Fingering The Jagged Grain

In Fingering the Jagged Grain, Keith E. Byerman discusses how black writers such as Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, and Ernest Gaines have moved away from the ideological rigidity of the black arts movement that arose in the 1960s to create a more expressive, imaginative, and artistic fiction inspired by the example of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Combining a strong concern for technique and craftsmanship with elements of African American heritage including jazz, blues, spirituals, cautionary tales, and voodoo, these writers have created a vital fiction that celebrates the strength and resilience of the black American voice as it recounts the painful details and brutal episodes of black experience.

The new edition of the groundbreaking chronicle of forty years of black music in America

This volume analyzes the work of a racially, ethnically, and geographically diverse group of recent social poets. These figures -- Thylias Moss, John Yau, Denise Duchamel, Carolyn Forche, Joseph Lease, Gloria Anzaldua, Martin Espada, Melvin Dixon, and Stephen Paul Miller -- utilize a diversity of aesthetic strategies to address a number of central problems, such as poetic speculations about dangers and opportunities of visual representations by dominant and marginalized groups, effacement of specific communities' histories, and attempts at restoration of history.

"A specter lurks in the house of music, and it goes by the name of race," write Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman in their introduction. Yet the intimate relationship between race and music has rarely been examined by contemporary scholars, most of whom have abandoned it for the more enlightened notions of ethnicity and culture. Here, a distinguished group of contributors confront the issue head on. Representing an unusually broad range of academic disciplines and geographic regions, they critically examine how the imagination of race has influenced musical production, reception, and scholarly analysis, even as they reject the objectivity of the concept itself. Each essay follows the lead of the substantial introduction, which reviews the history of race in European and American, non-Western and global musics, placing it within the contexts of the colonial experience and the more recent formation of "world music." Offering a bold, new revisionist agenda for musicology in a postmodern, postcolonial world, this book will appeal to students of culture and race across the humanities and social sciences.

Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.

Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of Ralph Ellison.

In Women’s Work, Courtney Thorsson reconsiders the gender, genre, and geography of African American nationalism as she explores the aesthetic history of African American writing by women. Building on and departing from the Black Arts Movement, the literary fiction of such writers as Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison employs a cultural nationalism—practiced by their characters as "women's work"—that defines a distinct contemporary literary movement, demanding attention to the continued relevance of nation in post–Black Arts writing. Identifying five forms of women's work as organizing, dancing, mapping, cooking, and inscribing, Thorsson shows how these writers reclaimed and revised cultural nationalism to hail African America.