The primary goal of this guide is to introduce the reader to the literature, careers, and critical issues surrounding major African American fiction authors published since 1970. This period witnessed an explosion of literary talent from American authors of African descent. As hundreds of these authors made an impressive and permanent mark upon the publishing world, they enjoyed an unprecedented level of attention from academics and critics alike. As a group, these authors clearly owe great debts to previous literary movements, but they have also carved out their own distinctive niches that have irreversibly transformed the landscape of African American literature and its reception in both American publishing and the academy. The reader will be able to trace, whether by randomly sampling this guide’s 164 entries or by reading it in its entirety from start to finish, how African American fiction became a centerpiece of American literary history at the end of the twentieth century even as it remained the site of celebration, contestation, diversity, and no small amount of controversy.
Each period within the history of African American literature contains its own loosely definable agenda. Most African American authors have sought to provide at least a glimpse into the varied experiences of African Americans and how those experiences, ranging from the joyous and celebratory to the cataclysmic and horrific, have forced America to transform itself into a nation that better reflects the promises and ideals of democracy. My ultimate goal is to demonstrate how the most recent wave of African American fiction and, to a slightly lesser extent, its criticism best reflect this often-tortured, yet endlessly fascinating transformation.
This guide reviews authors, movements, institutions, and publications that emerged between 1970 and 2000. I begin at 1970 primarily because that year was the crux of a number of major shifts in African American politics. The philosophy of integration and pacifism that Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference represented were slowly but inexorably supplanted by African American cultural nationalism beginning in the mid-1960s, inaugurating what is now known as the post–Civil Rights era, which extends until the present. The era that most Americans consider the apex of Civil Rights activism began with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court decision and ended with the assassination of King, although the fight for Civil Rights truly began many decades earlier, arguably at the end of legal chattel slavery in 1865. The modern push for equality, however, in which King participated and for which he has become a popular icon, arguably began with the Brown decision and had its first major victory in the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955. King’s assassination in 1968 meant that one of the most important eras in American history—rivaled only by the Revolutionary and Civil wars and the decades leading to them—lost a crucial leader, one who stood on the side of hope and peace. The vacuum he left was filled with many voices questioning the efficacy of the strategy and practice of the nonviolent direct action that defined the modern Civil Rights movement. Among these voices were many African American intellectuals and writers who constituted the Black Arts Movement.
In African American literary arts, the radicalism of the Black Arts Movement advocated by such luminary writers and critics as Imamu Amiri Baraka (né LeRoi Jones), Hoyt Fuller, Addison Gayle, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Carolyn Rodgers, Maulana Ron Karenga, and Gwendolyn Brooks brought about a sea change in the literature’s scope and content. As we shall see below, debates regarding the merits of pursuing art for art’s (or the artist’s) sake versus creating socially conscious art have raged for over a century among African American intellectuals. By the late 1960s, though, the latter position of the debate was ascendant as black politics became radicalized in the wake of racism’s continuing entrenchment, the demise of African colonialism, and the deaths of such leaders as Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. Literature with a more proletarian or “grassroots” orientation became popular, as did a sort of radical chic. This did not mean that careful artistic craft was in abeyance, but it did mean that someone interested in African American literature in 1970 would have found very little being published that resembled what Richard Wright called, in his famous criticism of the Harlem Renaissance, “humble novels, poems, and plays, prim and decorous ambassadors who went a-begging to white America.”* Instead, many of African American literature’s most prominent artists openly advocated various forms of revolution, from armed conflict to the ideological transformations of cultural nationalism.
Most obviously, 1970 also marked the end of the 1960s, in which the ideological foundations for most of the literature to follow were laid. In 1970 alone, many landmark novels, fiction anthologies, and bibliographies emerged from the writers and editors whose work has attracted extensive critical and popular interest: Ishmael Reed (19 Necromancers from Now), Alice Walker (The Third Life of Grange Copeland), Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye), Darwin Turner (Afro-American Writers). The years immediately following witnessed the publication of many texts that have since ascended to the current African American literary canon: The Black Aesthetic, by Addison Gayle (1971); Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972); Charles Johnson’s Faith and the Good Thing (1974); Toni Morrison’s Sula (1974), and so on. In short, 1970 marked the beginning of a contemporary flourish that has never truly subsided.
Critical and scholarly attention to African American authors has grown in the last three decades to the point that it is now virtually unthinkable for major literary journals specializing in American literature to ignore black authors. Most critical appraisals and analyses of these authors are now sympathetic, due in large part to the infusion of African American scholars into academia. Regardless of levels of sympathy, the theories of such African American scholars as W. E. B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Barbara Smith, Hortense Spillers, Houston A. Baker Jr., Arnold Rampersad, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Wahneema Lubiano frequently inform most critiques of African American literature. Hundreds of monographs, essay collections, and individual book chapters have been devoted to African American authors since 1970, and since 1996, several major anthologies and critical companions and guides have been published to provide the beginning student of African American literature with quick and easy access to the primary and secondary material in the field. This Columbia Guide is but one of these resources and should be considered as much a complement to the others as a gateway to this rapidly expanding world.
Each of the entries for different authors, institutions, major publications, and other critical terms opens this world to the reader and suggests a few additional readings that will expand upon the issues the entry raises. My objective is not so much to give a complete biography or history of a subject as it is to touch upon the subject’s keynotes. Therefore, instead of reproducing a complete biography of Toni Morrison, which could be found in any one of a handful of sources, it is more productive to discuss a few key events from Morrison’s life and career that illustrate why she has been a significant part of contemporary African American literature for the last three decades, then point the reader toward the best biographies.
The reader will also note that some author entries are much longer than others. The length of individual entries is due, as one might expect, to a particular author’s eminence in African American literature or, perhaps, to the number and complexity of an author’s works. Of course, this rule does not always hold; some authors may very well be major figures in African American literature, but since this guide is a resource for African American fiction, an author best known for her contributions to poetry or for his critical or journalistic career may be given but a short treatment. In such cases, I have taken pains to acknowledge the author’s relevance to other literary forms but have not dwelt on them, unless such attention would help illuminate the author’s contributions to prose fiction.
Although this volume is a guide to African American fiction, it is not exhaustive. That is to say, I do not attempt to provide an entry for every African American who has written fiction. With but a few exceptions, I have chosen to exclude at least two identifiable genres from the volume: specialized religious fiction, or fiction written specifically for an audience converted to a particular religion, usually Christianity; and romances. While the overwhelming majority of African Americans profess religious beliefs—most frequently Christian and Muslim, in that order—I assume that those seeking a guide to fiction with an explicitly Christian bent, for example, would have little trouble finding one via such other sources as their clergy or fellow parishioners. This is not to say that the theme of religion may not be found herein. The fact that religion has played and continues to play an essential role in African American communities has inspired countless African American authors to compose stories and novels that draw from and reflect upon black spirituality in all its forms. With few exceptions, though, these works are not necessarily written specifically to proselytize or offer succor for the faithful. Instead, they give us an opportunity to learn about many different aspects of African American life and culture, with religion and spirituality but one part of that mosaic. This guide, then, is for those interested in these aspects as found in African American secular fiction.
I have opted to exclude romance fiction written by African Americans for the simple reason that the numbers of works and authors in this vein are far too numerous and not nearly distinct enough in most appreciable ways to warrant separate entries or close study, despite the fact that this area grew significantly in the last decade or so of the twentieth century. For my purposes, I define “romance fiction” as short stories and novels whose purpose is to explore the terrain of romantic relationships primarily, if not exclusively, for the purpose of entertainment. While these works are certainly popular among an extensive core audience, it is also safe to say that despite the real talent of many writers working in this vein, detailed descriptions of these works would be repetitive and perhaps superfluous. The reader might object that some of the authors included could be classified as writers of romance fiction, to the extent that they write about African American relationships, including love and romance. I argue instead that any author or work included in this guide, including those who might seem to write to a formula or who stick to certain popular generic conventions of romance fiction, at the very least aspire to artistry either by virtue of the careful composition of their writing or by clear attempts to write artistically, politically, and socially challenging art. The few exceptions I have consciously made to this rule, then, are authors who have tried to challenge the limits of their chosen genres and to break out of generic formulae.
“Fiction” will be understood as meaning short stories, novellas, and novels. Unless they are directly relevant to our understanding of fiction or a particular author’s oeuvre, the Guide will not focus upon dramatic works and poetry. It will, however, discuss and utilize major nonfiction works that have been instrumental in altering the study of African American fiction.
One of the key purposes for this guide, then, is to help the reader make such distinctions. Although I admittedly have my favorite authors within the greater tradition of African American fiction, I have tried to be as objective as possible in my summaries and assessments of different authors. Every author listed has intrinsic value stemming from her or his sincere efforts to write to an intelligent reading audience. As is true of any type of literature, many authors strive toward an eclectic mix of artistic standards or ideological purposes, while others write primarily to entertain, and still others wish to balance the two. In fact, over the course of preparing this guide, it became abundantly clear that many of the most popular African American authors currently writing have a substantial stake in lending a certain degree of social consciousness to their works by incorporating plot lines that confront a number of pertinent social issues. These may range from the drug epidemics of the 1980s and 1990s and the concomitant “War on Drugs” that led to a number of severe social problems; the legacy of the Civil Rights movement in all its cultural, political, and economic implications; the Gay Rights movement, including (but not limited to) the rise of HIV/AIDS and its effects upon African American and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered communities; the women’s movement; racism’s continuing impact upon African American communities; and so on. These plotlines may be the crux of some works; in others they might be faintly discernible—or poorly developed—thoughts that do not always affect the overarching plot.
How to Use This Guide
I wrote the alphabetical entries that follow to provide the reader with an introduction to the subject, author, or work at hand. Each author entry in the Guide provides: basic biographical information for the author; a summary of the direction, importance, or effects of his or her work; short summaries of minor works; longer discussions of individual works that have had a significant impact upon the literary world, as each case may warrant; and a paragraph or two listing and occasionally annotating the books, essays, or articles that the reader might turn to for more detailed information. These last paragraphs function as bibliographies for individual authors, but they are not meant to be exhaustive catalogues. For many of the newer or younger authors, especially those who began writing in the mid- to late 1990s, the only articles to be found are book reviews. I have opted to exclude listings of book reviews, with two significant exceptions: 1) if the review in question is especially lengthy and informative, or 2) if the author in question is a major figure. Colson Whitehead, for example, promises to become an important author in both contemporary African American literature and the broader historical tradition. Some of the reviews of his two novels help shed light upon his significance and therefore have been included or quoted.
Interspersed with the author entries are terms, subjects, and individual books that have made a deep impression upon the greater field of contemporary African American literature and literary studies. Since I use or refer to many of the terms or subjects freely throughout the remainder of the alphabetized entries, the reader would likely benefit from having relatively brief definitions or histories. Individual books that merit their own entries fit into at least one of several categories. They are either extremely well known, frequently taught at high school and college levels, highly influential, studied regularly by scholars, or—in the estimation of an overwhelming number of professional critics and scholars—the most universally acclaimed. A few scholarly works have made it into this group due to their exceptional impact upon the field of African American literary studies, which grew and developed rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s. The reader is encouraged, however, to refer to this volume’s bibliography for a more complete listing of scholarly works.
The bibliography that follows the A–Z section is a listing of anthologies, critical books, book chapters, and articles that discuss the directions African American literature has taken throughout its history, but especially in the twentieth century’s last three decades. Most studies of African American fiction published in the last thirty years of the twentieth century consist of either discussions of single authors, a few closely related authors (not all of whom may be African American), and general discussions of African American literary history. I have annotated a number of entries that are particularly outstanding for their ability to shed light on either general African American literary history or the period covered by this volume. Single-author studies are not included.
A Note on Usage of Terms
Before proceeding further, some other commonly used terms warrant definition and clarification. I move interchangeably here between the terms “African” and “black,” with the former term used most frequently. “African American” is the formal term that many native-born Americans of African descent have chosen as the most accurate to describe both their heritage and identity, in the absence of precise genealogies extending back to West Africa. Since relatively few enslaved Africans were allowed to maintain fully their cultural traditions and language in the North American form of slavery, “African American” thus signifies a person whose ancestry is rooted in the African continent and whose phenotype, culture, and legal or personal identity, while containing contributions from European, Semitic, Asian or other peoples, reflects the black African element. This term was intended to replace or clarify such earlier terms as black, Black American (capitalized or not), Afro-American, Aframerican, Negro American (again, capitalized or not), colored, and so on. The identity itself may be a product of conscious self-identification or the sometimes-arbitrary categorization that frequently frustrates those American authors of African descent who might choose to reject some African American cultural traditions. For the sake of brevity, I choose to include under these labels all American-born authors of African descent, as well as those Caribbean authors of African descent who have adopted the United States as their home, whether formally or informally.
On this last point, selecting the authors to be included in this volume, and therefore under the rubric, required making an unsatisfactory but necessary distinction. Although I recognize the obvious fact that the United States of America is certainly not all of the Americas, that blacks in the Caribbean would, in the broadest sense, also be “African American,” and that blacks in the United States share some common historical experiences and some common cultural practices, they also have some distinct, complex differences that even the most cursory understanding of Caribbean nations’ history would highlight. I would not, therefore, consider an author who lives and works primarily in a Caribbean nation an African American, if the latter half of the term means “of the United States,” even if that author had spent considerable time in the United States. I should also imagine that a native Jamaican author, for example, would be insulted by my conflating her life and her nation’s history with those of black Americans in the same way she might object to the omnibus label “Caribbean writer.”
I am also equally comfortable with the term “black” when used as a synonym for African American, since African Americans still accept and use it widely, as do those outside of African American communities. The acceptance of both terms has depended largely upon substantial shifts in African American cultural politics, some of which I discuss below. Except when it is used as part of a proper name or title, though, I do not capitalize “black,” again in keeping with current common usage. I do not use decidedly outmoded terms such as “Negro” or “colored” unless, again, I am quoting these terms as part of a name, title, or literary passage. On some occasions I use the term “people of color” as a general descriptor of the major ethnic minority groups in the United States of America, including African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanics/Latinos or Chicanos, among others. While the question of who or what is “African American” is difficult to answer and will be addressed further in various entries within, the definition above serves as a general understanding.
Finally, I tend to place the term “race” in quotation marks to signify the fact that “race” is a commonly accepted but finally problematic term that connotes biological divisions between human beings. Modern science has soundly disproved “race” as a biological reality, yet it remains a social one for millions of people of color in the United States, to say nothing of the rest of the world. “Race” is therefore a falsehood, but it is one that people frequently rely upon to describe phenotypical and cultural characteristics that ultimately transcend “racial” divisions. My quotation marks indicate an ironic usage, which I hope will help inspire the reader to question the term’s meaning.
Abbreviations
Some commonly mentioned or cited texts and institutions have been abbreviated after their first appearances in the main body of the entries. These include:
| AAR | African American Review |
| BALF | Black American Literature Forum |
| CLA | College Language Association |
| DLB | Dictionary of Literary Biography |
| NALF | Negro American Literature Forum |
| Norton | The Norton Anthology of African American Literature |
* Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” The New Challenge: A Literary Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1937): 53.