..., and even diminish the achievements of black women writers and their contributions to American letters. Sources from the New York Times to Henry Louis Gates Jr. labeled Morrison's win a “great day” for black women writers, for black Americans, and for African American literature; but few if any commentaries...

... how black women writers “incorporate the multivalent and thick subjectivity of 1970s women's novels” into their vision of cultural nationhood in the 1980s and 1990s (16). Whereas Baker's Workings of the Spirit (1991) seems to “celebrat[e] a vague ‘Afro-American women's expressive production’ rooted...

... return of the white colo- nial daughter to the "cultural history known as the English literary tradition" (133). Examining African American women writers in two early chapters entitled "Adventures of the Magic Black Daughter" and "Further Adventures of the Magic Black Daughter," Rody...

... of the book elaborates this thesis through readings of works by black women writers from the 70s and 80s-Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, and Bessie Head; in the second half, Taylor uses the insights of these texts to revisit modernist works by William Faulkner, Gertrude...

... on the unresolved contradictions of imagining economically and sexually liberated black women under conditions of racism and patriarchy. Understandably ambivalent about Wright as a Jane Crow writer, Hardison sums up her sense of his contribution: “The domestic worker embodies ‘black hope’ but Wright is unable...

... Contagions: Nationality, Narrative, and Communality in Tutuola, Achebe, and Reed.” Nation and Narration . Ed. Homi K. Bhabha New York: Routledge, 1990 . 231 –49. Traylor , Eleanor . “Music as Theme: The Jazz Mode in the Works of Toni Cade Bambara.” Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical...

.... Morrison , Toni . “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” Black Women Writers (1950–1980) . Ed. Mari Evans. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1984 . 339 –45. Morrison , Toni . Sula . New York: New American Library, 1982 . Schmidt , Klaus H. “Reading Black Postmodernism: John Edgar...

... hovering at the fringe of the black power movement, with its potential for brotherhood and solidarity; to the later twentieth century, where the specter of incest—which has such a dramatic presence in the work of contemporary black women writers in particular—speaks, she says, to ‘‘racism’s profound...

... the “myopia of white feminist scholars, who like their nineteenth-century precursors, took ‘woman’ to mean ‘white woman’” ( 39 ). Alongside her antisexist and antiracist critiques, Bambara gathers the work of black women writers to “showcase” and celebrate them while “recasting recent historical periods like...

... as attempting to transfer the denigration he feels as a black male onto the white woman via the act of rape. In further readings, we encounter black-on-black rape (in Njabulo Ndebele’s superb short story ‘‘Fools andthe ‘‘white peril’’ fromthe perspective of two women writers, the black writer Lauretta Ngcobo...

... and intimate engagement with her intellectual predecessors, including African American women vocal artists, Lordi carries black feminist thought into new and fecund territory. Lordi's detailed analysis of literature, music, and the relation of black writers to black women singers shows how careful “close...

... southern African American women writers, such as Alice Walker in The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Zora Neale Hurston in Jonah's Gourd Vine, depict "antitypes to this stereotype: fragile black women with enormous inner strength-their bodies worn out by their economic rnar- ginalization...

...RICHARD PEARCE NANCY J. PETERSON, Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crisis of Historical Memory, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 242, cloth, $46.50. Copyright © Novel Corp. 2002 2002 Postmodern Historical Narratives...

... by pointing to the ways in which black intel- lectuals and writers have formulated diasporic narratives as alternatives to nationalism. By asking us to consider archives outside of the United States as well as the uneven proc- esses by cvhich African diasporic writers form allegiances and networks...

... manifesto Discourse on Colonialism as “a declaration of war” ( Kelley 7 ). And Frantz Fanon, in his essay “On National Culture,” originally addressed to the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers in Rome in 1959, called for a littérature de combat that would serve nationalist struggles...

..., and progress are intertwined with the refiguration of race. By 1940, the "road out of the Black Belt" had become a central focus for white liberals and social scientists in the United States, as well as for black intellectuals and writers, including Wright. As Omi and Winant have remarked, a major...

... and African). Frantz Fanon's essay on intellectuals and national culture, delivered in Rome in 1959 at the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists, diagnoses this point clearly. Fanon distinguished "national consciousness" from "nationalism," and saw in the former a dialectical relationship...

... adaptations. Nussbaum reads this transformation as reflecting the erasure of black women in the period and an anxiety about white women's attraction to mythically virile black men. For the growing number of blacks living in Britain, su& anxiety shadowed their own attempts to envisage a "black man...

.... In "The Bear," the ledger not only tells the founding story of Old Carothers' rape and incest but, tlwough its lists of everyday items, conveys the "con- tours" of slaves' lives. In Ike's readings "these black men and women themselves 'took sub- stance and even a sort of shadowy life with their passions...

...: New Slavery in the Global Economy . Berkeley : U of California P , 1999 . Beal Frances . “Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre.” Black Scholar 17 . 2 ( 1986 ): 14 – 18 . Bryant Dorothy . The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You . New York : Random House , 1971...