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Packer, ZZ (Zuwena; b. 1973, Chicago, Illinois) From the moment her story “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” appeared in The New Yorker magazine’s Debut Fiction issue in 2000, ZZ Packer generated extensive buzz in the literary world. Although this was not Packer’s first published work—she had appeared in the collection Twenty-five and Under/Fiction (1997) and in Seventeen magazine, for example—the buzz grew to murmurings of a new, great talent on the scene as she published other stories over the next couple of years in Harper’s, Ploughshares, The Best American Short Stories of 2000, and other outlets. When Packer published her first collection, also entitled Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2003), those murmurings became ecstatic shouts. The book drew almost universal acclaim, and Packer began to gather such laurels as a Jones Lectureship at Stanford University. (Packer was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford for 1999–2000.) Earlier in her career, Packer also won the Whiting Foundation Writers’ Award (1999) and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’Award (1997).

The stories in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere feature African American characters, but this is almost incidental to the stories’ content. They are more concerned with the harshness and cruelty of growing up in a world in which silence and exclusion are common responses to those who fail to conform. If Packer’s stories lampoon black churches, pimps, and hustlers and skewer African American communities’ silence regarding sexuality and black gays and lesbians in particular, these institutions and figures are not condemned as pathological or otherwise terribly different from the rest of American society; they are simply part of humanity’s baseness, no more, no less. The first story, “Brownies,” is a perfect example; it centers upon the conflict between black and white members of the Girl Scouts organization, but neither side of the “racial” divide comes out clean in the end. Packer has drawn as many comparisons to such authors as Flannery O’Connor as she has to Percival Everett and James Alan McPherson. The latter two writers are African American, but their fiction defies the usual stereotypes applied to African American fiction in general.

Pate, Alexs D. (b. 1950, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) Award-winning novelist Alexs Pate authored a number of novels in the 1990s that attracted respectable attention nation wide but especially in Minnesota, the site of his residence and the setting for several of his novels. Losing Absalom (1994) is a character study of protagonist Abraham Goodman, whose children are forced to confront the unsatisfying paths they have taken in life when they return home to be by their dying father’s bedside. Losing Absalom won the First Novel Award of the American Library Association Black Caucus and the Minnesota Book Award (both 1994). Finding Makeba (1996) centers upon novelist Ben Crestfield and his daughter Makeba, whom he abandoned along with her mother many years earlier. When Ben encounters Makeba at a book signing for the novel that is about his failed marriage, the narrative evolves into a mixture of Ben’s novel and Makeba’s journal, allowing for their widely divergent accounts of their personal history to be revealed. The Multicultiboho Sideshow (1999) is a satire in which young writer Ichabod Word holds a policeman hostage so he can recount the elaborate story that led him to the desperate moment. Word’s misadventures with a group of glib, multicultural, bohemian writers and intellectuals—hence the novel’s title—provide a scathing indictment of the cynical side of multiculturalism as practiced by those who wear their ethnic identities on their sleeves.

Journal articles on Pate include: Katherine Link, “‘Illuminating the Darkened Corridors’: An Interview with Alexs Pate,” AAR 36, no. 4 (Winter 2002). Pate also authored an article on African Americans who die of natural causes, “The Invisible Black Family Man,” in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 4 (Summer 1994).

Perry, Phyllis Alesia (b. 1961, Atlanta, Georgia) Journalist and novelist Phyllis Alesia Perry entered the national literary scene with the publication of her first novel, Stigmata (1998), which was compared to the best work of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due, and other authors who tell the undertold stories of African American women’s lives, particularly under slavery and other forms of oppression, through the lens of fantasy. These comparisons have their foundation in Stigmata’s plot, which concerns Lizzie DuBose, who inherits a trunk full of her late grandmother’s effects, including a quilt that contains her family’s complex history within its patches and intricately woven thread. Just as the other authors’ essays and novels argue that women’s creativity may be found in other forms than the printed page, in Stigmata Lizzie eventually has to create her own quilt—and therefore her own history—to understand her history and to come to terms with it. She learns about her great-great-grandmother Ayo’s torment during the horrific Middle Passage between Africa and Americas and as an enslaved woman in the United States. As Lizzie discovers this history, her body manifests the physical pain that her ancestors endured. Perry won high praise for the novel’s gorgeous yet disciplined language. In 2003, Perry published her second novel, A Sunday in June, which concerns a middle-class African American family living in Alabama in the early 1900s. As in Stigmata, the Mobley family includes young women, Grace, Eva, and Mary Nell, who possess mystic powers that enable their relatives to open and appreciate their African past and the turmoil of the present.

Perry is among a small handful of younger African American authors whose work attracted nearly immediate scholarly interest. To date, Stigmata has earned one article: Lisa A. Long, “A Relative Pain: The Rape of History in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata,” College English (March 2002).

Petry, Ann Lane (b. October 12, 1908, Old Saybrook, Connecticut; d. April 28, 1997, Old Saybrook, Connecticut) Novelist, poet, and short-story author Ann Petry became a major figure of twentieth-century African American literature on the basis of her classic novel of urban realism, The Street, which was originally published in 1946. Beyond being universally hailed by critics, The Street is also a best-seller, having sold well over two million copies.^* Between the great success following The Street’s publication and 1969, Petry continued to write at a steady clip—she had been writing since at least the early 1930s—including the excellent Country Place (1947), The Narrows (1953), and several works of fiction for children and young adults. Save for many reprints and anthologies of her work, though, Petry wrote only a handful of fictional works, primarily for a juvenile audience: Legends of the Saints (1970), a collection of profiles of major religious figures, including an African American;^* Miss Muriel and Other Stories (1971), is a solid collection that is accessible to both juvenile and adult audiences and comparable in quality to Petry’s novels. In 1988, Petry published “The Moses Project,” a short story on the effects of house arrest.

Critical scholarship on Petry is extensive, albeit focused almost exclusively on her career prior to 1970. Hilary Holladay, Ann Petry (1996) is the most current biography extant, while Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ann Petry: A Bio-bibliography (1993) offers a complete annotated bibliographic record of Petry’s career, including an excellent biographical sketch. Other major articles on Petry’s later work include Gladys J. Washington, “A World Made Cunningly: A Closer Look at Ann Petry’s Short Fiction,” in CLA Journal 30 (September 1986). General essays include: Calvin Herton, “The Significance of Ann Petry,” in his The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers: Adventures in Sex, Literature, and Real Life (1987); Vernon E. Lattin, “Ann Petry and the American Dream,” BALF 12, no. 2 (Summer 1978); Margaret McDowell, “The Narrows: A Fuller View of Ann Petry,” BALF 14, no. 4 (Winter 1980); and Keith Clark,“A Distaff Dream Deferred? Ann Petry and the Art of Subversion,” AAR 26, no. 3 (Autumn 1992).

Phillips, Caryl (b. 1958, St. Kitts) In the early 1980s, novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet Caryl Phillips quickly established himself as one of the most poetic and incisive chroniclers of the postcolonial legacy in the Caribbean. Phillips was born in St. Kitts but raised from infancy in England, returning many years later to his West Indian roots. Many of his five novels published between 1984 and 2000 are semiautobiographical; all reflect in some way on the problem of displacement among people of the African Diaspora, especially in the Caribbean and Great Britain. Phillips is consistently interested in investigating the way such displacement occurs over vast stretches of time divided into several sections within some novels. Some of his fictional works thus read as short-story collections, but ultimately come together thematically as unified wholes.

Phillips’s first novel, The Final Passage (1985), is his first major fictional investigation of the journey of black Caribbeans to England in search of new opportunities in education and employment, the passage named in the title. Protagonist Leila Preston, her son, and her errant husband make the trek after her mother falls ill and needs better medical attention. The blatant racism they encounter upon arrival speaks to the legacy of British imperialism for those from Commonwealth nations, especially the British West Indies. A State of Independence (1986) looks at the postcolonial subject’s conundrums as he attempts to return to his newly independent nation. Bertram Francis’s impressions during his sojourn and return to the West Indian island of his birth explode many of the romantic notions about independence and freedom; those states either create or perpetuate the class and political strata installed under colonial rule.

Higher Ground (1989) comprises three stories about individuals struggling to find dignity and selfhood in an alienating world. The first story is a semi-allegorical tale about an African who is spared many of the indignities of the institution by aiding the enslavers, at the cost of his humanity; the second revolves around Rudi Williams, an African American prisoner in the South who tries to maintain his humanity by drawing inspiration from the Black Power Movement; the third tells of Irina, a Jewish refugee from wartime Poland and the Holocaust nearly driven mad by her experiences. Set in the nineteenth century, Cambridge (1991) examines postabolition England and its Caribbean plantations. When Emily Cartwright, the daughter of a wealthy English plantation owner is sent to her father’s property to inspect its status, she encounters numerous tensions along social, sexual, religious, and class lines that delineate the divide between Anglo and African cultures. Similar to Higher Ground in structure, Crossing the River (1993) comprises three interconnected stories of the different paths that African slaves brought to the United States took historically as a way of tracing slavery’s extensive legacy. The Nature of Blood (1997) again interweaves stories about people (Jews and Africans) across time (the sixteenth century, World War II, and the postwar period) and location (Venice, Ethiopia, Israel, Germany) that are at once disparate yet tightly connected.

Phillips’s fiction has won the Malcolm X Prize for Literature (1984) for The Final Passage; a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1992); the (London) Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award (1992) for Cambridge; a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency (1994); the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1994) for Crossing the River; a Lannan Literary Award (1994); the University of the West Indies Humanities Scholar of the Year (1999); a fellowship with the Royal Society of Literature (2000). He was also short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1993 for Crossing the River.

Scholarly books on Phillips include: Bénédicte Ledent, Caryl Phillips (2002); Darryl Pinckney, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (2002), which features a section on Phillips’s work; and Phillips’s own The European Tribe (1987), a memoir of sorts that discusses his encounters as an exile in European locales. Journal articles include: Charles P. Sarvan and Hasan Marhama, “The Fictional Works of Caryl Phillips: An Introduction,” World Literature Today 65, no. 1 (Winter 1991); Evelyn O’Callaghan, “Historical Fiction and Fictional History: Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 28, no. 2 (December 1993); Bénédicte Ledent, “‘Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories’: Cross-culturality in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 30, no. 1 (Winter 1995); Gail Low, “‘A Chorus of Common Memory’: Slavery and Redemption in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and Crossing the River” Research in African Literatures (Winter 1998); Horace I. Goddard, “Travel Discourse in Caryl Phillips’ The Final Passage and A State of Independence,” Kola 14, no. 2 (Autumn 2002).

Pinckney, Darryl (b. 1953, Indianapolis, Indiana) Novelist and literary critic Darryl Pinckney caused a splash with the publication of his semiautobiographical novel High Cotton (1992). With its unnamed narrator, picaresque form, and eloquent lyricism, High Cotton takes a cue from Ralph Ellison’s classic Invisible Man, albeit with a then-unusual focus upon the African American upper middle class that grew and came into prominence during and after the Civil Rights era. In contrast to Ellison’s narrator, Pinckney’s grows up in suburbia in a very well-to-do family and toggles between his devout Anglophilia, nerdiness, militancy, and an overarching desire to find a viable identity as an African American. His travels to New York eventually bring him into comical encounters with everything that is noble or farcical within contemporary African American culture, resulting finally in a choice to remain true to himself rather than to any particular ideology.

Postmodernism While no single definition of postmodernism could ever suffice to describe it fully, in its broadest possible application to fiction it refers to contents, strategies, and styles of writing in which the ways that history, culture, language, identity, knowledge, and often the very idea of the written text itself are called into question within the narrative. Most of the texts now identified as postmodern were composed after World War II, when many in the West found themselves in a world under the threat of nuclear annihilation, full of wild changes in the social order (the modern Civil Rights movement; attacks upon communists and other political radicals; etc.), paranoia, and the triple threat of the rise of the suburban middle class, consumer culture, and widespread social conformity. The resultant alienation led to widespread questioning of the very same “grand narratives” of history and culture that allowed modern society to function. In general, though, the height of postmodernism in literature was the 1960s and 1970s, when the experimental surfiction and black humor of such non–African American authors as Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, William Gaddis, Ronald Sukenick, and William Gass became popular.

Linda Hutcheon’s definition is also helpful. Hutcheon argues that postmodernism is “a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges,” which means that the text often undermines itself even as it is trying to subvert specific concepts. Hutcheon posits this as an ultimately ironic relationship in which the text or author is fully conscious of the difficulty her or his text may have in creating meaning or an unequivocal argument.^* Postmodernism, then, is a rubric in which the dominant myths of and about the past and history, in all their manifestations, are subjected to critical and often ironic scrutiny, questioned at their very bases.

In African American literature, a number of authors have been defined as postmodern due to texts that do at least one of the following: question the way mainstream or Western versions of history have been constructed and by whom; revise, update, or parody such traditional literary forms as the travel narrative, slave narrative, romance, tragedy, and so on for the purpose of expanding these forms or showing how they have limited African American forms of expression; construct experimental texts that dispense with many literary conventions, including linear plots, rules about the mechanical arrangement of text and other media, and the obligation of the author to help the reader construct meaning. Some authors, such as Ishmael Reed, reject the label of “postmodern.” In Reed’s case, he sees the term as too limiting, inasmuch as the sort of maneuvers postmodernism makes in revising and subverting systems are not at all unlike the critical work that traditional African American folk figures have performed for centuries.^* By the same token, postmodernism does not differ significantly from what African American intellectuals have done by continually calling for American society to take a revised look at its myths and legends about its greatness that would include the viewpoints of peoples of color as subjects, rather than as objects of history.

Despite Reed’s objections to the label of being a postmodern writer, he is one of many African American authors whose novels from the 1970s until the present provide excellent examples of theories of postmodernism at work. In fact, most of the novels of one such author, Clarence Major, are often considered key postmodernist texts. Others who have either been discussed as postmodern or might justifiably earn the label include: Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Leon Forrest, Paul Beatty, Darius James, Hal Bennett, Fran Ross, John Edgar Wideman, Ernest J. Gaines, William Melvin Kelley, Charles S. Wright, Ronald Fair, and Toni Cade Bambara.

Post-Soul The term “Post-Soul” was coined as a way of describing the works emerging from the generation of writers that were born during or after the Civil Rights/Black Power eras or who reached personal and artistic maturity from the late 1970s forward. It is virtually synonymous with the new black aesthetic that author Trey Ellis outlines in his 1989 Callaloo essay of the same name (see the separate entry, new black aesthetic).

Post-Soul most accurately refers to the ambivalent outlook that the post–Civil Rights generation has toward its literary and political predecessors, specifically the cultural nationalism to which many black intellectuals adhered. “Soul” means, quite simply, “the essence of blackness … black authenticity… African-American culture” or “cultural truth or validity.”^* While this definition might make “Post-Soul” seem superfluous, it is meant to evoke the younger generation’s desire to transcend the definitions of the older, to rise above while being posterior. It indicates doubts about whether “black authenticity” may ever be achieved or whether it may be defined clearly at all. Of course, such a position may be achieved only by simplifying “soul” itself, but this is merely a reaction to perceived oversimplifications of “cultural truth.” Post-Soul writers, then, tend to look upon black cultural nationalism with an ironic, skeptical eye, never fully accepting an overarching definition of blackness. Post-Soul writers may demonstrate how “blackness” is always already complicated through binaries—biraciality, bisexuality, biculturality—or other identities, such as one’s gender, region, sexuality, culture, age, or politics. All of these, presumably, may become part of “blackness,” rather than compromise it.

Many writers would fit easily under this term, but some of the better examples would be Paul Beatty, Stephen Carter, Trey Ellis, Darius James, Randall Kenan, Darryl Pinckney, Sapphire, Danzy Senna, Greg Tate, Philippe Wamba, and Colson Whitehead.

Powell, Kevin (b. 1966, Jersey City, New Jersey) Journalist, writer, and editor Kevin Powell is a leading voice among the younger generation of African American writers that came into its own in the 1990s and 2000s. Although he first gained fame as one of the original cast members of MTV’s “The Real World” show, Powell has racked up an extensive and impressive résumé at such magazines and newspapers as Vibe, Ms., Rolling Stone, Essence, The Washington Post, and many others. His work for these magazines helped bring Powell into contact with many of the authors who populate his two anthologies of writing by younger African American and African Diasporic authors: In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers (1993; coedited with Ras Baraka); and Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature (2000). The former is one of the first major collections to focus primarily on African American writers born since the mid-1960s, while the latter extends the reach of its predecessor by including writers of African descent from Africa, Britain, Canada, and the Caribbean. Although only the fourth of Step Into a World’s six parts is devoted solely to fiction, the entire collection is invaluable; the other sections are “Essays,” “Hip-hop Journalism,” “Criticism,” “Poetry,” and “Dialogue,” with the sections of criticism and journalism arguably being the most relevant to the fiction reader. The anthology also includes short author autobiographies, which are both informative and entertaining. The selected fiction authors include Paul Beatty, Edwidge Danticat, Tananarive Due, Christopher John Farley, Jake Lamar, Ben Okri, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Patricia Powell, Danzy Senna, Zadie Smith, and Colson Whitehead.

* Hazel Arnett Ervin, “Petry, Ann,” The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 324.

* Ibid.

* Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 3–4.

* See Reginald Martin’s “An Interview with Ishmael Reed,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 4, no. 2 (1984). In this interview Reed argues that most of the labels American critics have used to describe African American literature have been inadequate; they often rely upon Western notions that do not allow for the type of inclusion that African religions and philosophies posit.

* Clarence Major, From Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang (New York: Penguin, 1994), 434.