The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction

Waiting to Exhale Terry McMillan’s 1992 novel may be considered nothing short of a publishing phenomenon and a major, albeit controversial, catalyst for African American authors’ success in the 1990s. By the end of 2000, McMillan’s third novel had sold approximately 800,000 hardcover and 1.75 million paperback copies. This is to say nothing of more than $120 million in worldwide box office and video-rental receipts ($100 million in the United States alone) for the 1995 film, 7 million copies of the film soundtrack album, and untold millions of dollars in accessories and merchandise linked to the book and film.^* In short, Waiting to Exhale’s success easily dwarfs that of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), which also had a major impact upon African American literature. It gave McMillan, whose first two novels, Mama (1987) and Disappearing Acts (1989), sold respectably and garnered favorable notices, the clout to demand million-dollar contracts for her subsequent works, How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996) and A Day Late and a Dollar Short (2001); Stella was also made into a successful film in 1998.

Waiting to Exhale’s success, however, extends far beyond McMillan’s own fortune. It is widely credited for several major achievements: (1) attracting publishers to African American authors and therefore spawning a new flood of black fiction writing that continues to this day; (2) enlarging the African American reading audience and increasing white Americans’ interest in African American literature in general; (3) pursuant to (2), inspiring the formation of thousands of book clubs and literature discussion groups nationwide, including Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club; (4) giving an essential shot in the arm to the black romance genre; (5) prompting novels by male authors that respond to Waiting ’s woman-centered plot. In short, most young African American authors who have published successfully since 1992 owe at least a small debt to McMillan’s success. Rival publishers even imitated the novel’s colorful cover art by Synthia Saint James for the covers of many African American authors’ books, including such established writers as Bebe Moore Campbell, who was fairly successful long before Waiting to Exhale captured the reading public’s imagination.

Although Waiting to Exhale has been an undeniable financial success story, its literary reputation has not come close to that stratospheric level. The novel centers around four middle-class African American women in their mid-thirties living in Phoenix, Arizona, whose bonds to one another are formed in part by their respective quests for true love, romance, and sexual fulfillment. Predictably, each woman is disappointed by the prospective romantic and sexual partners she encounters, and each shares her disgruntlement with her friends. The novel’s writing is often quite funny and sardonic and clearly sympathetic to the concerns modern women, especially African American women, have regarding romantic possibilities. In a number of scenes, for example, the women individually or collectively lament the changes in African American demographics wrought by the events of the post–Civil Rights era, including the devastation of black communities by drugs, health problems, and even desegregation itself. This sympathetic quality, which is continuously blended with humorous general complaints about men, certainly accounts for the novel’s general popularity, but it does not necessarily make for great literature. As Frances Stead Sellers put it in her Times Literary Supplement review, whereas “most black women writers are associated with a recognizable tradition of serious ideologically inspired black literature, written primarily for ‘concerned’ whites and black intellectuals, McMillan, however, has little truck with ideology of any kind. She writes to entertain, by providing the type of sexy, popular novel that has been making Jilly Cooper and Danielle Steele rich for years.”^*

To this extent, McMillan has helped redefine what African American fiction is expected to do or be and, arguably, helped make writing and publishing more lucrative for all African American writers. This does not mean, though, that Waiting to Exhale is apolitical. In fact, it refers to the spread of AIDS, crack cocaine, single-parent families, and the growing number of African Americans under the care of the judicial system, all of which were and remain crucial issues in many African American communities and the concern of much of McMillan’s readership. Moreover, in his review in the New York Review of Books, Darryl Pinckney points out that McMillan is both a part and a beneficiary of the wave of black women writers who emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, even if, as McMillan has allowed, she has not been fully embraced by those same authors.^*

In all fairness, though, neither McMillan nor a sizeable portion of her audience were particularly concerned with Waiting to Exhale ’s literary merits; its resonance with many women of all ages stems from its ability to touch an emotional center linked to the issues named above. Many of the criticisms that arose regarding Waiting to Exhale had much to do with the novel’s distance in quality from McMillan’s earlier novels, which had enabled her to win National Endowment for the Arts and Doubleday/Columbia University Fellowships, a National Book Award, and many other accolades. Nonetheless, if McMillan never achieves the same level of critical acclaim that her earlier novels gained, or even the same degree of success that Waiting to Exhale obtained, her third novel remains one of the most important in the history of African American literature.

Waiting to Exhale has not enjoyed the same amount of careful critical attention that its contemporaries have, but much of the attention it has received has been thoughtful. Tina M. Harris’s 1998 article “‘Waiting to Exhale’ or ‘Breath(ing) Again’: A Search for Identity, Empowerment, and Love in the 1990s,” focuses more on the way that the film version of the novel counters many of the stereotypes about African American women in the cinema rather than on the novel itself, but it argues smartly that both the novel and the film have had greater social significance as exemplars of feminist thought than a first glance might reveal.

Walker, Alice (b. 1944, Eatonton, Georgia) Of the African American authors who began writing and publishing fiction in the late 1960s and early 1970s, perhaps only Toni Morrison has attracted more critical laurels and sustained academic analysis than Alice Walker. She is also one of the most controversial, especially since the publication of Walker’s best-known novel, The Color Purple (1982; see the separate entry) and its production as a major film two years later. Walker is a novelist, short-story author, poet, and political activist who has worked within the Civil Rights movement and for various causes within the modern feminist movement. Walker’s novels are, in turn, closely tied to her ideological underpinnings as displayed in many essays on feminism (or womanism, the term Walker prefers when discussing the experiences of African American women; see separate entry) literature, and the arts for Ms. magazine, to which she contributed regularly for over a decade, beginning in 1974.

Walker also played a crucial role in the development of African American literary studies since 1970: She almost single-handedly rescued Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston from obscurity by working to get Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) back into print and back into scholarly attention. Eventually, through Walker’s efforts all of Hurston’s works returned to print and to popularity in both academic and popular circles, resulting in Hurston’s becoming one of the most heavily (and deservedly) studied African American authors of the twentieth century, despite her dying penniless and outcast in 1961. Walker also taught one of the first African American women’s literature courses at Wellesley College in 1977 and helped J. California Cooper publish her own novels and stories.

Walker’s activities in reviving Hurston’s career and beginning Cooper’s reveal the crux of her own artistic sensibility, which may best be summarized as a colorful mosaic that both rescues and criticizes African American communities’ virtues—rich oral and folk traditions and indomitable spiritual strength—and their shortcomings, especially sexism, intraracial racism or colorism, and homophobia. In this sense, Walker shares much with the generation of authors born and raised during and after the Civil Rights movement, to the extent that she believes strongly in the necessity of self-criticism within African America. From her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) through By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), to say nothing of her many essays, Walker persistently raises a number of disturbing issues within African American communities, particularly the oppression of black women at the hands of men, black and white, and other women who have learned to hate themselves and their sexuality. Walker attempts to end silence regarding taboo subjects in all of her major texts, consistent with the principles of feminism she developed before, during, and after her tenure at Ms. Walker built upon these principles to coin the term “womanism,” which combines feminism with the peculiar situations in which African American women find themselves (see separate entry).

Walker also offers extensive criticism of racism, the sometimes superficial or paternalistic white liberalism that caused many tensions during the Civil Rights movement, in which Walker was an activist, and the ways in which African American history, literature, and folk life have been silenced and marginalized. Walker’s depiction of males’, especially black males’, transgressions toward black women, however, has tellingly been the focus of many of her critics. Walker has been accused of everything from ignoring, betraying, or minimizing black men’s humanity to hating African American men altogether, primarily due to her character Mr.———in The Color Purple, her passionate campaign against female genital mutilation that began in The Color Purple and continued in Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), and her identity as a bisexual, then lesbian woman. While Mr.———is indeed a problematic character to the extent that he resembles some of the worst stereotypes about African American men, it is also fair to note that Walker, similar to her contemporary Toni Morrison, always attempts to show how women and men can resolve the damage done in the worst of their relationships; she seldom consigns her characters to irrelevancy or incorrigibility. In trying to avoid this trap, Walker arguably tries too hard, but the more extreme acts of which she has been accused seem to ring hollow once her novels are read closely. In short, she does not create negative men for the sake of relaying a simplistic message; her novels are meant to show the possibilities available to women through communitarian values.

Walker’s first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, gained considerable notice and criticism upon its publication for its focus upon familial conflicts within African American communities, which went against calls for positive images of black communities that were common in 1970. In the autocratic character of Brownfield, it also contained an early version of the type of character that incited Walker’s most hostile critics. The eponymous protagonist, however, represented the possibility of redemption not simply for men but also for anyone struggling to become more human and humane. The collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973), represented some of Walker’s strongest work, including “Everyday Use,” one of the most frequently anthologized short stories; it is virtually a staple of first-year college writing courses, to say nothing of African American and American literature curricula. Its popularity may be attributed to Walker’s use of implicit criticism of Black Nationalism through the character of Dee, who denies the richness of her black Southern heritage until she becomes radicalized during her first year in college. When Dee returns home, she fetishizes all of the homespun work her sister Maggie and mother (the narrator) have created, even though she had despised all of it mere months earlier. It is a cautionary tale against romanticizing African Americans’ African past, on the one hand, and against uncritical valorization of selected hallmarks of “blackness,” usually to the detriment of both family ties and a sense of reality, on the other. Through the painstakingly crafted quilt Maggie makes, the story also introduces the reader to Walker’s ideas regarding the importance of quilts and other domestic objects as commonly neglected expressions of women’s artistry. In these ways, “Everyday Use” is perhaps the best single representation of and introduction to Walker’s art. Its influence and accessibility were enough to warrant a nearly exhaustive guidebook: Everyday Use/Alice Walker (1994), which was edited by Barbara T. Christian as part of Rutgers University Press’s Women Writers: Texts and Contexts series. Christian includes interviews and essays by and about Walker that make the story’s innovations and artistry more lucid for both beginning and advanced readers. The remainder of In Love and In Trouble, however, should not be neglected; upon its initial publication, all but a handful of the nearly thirty reviews it received were largely positive, faulting only occasional artistic failures among the stories.

Walker’s second novel, Meridian (1976), is a semiautobiographical narrative based upon Walker’s experience in the 1960s. It revolves around Meridian, who, like Walker, grew up in a small Georgia town, went to a historically black women’s college that strictly regulated the students’ lives and morals, dropped out because of a pregnancy, joined the Civil Rights movement, and struggled with the complex relations between black and white men and women of that time. Perhaps more than Walker’s earlier stories and Grange Copeland, Meridian is her retrospective on the social, racial, and sexual upheavals that the Civil Rights and Black Power eras produced.

Some shifts in Walker’s political and artistic outlook are reflected in the short-story collection You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories (1981). Whereas In Love and In Trouble was concerned more with showing how African American women have managed to create or find creative outlets in the face of racist and sexist oppression, the stories in You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down focus more acutely upon the pain and tragedy that black women experience as a result of both oppression and the eternal pursuit of love and sexual freedom. Each story shows how it is possible to transcend pain and to find love against all odds. The later collection’s reviews were less generous than those for the earlier; while most acknowledged that Walker infused her short stories with engrossing lyricism, a few faulted her tendency to sacrifice art for ideology.

Walker’s third novel, The Color Purple (see separate entry), builds upon the ideas developed in You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down. It is also easily Walker’s most famous, celebrated, and controversial work. It is written in an epistolary format, in which the protagonist and narrator, Celie, writes to God and, later, her sister Nettie about her travails. Celie is raped by her stepfather (whom she believes to be her biological father at the time) and bears two children by him, both of whom he sends away for adoption. Celie is eventually married off to Mr.———(whose name is eventually revealed as Albert) when Nettie refuses Mr.———’s advances. This marriage of convenience becomes entirely miserable for Celie after Nettie runs away to escape Mr.———’s overtures. Celie eventually finds spiritual and sexual sustenance in her husband’s former lover, Shug Avery, who helps her discover her sexuality, her voice, her identity, and consequently her will to leave Albert, start her own business, and, much later, reunite with Nettie and her long-lost children. As mentioned above, The Color Purple’s depiction of such men as Celie’s stepfather and Albert, combined with Steven Spielberg’s problematic 1984 interpretation of the novel, brought great controversy Walker’s way. Criticism notwithstanding, The Color Purple also garnered extensive praise and the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. It soon became a staple of African American and women’s literature courses.

The Temple of My Familiar (1989) was somewhat less successful, both artistically and in terms of its popular appeal, than The Color Purple, but it curried favor with many critics for its highly imaginative story of humanity’s spiritual development. The novel is linked to The Color Purple via a few of the earlier work’s primary characters (specifically Shug Avery and Fanny Nzingha, Celie’s granddaughter) but in most other respects is a wholly independent work. The plot is a mythological fantasy about humanity’s movement away from a close connection to the natural and spiritual worlds, symbolized through animal familiars (spirits assigned to guard and help individual human beings). Walker imagines human development as having several ages. In the first, humans were in harmony with nature until the second age, when the appearance of cultural and racial distinctions and the desire for wealth began to corrupt humanity’s relationship with its environment. In the next age, capitalism and organized religion have almost completely sapped humanity’s ability to connect with its natural spiritualism. Although the novel’s mysticism and emphasis on a fantastic spiritual past took some of her readers by surprise, the reviews of The Temple of My Familiar were generally positive, citing the novel’s ability to construct an elaborate world, worldview, and history. It was occasionally derided for being too fantastic, and therefore divorced from reality and realistic solutions, as well as for its occasionally confusing mix of narrative techniques. Such articles as Bonnie Braendlin, “Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar as Pastiche,” American Literature 68, no. 1 (March 1996); and Felipe Smith, “Alice Walker’s Redemptive Art,” AAR 26, no. 3 (Fall 1992) offer readings of The Temple of My Familiar that use theories of the postmodern and a history of spiritual movements to place the novel in a more sympathetic light.

Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) earned nearly as much controversy upon its publication as The Color Purple. Extending that novel’s brief mention of pharoanic circumcision, in which most parts of the vulva are removed and the vaginal entrance shown shut, Walker uses the ritual, which is still commonly practiced among some East African ethnic groups, as a metaphor for women’s sexual oppression and repression. The controversy surrounding the novel came from its strong indictment of the practice. While many reviewers agreed with Walker and the novel that female circumcision was a brutal and humiliating ritual, it also raised the question of whether individuals from one culture have the right to criticize others’ cultural traditions. Other critics, such as the one for Publishers Weekly, simply found the novel too “strident and polemical” and lacking careful structuring and development. Nevertheless, Possessing the Secret of Joy and Walker’s subsequent activism are perhaps the two most important factors in bringing female circumcision to the world’s consciousness. Both have attracted quite a few journal articles since the novel’s publication, which seems to uphold Walker’s dictum that the “real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff”^*

By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998) earned Walker some of her least enthusiastic reviews, based largely upon a narrative style and content that some reviewers found too laconic and often too preachy, despite Walker’s thematic ambitions. The narrative is an example of magical realism revolving around the Mundo (Spanish for “world”), a people created via the union of escaped slaves and Mexican Indians, who are studied by two black anthropologists posing as missionaries. The magical part of the plot stems from the ability of spirits and angels to view and narrate the action, most of which is concerned with the relationships between fathers and their daughters. More to the point, the novel explores the liberating power of human sexuality—in all its orientations—which is always threatened by the dual specters of patriarchy and traditional, organized religions. Walker wishes for fathers to be able to recognize and support their daughters’ development, rather than sheltering and protecting them from both their sexuality and the larger world. While reviewers generally acknowledged that Walker’s attempt to build upon her earlier novels’ arguments for women’s freer sexual expression, some found the novel “deeply mired in New Age hocus-pocus and goddess religion baloney,” and “predictable.”^* As of this writing, only book reviews have been published on By the Light of My Father’s Smile, although Rudolph P. Byrd’s review in African American Review is one of the best and most sympathetic.

Critical studies of Walker’s novels, fiction, and poetry are plentiful in thesis, dissertation, book, or article form. Walker’s classic collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) gathers together the best and most famous of her essays, interviews, and letters on such topics as womanism/feminism, the art of writing, politics, the Civil Rights movement and its legacy, and many others. Beyond Walker’s early novels and short-story collections, it is the best introduction to her thoughts. Maria Lauret’s Alice Walker (2000) links Walker’s novels to her political and social activism and spirituality in a solid literary biography. Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993), edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. Anthony Appiah, is an excellent starting point for readers interested in the criticism and controversy surrounding Walker. This collection begins with contemporary, generally balanced reviews of Walker’s novels, but it mostly consists of scholarly articles. Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976 (1980), is a comparative study that begins by tracing the history of African American novelists until the contemporary period. It culminates with chapters on Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Walker and a conclusion linking the trio. The chapter on Walker became the basis of Smith’s later book on Walker’s “Everyday Use.” Elliott Butler-Evans, Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (1989), is another excellent comparative study; it offers a nuanced semiotic reading through contemporary feminist criticism. Butler-Evans’s chapter devoted exclusively to Walker focuses primarily on The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, and The Color Purple. Ikenna Dieke, Critical Essays on Alice Walker (1999), is a highly diverse essay collection. Most of the essays are relatively short—under twenty pages—but each covers compelling subjects. The majority of essays are on The Color Purple, and a few focus upon Walker’s poetry. Those that discuss Walker’s other novels do so briefly, which makes the collection more valuable as a resource on her most famous single work. Louis H. Pratt and Darnell D. Pratt, Alice Malsenior Walker: An Annotated Bibliography: 1968–1976, is an outdated yet valuable resource listing works by and about Walker through the Color Purple controversy.

To date, approximately 225 dissertations and theses have been written about Walker’s novels, short fiction, essays, and political activism, although Walker is usually one of several authors studied. The majority of those compare Walker to other African American authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Gloria Naylor, Harriet Jacobs, or Gayl Jones, while many others compare Walker to other authors—often women—who write in the same genres she uses (autobiography/memoir, fantasy, epistolary novel, pastoral novel, travel narrative, and so on) or to other explicitly political authors, including Margaret Atwood, Buchi Emecheta, James Baldwin, Louise Erdrich, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Similarly, Walker’s work has received extensive treatment in no fewer than one hundred scholarly articles (excluding book reviews) since she emerged on the literary scene. While the majority discuss The Color Purple, Walker’s short fiction and first two novels also receive extensive treatment. Callaloo in particular devoted a special section to Walker: issue 39, Spring 1989. The more prominent articles are: Philip M. Royster, “In Search of Our Fathers’ Arms: Alice Walker’s Persona of the Alienated Darling,” BALF 20, no. 4 (Winter 1986); Jacqueline Bobo, “Sifting Through the Controversy: Reading The Color Purple,” Callaloo 39 (Spring 1989); Roberta M. Hendrickson, “Remembering the Dream: Alice Walker, Meridian, and the Civil Rights Movement,” MELUS 24, no. 3 (Autumn 1999); Bonnie Braendlin, “Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar as Pastiche,” American Literature 68, no. 1 (March 1996); Deborah E. Barker, “Visual Markers: Art and Mass Media in Alice Walker’s Meridian,” AAR 31, no. 3 (Autumn 1997); Felipe Smith, “Alice Walker’s Redemptive Art,” and Ikenna Dieke, “Toward a Monastic Realism: The Thematics of Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar,” AAR 26, no.3 (Autumn 1992); Maria V. Johnson, “‘You Just Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down’: Alice Walker Sings the Blues,” and Angeletta K. M. Gourdine, “Postmodern Ethnography and the Womanist Mission: Postcolonial Sensibilities in Possessing the Secret of Joy,” AAR 30, no. 2 (Summer 1996); Deborah E. McDowell, “‘The Changing Same’: Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists,” New Literary History 18, no. 2 (Winter 1987); Ann duCille, “Phallus(ies) of Interpretation: Toward Engendering the Black Critical ‘I,’” Callaloo 16, no. 3 (Summer 1993); Lynn Pifer, “Coming to Voice in Alice Walker’s Meridian: Speaking Out for the Revolution,” and James C. Hall, “Towards a Map of Mis(Sed) Reading: The Presence of Absence in The Color Purple,” AAR 26, no. 1 (Spring 1992); Karen F. Stein, “Meridian: Alice Walker’s Critique of Revolution,” and Harold Hellenbrand, “Speech, After Silence: Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland,” BALF 20, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1986); Deborah E. McDowell, “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism,” BALF 14, no. 4 (Winter 1980); Anne M. Downey, “‘A Broken and Bloody Hoop’: The Intertextuality of Black Elk Speaks and Alice Walker’s Meridian,” MELUS 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1994); Cynthia Hamilton, “Alice Walker’s Politics or the Politics of The Color Purple,” Journal of Black Studies 18, no. 3 (March 1988); Trudier Harris, “On The Color Purple, Stereotypes, and Silence” and Calvin Hernton, “The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers,” BALF 18, no. 4 (Winter 1984); Trudier Harris, “Folklore in the Fiction of Alice Walker: A Perpetuation of Historical and Literary Traditions,” BALF 11, no. 1 (Spring 1977); Patricia Sharpe, F. E. Mascia-Lees, and C. B. Cohen, “White Women and Black Men: Differential Responses to Reading Black Women’s Texts,” College English 52, no. 2 (February 1990); Joseph A. Brown, “‘All Saints Should Walk Away’: The Mystical Pilgrimage of Meridian,” Callaloo 39 (Spring 1989); King-Kok Cheung, “‘Don’t Tell’: Imposed Silences in The Color Purple and The Woman Warrior,” PMLA 103, no. 2 (March 1988); Mary Jane Lupton, “Clothes and Closure in Three Novels by Black Women,” BALF 20, no. 4 (Winter 1986); W. Lawrence Hogue, “History, the Feminist Discourse, and Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland,” MELUS 12, no. 2 (Summer 1985); Lynn Pifer and Tricia Slusser, “‘Looking at the Back of Your Head’: Mirroring Scenes in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy,” MELUS 23, no. 4 (Winter 1998).

Weaver, Afaa Michael (b. Michael S. Weaver, Baltimore, Maryland, 1951) Afaa M. Weaver is best known and most accomplished as a poet. Several of his short stories, however, have been published. The best—and best known—of these are “By the Way of Morning Fire,” found in Gloria Naylor’s collection Children of the Night (1995), and “Honey Boy,” found in Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan’s Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to be American (1999). Beyond his six books of poetry, Weaver has also edited These Hands I Know: African-American Writers on Family (2002). He is profiled in Lynda Koolish’s African American Writers: Portraits and Visions (2001).

Whitehead, Colson (b. 1969, New York City) In the wake of Ralph Ellison’s achievements in Invisible Man (1952), critics and aficionados of African American literature have habitually hailed the advent of purported successors to Ellison’s intellectual and literary achievements. These pronouncements are invariably as problematic as they are premature; in the long view, an author is rarely well served by being compared to a canonized icon. Nevertheless, when Colson Whitehead’s first novel, The Intuitionist (1999), emerged, it was almost universally praised as a work comparable to Invisible Man, Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye (1970), and the best work of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Don DeLillo in terms of its genius and scope. It made the New York Times Notable Books and the San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year lists and was among the finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Whitehead’s second novel, John Henry Days (2001), received even higher accolades and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, thereby avoiding the sophomore jinx and indicating that Whitehead may be one of the few authors for whom the hyperbole nearly matches the reality.

Whitehead’s interviews have revealed his significant interest in popular culture, not uncommon among the post–Civil Rights generation. This interest led to a job writing music, television, and book reviews at the Village Voice in 1991. His first, and as yet unpublished, novel was, per his own description, “a kind of pop-culture-heavy book about a child-genius cherub, Michael Jackson-Gary Coleman type” who is forced to play various stereotypical roles.^* When this manuscript was rejected over two dozen times, leading to Whitehead’s agent abandoning him, Whitehead stumbled upon the idea of writing about elevator inspectors in a major city that closely resembles New York. The result, The Intuitionist, is an elaborate allegory exploring at once several crises of American modernity: the insidiousness of racism; the conflict between scientific knowledge and intuitive belief, especially the ways in which that struggle plays out in academic careerism; and the progress and regress of African Americans within the body politic. Set either in the near future or recent past, the elevator operators in question are divided between the Empiricists, who inspect elevators with scientific precision, and the Intuitionists, who complete their task through intuition and improvisation. Whitehead describes each faction as if it were a religious sect vying for control of the church, with each side ascribing heresy to the other.

This central conflict takes on a number of philosophical issues that defined tensions within critical discourse in the 1980s and 1990s. Questions of how scientific and other forms of knowledge are obtained, mastered, and become definitive—the cruces of epistemology—are the novel’s central concerns, closely connected to inter- and intraracial tensions. The protagonist, Lila Mae, is the leading Intuitionist, as she is blessed with the ability to detect problems within elevators simply by standing inside them. The Empiricists find Lila Mae and her ilk threatening precisely because their methods lack a structure that can be easily adapted and therefore co-opted by the Empiricist majority. When an elevator that Lila Mae inspected fails immediately after she has given her approval, she and other Intuitionists are immediately accused of being irresponsible charlatans. The Intuitionists charge in return that Empiricists are closed to new methods. Lila Mae is caught in the middle of this epistemological holy war as she attempts to clear her name and the world-view she represents.

Outside of its sophisticated meditations on differences between the material and the physical, the novel’s strengths are its irony, which is dispensed via the extremely witty and sardonic narrative voice, and its near-flawless weaving of pop culture references, contemporary history, and reflections on racial politics since the Civil Rights movement. Many of these same elements may be found in John Henry Days, albeit with a broader focus. That novel is a vast, picaresque epic featuring J. Sutter, as its nominal protagonist. He is an African American journalist, and his investigative reporting focuses on the United States Postal Service’s new commemorative John Henry stamp. The true center of the novel is the John Henry legend itself, which Whitehead uses as a riff to delve into the intricate corners of America’s postmodern, pop-cultural wasteland. The novel consists of a series of loosely connected vignettes, many wildly humorous and devastatingly ironic, that are as much about race in the post–Civil Rights era as they are about the larger American milieu itself. John Henry Days has been widely praised as a messy masterpiece comparable to recent works by Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, and it certainly deserves this esteemed company.

To date, little has been published on Whitehead’s fiction in major literary journals, but this is likely to change in short order as it passes through academic writing and publishing cycles. This is not to say that it has not attracted academic interest; Candra K. Gill wrote a thesis, “Beyond Boundaries: Counter-Discourse and Intertextuality in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist,” in 2002 (master’s thesis, Northern Michigan University). That same year, Whitehead was named a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, most likely based upon the achievements of his first two novels. In the meantime, Whitehead has given a number of interviews that help illuminate his artistic vision, and his novels have received some of the most thoughtful reviews that a contemporary author, African American or otherwise, could want. Perhaps most promising is the frequency with which Whitehead has been featured in such popular magazines as Time and Newsweek, which may help bring more attention to similar authors.

Wideman, Daniel Jerome (b. 1968; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) Wideman is the son of prominent African American novelist John Edgar Wideman and Judy Ann Goldman. After attending Brown University, traveling abroad, and graduate work at Northwestern University, Wideman coedited the anthology Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence (1996) with Rohan B. Preston. His work has since been published in the journal Callaloo and the anthologies Outside the Law: Narratives of Justice in America, Black Texts and Textuality, and Giant Steps. Of these three outlets, only Outside the Law contains actual fiction, the story “Free Papers.”

Readers of the senior Wideman will find that Wideman fils compares well to his father yet possesses his own conversational, probing, and haunting voice that is equally captivating and delightful to read. His essay “Your Friendly Neighborhood Jungle” does hint at the degree to which he inherited some of his father’s skills, but the essay and the rest of the younger Wideman’s output are more remarkable for their painstaking explorations of African Americans’ cultural identities, specifically their links to the African continent, its cultural riches, and the legacies of slavery. In addition, he tends to focus on more contemporary issues of identity, specifically those of the Post-Soul generation.

Wideman, John Edgar (b. June 14, 1941, Washington, D.C.) Although novelist, essayist, and passionate basketball aficionado John Edgar Wideman was born in Washington, D.C., his mature work has been focused primarily on his memories of life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he spent his formative years. His earliest years were spent in Pittsburgh’s predominantly black Homewood neighborhood, but he later moved to Shadyside, one of the city’s predominantly white, affluent areas. This act of moving from a predominantly African American area to a white one would be repeated in Wideman’s life and would also become one of his dominant metaphors. He won a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied psychology and English and was a star player on the school’s basketball team. In 1963, Wideman became only the second African American to win a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University; Harlem Renaissance luminary Alain Locke was the first. At Oxford he studied eighteenth-century literature, earning a bachelor of philosophy degree in 1966. He then attended the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Iowa from 1966 to 1967 as a Kent Fellow before accepting an appointment at the University of Pennsylvania (1967 to 1973). Since 1973, Wideman has been a professor of literature at the University of Wyoming. That state’s dearth of African American culture and the ways in which Wideman and his family have coped with it have been extensive sources of inspiration and material in Wideman’s later fiction, which is easily his best.

Wideman’s stories and novels repeatedly plumb the depths of the African Diaspora’s anguish as its members have been forced, whether physically or by economic need, or have chosen to become deracinated from their own Homewoods: the areas, cultures, ideas, and lives into which they were born. Wideman is equally fascinated by definitions of manhood within African American communities, the innumerable ways in which American culture perceives black males as threats, and how the quest for black manhood can be both self-destructive and liberating. This particular issue continuously bubbles beneath the surface or explodes outright in the overwhelming majority of Wideman’s work. Such interests should not be confused, however, with the overt political content of the Black Arts Movement, which was in ascendance as Wideman’s artistic career began with the publication of his first novel, A Glance Away, in 1967. Wideman has a strong interest in investigating the human condition in general, which has earned him praise from critics wary of political agendas in African American literature. Without a doubt, though, Wideman has garnered success and praise from the widest possible spectrum of critics.

Wideman’s first two novels, A Glance Away (1967) and Hurry Home (1969), are existential explorations of the identity that feature an interracial mix of protagonists and consciously eschew a specific focus upon race as a discrete category. In that respect, they stand apart from many African American works of the Black Power/Arts/aesthetic era. The Lynchers (1973) is the first of Wideman’s novels in which concerns about race and racism play prominent roles in the plot. It opens with a long catalogue of brutal lynching accounts from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries before launching into the main plot, a “blend of realism and surrealism” in which Willie “Littleman” Hall attempts to launch a scheme that would end in a white policeman being publicly lynched by the black community of Philadelphia’s South Side.^* Hall’s plan is meant to release the community of its fear of white people—specifically of killing whites—and is inspired in part by the splintering and collapse of Orin and Bernice Wilkerson’s family. Their son, Thomas, is interested in Littleman’s plan, but in an increasingly complex sequence of events, he finds that the prospect of communal and nationalistic revolution embodied in the lynching plot is far more difficult than he had determined. In the course of executing the narrative, Wideman experiments with many different techniques and points of view, creating the best of his early works.

Arguably, the crowning achievement of Wideman’s oeuvre is his Homewood Trilogy: Damballah (1981, short stories), Hiding Place (1981, novel) and Sent for You Yesterday (1983, novel), published eight years after Wideman’s last major work, The Lynchers. The trilogy not only included a PEN/Faulkner award winner in Sent for You Yesterday, but it also placed Homewood clearly on the literary map. Wideman’s Homewood may be compared favorably to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Joyce’s Dublin in terms of vibrancy and complexity, although it is perhaps more emotionally devastating than either. Damballah contains some of Wideman’s best short stories. One of the finest is the heavily anthologized title story, an account of the enslaved—but never subjugated—griot Orion, who keeps African traditions, especially reverence for the god Damballah, alive and inspires a young boy to maintain them. Damballah’s vignettes blend tragedy, cultural confrontations, myth, and mysticism to discover how Homewood came to have its history and sense of community. Reuben (1987) follows the lives of three characters living in Homewood: Reuben, a self-styled lawyer of sorts for the community; Kwansa, who recruits Reuben in the search for her five-year-old son; and the murderous Wally, a college scout. The novel explores the nature of personal tragedies and how individual characters find the means to cope and live with those tragedies; those who do not find themselves destroyed physically and psychically. Wideman furthers his experiments with vernacular language and point of view begun in his earlier Homewood stories and novels as well.

Fever (1990) collects twelve short stories about a wide variety of subjects, including Wideman’s own writing. The story “Surfiction,” for example, parodies Wideman’s most difficult fiction, consciously playing with his longtime readers’ expectations. That same year, Wideman published Philadelphia Fire, an extraordinary novel that both concerns and is inspired by the May 13, 1985, fire-bombing of the West Philadelphia neighborhood in which the controversial MOVE organization was headquartered. The bombing resulted in the deaths of 6 adults and 5 children and the destruction of 53 houses, which left 262 people homeless.

The novel is not so much about the event as it is a lyrical chronicling of the complexities of black neighborhoods whose demographics, politics, and culture shifted and decayed in the crises of the 1980s. All Stories Are True (1992), a collection of stories excerpted from the previous year’s The Stories of John Edgar Wideman (1992), consists of ten stories drawn from the author’s vision of Home-wood and academe, and it is one of the better introductions to his craft.

Finally, Wideman’s epistolary memoir Brothers and Keepers (1984), although technically nonfiction, ranks among his best work. It is an extended, wrenching meditation on the differences between Wideman’s great artistic and personal success and the fate of his brother Robby, who was sent to prison in 1976 for armed robbery and murder. Wideman succeeds in blending, in his words, “memory, imagination, feeling, and fact” into a frank yet compassionate account of the brothers’ emotional and physical strife.

Wideman’s work has earned him an extensive list of awards, fellowships, and honors. He has been a Rhodes Scholar (1963), Kent Fellow (1966–67), and was the recipient of the PEN/Faulkner award twice, in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday and in 1991 for Philadelphia Fire. In 1993, Wideman received a MacArthur Fellow, the so-called Genius Grant.

To date, book-length critical studies of Wideman’s work have been limited. Bonnie TuSmith edited Conversations with John Edgar Wideman (1998), an invaluable source of Wideman’s own thoughts on his fiction and related issues. But only three books on Wideman alone are currently in print: Keith Byerman, John Edgar Wideman: A Study of the Short Fiction (1998); James William Coleman, Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Development of John Edgar Wideman (1989); and Doreatha D. Mbalia, John Edgar Wideman: Reclaiming the African Personality (1995). Each of these books has great merit on its own terms, but all are quite limited in their scope and outlook for various reasons. Byerman’s, of course, looks only at the short fiction, while Coleman’s places Wideman in the context of modernism, which many critics have noted over the years. Mbalia’s is arguably the most inventive, but its focus on African elements necessarily excludes many other considerations.

Readers of Wideman’s fiction, therefore, might do better by seeking studies not devoted solely to his work. Philip Auger, Native Sons in No Man’s Land: Rewriting Afro-American Manhood in the Novels of Baldwin, Walker, Wideman, and Gaines (2000), is especially valuable for its attention to a theme that torments Wideman’s most memorable characters. Of the more than two dozen extant critical essays on Wideman, several stand out for their creative perspectives: Ashraf Rushdy, “Fraternal Blues: John Edgar Wideman’s Homewood Trilogy,” Contemporary Literature 32, no. 3 (Fall 1991); Madhu Dubey, “Literature and Urban Crisis: John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire,” AAR 32, no. 4 (Winter 1998); Heather Andrade,“‘Mosaic Memory’: Auto/biographical Contexts in John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers,” The Massachusetts Review 40, no. 3 (Autumn 1999); and Mumia Abu-Jamal, “The Fictive Realism of John Edgar Wideman,” The Black Scholar 28, no. 1 (Spring 1998), which is unique in that activist and journalist Abu-Jamal is a longtime advocate for the MOVE organization, featured in Philadelphia Fire. Finally, the entire Summer 1999 issue of Callaloo was devoted to Wideman’s work and represents the most diverse collection of essays on his work currently in print.

Williams, John Alfred (b. 1925, Hinds County, Mississippi) Novelist, journalist, and essayist John A. Williams is one of the most enduring and prolific authors to begin a writing career in the 1960s. Over the course of eleven novels, as well as six nonfiction books, three anthologies of both his own and others’ writing, a play, and hundreds of essays, Williams has maintained an intensely political focus upon African Americans’ experiences that usually manages to avoid pedantry. He is best known as the author of The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), a landmark book of social-realist fiction that frequently has been compared to Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Since 1970, Williams has continued to write and publish often, although only one novel, Captain Blackman (1972), has approached the popularity of The Man Who Cried I Am, although it is in many ways more artistically successful than its predecessor. Williams has also played a significant role as an editor; he coedited the seminal anthologies Amistad (1970) and Amistad II (1971) with Charles F. Harris and compiled Yardbird No. 1 (1979), which reprinted material from Ishmael Reed and Al Young’s Yardbird Reader magazine. In addition, Williams edited a key textbook of the 1980s, Introduction to Literature (1984).

Most of Williams’s novels fit the definition of the useful art that the Black Arts Movement demanded, to the extent that they draw upon Williams’s own life experiences as well as those of many others within African American communities. One of Williams’s most harrowing and foundational experiences came from his time in the United States Navy, in which he enlisted in 1943 after growing up in Syracuse, New York. Williams witnessed firsthand the racism inherent both in the rigidly segregated armed forces and in the conduct of the Pacific Theater of World War II. His stint involved, in fact, a stretch in the brig for violating the Navy’s rules regarding segregation.^* These experiences in the Navy and with other forms of legal and customary segregation while growing up in Syracuse, New York, and working in New York City’s publishing industry formed Williams’s continuing belief in the exploitative nature of American society, especially along racial lines. His early novels—The Angry Ones (1956; republished 1969; later republished as One for New York—Williams’s original title—in 1975), Night Song (1961), Sissie (1963), The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), and Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969)—all deal with the difficulties African Americans encounter as they try to sidestep America’s racial barriers to find gainful, fulfilling employment. Although they are not the sort of seminal characters as Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas from Native Son (1940), Williams’s early protagonists share that creation’s frustration with the policies and practices of the color line.

Yet Williams’s abiding interest has also been to educate his audience regarding African American history and to get that that audience to identify with his protagonists. Paradoxically, each of Williams’s novels seems to build upon the achievements of its predecessor, yet Captain Blackman is perhaps the culmination of Williams’s attempts to create heroic yet sympathetic characters. The novel, Williams’s sixth, is the third in a triptych beginning with The Man Who Cried I Am and continuing with Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light. Each of these novels faetures a plot that ultimately turns apocalyptic, positing the possibility that a devastating race war is the likely result of the duplicity of the U.S. government, to say nothing of the general public’s complicity. In the case of Captain Blackman, the U.S. comes under specific indictment. It is the story of Abraham Blackman, a captain in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War who, after being wounded in battle, is transported back in time to every major military conflict in U.S. history through the delirium caused by his injuries. All of these conflicts involved African Americans in one way or another—often in prominent or pivotal roles—and it is into the lives and experiences of earlier black soldiers that Blackman and the men in his unit are transported. Through their experiences in the past, Blackman and his integrated platoon learn about the many ways in which African Americans have been exploited in American military history, which symbolizes the way that power has been denied African Americans in general. Their ultimate plan is to obtain freedom through power. In the course of reaching this plan, Williams offers unflinching portrayals of the brutality and complexities of war, which is linked symbolically to the complex oppression African Americans have both endured and participated in, whether willfully and wittingly or not. The novel’s crux is the question of the origins and means of obtaining agency and power.

Power or its absence, therefore, ultimately occupies Williams’ artistic focus. To be more specific, he is interested in the myriad ways African American historical figures and artists have pursued and been denied agency and power and the methods by which they were denied their dreams and opportunities. In !Click Song (1982), Williams’s autobiographical protagonist is novelist William Cato Douglass, who finds himself improving as a writer as he becomes more sophisticated and perspicacious with regard to both his art and his racial identity but is also increasingly ignored by critics, reviewers, and academics. Douglass simultaneously descends into despair and finds sustenance and meaning in his writing, which most others fail to comprehend. The novel’s title, in fact, refers to black South African songs and languages that were for many years beyond the ken of European ears and sensibilities in much the same way that Douglass’s/Williams’s novels are incomprehensible to a critical establishment that long ago lost interest in a highly talented, accomplished, yet challenging author.

The Berhama Account (1985) tells of an elaborate assassination plot against the head of a small Caribbean nation that eventually leads to extensive social reforms. Jacob’s Ladder (1989) is a novel about Pandemi, a mythical African nation that aspires to obtain true independence by eschewing the aid of both the United States and the Soviet bloc. It functions as an extended meditation on the state of former colonized states on the African continent, arguing that colonialism never ended; it was merely transformed into new forms of financial and material dependence. Clifford’s Blues (1999) is a book of travel fiction that is based upon Williams’s own travels.

Despite his eminence in the history of African American letters, Williams’s corpus of fiction arguably has not been studied to the extent it should merit, given its breadth, its depth, and Williams’s enormous influence. On the other hand, Williams has not been ignored, either. His papers have been stored in the University of Rochester’s library since 1987, and several books examining Williams’s works and career, especially his early novels, have been published, along with many excellent comparative articles. Of the former, a first choice should be Gilbert Muller, John A. Williams (1984), from Twayne Publishers’ United States Authors series, if only because Muller is one of Williams’s close friends and collaborators. Earl Cash’s earlier—and therefore significantly outdated—John A. Williams: Evolution of a Black Writer (1975) is valuable primarily because of its extensive and balanced analysis of Williams’s life and work through Captain Blackman.

Williams, Sherley Anne (b. 1944, Bakersfield, California; d. 1999, San Diego, California) Sherley Anne Williams’s literary reputation has rested primarily upon two major components of her oeuvre. The longtime Fresno, California, resident is one of the more accomplished poets to emerge from the Black Arts Movement era, and her first novel, Dessa Rose (1986), stands as one of the finest to be published in the 1980s. Her poetic accomplishments have been celebrated elsewhere, but it is worth mentioning that Williams’s first book of poetry, The Peacock Poems (1975), was nominated for both a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1976. Williams’s poetry and fiction have drawn on a number of strong influences, including poets Langston Hughes, Philip Levine (one of Williams’s professors at Fresno State College, now Fresno State University, where she earned her B.A.), Amiri Baraka, and Sterling Brown. The fictional and nonfictional works of authors Richard Wright and Eartha Kitt were also extremely important, as were the lyrical content and rhythms of the blues, which can be seen throughout Williams’s work. After completing graduate work at Howard University, Williams earned her M.A. at Brown University in 1972 and began a long tenure at the University of California at San Diego until her death in 1999.

Williams began writing and publishing short stories in the late 1960s; the first of these is “Tell Marth Not to Moan,” which shows Williams’s blues influences; it has since been widely anthologized. Save for a book of criticism, Give Birth to Brightness (1972), however, Williams concentrated most of her efforts in poetry until Dessa Rose. Its story is based upon two actual historical incidents: a pregnant, enslaved woman’s rebellion on a coffle (a line of slaves chained together for transportation to a slave auction) in Kentucky in 1829, and a white woman who gave sanctuary to runaway slaves on her North Carolina farm in 1830. Williams’s novel imagines what would have occurred had these women met. It is an example of what Ashraf Rushdy calls a neo–slave narrative, “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.^* Many neo–slave narratives are partially responses to the controversy surrounding William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), which many African American writers and critics roundly condemned for its interpreting Nat Turner’s original testimony by focusing upon a questionable reconstruction of his psyche and sexual proclivities, as well as the marked absence of his historical wife.^* Thus while the story of the enslaved woman, Dessa Rose, is told primarily through her own voice, it also comprises the narrative viewpoint of Nemi, an unreliable white male amanuensis who refers to Dessa as a “darky,” and Miss Rufel, a white female plantation owner, who is considerably more sympathetic to Dessa but still problematic as a narrator due to her idealism. The plot tells of Dessa’s life on a plantation, the path that led to her motherhood, the growth of her desires for freedom and her own voices, and her subsequent escape with Miss Rufel’s aid. As in Williams’s earlier work, the story of loss and survival that is essential in the blues informs every aspect of Dessa’s narration. In many respects, Williams’s gestures in re-creating Dessa’s story prefigure and parallel Toni Morrison’s masterpiece, Beloved (1987), which is based upon the history of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who attempted to kill her children—succeeding with one—and herself rather than return to slavery. In fact, Anne E. Goldman fully makes the argument via her comparative essay, “‘I Made the Ink’: (Literary) Production and Reproduction in Dessa Rose and Beloved.”

Although a substantial portion of the critical work on Williams has focused on her poetry, Dessa Rose has received a wealth of attention as well. Besides Rushdy’s Neo-slave Narratives (1999), Mary Kemp Davis,“Everybody Knows Her Name: The Recovery of the Past in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose,” Callaloo 40, no. 1 (Spring 1989) offers a meticulous discussion of the importance of the neo-slave narrative form and Dessa Rose’s place within the tradition. Shirley M. Jordan’s exquisite biography of Williams may be found in Claudia Tate’s Black Women Writers at Work (1983), while Jordan’s interview with Williams may be found in Jordan’s collection Broken Silences: Interviews with Black and White Women Writers (1993). Mae Henderson,“(W)riting The Work and Working the Rites,” BALF 23, no. 4 (Winter 1989), is a detailed analysis of the relationship of Dessa Rose to Styron and to African American cultural rituals and forms, including the blues; Henderson’s essay on the novel’s erotic elements and subversive qualities may be found in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1997), edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen. Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Textual Healing: Claiming Black Women’s Bodies, the Erotic, and Resistance in Contemporary Novels of Slavery,” Callaloo 19, no. 2 (Spring 1996) follows a similar tack, with special emphasis on how Dessa Rose and other neo-slave narratives portray African American women as fully human subjects, complete with sexual identities and desires, rather than as objects. Marta E. Sanchez, “The Estrangement Effect in Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose,” Genders 15 (Winter 1992), examines the novel’s narrative technique and voices.

Womanism “Womanism” is a term that author Alice Walker coined to help define a way for African American women to be feminists in ways relevant to Black people. The best definition may be found in Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1984):

Womanist 1. From womanish. (Opp. of “girlish,” i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, “You acting womanish,” i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered “good” for one. Interested in grown-up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: “You trying to be grown.” Responsible. In charge. Serious.

2. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women’s strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health. Traditionally universalist, as in: “Mama, why are we brown, pink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige, and black?” Ans.: “Well, you know the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented.” Traditionally capable, as in: “Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.” Reply: “It wouldn’t be the first time.”^*

Walker posited the concept of womanism to distinguish the struggles African American women have faced from those of the mainstream—that is, white—women’s rights movement, which has sometimes been oblivious, insensitive, or even hostile to African American women’s history and concerns. Walker, as an editor for and frequent contributor to the pro-woman/feminist magazine Ms., wrote many articles criticizing modern feminism’s blind spots. Her main argument is that African American women have historically been less concerned with entering the workplace, since they have always been forced to work, whether because of enslavement or necessity. A feminism that fails to recognize this fact is therefore inadequate, inasmuch as it is tailored more for middle-class white women. A secondary complaint may be found within the definition above. Specifically, African American women, while strong and independent, are not likely to be gender separatists. They appreciate their womanhood but do not necessarily subscribe to the converse: antipathy towards men qua men. Instead, African American women/womanists desire economic independence and mutually beneficial relationships with men. A womanist would understand, for example, that one of her goals is “to assure understanding among black women, and that understanding among women is not a threat to anyone who intends to treat women fairly.”^*

To the extent that Walker’s theory attempts to inscribe a strong, consistent critique of sexism and racism into African American intellectual discourse, womanism’s precepts bear a strong resemblance to those of the Combahee River Collective, whose 1977 statement also asserts the possibilities for liberation found in black women’s identities, voices, and political work. As Walker outlines in her essay, “Duties of the Black Revolutionary Artist,” the “real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff. With raising a reading level from second grade to third. With simplifying history and writing it down (or reciting it) for the old folks. With helping illiterates fill out food-stamp forms—for they must eat, revolution or not. The dull, frustrating work with our people is the work of the black revolutionary artist.”^* Such revolutionary work includes helping women and men to find and appreciate their voices and ways to express themselves that may range from the written, to the verbal, to expressive artistic forms that transcend the verbal.^*

Walker thus envisions womanism as she does her other ideal political positions: firmly based in grassroots activism and therefore focused on individual and contingent needs rather than on concerns and strategies strictly circumscribed by ideology. The goal is to eschew hierarchies constructed by men for men, in favor of inclusive pluralities and a pantheism that stands in sharp contradistinction to traditional religions. It requires women making full use of their voices and their creative capacities, however they might be manifested. In African American fiction, especially Walker’s own, such possibilities may be offered either by portraying them in imagined worlds or positing them through the words and actions of pivotal characters. This is especially true of Walker’s later works, especially The Color Purple, The Temple of My Familiar, and Possessing the Secret of Joy. Walker demonstrates the double burden of racism and sexism that African American women bear throughout her novels and short stories, but if womanism may be considered an aesthetic, it is best illustrated in the later selections.

As one might expect, Walker’s womanism lacks neither precedents nor fellow travelers. The poetry, novels, and stories of Toni Cade Bambara, Bebe Moore Campbell, Edwidge Danticat, Gayl Jones, Jamaica Kincaid, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Sonia Sanchez, Sapphire, Ntozake Shange, Sherley Anne Williams, and many others are frequently cited as exemplars of a womanist aesthetic. Even if they were not influenced directly by Walker’s work—and many were—these authors have either professed strong desires to give voice to frequently silenced women’s concerns via their fiction or to encourage others to do so. This may involve citing a matrilineal string of influences ranging from archetypal or legendary African women, to everyday women and pioneering African American women of letters.

Analyses of womanism and its role in African American literature may be found throughout African American literary criticism since the late 1970s, but a few books and essays have distinguished themselves in their complexity and sensitivity to the subject. Among them are: Tuzyline Jita Allan, Womanist and Feminist Aesthetics: A Comparative Review (1995), which includes a chapter on Walker’s Color Purple; Elliott Butler-Evans, Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (1989), whose definition of womanism is particularly accessible, especially when applied to the authors named in the title; Lean’tin L. Bracks, Writings on Black Women of the Diaspora: History, Language, and Identity (1998), a monograph that includes chapters on Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Paule Marshall.

Equally important would be the major books of essays on African American feminism and feminism among people of color, including All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (1982), and This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981).

* Frances Stead Sellers, review of Waiting to Exhale, by Terry McMillan, Times Literary Supplement, 6 November 1992, 20.

* Darryl Pinckney, review of Waiting to Exhale, by Terry McMillan, New York Review of Books, 4 November 1993, 35; Esther Fein, “Fiction Vérité: Characters Ring True,” New York Times, 1 July 1992.

* Alice Walker, “The Unglamorous but Worthwhile Duties of the Black Revolutionary Artist, or of the Black Writer Who Simply Works and Writes,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984), 135.

* Francine Prose, review of By the Light of My Father’s Smile, by Alice Walker, New York Times Book Review, October 4, 1998; Richard Bernstein, review of By the Light of My Father’s Smile, by Alice Walker, New York Times October 7, 1998.

* Christopher Mari, “Whitehead, Colson.” 2001 Current Biography Yearbook (New York: H. W. Wilson, 2001), 593–95.

* Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 309.

* Rushdy, Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3.

* Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984), xi.

* Walker, “A Letter to the Editor of Ms.,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 273.

* Walker, “Duties of the Black Revolutionary Artist,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 135.

* See Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, pages 231–43.