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Sapphire (b. Ramona Lofton, 1950, Fort Ord, California) Sapphire is one of the most controversial and startlingly innovative authors to emerge since 1970.Not unlike such predecessors as Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, Sapphire’s work and reputation have rested upon her pushing the boundaries of acceptable discourse about the secrets and secret histories within African American families.

Sapphire’s first book, American Dreams (1994), is a largely autobiographical poetic account of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her father and of the later discovery of her sexuality. While the poetic narrative cannot be called a novel in the strictest sense, it bears much of the continuity and realism commonly associated with the novel form. It is, nonetheless, an extremely graphic and ultimately—purposely—disturbing indictment of the ways in which the pursuit of the American dream, or at least the image thereof, is horribly destructive in both psychic and physical ways. Arguably, the most distressing element within Sapphire’s/the protagonist’s narrative is the degree to which the mother in the family aids and abets the father’s abuse for the sake of maintaining the image of middle-class respectability.

One particular passage from a later vignette in the book is worth mentioning primarily because its image of Jesus Christ performing fellatio was among many that angered conservative politicians to the point of starting a backlash against the National Endowment for the Arts, leading to that agency’s struggle for survival in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Sapphire’s second book, Push (1996), continues the same subject matter and thematics as the first but is written as a novel. Its protagonist is Claireece Precious Jones, a poor, functionally illiterate, obese, and HIV-positive young girl abused by her mother and raped by her father. Her harrowing narration of her suffering and methods used to cope with it is written in a dialect that is difficult at first but ultimately moving and utterly devastating. Push earned Sapphire even greater accolades, attention, and controversy, making her one of the most important writers of the late 1990s. Since Push, Sapphire has published Black Wings and Blind Angels, a book of poetry that has also received strong reviews.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Located in the heart of New York City’s Harlem community, the Schomburg Center is the preeminent research center in the United States for anyone interested in the African Diaspora, especially African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean history and culture. It comprises five divisions: Art and Artifacts (paintings, sculptures, historical and archeological artifacts); General Research and Reference (holdings in African, Caribbean, and African American literature and newspapers); Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books; Moving Image and Recorded Sound; and Photographs and Prints. All of these divisions hold extremely impressive and invaluable materials, but the Schomburg is best known for its holdings in African American literature, manuscripts, and photographs. Arguably, the only other facility that exceeds the Schomburg’s manuscript holdings is the James Weldon Johnson Collection in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Schomburg Center is also part of the New York Public Library system and therefore enjoys the benefits of being partially supported by one of the best public library systems in the world.

The Schomburg Center began as the private book collection of Arthur A. Schomburg, a bank messenger, ardent bibliophile, and significant figure of the “New Negro” or Harlem Renaissance, interested in proving the worthiness and cultural wealth of the peoples of the African Diaspora. In 1926, one year after the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library opened, the Carnegie Corporation bought Schomburg’s collection and, six years later, designated him curator. After Schomburg died in 1940, the collection was renamed in his honor. It has since amassed over five million pieces classified under the five separate divisions. The collection now includes books, manuscripts, newspapers, magazines, films, photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures, anthropological artifacts, organizational records and archives, and the personal papers of many famous figures in African American history, favoring those who lived or otherwise played crucial roles in New York, particularly black Harlem. When all of its holdings are considered together, the Schomburg stands as the single largest collection of materials documenting the achievements of the African Diaspora in the world. For scholars interested in contemporary African American fiction, the collection’s holdings in original manuscripts of authors of Black Arts Movement are invaluable, as are the many scholarly books contained therein. Although the collection is open to the public, access to archival materials is restricted to scholars working on research projects.

Science/speculative fiction and fantasy The genre of science, or speculative fiction is defined broadly by narratives “that represent an imagined reality that is radically different in its nature and functioning from the world of our ordinary experience,” with the setting often the Earth of the future or another world with a history or society resembling Earth’s.^* The “science” and “speculative” parts of the term refer to the possible or real inventions resulting from the application of scientific inquiry, used to make fantastic elements in the genre’s stories plausible. Science/speculative fiction thereby offers speculation on what the future or present might hold if science or history were to develop or had developed in various ways. While fantasy is closely related to science fiction, it does not always rely upon scientific plausibility, assuming instead that the uncanny elements within the narratives are plausible in their own right.^* Each genre has a number of subgenres, including space opera (e.g., the Star Wars franchise, “Flash Gordon,” and the like), sword-and-sorcery (Conan the Barbarian, John Carter, Warlord of Mars, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series, and so on), cyberpunk (concerned with the impact of computer technology, computer networks, and the culture they have spawned, as delineated in the novels of William Gibson and selected works of Samuel R. Delany), among many others. Ultimately, however, both science/speculative fiction and fantasy are very difficult to define precisely, as they frequently cross generic boundaries and vary widely in quality and purpose.

Historically, very few African American authors have publicly succeeded in the genre, which is dominated by white males, who also make up the majority of the audience. Since the late 1960s, however, at least two authors have established themselves as major voices in science fiction: Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany (see separate entries). Both have won the highest awards (the Hugo and the Nebula) in the field, loyal audiences, and impressive sales. Several other authors have also contributed to the field as well, albeit not as prolifically as Butler and Delany. These authors include Jewelle Gomez (see separate entry), who attracted high praise for her novel The Gilda Stories (1991) and short-story collection, Don’t Explain (1998), both of which have been read as science fiction and fantasy; Walter Mosley (see separate entry), who has also made a recent foray into the field with his novel Blue Light (1999); Tananarive Due, whose first novel, The Between (1995) relies heavily on science fiction conventions; Steven Barnes (Due’s husband), who has written or cowritten (with Larry Niven) half a dozen fantasy novels since 1981; Charles R. Saunders, who wrote several fantasy novels in the Imaro series during the early to mid-1980s.

Scott, Darieck (b. August 7, 1964, Fort Knox, Kentucky) Novelist Darieck Scott is among the group of younger black authors whose fiction openly questions many of the divisions and silences within African American communities. He is also a prominent figure in contemporary black gay fiction. Scott’s first novel, Traitor to the Race (1995), is an experimental novel about African American actor Kenneth Gabriel and his white lover, Evan, a soap opera star. Their complex relationship is filled with sexual role-playing games and broken cultural taboos (hence the title) that are linked symbolically to other events in the text, particularly the murder of Kenneth’s brother Hammett. Kenneth finds himself having to deal with the intersections of “race,” sexuality, class, gay politics, the AIDS epidemic, and many other issues. The novel received good reviews upon its initial publication, with a few reviewers wishing that Scott had sacrificed either some of the issues he wished to tackle or some of the text’s experiments.

Scott’s short stories have also been published in Callaloo 17, no. 4 (Fall 1994); 21, no. 1 (Winter 1998); 23, no. 1 (Winter 2000) and in the anthologies Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe (1995) and Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (2000).

Senna, Danzy (b. 1970, Boston, Massachusetts) Danzy Senna may rightfully be considered among the most talented of the “neo-soul” or “Post-Soul” generation of African American authors born during or after the modern Civil Rights Movement. As is true of many of her contemporaries, she is a product of that movement and of various cultural influences, including historically “white” institutions of higher education (B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., University of California at Irvine). She teaches at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The bulk of Senna’s work has been a number of brilliant essays and short stories that blend the barrier between the two genres and a major debut novel, Caucasia (1998). Although her output has not been extremely prolific, it has been consistent in its quality and provocative nature. Senna focuses primarily upon the complexities of life for the children of biracial unions, but she never slips into the cliché of the “tragic mulatto” stereotype, except to satirize it.

This description befits her strongest short story/essay, “The Mulatto Millennium,” which debuted in Utne magazine’s September/October 1998 issue and was later collected in Claudine C. O’Hearn’s acclaimed anthology, Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural (1998). Senna’s story riffs on the late-1990s fad of claiming multiracial or -cultural status in the wake of multiracial golfer Tiger Wood’s spectacular and unprecedented celebrity. Senna invents a number of hilarious neologisms for bicultural classifications (e.g., “Jewlato” for half-Jewish, half-black; “Gelato” for half-Italian, half-black; and so on) as she simultaneously reaffirms the fact of race as a social phenomenon while highlighting the absurdity of racial classifications.

Caucasia earned Senna enthusiastic accolades from numerous mainstream sources, including trade journals and the major American news magazines. Caucasia is a semiautobiographical narrative about Birdie Lee, the younger—and lighter-skinned—daughter of a black male intellectual and white activist descended from Eastern blue-bloods. When her parents split up, Birdie travels the countryside with her mother under a Jewish pseudonym, attempting to stave off her sense of invisibility in the absence of her father’s and sister’s connections to African American culture. Birdie’s struggle to find her racial and cultural identity is both engaging and compelling, peppered liberally with references to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment, and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, the texts to which it owes much of its thematic content.

Since Senna’s work is so new, no critical articles or books have yet emerged, save for initial book reviews, which were mostly positive. Senna’s second novel, Symptomatic, appeared in 2004.

Shange, Ntozake (b. Paulette Williams, 1948, Trenton, New Jersey) Ntozake Shange is best known as a prolific and controversial playwright and poet. Her landmark play, the “choreopoem” for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow was enuf (1977) first elevated her as one of the strongest playwrights of the 1970s and 1980s. Her work is routinely discussed in the same breath as the major novels and stories of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and Sonia Sanchez for its complex weaving of feminist themes and African American cultural politics. Shange consistently calls for women, particularly African American women, to learn how to free themselves from their dependence upon men in order to develop fully as individuals. This applies equally to Shange’s style as a poet and writer. Shange plays with spelling and punctuation conventions to create rhythm and timbre that suggest the sound and structure of everyday speech. Her novels push the boundaries of the genre, reading more like extended poems than traditional prose.

Although the quantity of Shange’s output in fiction ranks well below that of her poetry and plays, it reflects her commitment to the aesthetics of poetry. Shange’s first major prose work, Sassafrass: A Novella (1976) contains prose that resembles poetic verse in its rhythm, cadence, and physical setting on the page. The novella’s eponymous and semiautobiographical heroine recounts the many obstacles she has encountered on the way to developing her artistic sensibility as a weaver. Shange later expanded Sassafrass into Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1982), in which Sassafrass joins and interacts with her sisters, who also practice arts that require improvisation and intuition: Cypress is a dancer, while Indigo is a midwife. Through a complex, blues-based dialogue, each searches for her creative muse and the expressive forms that will allow her to realize her artistic identity. In the process, each learns the difficulties of abusive personal relationships, which leads in turn to lessons about the artist’s need for independence from material trappings or societal norms. The novel garnered some controversy for its portrayal of both black males and lesbian relationships, but it remains the strongest and most popular of Shange’s novels. The titular protagonist of Betsey Brown (1985) is a young African American girl who becomes the first to attend an all-white school. Although the novel’s plot is based upon school integration events of the Civil Rights era, it is concerned more with the way Betsey’s encounter with her school affects her family and her sense of personal identity. To that end, it may be considered another semiautobiographical work. Liliane (1994) is the story of Liliane Lincoln, a painter who struggles to express herself through her vivid, colorful art. Her story is narrated through a mix of voices and settings, including Liliane’s own voice, that of her lovers, and sessions with her analyst. It also continues Shange’s experiments with form, as chunks of the narration are formatted as pure dialogue, as if written for a play.

Most of the scholarship on Shange focuses upon her work as a playwright and poet rather than her fiction. Since her novels frequently evoke the format and rhythm of her dramatic works and frequently cover the same themes, at least some of the scholarship may safely be applied to Shange’s novels. The only book-length study of Shange’s fiction extant is Teshie Jones’s master’s thesis, “Uncovering African Retentions: Traditional West African Religions and Philosophy in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo” (Florida State University, 1998); it is not yet available in book form. Neal A. Lester, Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays (1995), focuses exclusively on Shange’s drama, as do Phillip Effiong, In Search of a Model for African-American Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, and Ntozake Shange (2000), and Tejumola Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African-American and Caribbean Drama (1995). Claudia Tate’s interview collection, Black Women Writers at Work (1983) also contains and interview with Shange about her art and the critical response to it.

Journal articles on Shange’s fiction are more plentiful: Arlene Elder, “Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo: Ntozake Shange’s Neo-Slave/Blues Narrative,” AAR 26, no. 1 (Spring 1992); Henry Blackwell, “An Interview with Ntozake Shange,” BALF 13, no. 4 (Winter 1979); Neal A. Lester, “At the Heart of Shange’s Feminism: An Interview,” BALF 24, no. 4 (Winter 1990); Karla F. C. Holloway, “Revision and (Re)membrance: A Theory of Literary Structures in Literature by African-American Women Writers,” BALF 24, no. 4 (Winter 1990); Charles Johnson, “Whole Sight: Notes on New Black Fiction,” Callaloo 22 (Autumn 1986).

Signifying Monkey, The: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s seminal 1988 volume is one of a handful that transformed African American literary studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Gates became the preeminent scholar of African American literature in the United States largely upon the wide acceptance and success of this book, considered Gates’s most significant contribution to African American literary theory. Although a substantial portion of the material reprises and revises Gates’s first book, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (1987), a collection of papers and essays Gates had presented and published beginning in the late 1970s, The Signifying Monkey is mostly distinctive from its predecessor, to the extent that it expands one of Gates’s central theories.

Fittingly, Gates combines the methods and approaches of structuralist and post-structuralist theories, hermeneutics, and phenomenology to argue that African American literature consists of a tradition in which each author effectively revises the work of those who went before her or him. Gates calls this practice a form of “signifying,” or troping, whereby one author acknowledges a previous author’s contributions to the tradition yet simultaneously pays homage to and alters the meaning of her or his literary antecedents’ phrases, ideas, or entire texts. “Signifying,” in African American vernacular discursive communities, is a verbal behavior used for a number of purposes. It may describe a type of verbal jousting consisting of insults and trickery used to create a clever, often subtly devastating critique of a particular person, idea, or object. According to Roger D. Abrahams, signifying can mean several things, including “the propensity to talk around a subject, never quite coming to the point…; making fun of a person or situation;… speaking with the hands and eyes,” and so on.^* Equally instructive is Claudia Mitchell-Kernan’s suggestion that signifying is “a way of encoding messages or meanings which involves, in most cases, an element of indirection,” which “might best be viewed as an alternative message form, selected for its artistic merit, and may occur embedded in a variety of discourse.”^* The fact that signifying is occurring may be deeply buried within those forms of discourse, including literary texts, to such a degree that all but the more informed reader—or at least one attuned to African American cultural traditions—may be completely unaware of it. Signifying is thus a way for an author to make use of her or his influences and models while remaining true to her or his own vision and identity as an author. It “puts one over” on the uninformed or naïve reader or critic in much the same way that peoples of the African Diaspora have been forced to speak with double voices over the course of their history, beginning in sub-Saharan Africa but especially in slavery and the century of legal segregation that followed it. The Signifying Monkey’s title itself refers to the trickster featured in African American rhyming “toasts,” who signifies upon those unable to comprehend that he is indeed “putting one over.”

Gates also devotes an entire chapter to one particular form of signifying, the trope of the “Talking Book,” a figure found throughout the African American literary tradition. The “Talking Book” signifies the clash between oral traditions, which are crucial to expression in most black African cultures, and the written text, which is privileged by Western or European cultures. When it appears in the African American literary tradition, whether in literal books that characters or authors expect to “talk” or in more figurative manifestations, such as the pandemic “Jes Grew” in Ishmael Reed’s masterpiece Mumbo Jumbo, the Talking Book signifies the ways in which cultural differences can be both illuminating and confusing.

Gates’s tracing of the Talking Book’s place in the African American literary tradition is arguably The Signifying Monkey’s most original contribution to African American literary theory. Less original, but no less influential, is Gates’s theory of signifying; it is itself a signification upon prior musings regarding the importance of different influential figures to such individual African American authors as Gwendolyn Brooks, George S. Schuyler, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, Addison Gayle, Houston A. Baker Jr., and Hoyt Fuller. Indeed, countless essays on the subject of African American literature since the Harlem Renaissance and through the Black Arts Movement have touched upon the topic of African American literature being both a collusion and collision of multiple cultural influences, with the African portion often dominating. It would be more accurate to say, therefore, that Gates’s text is a concatenation of all that has gone before; it is the literal fulfillment of his theory, an end that Gates undoubtedly intended.

Gates and The Signifying Monkey have since come under some criticism for minimizing the place of women within this tradition, although The Signifying Monkey improves upon Figures in Black in this regard. To the extent that Gates is attempting to fuse poststructuralism with a more Afrocentric approach via his privileging of African American vernacular language and culture, it may also be said that the theory depends too heavily upon a forced syncretism that differs markedly from what his text describes. Critical reviews of the theory have reflected the problematic aspects of the theory, such as Barbara Johnson’s response to one crucial presentation of Gates’s ideas.^*

Nonetheless, no one could possibly deny that Gates’s arguments dominated African American literary studies for the better part of the 1990s. The Signifying Monkey was not only assigned frequently to graduate students and reviewed in the mainstream press but also cited in countless studies of African American literature that followed it. In addition, it brought enormous attention and influence to its author, who was courted by many major American universities. Gates eventually settled at Harvard University, where he revitalized its African American Studies department by attracting a “dream team” of major black intellectuals, including philosophers Cornel West and Kwame Anthony Appiah, sociologist William Julius Wilson, and critical scholars Patricia Williams, Lani Guinier, and Evelyn Higginbotham.

Sinclair, April (b. 1953, Chicago, Illinois) April Sinclair’s three novels written in the 1990s stand out among the works published in the wave of interest in African American fiction that began swelling in the middle of that decade. This is not to imply that Sinclair simply rode the wave; on the contrary, her works reflect several influences at once: the Black Arts Movement, her activist spirit, a feminist outlook, and an interest in intelligently and accessibly raising difficult issues among African American women. Sinclair manages to keep these issues in the forefront of her novels without being pedantic or losing her robust sense of humor, an achievement made more impressive by the fact that each novel is semiautobiographical.

Sinclair’s Coffee Will Make You Black (1994) was her breakthrough novel, attracting both respectable sales and strong critical support. It is a semiautobiographical narrative set in Chicago during the latter half of the 1960s, when the protagonist, Jean “Stevie” Stevenson, attempts to wade through the tense intra- and interracial politics of the time. As she moves from intermediate through high school, Stevie is bewildered by the transformation of African Americans of her generation into militant advocates of Black Nationalism who are still haunted by the self-hatred that defined their lives before blackness became beautiful. Stevie finds herself confronting both racist oppressors and black militants who are more interested in radical chic even as she discovers her own bisexuality. Ain’t Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice (1995), the sequel to Coffee Will Make You Black, finds Stevie leaving Chicago for college, then San Francisco, where she stays and explores the bisexuality she began accepting at home. In the process, Stevie negotiates the tensions and complexities of black and gay politics of the 1970s with humor and irony. I Left My Back Door Open (1999) moves away from some of Sinclair’s autobiographical material to focus on Chicago deejay Daphne “Dee Dee” Dupree, who struggles with her weight, bulimia, and difficulty with romantic relationships that stem from repressed memories of an abusive childhood. Dee Dee is eventually forced to confront her memories and learn to love herself as she is before she can enter into a healthy, loving relationship with her friend Skylar.

Sister Novel This is one term (another is “Girlfriends’ book”) describing the sub-genre of African American fiction that became popular in the early 1990s, especially after the publication of Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale (1992). “Sister” or “sistah” is a term of endearment for an African American woman. The plot of a sister novel usually revolves around a small, close-knit group of women who may be of various ages but are frequently middle-class professionals in pursuit of romance and marriage, family stability, career advancement, sexual satisfaction, and spiritual peace. Along the way, the women have at least a few witty, engaging discussions of their partners’ strengths and shortcomings and highlight the difficulty of finding personal fulfillment in communities undergoing significant change.

These novels are notable for the immense popularity they have enjoyed and the influence they have inarguably had upon African American fiction. Their appeal comes from the authors’ willingness to speak sympathetically and almost exclusively to black, predominantly female audiences and their experiences and to affirm their thoughts and feelings.

Key authors who might be classified in this vein would be Terry McMillan, Venise Berry, Connie Briscoe, Eric Jerome Dickey, E. Lynn Harris, Sheneska Jackson, Benilde Little, Omar Tyree, Lolita Files, April Sinclair, and Rosalyn McMillan. As with any such classification, though, the reader is cautioned against pigeonholing any of these authors, equating one’s work with another’s, or otherwise discounting these works’ intrinsic value. None are bereft of valid social commentary or artistic merit, even if some might adhere more closely to formulaic plots and subplots.

Song of Solomon Toni Morrison’s third novel, published in 1977, first brought her major national attention, especially after it won the National Book Critics Circle Award. When Morrison won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993, the Nobel jury cited Song of Solomon as her strongest work. Accordingly, it has been studied and cited most often in the many books and articles devoted to Morrison’s work, edging out Morrison’s equally powerful Beloved.

Song of Solomon is the saga of Macon “Milkman” Dead and his family, which contains and represses a number of secrets that threaten to tear them apart. Milkman is forced to confront his own disdain for family, community, and African American history, which stems from his middle-class status, his father’s fear of his own humanity, and the ways in which women are expected to revere men uncritically. Milkman is the third Macon Dead; he earns his nickname after one of the family’s tenants witnesses his mother breastfeeding her eight-year-old son. Milkman’s birth name and nickname alone evoke several of the novel’s many complex themes. The surname was given when the first Macon Dead, a freedman, had his original name replaced when a drunken Freedmen’s Bureau clerk construed his report that he was from Macon, Georgia, and that his father was dead to mean that his name was Macon Dead. Because the first Macon Dead could not read—a product of the slave system—and a white person had no regard or respect for him, his origins and, consequently, his future progeny’s heritage, began to be shrouded in mystery. Moreover, an old identity died at that moment, yet the family’s definite connection to the South remained, as will be revealed later in the plot. Furthermore, each succeeding male generation of the family becomes increasingly alienated from these same origins, which means a spiritual and cultural death is passed on from generation to generation. The second Macon Dead, Milkman’s father, takes pains to distance himself emotionally from other African Americans, his own past, his sister Pilate, and his family, most notably his wife and daughters, who desperately seek out sustaining love elsewhere. Macon Dead thus openly rejects virtually all of the markers of his African or African American cultural heritage, which has a direct effect upon Milkman’s outlook, one that is as “white” as the substance buried in his nickname.

Milkman’s spiritual death is manifested as complete disregard for the emotional lives of anyone besides himself, but especially for any and all women in his family and in his love life. His second cousin and paramour, Hagar, an avatar for the Biblical character, loses her grip on reality after Milkman casts her aside when she seeks a closer connection to him, while his utter indifference toward his sisters (First Corinthians and Magdalena, called Lena) and mother earns his siblings’ enmity. After his aunt, Pilate Dead, reveals that she might have the key to a treasure that she and Milkman’s father stumbled across as children, both Macon and Milkman’s close friend Guitar goad (for markedly different reasons) Milkman to return to the family’s Southern roots and ancestral home in Virginia to discover the treasure’s whereabouts. Along the way, Milkman slowly picks up clues to his heritage, eventually discovering that he is descended from the same Africans found in a well known folktale about Africans who were once able to fly but who lost this ability in slavery. Equally important, Milkman learns greater respect for other people, especially women, and a greater sense of his connection to a larger community of African Americans.

Song of Solomon is now routinely praised as the culmination of Morrison’s creative powers. It is an accessible novel that is rich in haunting imagery, multivalent symbols, and Morrison’s trademark lyricism. It also received a substantial boost in sales and revived interest after Oprah Winfrey featured Song of Solomon in her nationally syndicated book club. Accordingly, Song of Solomon has been written about more often than any other in her body of work, although most scholarly interest came well before Winfrey helped revive the book. Beyond the listing of books, chapters, and articles found in the bibliography accompanying Morrison’s separate entry, the following are among the most helpful resources.

Over thirty major journal articles have been written on Song of Solomon since its publication. Of these, Bertram Ashe, “‘Why Don’t He Like My Hair?’: Constructing African-American Standards of Beauty in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,” AAR 29, no. 4 (Winter 1995), offers a comparative study that traces the ways that intraracial beauty standards have defined African American women’s literature, especially the chosen texts. Ann E. Imbrie, “‘What Shalimar Knew’: Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon as a Pastoral Novel,” College English 55, no. 5 (September 1993), is a somewhat conventional reading that places Morrison into a larger generic category, but it is still quite useful as an examination of Morrison’s project. A more Afrocentric perspective may be found in Betty Taylor Thompson’s recent “Common Bonds from Africa to the U.S.: Africana Womanist Literary Analysis,” Western Journal of Black Studies 25, no. 3 (Fall 2001), which draws connections between Song of Solomon, Beloved, Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café, and three African authors (Flora Nwapa, Mariama Ba, and Tsitsi Dangarembga). David Cowart, “Faulkner and Joyce in Morrison’s Song of Solomon,” American Literature 62, no. 1 (March 1990), connects Morrison to two of the writers with whom she is most frequently compared (especially Faulkner, upon whom Morrison wrote her master’s thesis). Finally, Nellie Y. McKay and Kathryn Earle, Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison (1997), bears another endorsement, as does Missy Dean Kubitschek, Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion (1998).

Souljah, Sister (b. Lisa Williamson, 1964, New York City) Sister Souljah is perhaps better known as a political activist and performer than as an author of fiction, but she has won substantial acclaim in the last occupation. She attended Cornell and Rutgers, where she obtained degrees in African history and a sharp political consciousness that shaped her subsequent career.

Souljah first gained attention for her activism, which led to a charter membership of the hip-hop group Public Enemy in 1991 and her own recording contract. The following year, Souljah was thrust into the national spotlight when Arkansas governor and U.S. presidential candidate Bill Clinton publicly lambasted Souljah for controversial remarks about race relations she made on a New York radio program. This temporarily improved sales of her recording, 360 Degrees of Power, and breathed new life into Clinton’s candidacy, but the notoriety and its benefits to Souljah’s recording career were extremely short-lived. Nevertheless, she earned the respect of many African Americans, especially disadvantaged young women of her native Bronx, whom she has mentored and aided for many years.

Souljah’s career gained new life after she published her intensely personal memoir, No Disrespect, in 1995. Not only does the book contain devastating accounts of Souljah’s difficult life and of the Bronx’s heartbreaking conditions, it also establishes Souljah as a writer more than capable of seamlessly combining immense storytelling skills with astute, impassioned political observations and arguments. In the book tour and public appearances that followed, Souljah won over a new audience. Her first novel, The Coldest Winter Ever (1999), is semiautobiographical in its approach, with some events similar to those in Souljah’s life and memoir. The novel, however, stands on its own as an accomplished work of fiction. It revolves around Winter Santiaga, the daughter of a Brooklyn drug dealer who tries to maintain her family’s grip on power in general and in the drug trade in particular after her mother is murdered and her father is sent to prison. The novel’s graphic language and contents offer a gripping and horrifying moral play on the seductiveness of money, materialism, and power at the individual, communal, and societal levels.

* M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1999), 278–79.

* Abrams, Glossary, 279.

* Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), 52.

* Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, “Language Behavior in a Black Urban Community” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1971), 87.

* Barbara E. Johnson, response to Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s essay “Canon-Formation and the Afro-American Tradition: From the Seen to the Told,” in Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, ed. Houston A. Baker Jr. and Patricia Redmond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 39–44.