode that Crouch later rejected and actively condemned as he established his career as a critic, as the volume’s title indicates, but remain complex and subtle.

In 2000, Crouch published his long-awaited first novel, Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing. The novel centers upon the relationship between Carla, a white jazz singer from South Dakota, and her tempestuous relationship with Maxwell, an African American saxophone player. Carla’s central problem is that she wishes to be fully steeped in the blues idiom, but the myth of “race” stands in her way. The novel’s course takes it through New York literary society and disquisitions on the problems of racial ideologies.

Reviews of Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome have been both limited in number and mixed, at best; no critical articles studying the novel have yet appeared. Michael Thelwell’s review in African American Review was both an admittedly ad hominem attack upon Crouch and a complete dismissal of the novel, save for a few “engaging, original, and skillfully drawn characters” and “the occasional passage of inspired, nicely achieved prose” among “a Sahara of arid, malformed” writing.^* The anonymous reviewer for The Economist judged the text more a “passionate polemic” than a novel, one that “captures America’s particular zest and, even in discontented times, its underlying confidence.”^* The review in Library Journal is perhaps most judicious; it notes that “Crouch is at his best when writing about [jazz],” that his “descriptions have a flow that makes the reader feel as though he or she is listening to a blues band or gospel choir,” and that “some of the dialog is talky and the main characters distant.”^* Overall, then, it may be fair to say that critics have deemed Crouch’s debut as inauspicious, so far as its artistic quality is concerned. Given the many enemies Crouch has created over the years, though, it is doubtful whether any future novels, which may very well improve upon the first, will receive the credit they might deserve. Nonetheless, Crouch’s reputation as an incisive, if blunt, critic of the contemporary African American cultural scene is assured.

Cultural Nationalism In African American intellectual history, cultural nationalism asserts the intrinsic value of African American culture. It frequently assumes that African Americans and whites have separate values, cultures, histories, and ways of living in and perceiving the world and that art and other cultural expressions are clear reflections of these differences. In addition, a few cultural nationalists regard African American culture as superior to “white” culture, whether implicitly or explicitly.

Although African American cultural nationalism is commonly connected to the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, the more recent form is, like those struggles, a culmination of many years—decades—of theorizing about art and literature. Some of the most heavily anthologized essays of the Harlem Renaissance era, including Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), Alain Locke’s “Youth Speaks” (1925), and Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937), are nothing if not calls for or records of nationalistic feeling and a degree of cultural pride among African American artists. Accordingly, these same essays were included in The Black Aesthetic (1971), edited by Addison Gayle Jr., to undergird that volume’s theoretical basis.

Accordingly, cultural nationalism since 1970 has found a number of expressions inextricably tied to the Black Aesthetic that emerged in the 1960s. This bent owes as much to earlier theories as it does to an often pungent strain of vulgar Marxism. In fact, one of the most straightforward, if controversial definitions of this genus of black cultural nationalism, Maulana Karenga’s essay “Black Cultural Nationalism” (1968), was also included in The Black Aesthetic. In that essay, Karenga argues vociferously against the validity of the notion of “art for art’s sake” for the black artist, since “black art, like everything else in the black community, must respond positively to the reality of revolution.”^* Art must be “useful,” which means that it must correspond with the black community and serve its needs, not those of the individual artist, whom Karenga insists must be a “personality” within the larger collective rather than expressing his or her “individualism,” which is a luxury that, in fact, “does not exist,” since all artists are part of a larger cultural context. Karenga goes on to dismiss the blues as being irrelevant in face of the coming revolution, due to its alleged nostalgia.^*

Not surprisingly, Karenga has taken a sound critical drubbing for the last comment, but he was neither the only critic to hold that opinion, nor the only one to come under fire for it. Karenga and others sought to tie African American culture to sub-Saharan Africa through a Marxist lens in order to stress a communal bond. If their glee toward the prospect of an impending revolution seems misplaced now, we would do well to remember that the climate of violence and unrest in the late 1960s made a physical revolution seem not only likely but inevitable within a matter of years. Even those cultural nationalist critics who were not as strident as Karenga made cases for the differences between “white” and “black” culture and reified the right of African American authors not to serve a “universal” goal of appealing to a wider—read: whiter—mass audience.

To attempt to devise a complete bibliographic record of discussions of black cultural nationalism here would be foolish indeed, as that task would require listing the majority of African American literary criticism published in the last thirty years. On the other hand, one may safely offer a few exemplary texts in a broad stylistic and contextual range that will inevitably provide links to a larger body of texts. The Black Aesthetic is, of course, the best single-volume contemporary reflection of 1970s cultural nationalism, but it is out of print and not readily available to most readers, unless they have access to university libraries. One recent anthology, however, collects many essays that track the arguments for and against black cultural nationalism: African American Literary Theory (2000), edited by Winston Napier. Napier collects essays by virtually every major African American literary critic of the twentieth century, but strangely, Karenga is not represented, although many of the authors included in The Black Aesthetic are.

The reader with access to a better library possessing extensive journal holdings should attempt to find and peruse the later years of Negro Digest, renamed Black World (1970–76), which was the premiere forum for African American cultural and literary criticism after Hoyt Fuller assumed the editorial reins in 1961. Many of the essays in The Black Aesthetic, in fact, were originally published in Negro Digest and Black World.

* Charles Henry Rowell, introduction to Making Callaloo: Twenty-five Years of Black Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002), xix.

* Patrician Liggins Hill, preface to Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), xxxiii.

* Julia Eichelberger, review of Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, ed. Patrician Liggins Hill, Mississippi Quarterly 53, no. 1 (March 1999): 111.

* Chester Fontenot, review of Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, ed. Patrician Liggins Hill, CLA Journal 40, no. 4 (June 1998): 477–93.

* M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, Seventh Edition (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), page 29.

* James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922), 9.

* Chester Fontenot, review of Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, ed. Patrician Liggins Hill, CLA Journal 40, no. 4 (June 1998): 483.

* Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” reprinted in Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations Between Women and Men, ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Paula S. Rothenberg, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1984), 202.

* Duchess Harris, “‘All of Who I Am in the Same Place’: The Combahee River Collective,” Womanist Theory and Research 3, no. 1 (1999); http://www.uga.edu/~womanist/harris3.1.htm.

* Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 202, 203, 206, 205.

* Elliott Butler-Evans, Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 39–41.

* Michael Thelwell, review of Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing, by Stanley Crouch, AAR 36, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 171.

* Review of Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing, by Stanley Crouch, The Economist, 15 July 2000, 14.

* Ellen Flexman, review of Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing, by Stanley Crouch, Library Journal 125, no. 6 (April 2000): 129.

* Maulana Karenga,“Black Cultural Nationalism,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle Jr. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 32.