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Kelley, William Melvin (b. 1937, New York City) Although William Melvin Kelley began writing and published his most celebrated works at the cusp and in the midst of the Black Arts Movement, his fiction tended to be far more surrealistic than much of the material emanating from that period, privileging aesthetics over politics, although all of Kelley’s fiction contains political elements that clearly comment upon the larger issues regarding American history, especially the role of African Americans within that history. Kelley’s renown as an author may be most easily attributed to A Different Drummer (1962), dem (1967), and, to a lesser degree, A Drop of Patience (1965), which has been out of print for most of the last forty years.

Kelley’s early novels examine and satirize white America’s dependence upon both white supremacy and the continued presence and labor of African Americans to create their identity within a falsely constructed white/black binary. A Different Drummer, for example, tells a story not unlike that of Douglas Turner Ward’s play A Day of Absence (1965), as the African American populations of different mythical Southern towns disappear, thereby highlighting the extent to which American identity depends upon African Americans’ existence and labor. A Drop of Patience is a Kunstlerroman centering upon Ludlow Washington, a blind jazz musician who obviously cannot tell people’s “race” by sight but nevertheless discovers and experiences racism and its effects. These are contrasted with the power of jazz music in ways that parallel Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and precede such later works as Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), Leon Forrest’s Divine Days (1994), and Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate trilogy (1986–2001). Kelley’s third book, dem, finally, satirizes hypocritical American apprehensions regarding miscegenation in a complex fabliau.

The achievements of A Different Drummer, Kelley’s short-story collection, Dancers on the Shore (1964), and A Drop of Patience earned Kelley the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1963 and paved the way for the more consistent satirical milieu of dem and Kelley’s last novel, Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970). Since the publication of Dunfords Travels Everywheres, Harvard University graduate Kelley has devoted himself to nonfiction social and political commentary and to teaching literature and writing at several institutions, including the New School for Social Research in New York City, the State University of New York at Geneseo, the University of Paris, Nanterre, the Taos Institute of Art, and Sarah Lawrence College (1989–present).

As in the work of such influential antecedents as William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison, and such peers as Hal Bennett, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman, Kelley’s fiction meditates upon the interracial nature of much of American society and, in the case of his African American peers at the very least, the comic absurdities of racism. Kelley’s early novels and short stories are either comedic or satiric, while those published since 1970 combine comedy and satire with the influence of James Joyce, especially Finnegans Wake (1939). Dunfords Travels Everywheres is heavily influenced by Joyce’s magnum opus, taking cues from Joyce's experiments with language and plot structure to create a fantastic allegory about race. The plot concerns Chig Dunford, who lives in a land in which segregation is the norm based upon color schemes individuals choose on a given day, an ironic commentary upon the fluidity of identity in general but particularly in societies that depend upon racial polarization. When Dunford later travels back to the United States, his bizarre adventures serve only to highlight the absurdity of both racial categorizations and human behavior, especially in terms of sexual desire, which leads to the racial admixture that undermines the aforementioned categories. Dunfords Travels Everywheres also comprises a version of Kelley’s 1968 short story “The Dentist’s Wife.”

Although critics have considered Kelley’s novels to be among the finest to emerge from the Black Arts era, the amount of scholarly attention devoted to Kelley has not fully reflected this esteem, perhaps because Kelley has not published a novel since 1973 and has therefore fallen out of the critical consciousness. Most of the scholarship on Kelley may be found in publications from the 1970s. Greater attention came to his works by the 1990s, yet most of that scholarship analyzes A Different Drummer and occasionally dem, with very little attention paid to the later novels. Bernard W. Bell’s reliable Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987) has a subsection devoted to all of Kelley’s novels. One of the few recent books that examines the later works is Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African American Postmodernism (1997), which argues that Dunfords Travels Everywheres is one of the great experiments in African American fiction that truly challenges the way readers define and perceive “black” and “white” language. Roger Rosenblatt’s section on Kelley in Black Fiction (1974) is an informative retrospective of Kelley’s career, as are Donald M. Weyl, “The Vision of Man in the Novels of William Melvin Kelley,” Critique 15, no. 3 (1974); Jill Weyant, “The Kelley Saga: Violence in America,” CLA Journal 19 (1975); and Addison Gayle, The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (1976). More recent are W. Lawrence Hogue, The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Culture, and Theory (2003), which devotes a chapter to Kelley’s A Different Drummer, with some discussion of Kelley’s far-too-neglected role in African American fiction; and James W. Coleman, Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban (2001), which rightly places Kelley among a group of African American authors who took Ralph Ellison as a key literary forebear. Charles Johnson, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (1988), also briefly mentions Dunfords Travels Everywheres and Kelley’s later works.

Significant journal articles on Kelley include: W. Lawrence Hogue, “Disrupting the White/Black Binary: William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer,” CLA Journal 44, no. 1 (September 2000); Eric J. Sundquist, “Promised Lands: A Different Drummer,” TriQuarterly 107–108 (Winter-Summer 2000); H. Nigel Thomas, “The Bad Nigger Figure in Selected Works of Richard Wright, William Melvin Kelley, and Ernest Gaines,” CLA Journal 39, no. 2 (December 1995); Charles Alva Hoyt, “The Five Faces of Malcolm X” (includes helpful biographical information about Kelley’s early career), NALF 4, no. 4 (Winter 1970); Stanley Schatt, “You Must Go Home Again: Today’s Afro-American Expatriate Writers,” NALF 7, no. 3 (Autumn 1973); John M. Reilly, “The Black Anti-Utopia,” BALF12, no. 3 (Autumn 1978); Elizabeth A. Schultz, “The Insistence Upon Community in the Contemporary Afro-American Novel,” College English 41, no. 2 (October 1979); Sigmund Ro, “‘Desercrators’ and ‘Necromancers’: Black American Writers and Critics in the 1960s and the Third World Perspective,” Callaloo 25 (Autumn 1985); Phyllis R. Klotman, “An Examination of the Black Confidence Man in Two Black Novels: The Man Who Cried I Am and dem,” American Literature 44, no. 4 (January 1973).

Kenan, Randall (b. 1963, Brooklyn, New York) Novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Randall Kenan is one of the more prominent younger authors to emerge as part of the Post-Soul generation of African American authors and a major voice in gay and lesbian fiction. After working for several years as an editor in the offices of the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, Kenan published his first novel, A Visitation of Spirits in 1989 to excellent reviews. The novel focuses upon the Cross family of Tim’s Cross, North Carolina (which is based upon Kenan’s hometown of Chinquapin, N.C.), especially teenage protagonist Horace Cross. Horace’s realization that he is homosexual conflicts harshly with his family’s and community’s mores and precipitates the decay of his mind. Horace slowly goes insane as he seeks redemption through an imagined transformation into a hawk, and he eventually commits suicide.

The stories in Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and Other Stories (1992), Kenan’s first collection of short fiction, are connected by their setting in Tim’s Creek. The town’s diverse characters are also united by their struggles with public and private selves; in more than one story, gay characters are either persecuted for their orientation and desires or forced to keep them secret. These struggles ultimately force most characters to live in deep loneliness and fear. Kenan also inserts his interest in African American historical figures and moments in such stories as “This Far,” in which Tuskegee Institute President Booker T. Washington visits old friends living in Tim’s Creek, or in the title story, which Kenan frames as the town’s oral history. Kenan has also published his short fiction and essays in many different venues, including Callaloo: “Now Why Come That Is?” 21, no. 1 (Winter 1998); “The Boy Who Played Cards with the Devil,” 23, no. 1 (Winter 2000).

Kenan has already received some scholarly attention in article form: Karla F. C. Holloway, “Cultural Narratives Passed On: African American Mourning Stories,” College English 59, no. 1 (January 1997); David Bergman, “Race and the Violet Quill,” American Literary History 9, no. 1 (Spring 1997); V. Hunt, “A Conversation with Randall Kenan,” AAR 29, no. 3 (Autumn 1995); Charles H. Rowell, “An Interview with Randall Kenan,” Callaloo 21, no. 1 (Winter 1998).

Killens, John Oliver (b. January 14, 1916, Macon, Georgia; d. October 20, 1987, Brooklyn, New York) Few contemporary African American novelists have been as inexplicably neglected as John Oliver Killens, who was a major influence in African American literature through four decades, both as an author of fiction and as a major critic and intellectual. His literary, scholarly, and political careers were coterminous, which led to his being an associate of such diverse figures as Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Mari Evans, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and Maya Angelou. As an instructor at Howard University, he could also boast that Thulani Davis, Arthur Flowers, Ntozake Shange, Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell, and Richard Perry were once his students. Killens cofounded the Harlem Writers Guild in 1950 with Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, and Walter Christmas; later members included Maya Angelou, Ossie Davis, Audre Lorde, Terry McMillan, Lon Elder III, Paule Marshall, and Walter Dean Myers; the guild still meets to this day. From the late 1940s until his death in 1987, Killens was a prolific and formidable critic, although his greatest years of influence were inarguably in the 1950s and 1960s. Although Killens’s literary output from 1970 until his death did not equal that of the two prior decades in either quality or quantity, his oeuvre is fairly consistent in its critical outlook. In his work since 1970, though, Killens took on a perspective that was more Black Nationalist in its reading of African American culture and history, as seen in the characters (The Cotillions Ben Ali Lumumba) and historical personages (Denmark Vesey, John Henry, and Alexander Pushkin) featured in his novels. Despite his influence and prolific career, many of Killens’s best works have gone out of print for long stretches, making access and appreciation difficult for readers and teachers alike. Fortunately, several publishers began reprinting Killens’s work in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Bernard W. Bell has identified Killens’s fiction as the epitome of the “critical realism” school that developed out of the social realist and naturalist innovations of Richard Wright. Critical realism differs significantly from social realism, however, to the extent that the latter is not necessarily allied to leftist politics, whereas, according to Bell, the former is “a Marxist literary concept” that contains “a negative attitude toward capitalism and a readiness to respect the perspective of socialism and not condemn it out of hand.”^* Critical realism is willing to entertain the possibility of redistributing wealth (and other foundational socialist beliefs), largely because it perceives capitalism as generally harmful towards the masses. Critical realism may safely be said to be allied to the more ambitious goals of the modern Civil Rights movement that was developing as Killens began his career. His early works were certainly connected to his Civil Rights activism, insofar as he consistently incorporated political themes into every work, albeit not for the purpose of simple protest. True to Professor Killens’ calling as a teacher, his novels often educate their readers regarding African American historical and political figures in general and the lives and intragroup politics of Southern African Americans in particular, but they are seldom pedantic in the ways that 1940s and 1950s black protest literature could be at times. In fact, Killens’s earlier novels, Youngblood (1954), And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962), and ’Sippi (1967), while all politically charged dramatizations of Southern black lives, are imbued with fully rounded characters, frequent uses of and references to black folk culture, and a stronger sense of pathos, humor, and irony than many novels of the period. They were also very well received; Killens was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his first two novels and for The Cotillion, or, One Good Bull Is Half the Herd (1971). In the years that each of those three novels were nominated, though, the Pulitzer jury did not award prizes for fiction, which has occurred on only five other occasions between 1918 and 1976. Perhaps most suspect of all, when And Then We Heard the Thunder was nominated in 1964, it had no competition. The precise reasons for the absence of a prize are unknown, but a combination of the politically charged nature of Killens’s fiction and the tense atmosphere of the Civil Rights era are not outside the realm of possibility.

As the Black Arts Movement and its concomitant black aesthetics emerged out of the conflicts within the Civil Rights Movement, though, Killens began to foreground an ideological alliance with black nationalism in his work. One novel of Killens’s later period stands above the rest, largely because it is his best known, most humorous, and one of his most complex. The Cotillion locates itself well in the thick of African America’s post-Civil Rights intraracial conflicts to concentrate primarily on the black community’s own class divisions, which threaten to destroy it. The Cotillion represents the convergence of numerous literary and ideological aesthetics and conventions. Bernard W. Bell classifies the novel as part of Killens’s attempt to “‘change the world, to capture reality, to melt it down and forge it into something entirely different,’” via critical realism’s “negative attitude toward capitalism and … readiness to respect the perspective of socialism and not condemn it out of hand.”^* Killens turns a skeptical, satirical eye turned toward the divisiveness of the class system within the African American community, specifically the yawning divide between, on the one hand, a petit-bourgeois black middle class that identifies and strives for assimilation with the white middle class and, on the other hand, unpretentious, working-class blacks. The Cotillion’s events are seen through the cynical eyes of Ben Ali Lumumba, the protagonist, who is taken with Yoruba Lovejoy, a beautiful young woman from a petit-bourgeois family. Lumumba’s narrative voice continuously switches between straight, conventional narrative and African American “street” argot as well as between first-, second-, and third-person narrative, which marks him as a trickster. It is also his means of creating an inclusive text, one appealing to all types and classes of African Americans.

Most of the novel’s tension and satirical thrust derives from the tensions between the bourgeois aspirations of Daphne Lovejoy (mother to Yoruba, and “a caricature of her own dear bourgeois self”), Lumumba’s nationalism, and Yoruba’s quest for independence from each of these positions. The plot leads toward Daphne’s ambitious plans for Yoruba’s debut at the grand cotillion held every year by a group of upper-crust black women, the Femmes Fatales (or, in the words of Yoruba’s father, Matthew Lovejoy, “Femmes Fattails”). The cotillion itself is modeled after those held in the deep South, down to an utterly offensive portrayal of black southerners. As an object of satiric attack, the cotillion serves to prove Lumumba’s (and the novel's) essential belief about both Daphne and the black bourgeoisie: as Matthew says during the event, “‘Like brother Malcolm said, [middle-class African Americans] don’t want no liberation. They tryna sneak back on the old plantation’” (Killens, Cotillion, 245).

Killens’s Cotillion thus stands as one of the finest examples of the satire emanating from the brand of black nationalism born in the 1960s and explored in African America in the 1970s. In fact, the relative obscurity surrounding the novel is indeed mysterious, given the force of its satirical message. In the last twenty years the novel has barely been mentioned at all in critical discourse, except for brief, pro forma mentions in surveys of African American novels. This obscurity, however, may be attributable to the novel’s politics; though it speaks to a continuing problem within African America, it is immersed in a period in which black nationalism was a more palatable option for black progress. Fortunately, though, Coffee House Press reprinted The Cotillion in 2002, complete with a new introduction by novelist Alexs D. Pate.

Killens’s next two works of fiction were written with a younger audience in mind, specifically a young black audience that might not have been familiar with the exemplary black revolutionaries Killens admired. Great Gittin’ Up Mornin’ (1972) is a fictionalization of the life of nineteenth-century slave insurrectionist Denmark Vesey that argues that obtaining freedom for African Americans is a process that inevitably and necessarily requires periodic bloodshed, no matter how tragic that outcome may be. Great Gittin’ Up Mornin’ may also be considered a response in fictional form to William Styron’s highly controversial Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), which outraged many African American authors and intellectuals, including Killens, who published their arguments against the novel in William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968). Equally notable is A Man Ain’t Nothing but a Man: The Adventures of John Henry (1975), a retelling of the legend of John Henry, the African American folk hero who battles a steam drill in a tunnel-digging contest to prove both his strength and his dignity. It also predates and precedes Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days (2001) in both its subject matter and theme. Both novels treat John Henry as an elaborate metaphor for African Americans’ struggles, albeit in dramatically different ways. Killens’s novel recasts the folk figure in an imaginatively realistic setting, while Whitehead examines the soullessness of contemporary America. Killens is especially concerned with showing the need for African Americans to form cross-racial alliances—as exemplified in the characters George Lang Lee (a Chinese American of mixed heritage) and Big Ben Lawson, a poor Southern white—to free the working masses and defeat the worst excesses of the machine-driven Industrial Age and capitalism.

The scope of Killens’s work is also well represented in two volumes published posthumously: Great Black Russian: A Novel on the Life and Times of Alexander Pushkin (1989) and Black Southern Voices: An Anthology of Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction, and Critical Essays (1992). The former, which was accepted for publication mere weeks before his death from cancer on October 20, 1987, is an elaborate exploration of the significance of the father of Russian literature, who was of African descent via his maternal grandfather, Hannibal, an Abyssinian (Ethiopian) prince. Rather than minimize Pushkin’s African heritage, the novel questions why this aspect of the legendary author has been virtually ignored by all but a few historians, most of whom have been black. The novel also attempts to show all of Pushkin’s personal complexities in order to make the legend real without sacrificing one iota of his essential role in the development of modern Russian literature. Black Southern Voices is one of the better collections of African American literature to emerge in the early 1990s. It highlights a group of African American writers (including Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Frank Yerby, Zora Neale Hurston, Nikki Giovanni, James Weldon Johnson, Tom Dent, Kalamu Ya Salaam, and Martin Luther King Jr.) whose identities as Southerners in background and cultural outlook are highlighted in the selections chosen. Killens began editing it shortly before his death and contributed its introduction; it was completed by critic Jerry W. Ward, who also wrote the foreword. According to historian Louis Reyes Rivera, Killens was also working on a manuscript, “The Minister Primarily” at the time of his death. Reyes, who worked with Killens later in life, offers this description: a “comedy of errors in which an African American goes back to [Africa] and returns to the States … as a double for the Prime Minister of a small theretofore unknown nation, both of which [become] targets of international intrigues and counterplots. Here he [Killens] engages the search for a Pan-African self while exploring the pitfalls of our American lack of consciousness and the eagerness with which we grab at anything that runs counter to European models without sufficient thought given to what we’re being led into”^* It has yet to be published.

Critical works on Killens, again, have been somewhat limited. The only book-length study of Killens widely available is Keith Gilyard, Liberation Memories: The Rhetoric and Politics of John Oliver Killens (2003). Several dissertations on Killens have emerged; none have yet been published in book form: Betty L. Hart, “The Black Aesthetic and the Novels of John Oliver Killens” (West Virginia University, 1974); Audrey Rouse Bell, “A Progression of Protest in Three Novels of John O. Killens” (master’s thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1976); Paul R. Lehman, “The Development of a Black Psyche in the Works of John Oliver Killens” (University of Michigan, 1976); Gatsinzi Basaninyenzi, “Ideology and Four Post-1960 Afro-American Novelists” (University of Iowa, 1986); and Stephen A. Cary, “Black Men’s Du Boisian Relationships to Southern Social Institutions in the Novels of John Oliver Killens” (University of Texas at Dallas, 1992). All of these studies attempt to place Killens within his proper historical context, particularly as one of the premier authors of the 1950s through the early 1970s, but the reader will also note that only two dissertations have been written in the last twenty years, and only one since Killens’s death. This author has also written on The Cotillion in African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (2001). Alexs D. Pate’s aforementioned introduction to the 2002 reprint of The Cotillion is also a fine overview of Killens’s career. William H. Wiggins Jr.’s entry on Killens in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 33, Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955 144–52) is seminal, yet somewhat outdated; it was published in 1984, several years before Killens’s death.

Kincaid, Jamaica (b. 1949, St. John’s, Antigua) Jamaica Kincaid has enjoyed great literary accomplishments and critical admiration since the early 1970s. In 1965, she moved from her native Antigua to Scarsdale, New York, then to New York City, to work as an au pair. Within a decade of this migration, Kincaid was a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine, and by the mid-1980s, had become an acclaimed fiction writer whose poetic nonfiction, short stories, and books earned her comparisons to Toni Morrison. Born Elaine Potter Richardson to “land peasant” parents in 1949 in Antigua, which was then under British colonial rule, Kincaid formed an identity not entirely uncommon among black writers of Caribbean descent: simultaneously British/ Anglophone, African, and feminine, but ultimately humanistic. These influences are found in a rich mix throughout Kincaid’s writing, insofar as they are both complementary and contradictory. As her literary biographer Diane Simmons has put it, “Kincaid’s language may be the most powerful symbol of all for the themes of loss and betrayal in a world divided against itself.”^* Her sentences and paragraphs tend to follow a pattern of rhetorical questioning that seeks both to understand and to indict, as the case may warrant—and it may warrant it simultaneously. In addition, Kincaid incorporates a less narrative form of writing meant to emulate the workings of the conscious mind, as opposed to the artifices of fictional conventions. Two of her most profound artistic inspirations and models have been French author Alain Robbe-Grillet and the French film La Jetée, both examples of storytelling that eschew conventional narrative form.^*

Kincaid’s short stories and novels are also highly autobiographical and frequently concern conflicts with the mother or maternal figures, whose ability to exert powerful influence and control over their children causes deep conflicts and seriously affects the tenor and direction of other relationships, especially romantic ones. In addition, Kincaid writes extensively against the oppression and cultural deracination that typically result from colonialism, especially in current and former British possessions. Kincaid finds distinct parallels and analogues in the forms of oppression that extend from matriarchs and colonialists alike; they are two of her crucial and most damning metaphors. The counter to such undue influences and controls is artistic creation, particularly writing. Kincaid’s first collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River (1983), for example, contains one of her best pieces, “My Mother,” which queries the role of a nearly omnipotent mother over her young daughter and is based heavily upon Kincaid’s own experiences. Her first novel, Annie John (1985) continues in the same vein, albeit with a slightly more conventional narrative style, and shifts its focus to the adolescent years and the loss of innocence and naïveté that comes with that crucial transition. It was originally published in the preceding years in the New Yorker, as was Kincaid’s second novel, Lucy (1990). The latter continues the narrative and (auto)biographical arc begun in its predecessor, albeit with a different female protagonist, and attention focused upon the struggles of young adulthood. Autobiography of My Mother (1994) is a novel about Xuela, a seventy-year-old woman whose mother died in childbirth. This event becomes a metaphor for the lack of connection Xuela has to most people, objects, and ideas in her life ranging from her mother, to love, and to her homeland or a sense of home in general.

Several notable books that study Kincaid’s work, usually in conjunction with other African Diasporic women authors, have been published in the 1990s and 2000s: Victoria Burrows, Whiteness and Trauma: The Mother-Daughter Knot in the Fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Toni Morrison (2004); Antonia MacDonald-Smythe, Making Homes in the West/Indies: Constructions of Subjectivity in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid (2001); Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion (1999); Harold Bloom, Jamaica Kincaid (1998), part of Chelsea’s Modern Critical Views series; Moira Ferguson, Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body (1994), and Colonialism and Gender From Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid (1994); and the aforementioned Diane Simmons, Jamaica Kincaid (1994).

* Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 247.

* Bell, The Afro-American Novel, 248, 247. Bell quotes Killens, “The Black Writer vis-à-vis His Country,” from his collection Black Man’s Burden (New York: Trident, 1965), 34.

* Louis Reyes Rivera, “John Oliver Killens: Lest We Forget,” http://www.nathanielturner.com/joklestweforget.htm, August 3, 2003.

* Diane Simmons, Jamaica Kincaid (New York: Twayne, 1994), 4.

* Simmons, Jamaica Kincaid, 16.