The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction

Haley, Alex (b. August 11, 1921, Ithaca, New York; d. February 21, 1992, Seattle, Washington) Alex Haley is best known for two major contributions to African American literature: The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), which has become perhaps the most important and influential autobiography of an African American in the last fifty years; and Roots (1976), a novel based upon Haley’s own genealogy. Roots was a critically acclaimed best-seller upon its publication. The following year, it also won the Pulitzer Prize and became a major phenomenon when it was transformed into the first of two television miniseries on the ABC network. The Roots miniseries became one of the highest-rated shows ever to air on television, with between one-third to nearly one-half of the American population tuning in each week, and won countless accolades. Surveys and polls taken in the succeeding decades name Roots as one of the best and most successful miniseries of all time. It also stirred a national interest in genealogy, especially among African Americans. This interest only became stronger when Roots: The Next Generation, the sequel to the first miniseries, was produced in 1979.

Roots is the saga of Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka from what is now Gambia, who is kidnapped from his African home and enslaved in Virginia. Kunta Kinte’s adherence to the beliefs and traditions of his African upbringing, as well as his determination to pass them on to his descendants (especially his daughter, Kizzy), were inspirational odes to the power of black pride, which is where both the book and the series gained much of their appeal to African Americans. Haley was later criticized for sloppy historical research in the book and accused of plagiarizing substantial portions of it. Nevertheless, no other single work of African American literature has reached an audience as great as the book and miniseries’ combined numbers.

Haley also wrote a novella, A Different Kind of Christmas (1988), in which a slaveholder’s son learns to despise slavery to the point of joining the abolitionist movement. Another novel, Alex Haley’s Queen (1993), was left unfinished at Haley’s death but later edited for publication by David Stevens.

Hamilton, Virginia (b. March 12, 1936, Yellow Springs, Ohio; d. February 19, 2002, Yellow Springs, Ohio) Novelist Virginia Hamilton was one of the most prolific and influential authors of juvenile fiction in African American literary history. She was the author of several modern classics of fiction for young people: Zeely (1967), The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974), and The People Could Fly (1985, republished 2000; retold African American folktales). Hamilton’s reputation rests upon her ability to create richly poetic juvenile fiction for and about African Americans, with emphases upon the possibilities for survival and success despite the burden of racist discrimination and upon characters who are fully three-dimensional and complex.

The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), which won the Newbery Award in 1971, tells the story of Junior Brown, an obese musical prodigy, and his fellow eighth-grader, Buddy Clark, who protects Junior from many of the persecutions of his world. M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974), winner of the National Book Award, the Newbery Medal, and the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award (all 1974), is the captivating story of young M. C., who wishes to save his family’s home from destruction by the mining company that is destroying the land around him. Justice and Her Brothers (1978), Dustland (1980), and The Gathering (1980) form a science fiction trilogy centered upon a young girl, Justice, and her twin brothers, all of whom attempt to save the Earth from an evil force.

Other works by Hamilton include: The Girl Who Spun Gold (2000); Bluish (1999); Second Cousins (1998); The Bells of Christmas (1997); A Ring of Tricksters (1997); When Birds Could Talk and Bats Could Sing (1996); Her Stories (1996); Jaguarundi (1995); Plain City (1993); Drylongso (1992); The All Jahdu Story Book (1988); The Mystery of Drear House: The Conclusion of the Dies Drear Chronicle (1987); A White Romance (1987); A Little Love (1984); Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982); The House of Dies Drear (1968). Time Pieces: The Book of Times (2002; semi-autobiographical fiction about a black family’s migration) was published posthumously. Among her many awards, Hamilton also won a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant in 1995.

Scholarly work on Hamilton is extensive; she is among the most frequently cited African American authors in her chosen genre. Key books and book chapters include: Nina Mikkelson, Virginia Hamilton (1994); Millicent Lenz, “Virginia Hamilton’s Justice Trilogy: Exploring the Frontiers of Consciousness,” in African-American Voices in Young Adult Literature: Tradition, Transition, Transformation, ed. Karen Patricia Smith (1994), 293–310. The entire Spring 1998 issue of African American Review (32, no. 1) is dedicated to children’s literature, with significant attention paid to Hamilton’s work; that issue should be consulted first. Scholarly articles include: Roberta Seelinger Trites, “‘I Double Never Ever Never Lie to My Chil’ren’: Inside People in Virginia Hamilton’s Narratives,” AAR 32, no. 1 (Spring 1998); Gail Sidonie Sobat, “If the Ghost Be There, Then Am I Crazy?: An Examination of Ghosts in Virginia Hamilton’s Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush and Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 20, no. 4 (Winter 1995–1996); Janice Hartwick Dressel, “The Legacy of Ralph Ellison in Virginia Hamilton’s Justice Trilogy,” English Journal 42 (November 1984).

Hardy, James Earl (b. 1966, Brooklyn, New York) Novelist and poet James Earl Hardy’s debut novel, B-Boy Blues: A Seriously Sexy, Fiercely Funny, Black-on-Black Love Story (1994), won resoundingly positive reviews and wide attention for its engaging, humorous, yet unflinchingly honest portrayal of black gay males’ lives. Although Hardy has been compared to author E. Lynn Harris, another popular black gay author who writes about black, middle-class, closeted gay men, those connections are virtually the only ones the authors share. Whereas Harris’s novels are divided between “straight” and gay characters and written for a mass “straight” audience, Hardy’s focus squarely on black gay men, especially the “B-Boys,” the streetwise, break dancing, members of hip-hop culture, and Caucasians are relegated to the margins of the novels’ worlds. B-Boy Blues’s protagonist, Mitchell Crawford, desires and eventually enters into a relationship with one such B-Boy, Raheim, who represents the height of masculinity for him. The novel reveals the complexities within African American culture along lines of sexuality, class, and gender as Mitchell must come to terms with both his lover’s machismo and the son he brings with him.

Although it was not a bestseller, B-Boy Blues was popular enough to warrant the creation of a series of additional books based upon Mitchell’s experiences. Second Time Around (1996) picks up where B-Boy Blues ends, with Mitchell now deeply ensconced in his relationship with Raheim. The novel also delves further into the analyses of the conflicts within African American communities about gays, particularly gay men, especially the silencing and blatant discrimination they encounter. If Only for One Nite (1997) finds Mitchell reminiscing about the affair he had with Warren, his high school gym coach, during his class reunion. These memories turn into a rekindled affair in the present. Hardy continues Mitchell’s saga in The Day Eazy-E Died: A B-Boy Blues Novel (2001) and Love the One You’re With (2002).

No scholarly articles on Hardy’s novels exist thus far, but since he is a major figure in contemporary gay fiction, that is sure to change. Hardy is profiled in Robert L. Pela, “James Earl Hardy,” The Advocate: The National Gay and Lesbian Newsmagazine, September 17, 1996; and interviewed in Greg Herren, “Frank Words from James Earl Hardy about Racism, Homophobia, Hip-Hop, and Shopping at Macy’s,” Lambda Book Report 10, no. 2 (September 2001).

Harris, E. Lynn (b. 1956, Little Rock, Arkansas) A former computer salesman for IBM, E. Lynn Harris began publishing his popular series of novels with Invisible Life (1994). Each of Harris’s novels has since hit the best-seller lists and sold at least 100,000 copies, thereby making him one of the most popular African American authors of the 1990s and 2000s. All of Harris’s novels focus on similar themes: romantic relationships, whether between African American men and women or between African American men; secrets within those relationships, particularly secrets regarding hidden sexual desires or orientations; the construction of masculinity and (false) gender identities; and color consciousness among African Americans. The content of his novels is semiautobiographical; Harris discovered he was bisexual in college but remained in the closet for many years for fear of losing his employment.

Harris’s novels are typically populated by middle-class, African American professionals and athletes who find their personal and romantic lives troubled by secrets from the past. In Invisible Life and its sequels, Just As I Am (1995) and Abide With Me (1999), protagonist Raymond Tyler, a former college football star and successful lawyer, is forced to confront his own bisexuality as past men he has slept with come back to haunt him as he tries to maintain his relationship with his fiancée, Nicole. After a great deal of consternation, Tyler chooses his male lovers and, eventually, a gay identity over his heterosexual life, but in the process his struggles raise a number of questions about the way African American communities deal or fail to deal with the fact of homosexuality within social and religious institutions. In And This Too Shall Pass (1996), Harris again explores sexual identity but also addresses substance abuse and the treatment of women in contemporary African American communities.

Despite the challenge his novels pose in foregrounding these questions, they occasionally suffer from a degree of sameness in basic plot structure and a tendency to classify characters too quickly into neat stereotypes. The sequels to Invisible Life and Not a Day Goes By (2000) particularly reflect this problem, although Harris attempted to include slightly different (but still black, middle-class, professional) characters in If This World Were Mine (1997). Nevertheless, Harris’s largely African American audience is attracted to his novels because of their reliably consistent exploration of African American sexuality and sexual identities. In a period in which the rapid and epidemic spread of AIDS among African Americans has forced many communities within the larger group to ask hard questions about sexuality, Harris’s novels help answer some of those questions. Harris’s reward, beyond impressive sales, has been mixed, but overall positive reviews. Most reservations about his work have to do with “stilted dialogue” and charges that Harris’s plots are “soap opera material.”^* On the other hand, Harris has also been commended for creating “a body of diverse characters, a group of friends and family members who admirably demonstrate a continuity of love and support,”^* and his undeniable ability to expose his readers to the complexities of gay men’s lives. Thus far, however, Harris’s novels have not received notable scholarly treatment.

Harris has also published a short story in the collection Got to Be Real: Four Original Love Stories (2000) and coedited, with Marita Golden, Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing (2002), an anthology benefiting the Hurston/Wright Foundation and collecting a wide variety of African American fiction, almost all of it from the 1980s and 1990s. Authors gathered in the anthology include Bertice Berry, Bebe Moore Campbell, Lorene Cary, Pearl Cleage, J. California Cooper, Edwidge Danticat, Eric Jerome Dickey, David Haynes, Ravi Howard, Mitchell Jackson, R. M. Johnson, Terry McMillan, Walter Mosley, Danzy Senna, John Edgar Wideman, Shay Youngblood, and the editors.

Haynes, David (b. 1955, St. Louis, Missouri) Since the early 1990s, Minnesotan teacher and novelist David Haynes has published a diverse series of novels that take a witty, often satiric view of contemporary African American culture, especially as lived among the black bourgeoisie. All of his novels are narratives of self-discovery and growth, with a healthy dose of irony. The first, Right By My Side (1993) is the story of African American teen Marshall Field Finney, whose mother left him and his father to discover herself, which led in turn to the emergence of Marshall’s own identity and will. The novel was cited by the American Library Association as one of the Best Books of the Year for Young Adults and won the Minnesota Voices Project award. In Somebody Else’s Mama (1995), Paula and Al Johnson, a middle-class African American couple living in an all-black town in Missouri, find themselves trying to cope with the reemergence of Al’s elderly mother into their busy lives. In the process, the family is forced to deal with its fragmentation (linked to the situation of the larger African American community) as its fortunes have changed, thereby resolving some generational differences. Live at Five (1996) is a satire concerning the fortunes of African American TV newscaster Brandon Wilson, whose condescending supervisors send him into the poorest community in St. Paul, Minnesota, to create a superficial report on the people living therein. When Brandon falls in love with one of the residents, the novel takes on some of the elements of romance, but at its heart it offers a scathing indictment of American media when Brandon’s new love, Nita, undermines the original purpose of the report.

Heathens, also published in 1996, is a series of vignettes told from several different points of view within the middle-class, African American Gabriel family as it tackles a number of personal and familial crises. It also won the Minnesota Voices Project award. The Gumma Wars (1997) is the first volume of Haynes’s series of fiction for young adults. It centers upon the adventures and travails of a multiethnic middle-school clique, the West Seventh Wildcats; Business as Usual (1998) is the series’ next installment. All American Dream Dolls (1997) is a comedic farce akin to the previous year’s Live at Five, with a young African American advertising executive, Athena Deneen Wilkerson, taking a role similar to Brandon Wilson’s in the earlier work. After a number of personal crises, Wilkerson returns to her mother’s house, only to find that her family’s dynamics have changed as both her mother and her adolescent, beauty-queen half-sister Ciara make life extremely difficult. These difficulties are compounded when Deneen becomes enamored of a beauty pageant coach whose career seems to depend upon Ciara’s failure.

Haynes has also coedited Welcome to Your Life: Writings for the Heart of Young America (1998) with Julie Landsman. The anthology collects short stories—fictional and nonfictional—about growing up in the 1990s. One scholarly article has been written on Haynes: Daylanme K. English, “Somebody Else’s Foremother: David Haynes and Zora Neale Hurston,” AAR 33, no. 2 (Summer 1999). He was also picked as one of Granta’s “Best Young American Writers” in 1996.

Heard, Nathan (b. November 7, 1936, Newark, New Jersey) Novelist and English professor Nathan Heard is one of numerous writers who began publishing in the late 1960s and early 1970s and who have been almost entirely neglected in the intervening decades. Heard’s first novel, Howard Street (1968) is a gritty classic of urban realism heavily influenced by Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Norman Mailer. A high school dropout who later served time in prison for armed robbery, Heard established a place for himself among the most important writers to emerge from the 1960s in spite, or perhaps because of these challenges. In prison he began to read hungrily works by Wright, Baldwin, Mailer, Langston Hughes, Jean Genet, Malcolm X, and Amiri Baraka, among others.^* Inspired by these writers’ examples and a desire to make a living as a professional writer, Heard began writing Howard Street in prison in 1963 but was unable to find a publisher until 1968. Upon its appearance, Howard Street became a best-seller; it has gone through some fifteen printings since its initial publication, although most of its sales were generated in its first few years in print. Howard Street gained both favorable and unfavorable notice for its nonjudgmental, even favorable portrayal of African American street life, particularly the shadow economy: pimps, sex workers, drug addicts, winos, hustlers, and so on. The novel’s—and Heard’s—refusal to judge the characters’ morality led to several harshly negative reviews, but it was generally received as an authentic portrayal of the environment familiar to millions of urban African Americans.

Heard’s newfound celebrity and the growing black studies movement in American universities led to appointments at Fresno State College in California (now Fresno State University) and Rutgers, where he wrote and published his second novel, To Reach a Dream (1972). An example of urban realism similar to Howard Street, To Reach a Dream tells the story of Bartholomew (Bart) Kedar Enos, who aspires to be a hustler, gigolo, and street celebrity, all to realize his manhood. As in Howard Street, Heard focuses successfully upon depicting the language, sounds, smells, and harsh realities of urban African America, although his character development sometimes leaves much to be desired. A Cold Fire Burning (1974) takes on a different subject, albeit one familiar within African American fiction: interracial sexual tensions and unions and the degree to which they symbolize both the worst excesses of racism and the greatest possibilities across racial lines. When Shadows Fall (1977) centers upon the illicit drug trade and its effects upon African American communities. Heard is particularly concerned with the extent to which the drug trade fuels cynicism and self-interest at a time when African Americans could use a greater communal consciousness. As Richard Yarborough notes, however, When Shadows Fall went almost completely unnoticed when it was initially published, coming as it did from the soon-defunct pulp publisher Playboy Press; it is extremely difficult to find. Heard’s most recent novel, House of Slammers (1983), however, garnered considerable praise and notice from such major African American reviewers and authors as Mel Watkins, Cecil Brown, and John Edgar Wideman upon initial publication. Based largely upon Heard’s experiences in prison, House of Slammers is one of the most brutal depictions of the American penal system and its crushing effects upon the individual ever published, and one of the more remarkable African American novels of the early 1980s. Nevertheless, it soon went out of print and is also somewhat difficult to obtain.

Critical assessments of Heard’s novels have been sparse, to say the least. Save for contemporary reviews of his novels and entries in reference books, the only significant critical assessments of Heard’s work are Eric Beaumont, “The Nathan Heard Interviews,” AAR 28, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 395–410; and a chapter on Howard Street in W. Lawrence Hogue, The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Culture, and Theory (2003). Both sources, however, are fairly solid; Beaumont’s interview with the author, while wide ranging, focuses directly upon his literary works and their development, while Hogue’s study of Howard Street is a definitive appreciation of the novel’s challenge to middle-class African American values. No one, however, has yet studied Heard’s later novels in depth. Howard Street, To Reach a Dream, and A Cold Fire Burning are available from Amok Books, although only A Cold Fire Burning is in print.

Herron, Carolivia (b. July 22, 1947, Washington, D.C.) Novelist and children’s literature author Carolivia Herron attracted national attention in 1998 for her children’s book, Nappy Hair (1997), about a young black protagonist who learns to appreciate her natural hair texture. It was not the book or its subject matter that caused a furor at first but rather the fact that a white teacher in New York City opted to read it to her predominantly black classroom. A number of the school’s parents decried a situation they perceived as a condescending white teacher reading a racist text to her charges, despite Herron’s vociferous plaints to the contrary. The teacher was eventually dismissed from her position. The controversy brought issues regarding self-hatred and the troubled history of the term “nappy” to the fore of discussions within African American communities. Although the controversy was ultimately short-lived, it overshadowed Herron’s earlier achievement, the novel Thereafter Johnnie (1991), which received strongly positive reviews upon its initial publication. The novel’s protagonist, Johnnie Snowdon, endures life as a mute until puberty, when she begins to discover the history of the incestuous relationship between her mother and grandfather that resulted in her birth and that torments her existence. Her quest for truth crosses the bildungsroman form with the themes of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975) and Hal Bennett’s Lord of Dark Places (1970), both of which use incest both in literal and metaphorical ways to explore African American history.

Hip-hop/rap Inarguably, hip-hop culture and rap music are among the most critical influences upon African American authors born after the early to mid-1960s. It is little wonder, in fact, that this grouping is often called the “hip-hop generation,” since it either invented, innovated, or embraced both the music and the culture, which ranges from dance (“break dancing” or “street dancing”), clothing, graffiti, and a lexicon of terms that now run so deeply in the American mainstream that it is amazing to remember that most music critics dismissed this still-controversial phenomenon as a mere fad well into the 1980s. In African American literature, all aspects of hip-hop culture have inspired and galvanized such “Post-Soul” authors as Lisa Jones, Greg Tate, Paul Beatty, Darius James, Trey Ellis, and Danzy Senna, all of whom are interested in locating the younger black generation vis-à-vis the preceding one, with hip-hop and rap functioning as a major marker of difference.

Hip-hop arose out of the youth culture of the housing projects of the South Bronx in New York City in the early 1970s, a place and time situated in the wake of the political struggles of the 1960s. Such famous disc jockeys as Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, Breakout, and many others began attracting large followings at house parties and parks for their skills mixing and, later, scratching records with flair. As these followings grew and began paying more attention to the DJ than to dancing, some DJs, most notably Kool Herc and Afrika Bambataa, began to “rap” while performing. This rapping was derived directly from the “toasts” common in Caribbean cultures; Kool Herc was Jamaican and drew upon dancehall music and its traditions, as well as the rhythms of black singers such as James Brown, in his performances. Many imitators followed, exhorting crowds in increasingly creative ways between beats and choruses. Hip-hop culture was also indelibly linked to trends in dancing and fashion, as well as to sophisticated graffiti art and other aspects of urban-black-youth culture.

Outside of the New York and New Jersey areas, though, this culture was largely unknown until 1979, when the Brooklyn group the Sugar Hill Gang, released a single, “Rapper’s Delight” (derived from an earlier record, “DJ’s Delight”), which caused a national sensation, effectively bringing more attention to other New York DJs and rappers (called MCs—for Master of Ceremonies—in hip-hop parlance) and to hip-hop culture in general. This inspired countless teenagers, especially African American ones, to begin emulating the musical, dance, and fashion styles coming from the movement. Break dancing, which fused many dance styles, including those of James Brown and such soul acts as the Temptations, with contemporary moves found in New York discotheques, had developed as another diversion during street parties; by the early 1980s, youths across America could be found emulating and passing on moves.

All of these elements combined to capture the imagination of young African Americans coming of age from the late 1970s until the present. Although critics almost universally dismissed each aspect of hip-hop culture as a fad, rap and break dancing were enormous influences on music throughout the 1980s. Hip-hop, like incarnations of jazz music before it, represented youthful rebellion and a simultaneous homage to and rejection of the previous generation’s aesthetics. It was also the epitome of postmodernism, to the extent that it crossed a number of cultural barriers and musical genres and influences, was difficult to define, and always implied an ironic relationship to everything it absorbed or incorporated. Regardless of whether this absorption occurred via the practice of “sampling” earlier music, sounds, or references to popular culture, it connected to millions of young people (and no small number of their parents) primarily because the artists who developed the music grew up with the same popular culture as their fans.

Naturally, an enormous amount of controversy has dogged rap from the beginning. The sine qua non of rap is aggressive, often hyperbolic braggadocio about the MC’s abilities in “freestyling,” or rapping extemporaneously. Given this aggression, the fact that males dominate the genre and that many lyrics either demean women or appear to do so, critics have accused rap of fostering sexism, misogyny, and violence in general. Popular images and stereotypes regarding African American males and their sexuality have played a role in these criticisms as well. As Tricia Rose notes in her groundbreaking Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), the controversies that swirl around rap concern the music’s imagined or real influence on its audience, which became predominantly white by the late 1980s and early 1990s. In addition, Rose writes,

rappers engage [these debates] in contradictory ways. Some rappers defend the work of gangster rappers and at the same time consider it a negative influence on black youths. Female rappers openly criticize male rappers’ sexist work and simultaneously defend the 2 Live Crew’s right to sell misogynist music. Rappers who criticize America for its perpetuation of racial and economic discrimination also share conservative ideas about personal responsibility, call for self-improvement strategies in the black community that focus heavily on personal behavior as the cause and solution for crime, drugs, and community instability.^*

In other words, the responses to the many arguments surrounding rap from the very artists who create it is extremely complex. This underscores rap’s postmodernity to the extent that postmodern artists and works question the very means by which they create and are created, as well as the ideologies they contain. This has caused the genre to transform and grow many times over, with many different trends, fads, styles, and subgenres emerging over the years. These may range from heavily jazz-influenced rap to the more hardcore “gangsta” rap. The latter has received the most media attention and record company promotion by far, which raises the issue of who actually owns or controls rap.

These issues parallel similar issues in contemporary African American fiction, where hip-hop has found particular resonance among the “Post-Soul” generation of authors, or those born since 1960. Many of these younger artists grew up listening to rap music and made it part of their literary soundtracks or, in the cases of fiction writers Paul Beatty, Darius James, Omar Tyree, Sheneska Jackson, Jake Lamar, and Eric Jerome Dickey, incorporated it into the rhythms and referentiality of their texts. Equally important, many younger writers grew up with the same pop cultural or African American icons that inspired hip-hop’s development, often because they grew up in the same cities and neighborhoods, watched the same television programs, listened to the same music or, quite simply, are in or near the same age range as rappers. Paul Beatty’s novels and poetry are especially adept at incorporating hip-hop sensibilities and rhythms, and the entire “poetry slam” movement, in which poets use their best poems in competitive performances, owes part of its development and flavor, if not its invention, to hip-hop. Equally important, however, are the parallels between contemporary African American fiction and hip-hop: both are products of the politics of the Civil Rights and post–Civil Rights era; both are now read largely by white audiences; both enjoyed a “renaissance” or “golden age” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, once sales of selected titles soared and mainstream media began taking notice; both have struggled with questions of gender issues; both struggle with questions regarding the nature of art or, to be more, politics, and commerce. Perhaps the strongest parallel is the degree to which both contemporary African American fiction and hip-hop speak to African Americans’ concerns in the post–Civil Rights era.

Information on hip-hop and rap’s development is easily available. Numerous national magazines have sprung up around hip-hop alone (Black Beat, Vibe, The Source, Rap Pages, Right On!, XXL, and so on). Each has its own style and culture but is also attuned to developments within the music, the media, and the music industry. In short, an extensive education on hip-hop may be had through these magazines alone.

At first, the academic world was neither kind nor prolific with its interest in rap music and its culture, but in the 1990s and 2000s many scholars began coming around to both rap’s legitimacy as a musical art form and hip-hop’s cultural significance as both grew in popularity. The product was an impressive tide of extensive studies of hip-hop and rap. One of the first books on rap is David Toop’s The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip Hop (1984; reprinted in 1991 as Rap Attack 2: African Rap to Global Hip Hop and revised in 2000 as Rap Attack 3), while the first analyses of rap’s coming importance to the academy came from leading African American critic Houston A. Baker Jr. in 1993: Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy and Village Voice cultural critic Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk (1992).

The single best book-length analysis of hip-hop and rap’s cultural significance, however, would be Rose’s Black Noise (1994). Rose engages most of the debates about rap directly, using a fluid yet accessible pastiche of contemporary literary theory. Some of Rose’s early work on the subject may be found in Michele Wallace and Gina Dent’s Black Popular Culture (1992), one of the best collections of criticism on African American popular forms. The volume also contains essays by the editors, Rose, Baker, Greg Tate, Manthia Diawara, Valerie Smith, Manning Marable, Stuart Hall, Cornel West, and many others on a variety of subjects under the book’s rubric, but many essays either touch upon or discuss at some length hip-hop and rap. In a similar vein are Michael Eric Dyson’s meditative analyses of rap, Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture (1996), which examines the eternal conflict between the sacred and the profane in black culture, including that conflict’s paths in rap music; Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur (2001) reviews the life, career, politics, and enormous influence of one of rap’s greatest MCs; Open Mike: Reflections on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture, and Religion (2003) collects essays on various subjects, including an excellent piece on preaching and rap rhetoric. Veteran music and culture critic Nelson George’s Hip Hop America (1998) also examines the culture’s growth.

Histories of hip-hop culture and rap music also abound: Bakari Kitwana’s The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture (2002) is a thorough cultural history on hip-hop and its politics, influence, and future, while Mark Anthony Neal’s Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002) links everything from 1970s soul music, to the Civil Rights/Black Power eras, to the rise of hip-hop/rap and the Post-Soul movement within African American literature in the 1990s. Adam Krim’s Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (2000) works a similar vein as the books by Rose, Neal, and Kitwana, as does William Eric Perkins’s collection, Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture (1996), with essays by Perkins, Tricia Rose, Robin D. G. Kelley, Juan Flores, and several others. Gail Hilson Woldu wrote an extraordinary essay on rap for the collection American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century (2001), edited by Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick. Another collection that places rap in its musical context is African American Jazz and Rap: Social and Philosophical Examinations of Black Expressive Behavior (2001). R. Christopher Corley also wrote a dissertation, “Voices from the Margins: Rap Music as Contemporary Cultural Production and Sexual Politics in New York City” (Florida State University, 1998), investigating, similar to Tricia Rose, rap’s emergence from the sexually complex B-boy culture.

Hopkinson, Nalo (b. 1960, Jamaica) Short-story writer and novelist Nalo Hopkinson is one of a small but critically acclaimed group of African American authors publishing speculative fiction, which encompasses horror, fantasy, magical realism, and science fiction (for which “speculative fiction” has become an accepted synonym). The other notable black authors who have published in this genre are Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Ronald L. Fair, Jewelle Gomez, Walter Mosley, and Hopkinson’s contemporary, Tananarive Due.

Hopkinson’s first stories appeared in 1993 and soon attracted enough attention to guarantee the author a spot in the 1995 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University. Hopkinson entered the novel’s manuscript she started at the workshop in the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest, which she won in 1997. This led to the publication of Brown Girl in the Ring (1998). Set in twenty-first-century Toronto, the novel centers upon Ti-Jeanne Baines, a young woman of Caribbean descent and a single mother. In a city whose urban sprawl and abandonment of the inner city have made it a virtual postapocalyptic wasteland, Ti-Jeanne must eventually learn about the rich depths of her heritage, especially Obeah spiritual practices, to survive both physical and psychological dangers. Brown Girl in the Ring also won the Locus Award for Best First Novel (1999) and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (1999).

Hopkinson’s next novel, Midnight Robber (2000), is set on the planet Toussaint, which has been colonized by Caribbeans who have created a prison planet in New Half-Way Tree, an alternate universe. This is where the novel’s young protagonist, Tan-Tan Habib grows up, as she struggles against her incestuous father. Through immersion in the magic rituals and lore of her Caribbean past, Tan-Tan eventually becomes a Midnight Robber, or a version of Three-Finger Jack, a folk figure who champions the poor against the rich. Midnight Robber was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, and James Tiptree, Jr. Awards in 2001.

In 2001, Hopkinson published Skin Folk, a collection of fifteen of her short stories, ranging from science/speculative fiction and erotica to more conventional fiction. It includes the celebrated “Slow Cold Chick,” “Riding the Red,” and “Greedy Choke Puppy.” Most of the stories incorporate the same Caribbean folk elements that marked Hopkinson’s first two novels, including “Tan-Tan and Dry Bone,” a story about the heroine of Midnight Robbers. Skin Folk won the World Fantasy Award in 2003. The Salt Roads, a novel, appeared in 2003. Similar in many ways to Hopkinson’s earlier novels and stories, The Salt Roads is set in early nineteenth-century Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti), where the African-Caribbean loa (goddess) of love and sexuality, Ezili, inhabits the bodies of various women to help them come to terms with their identities as women and sexual beings in a society that devalues both. Hopkinson is also editor of Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000), and Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003).

Although Hopkinson’s work has not been the subject of scholarly articles per se, she is one of the primary subjects of Candra K. Gill’s dissertation, “Beyond Boundaries: Counter-Discourse and Intertextuality in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist,” written in 2002 (Northern Michigan University). She has also been interviewed in the leading journals of African American literature: Diane Glave, “An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson,” and Jene Watson-Aifah’s “A Conversation with Nalo Hopkinson” Callaloo 26, no. 1 (Winter 2003); and Gregory E. Rutledge, “Speaking in Tongues: An Interview with Science Fiction Writer Nalo Hopkinson,” AAR 33, no. 4 (Winter 1999).

* Review of And This Too Shall Pass, Publishers Weekly, January 29, 1996, 84; review of Just As I Am, Publishers Weekly, January 24, 1994, 41.

* Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 1–2.