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National Association of African American Studies The National Association of African American Studies (NAAAS) was formed as an interdisciplinary gathering and scholarly group in 1992 at Virginia State University’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences by that school’s dean, Dr. Lemuel E. Berry Jr. Since February 1993, it has held a five-day annual conference; most conferences have converged on Houston, Texas. The membership comprises scholars and artists from the humanities (particularly in English, modern language, and history departments), the social sciences (primarily sociology, psychology, and anthropology), physical sciences (biology), and the arts (including dance, graphic arts, and theatre). In 1995 NAAS began affiliating itself officially with the National Association of Hispanic and Latino Studies (NAHLS), National Association of Native American Studies (NANAS), and the International Association of Asian Studies (IAAS). Since 2000, NAAS has also published an annual journal, the Journal of Intercultural Disciplines.
Due to its interdisciplinary nature, the panels at NAAAS conferences cover an extremely diverse set of topics. The group also serves as a source of mentoring for newer or younger faculty of color, especially those who work in nontraditional disciplines or fields. Membership information may be found online at www.naaas.org.
Naylor, Gloria (b. January 25, 1950, New York City) With the publication of her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Gloria Naylor quickly became one of African American literature’s most respected and studied authors. Her work follows closely in the footsteps of Toni Morrison, the author whose work first inspired her to pursue seriously a literary career. Naylor was entranced with the written word from an early age, but it was not until after she had converted to and later left the Jehovah’s Witness faith (1968–1975) that Naylor revisited her passion for writing. She entered Brooklyn College in 1976, earned a B.A. in English in 1981, and a M.A. in Afro-American studies at Yale in 1983, for which she wrote a master’s thesis that later became her second novel, Linden Hills. While at Brooklyn College, Naylor read Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), which showed Naylor how an African American woman’s experiences could be validated in the most eloquent terms.
Naylor has made that eloquence her own in five novels to date—The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988), Bailey’s Café (1992), and The Men of Brewster Place (1998)—most of which closely resemble the work of Morrison, her artistic mentor, in content and approach. Each offers a searching critique of contemporary African American cultural issues and frequently combines such genres as magical realism, urban realism, and the romantic novel, while weaving in the folk culture of various traditions within the African Diaspora, including vodun/voo-doo/hoodoo and trickster tales. Naylor’s work, however, is not simply derivative of Morrison; she has managed to connect all of her novels into a complex weave, sharing characters, settings, and situations to an extent matched only by Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Naylor simultaneously revises some of the most significant texts from European literary traditions, including William Shakespeare’s Tempest (Mama Day) and Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (Linden Hills). At its best, Naylor’s often lyrical prose and shifting narrative voices open her texts and characters to rich ambiguity while still arguing for the need for African American community solidarity and unity of purpose. In her less inspiring moments—most notably in her Brewster Place novels—Naylor is susceptible to occasional demonizations of her characters on both sides of the gender divide as she struggles to reconcile tensions between black men and women. In addition, her political messages sometimes slip from their lyrical couching and may seem rather heavy-handed.
Despite these relatively minor flaws, Naylor has enjoyed an overwhelmingly kind critical and popular reception, winning an American Book Award (1983) for The Women of Brewster Place, which was adapted for a television film in 1989, numerous favorable reviews and top sales for all of her subsequent novels, and Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. She has also taught at George Washington University, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Boston University, Brandeis, and Cornell. Several high-quality critical studies and essay collections of Naylor’s work have already emerged: The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor, ed. Sharon Felton and Michelle C. Loris (1997); Gloria Naylor’s Early Novels, ed. Margot Anne Kelley (1999); Conversations with Gloria Naylor, ed. Maxine Laron Montgomery (2004); and Understanding Gloria Naylor, by Margaret Earley Whitt (1999). Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah have collected and edited some of the best reviews and critical essays on Naylor in Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993). Finally, Naylor has also contributed to African American scholarship through her collection Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present(1995).
Négritude The négritude movement in literature traces its origins to in a series of conversations in 1930s Paris cafes between three writers and intellectuals: Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, Senegalese intellectual Léopold Sédar Senghor (later the first elected president of that country), and French Guianan Léon Damas. Their conversations were intended to find ways to lift the stigma of inferiority that has been cast upon the artistic and intellectual abilities of people of Africa and the African Diaspora for hundreds of years. They were inspired by the example of the Harlem Renaissance (especially the Jamaican poet Claude McKay, a major figure of that movement) to find ways to turn racist views of African peoples on their head. Instead of viewing African or African-derived customs, cultural traditions, religions, art, and literature as inferior or derivative, the progenitors of négritude argued that these forms were products of a unique experience and richly deserving of value on their own terms. Later, a more essentialist version of this argument would emerge, with Senghor in particular arguing that African peoples possessed in common a naturally superior essence. The goal of the movement as a whole, however, was to counteract deeply entrenched beliefs in African inferiority as espoused by such philosophers as Kant and Hegel. The theories, arguments, and movements of such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Delany, and William Blyden were particularly helpful in négritude’s development, while the writings of McKay, Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon were extremely influential as the movement developed over the next four decades.
In African American fiction, négritude had a significant impact in the way it helped bring to light the strong connections between cultural practices developed among the African Diaspora and continuous traditions on the African continent itself. Négritude was also nationalistic at its core and therefore resonated among American Black Nationalists and Black Arts Movement writers and intellectuals interested in rediscovering and revaluing African and syncretic traditions with traceable African origins. Its influence may be seen in the work of Alice Walker, especially The Color Purple (1983) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) and By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998); John Oliver Killens; Toni Morrison; Gloria Naylor, especially Mama Day (1998); Ishmael Reed, particularly Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974); John Edgar Wideman; and many others.
Negro American Literature Forum. See African American Review.
Negro Digest/Black World (1942–1976) Negro Digest/Black World was arguably the most important periodical of the Black Arts Movement, to the extent that it offered a prime venue for the Civil Rights/Black Power era’s intellectuals and writers. Toward the end of its existence, it became, through its editor, Hoyt Fuller, the vehicle for the articulation of the black aesthetic. It is neither insignificant nor coincidental that Negro Digest became Black World in May 1970, near the apex of the Black Arts Movement and at the beginning of the contemporary period. Other major publications of the time, including John Henrik Clarke’s Harlem (1969) and Addison Gayle’s Black Aesthetic (1971), owe their geneses to Negro Digest/Black World. It was also a direct ancestor to the journal Callaloo, whose editorial direction and philosophy were highly similar and that began publication in 1976, the same year that Johnson Publications cancelled Black World.
Negro Digest’s evolution into a conduit for African American intellectualism and creativity is fairly curious, since its original purpose served more conservative ends. It began in 1942 as African American entrepreneur John H. Johnson’s first foray into periodical publishing, inspired by the absence of a publication similar to Life magazine or Reader’s Digest. It was in many respects the forebear to Johnson’s most famous magazines, Ebony and Jet, especially in its goal of making news by and about African Americans palatable to the black masses without losing the attention or support of the black middle class. In its initial decade-long run, it emulated the best-selling Reader’s Digest in both title and format, except that its condensed stories kept African Americans apprised of national events that directly affected them and it was decidedly more liberal politically than its model. Its list of editors and contributors in that period included virtually all major and not a few minor African American authors, including Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ruth Benedict, Walter White, George Schuyler, Fannie Hurst, Arna Bontemps, Sterling Brown, Alain Locke, and many others. The magazine’s quality was eventually rewarded via advertising from corporate sponsors, a circulation peak around 100,000, and the U.S. government’s willingness to ship it to black GIs overseas.*
After Johnson introduced Ebony in 1945 as a more politically mainstream version of Negro Digest, he turned less of his attention and support to his first magazine, and it suspended publication in 1951. Johnson revived it in 1961 largely as a response to two imperatives: the momentum of the Civil Rights movement and the relative dearth of publication outlets for young writers, to say nothing of his desire to capitalize upon the mood within his targeted middle-class black audience.* Johnson picked Hoyt Fuller, who had briefly worked for Ebony in 1954, as the journal’s new editor to address these imperatives, despite the fact that Fuller was far less convinced of the integrationist Civil Rights movement’s ultimate success than Johnson. Nevertheless, the new Negro Digest did not immediately become a bulwark of radical thought. As Fuller rapidly became comfortable with the editorial reins and his relationship with Johnson, he soon disposed of the digest format and began soliciting work from young, progressive, and increasingly nationalist black artists and critics. A typical issue contained about eight articles, a few short stories and poems, Fuller’s concatenation of cultural events and information, and a short editorial.
As the Civil Rights movement began to encounter more entrenched forms of racism, such as the attempts by national politicians to undermine the struggle, more young African Americans began to lose their faith in the promise of American democracy. The violent urban uprisings of the “long, hot summers” of 1964 and 1965, along with the assassination of former Nation of Islam minister Malcolm X (el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) in February 1965 and the compromises of Civil Rights leaders helped radicalize this generation. This mood shift extended deeply into such young African American artists as LeRoi Jones and Don L. Lee, whose work began to reflect this new skepticism via an embracing of black nationalism in general, and black cultural nationalism in particular.
Most important, Fuller shared this new mood, leading to substantial changes in Negro Digest’s content and direction; black cultural nationalism inarguably dominated the journal by the latter part of the 1960s. Unlike the more explicitly radical “little magazines,” including Liberator, Umbra, Soulbook, Black Dialogue, Journal of Black Poetry, Kitabu Cha Jua, and Black Creation, Negro Digest maintained an editorial stance of tolerance toward integrationist perspectives, even if many of its more nationalistic contributors tended to discredit and denounce them at every opportunity. This stance was as much a product of Hoyt Fuller’s judiciousness as John S. Johnson’s ultimate editorial control.* The result was a list of contributors comprising most major and many minor African American intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s: Amiri Baraka (né LeRoi Jones), Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Brooks, Henry Dumas, Mari Evans, Ronald Fair, Julia Fields, John Hope Franklin, E. Franklin Frazier, Sam Greenlee, Nathan Hare, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, Maulana Ron Karenga, Etheridge Knight, Don L. Lee (later Haki Madhubuti), Audre Lorde, Clarence Major, Julian Mayfield, Louise Meriwether, Dudley Randall, Leopold Senghor, Wole Soyinka, Wyatt T. Walker, and John A. Williams, among many others.*
By the close of the 1960s, though, Negro Digest no longer possessed any appreciable ties to its original purpose and looked entirely different than it did near the decade’s beginning. As African Americans began rejecting the label “Negro” as a reflection of slavery and oppression, the journal’s title looked increasingly antiquated and offensive, which led to the May 1970 title change. The new title was meant to reflect the common nationalistic argument that African Americans shared a history and cultural solidarity with other black people around the world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Fuller had concluded years earlier that the responsibility of the black artist was to raise the consciousness of black people, rather than to pursue art for art’s sake, and this became the magazine’s overarching vision. Like its rivals, Negro Digest/Black World attempted to “[break] with the West” and advocate cultural nationalism and economic separatism so that a new, independent black mythos might emerge.*
The magazine shared a fate similar to that of its rivals. The decreasing interest in nationalism in the 1970s led to a great deal of self-criticism in the pages of the black literary magazines, Black World not excluded. Amiri Baraka, for example, rejected black cultural nationalism for Marxism and consequently “faulted black nationalists, including himself in earlier years, for an indiscriminate emphasis on Africa” and for “attempting to reject everything white.”* Similarly, Nathan Hare found the emphasis upon the symbols of west African cultures in lieu of substantive political struggle “pathological.”* These types of contributions led Hoyt Fuller to reflect, mere months before the journal was cancelled, that the solutions to African Americans’ problems that he and other radical black intellectuals had embraced in the 1960s no longer seemed as viable as they had but a few years earlier.* Nevertheless, no other single magazine or editor was as crucial as Fuller in developing the Black Arts Movement, inasmuch as it had the largest circulation—about 30,000 per issue—of the black literary magazines. When this support dropped off significantly by the middle of the 1970s, John Johnson suddenly cancelled the magazine, apparently deeming it increasingly irrelevant.
In the absence of finding the complete run of Negro Digest/Black World in a library, those interested in the history and impact of the journal would be best advised to find Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of African American Magazines in the Twentieth Century (1979, reprinted with a new preface in 1991), which devotes an excellent, long chapter to the Black Arts Movement and concomitant black aesthetic as expressed in the little magazines. More recent, and more complete in terms of careful examination of Negro Digest/Black World from its inception to its demise, is James C. Hall’s chapter, “On Sale at Your Favorite Newsstand: Negro Digest/ Black World and the 1960s,” in The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays, edited by Todd Vogel (2001).
Neorealism/urban realism Realism, by definition, presents life as it is actually lived rather than an idealized portrait of our surroundings. It tends to highlight the material nature of the world as it appears at a particular moment via a narrator or protagonist who makes a more objective appraisal of her or his environment. In The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, Bernard W. Bell defines earlier (that is, pre-1970s) realistic African American novels as narratives that “used the conventional linear, closed plot and combined elements of the slave narratives, historical romance, and genteel realism … which attacked racial discrimination while embracing middle-class values.” Neorealism falls under this same basic rubric, but it also takes a critical stance toward middle-class values and eschews the nihilism of some realistic texts, especially those of the existentialists. Instead, Bell writes, African American neorealists “assume that man is a social being who ought not to be separated from the social and historical context … in which he [ sic ] finds his significance and develops his potential as an individual.… There is more hope for humanity and the world expressed in [African American] neorealism.” Bell goes on to divide most African American realism into two major subcategories: critical realism, which openly criticizes the dangers of capitalism, and poetic realism, which “uses regional and racial matter in a poetic manner.”*
Urban realism may fall into either of these subcategories, but as the name implies, it is defined by urban settings that offer critical or poetic readings of the world of the city dweller. Most texts in this subcategory have special emphases on the unique outlook of a city’s or community’s denizens and the pressures of their environment. In the contemporary period, African American neorealism in all its forms has generally served the purpose of offering reflections of life in African American communities in different regions or within specific cities. Contemporary realism is also distinguished from earlier forms by signs that clearly mark and foreground the narrative’s location, whether rural or urban, thereby lending a strong sense of authenticity. These signs may include everything from actual street names to detailed descriptions of historical events that occurred at the time the narrative is set. The social and historical context of the narrative is therefore never far from the reader’s mind, lending the narrative more immediacy.
The overwhelming majority of African American authors since 1970 either write within the realistic mode or use some of its techniques. The authors most frequently associated with neorealism, however, include: John Oliver Killens, Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Alice Walker, John A. Williams, Ann Petry, Gloria Naylor, James Baldwin, Jess Mowry, Donald Goines, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Cade Bambara, James Alan McPherson, Bebe Moore Campbell, J. California Cooper, Edwidge Danticat, Sapphire, Walter Mosley, and Al Young.
Neo–slave narrative Scholar and critic Bernard W. Bell coined the term “neoslave narrative” to describe a particular subgenre of the novel that emerged in African American fiction in the late 1960s in his Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987), while Ashraf H. A. Rushdy altered Bell’s term to “neo-slave narrative” and expanded Bell’s definition to include a wider variety of texts. Whereas Bell defines the neoslave narrative as a novel that combines “elements of fable, legend, and slave narrative to protest racism and justify the deeds, struggles, migrations, and spirit of black people, Rushdy defines neo–slave narratives as “contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of the antebellum slave narrative,” often to make a number of arguments about the ways in which history and individuals’ personal stories are recorded, interpreted, and frequently misunderstood.*
Since their emergence, neo–slave narratives have been written by some of the finest writers in the African American literary tradition. Many neo–slave narratives written after 1968 have been in part responses to the controversy surrounding William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Numerous African American writers and critics roundly condemned Styron’s novel for its reading of Nat Turner’s original testimony by focusing upon a questionable reconstruction of his psyche, sexual proclivities, and the marked absence of his historical wife.* At issue in the controversy was whether white writers and critics have the right or authority to appropriate or revise African American history and culture for their own purposes, given the ways in which both have been distorted or silenced throughout the history of the Afrian Diaspora. In addition, white critics’ clear disdain for Black Power politics and African Americans’ attempts to take ownership of their history caused many to dismiss the valid criticisms of Styron’s novel.*
In contrast, neo–slave narratives are meant to imagine and approximate the views and experiences of slaves based upon a combination of authentic historical documents, oral histories, and the author’s intelligence and creative powers, albeit with fairly sympathetic views of those experiences or, at the very least, with more historically accurate views and careful attention to the complexities of African American cultures. Rushdy and Bell consider the first neo–slave narratives to be Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966) and John Oliver Killens’s Slaves (1969), although an argument might be made that portions of William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer (1962) qualify. In any case, virtually all of the novels that might either be classified as neo–slave narratives or that comprise neo–slave narratives within their pages have been published since 1970.A partial listing follows in chronological order:
Ernest Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971)
Gayl Jones, Corregidora (1975)
Lucille Clifton, Generations: A Memoir (1976)
Alex Haley, Roots (1976)
Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (1976)
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings (1979)
David Bradley, The Chaneysville Incident (1981)
John Edgar Wideman, Damballah (1981)
Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale (1982)
Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose (1986)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Echo of Lions (1989)
Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)
J. California Cooper, Family (1991)
Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992)
Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River (1993)
J. California Cooper, In Search of Satisfaction (1994)
Louise Meriwether, Fragments of the Ark (1994)
Barbara Chase-Riboud, The President’s Daughter (1994)
Fred D’Aguiar, The Longest Memory (1994)
Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone (2001)
Neo-soul. See new black aesthetic.
New black aesthetic The term “new black aesthetic,” or NBA, is the invention of author Trey Ellis as the concatenation of the critical and social outlooks of “cultural mulattoes”: African Americans raised in white, middle-class suburbs, frequently misunderstood by both the white and black worlds (234). Ellis first put his definition of the term forward in an eponymous 1989 essay and manifesto published in Callaloo 12, no. 1. That issue also included critical responses from Tera Hunter and Eric Lott, as well as Ellis’s responses to his critics.
Ellis’s definition of the new black aesthetic riffs equally off of Langston Hughes’s declaration of artistic independence nearly sixty-five years earlier in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and the many debates over the responsibilities of African American artists to their community that have dominated African American literary criticism ever since, but especially the debates of the 1960s and 1970s. Ellis argues in “The New Black Aesthetic” that contemporary black artists and writers should be free to pursue artistic projects that reflect all of their influences, rather than trying to accommodate a single, overarching vision of “blackness” or black progress. To paraphrase Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s foreword to Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk, new black aestheticians feel but resist “the temptation to romanticize black culture [and] can parody black nationalism because [they have] a real measure of sympathy for it.” By the same token, these artists and intellectuals have also learned much from feminism, the gay rights movement, other liberation struggles, and their own immersion in the complexities of black culture either to “apologize” for it, or to excuse the fallacies of its past proponents.*
Ellis’s argument in “The New Black Aesthetic” stems from the fact that one segment of the first generation of African Americans born during or after the modern Civil Rights movement—the “Post-Soul” generation—has benefited from the new opportunities that the movement engendered by learning how to move between two cultures: the dominant, or “white,” defined by rock ’n’ roll music and Caucasian cultural and literary icons; and “black,” as defined by rap/hip-hop, jazz, African American literature and history, and so on. The healthy “cultural mulattoes,” the core of the NBA, are sufficiently “torn between two worlds to finally go out and create [their] own” (236). The resulting world would be the site of a cultural rapprochement not unlike the balance that W. E. B. Du Bois sought while describing double-consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk (1903): “He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”* The difference between Du Bois’s generation and Ellis’s, of course, is that the latter’s is formed of African Americans in an unprecedented situation, given their access to middle-class privileges, employment opportunities, and cultural cachet of which Du Bois could scarcely dream. In fact, the very goal of this rapprochement for new black aestheticians is to show how much African Americans have already given their “message to the world” or, more accurately, to the world’s culture.
Ellis’s definition of the new black aesthetic and its most receptive audience is not without its problems either. Ellis privileges the experiences of suburban, often middle-class blacks who attended predominantly white colleges and universities as exemplary developers and keepers of this aesthetic. Yet as Mark Anthony Neal points out, “with the intense commodification of black popular culture in the post–civil rights era and unprecedented access to it within mainstream commercial culture, young blacks were connected to mainstream commercial culture in ways that previous generations had not been,” and this includes those black youths not living in white suburbia.* Neal also quotes Tera Hunter’s response to Ellis, in which she asks, “If one has to attend an elite, predominately white university to live among black people for the first time, to what extent is [Ellis] talking about an aesthetic that is homegrown in black culture?”* Ellis’s definition, in other words, too glibly assumes that access to mainstream, or “white” culture, comes from a physical or class location.
Neal cites Greg Tate’s essays, “Nobody Loves a Genius Child: Jean Michel Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk” and “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke” from Tate’s collection Flyboy in the Buttermilk, as more trenchant and theoretically sophisticated facets of the new black aesthetic. Tate parses the ways in which younger African American artists simultaneously and paradoxically embrace black cultural nationalism and corporate capitalism. Put simply, most new black aestheticians want to be “black” in the sense of 1960s and 1970s black nationalism, without its sexism, homophobia, or myopia, but they also want to enjoy freely every aspect of American culture that is not self-destructive. The combined affinity for and skepticism of an earlier generation’s nationalism that many of these artists held has also earned them the label “neo-soul” or “Post-Soul.” The former term, incidentally is most often used to describe one style of R&B music that pays homage to 1970s soul while combining hip-hop beats and rhythms.
In literary terms, the new black aesthetic found expression most obviously in the “new black renaissance” of the 1980s and 1990s. Although most of the authors in this volume born after 1965 would qualify (as would some born earlier in the decade), the fiction authors that best represent the aesthetic are: Eric Jerome Dickey, Tananarive Due, Trey Ellis, Darius James, Darryl Pinckney, Danzy Senna, Sister Souljah, Omar Tyree, Colson Whitehead, and Monique Wright.
“New black renaissance” The “new black renaissance” has a number of different meanings, depending upon who is employing the term. One could justifiably identify the surge of writing by African Americans, especially women, beginning in the mid-1970s as the beginnings of a new renaissance, but the wave of young artists who began publishing in the late 1980s has usurped the title, thanks to a combination of the “new black aesthetic,” which Trey Ellis, Greg Tate, and others developed in the 1980s, and the revival of traditional, acoustic jazz spearheaded by an alliance of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and cultural critic Stanley Crouch.
New breed or new fiction These are terms used to describe African American authors who either began publishing or achieved prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including David Bradley, Virginia Hamilton, Charles Johnson, Clarence Major, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and John Edgar Wideman. These authors were often cited as the beginning of the new black renaissance as a result of their challenging, often experimental fiction.
Nobel Prize in Literature Although it is almost universally regarded as the highest honor any author might receive for a lifetime of literary achievement, the Nobel Prize in Literature has thus far been bestowed upon only one African American author, novelist Toni Morrison, who received it in October 1993. This accolade did not come without considerable controversy. Morrison’s most vocal critics, including Charles R. Johnson and Stanley Crouch, among others, decried what they viewed as an award given more for political reasons than for literary merit. Johnson and Crouch in particular favored Ralph Ellison as the most deserving recipient.*
While it may be true that Morrison’s Nobel Prize was awarded in part to end a rather resoundingly inexplicable absence of African Americans among the exclusive club of recipients, many of her critics conveniently ignored the fact that the Nobel Prizes in Literature have never been divorced from politics. Charles Johnson’s advocacy of Ralph Ellison and Invisible Man as better candidates for the prize similarly ignores the fact that the prize has historically been awarded for a lifetime of achievement. Brilliant as Ellison was, at the time of Morrison’s award he had still published only one novel—albeit one of the most impressive and revered in modern literary history—the only in his lifetime. Morrison, on the other hand, published six novels in the nearly twenty-five years between The Bluest Eye’s appearance in 1970 and the awarding of the Nobel. Each of these has become the subject of extensive scholarly scrutiny and, with the exception of Tar Baby, great popular acclaim.
The controversy over Morrison’s award reveals, perhaps to the same extent as the controversy over Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple in the early 1980s, how the rise and dominance of African American women authors has led to some black male authors’ resentment toward the power of the critical establishment, especially feminists within that larger group. It also reveals general antipathy toward the inroads African Americans and their literature and culture have made in mainstream America, further reflecting the ways the face of African American literature has changed along with its popular acceptance since 1970.
Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996) As the most heralded anthology of African American literature to be published in recent years, the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996) stands as one of the finest collections for classroom and personal use. Although hundreds of anthologies of African American literature have been published since the nineteenth century, perhaps none was so widely and eagerly anticipated as the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, whose general editors were Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. The other editors, each of whom was responsible for a major segment of the text, were selected from the most eminent scholars of African American literature in the latter part of the century. They included: William L. Andrews, Houston A. Baker Jr., Barbara T. Christian, Frances Smith Foster, Deborah E. McDowell, Robert G. O'Meally, Arnold Rampersad, Hortense Spillers, and Richard Yarborough. The Norton Anthology preceded into print by several months Houghton Mifflin's Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, for which Patricia Liggins Hill was the general editor. The anthologies inevitably competed with each other, and are, for different reasons, virtually equal in their merits. Due in large part to a decade of aggressive advance publicity, savvy marketing, and name recognition, though, the Norton Anthology has become the most commonly used anthology and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
The Norton Anthology’s significance and eminence stem from its fulfillment of several critical needs in African American literary studies:
1) It was the first comprehensive and fully updated anthology since Richard Barksdale’s and Keneth Kinnamon’s Black Writers of America (1972)
2) It was published by W. W. Norton & Co., which produces many of the most popular and widely respected literary anthologies used on college campuses
3) It helped advance the project of canon building that earlier anthologies had attempted to complete
4) It was relatively affordable and, with 127 discrete writers and orators represented, as well as eighty folktales, sermons, work songs, spirituals, jazz and blues songs, toasts, and raps, it had a broader selection of artists than Barksdale and Kinnamon’s, or any other previous anthology
5) Of the artists represented, fifty-one were women, far more than had ever been included in earlier collections
6) Not only were song lyrics included, but a compact disc of songs, rhymes, speeches, and poems—many read or performed by the original artists—also accompanied the anthology. For all of these reasons, the anthology sold dramatically
Clearly, the publication of Norton Anthology of African American Literature was a major event. It began with a proposal that Henry Louis Gates Jr. made in 1986 to M. H. Abrams, a preeminent literary critic of the United States and the general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. Abrams and editors at Norton gave their enthusiastic support, and Gates began assembling the editorial team and resources to construct the anthology. Its editorial philosophy focused upon the thesis that African American literature had always already been part of American literature but had been excluded from mainstream recognition by the academy and the general public due to a combination of racism and paternalism. Such exclusions had the effect of silencing African American voices for much of the nation’s history, effectively placing black people, their identities, and their thoughts under erasure. The anthology is also meant to benefit the unprecedented demand for African American literature courses and their teachers in black studies and English programs and departments that developed in the 1980s and 1990s in particular.
The anthology’s greatest virtues are its richly detailed biographies and histories that accompany each author’s entry and its extensive bibliography, timeline, and index. All of these resources make it about as close to a self-sufficient study guide for African American literature as any editor could hope to get. Each historical era, individual author, or movement has a list of related books, articles, stories, recordings, and other media sources that the interested student would find invaluable. The timeline,“African American Literature in Context,” begins at 1492, when Pedro Alonzo Nino, an explorer of African descent, sailed with Christopher Columbus and ends with a list of major publications of 1996. In the intervening years, the timeline lists major events and publications that influenced or changed the direction of African American literature, culture, and history.
The essays that preface individual historical sections are, per the editors’ wishes, written mostly in the singular voices of the individual editors, with due uniformity of format and objective. This has the benefit of creating a diverse, rich blend of perspectives and ideological positions, and most of these essays are both thorough and perceptive. A few, however, veer too far into the more esoteric language and theoretical analyses that might be transparent to the teacher but that are likely to be opaque to the beginning student. In addition, the volume arguably contains too little of the strongest contemporary fiction—especially examples of urban realism—opting instead to include the entirety of Toni Morrison’s Sula. While the latter is certainly one of Morrison’s finest works, and therefore a worthy addition to the volume, one wonders how many other authors and stories could have been included. Of course, this is a problem that no anthology can realistically hope to avoid, and most of the anthology’s lapses are visible mostly to the more experienced reader of African American literature. Nonetheless, a comparison of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature to some of the other volumes that have been published in its wake would reveal just how much more diversity may be found among the builders of an African American canon. In late 2003, the second edition of the anthology appeared, without Sula and with a broader representation of contemporary authors.
Nunez, Elizabeth (b. 1944, Cocorite, Trinidad) Novelist Elizabeth Nunez is one of the founders of the National Black Writers Conference, which she directed from 1986 to 2000. Nunez wrote a series of novels in the 1990s that are set in and inspired by her homeland of Trinidad. Each of these novels reflects Nunez’s specific concern with the effects of colonialism on Trinidad and other Caribbean nations, particularly their black populations. Her first novel, When Rocks Dance (1986, republished 1992; Nunez’s name is given as Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell), focuses upon Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the Americas and the destruction wrought by Columbus and the conquerors and merchants that followed him. Bruised Hibiscus (1994) is based upon real events in the Trinidad of the 1950s, where protagonists Rosa and Zuela seek answers regarding a gruesome murder that brings to light a number of long-simmering issues of racial and gender inequality. Although Nunez was criticized for the novel’s treatment of men, particularly black men, it was also roundly applauded for its discovery of the tensions within Trinidadian society along racial and gender lines. Sara Edgehill, the protagonist of Beyond the Limbo Silence (1998), wins a scholarship to a women’s college in Wisconsin and faces several challenges simultaneously: the paternalism of the school’s officials towards people of African descent; the pain of the racial and class divide between Sara and her white classmates, which is barely ameliorated by the friendship of the school’s few other Caribbean students; and the impact of the Civil Rights movement’s most harrowingly momentous events upon Sara’s consciousness and life.
Due in no small part to her major contribution to contemporary literature by and about people from Caribbean nations, Nunez’s novels should soon generate considerable scholarly interest. In the meantime, Nunez’s own contributions to the scholarship on this area will suffice. She is the author of “Could Shakespeare Have Known,” The Journal of Negro Education 45, no. 2 (Spring 1976); (as Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell) “The Paradoxes of Belonging: The White West Indian in Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 31, no. 2 (Summer 1985); and she is coauthor, with Brenda M. Greene, of “The Big Nommo: The Writer as Prophet,” in their edited collection Defining Ourselves: Black Writers in the 90s (1999).
* James C. Hall, “On Sale at Your Favorite Newsstand: Negro Digest/Black World and the 1960s,” in The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Todd Vogel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 191–93. Hall notes that the magazine’s popularity came despite the fact that its original editor was Ben Burns, who was both white and a communist at a time when African American publications steered clear of editors with either of those identities. Burns, however, was not listed on Negro Digest’s masthead until years after the magazine was established.
* Hall, “On Sale at Your Favorite Newsstand,” 195.
* Hall, “On Sale at Your Favorite Newsstand,” 198–200.
* Hall, “On Sale at Your Favorite Newsstand,” 198–99.
* Carolyn Gerard, quoted in Abby Arth Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of African American Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), 165.
* Amiri Baraka, quoted in Johnson and Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics, 195.
* Nathan Hare, quoted in Johnson and Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics, ibid.
* Johnson and Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics, 196.
* Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press), 246.
* Bell, The Afro-American Novel, 285; Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3.
* Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives, 54, 61ff.
* Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives, 61.
* Henry Louis Gates Jr., foreword to Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, by Greg Tate, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 14.
* W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New York: Knopf, 1993), 9.
* Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2002), 112.
* Tera Hunter, “‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World’: Specters of the Old Renewed in Afro-American Culture and Criticism,” Callaloo 12, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 247.
* Courtland Milloy, “For Morrison, a Song of Sour Grapes,”Washington Post, October 10, 1993.