... Cadillac on a US senator’s lawn to protest the senator’s racist pronouncements, I argue that Ellison adopts expressive strategies of black vernacular culture—the ritual of the dozens and African American automotive consumption—to explicate a singular conception of literary commitment, one that seeks...

... traditionally accepted surrealists. He characterizes Himes’s crime fiction as a form of “vernacular surrealism” (246), a subversively comic deployment of African American vernacular culture that extended the surrealist movement’s ideological and epistemological critiques into a popular genre...

... that Ellison attempts to expand the boundaries of history to include the previously unacknowledged records of African-American and vernacular culture. But although these critics have devoted considerable attention to the forms of history on display in Invisible Man, few of them have addressed...

... and cultural legacies. As fluent in jazz history and theory as he is in the vernacular traditions of African American poetry, Marcoux elucidates the innovative formal practices of these challenging poets. Marcoux’s introductory definition of the griot is at once precise and flexible enough to accommodate...

..., that the African American vernacular tradition needs to expand to include poets even Langston Hughes, the champion of the vernacular, appreciated: “it would seem unseemly for those of us who read after Langston Hughes to be less capacious and more captious in our cri- tique than he was” (xiv). Rather than...

... commitment to African American folk culture, has now moved to center stage in his critical reception, as scholars such as James Smethurst, Anthony Dawahare, William J. Maxwell, Kate Baldwin, Cary Nelson, and David Chioni Moore have positioned Hughes as a major figure in complex international...

... and in it” (339). Contrary to critical claims about their stronger grip on the social referent, African-American and other “minority” postmodern writers pointedly depart from realism in order to signal the difficulty of positing either a knowable community or a clear social function for the novel...

... ; Nurhussein 2013 ; Rambsy 2013 ; Ramey 2008 . Works cited Bolden Tony . 2004 . Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture . Urbana : University of Illinois Press . Gabbin Joanne V. 1999 . The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry . New Brunswick...

... ventriloquism” (9), James Weldon Johnson and older New Negro leaders argued that acting modern meant not writing or speaking “too black” because African-American dialect had been so tarred and tarnished by its historical associations with minstrelsy and racism (10). Even when younger Harlem Renaissance...

... and ideals. While those interested in postcolonial theory have tended to casti­ gate modernism, those who study African American or Caribbean writ­ ers have been more willing to employ modernism as a useful conceptual category. For example, in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Houston...

... introduction of the hero then combines the epic epithet (“sea-smart” Odysseus) with the African-American influenced colloqui­ alism “my main man.” Walcott’s primary signification of geographic displacement is under­ scored macaronically, however, in the fifth line’s transliterated Greek: “An­ dra...

... to recall the existentialist maxim that “experience precedes essence” when thinking of Black American 269Twentieth-Century Literature 55.2 Summer 2009 269 John C. Charles identity, history, and culture, and to confront the fact that African Ameri- cans have always “chosen...

... Anglo-American poets, and Baraka, one of the foremost African American experimental writers. In Mackey’s reading, this hinge aspect is what makes Lorca so vital to “new American possibilities, to an American newness that is about mix, the meeting of different cultural styles...

... self, Epstein observes, arises later in pragmatist thought, for instance in the work of John Dewey. One of the benefits of including Baraka in Epstein’s triad of writers is the access thus gained to important new scholarship on the connections between pragmatist thought and African American...

...” (131-32). But why, on this view, should African Americans care about being invisible to and separated from such a community of racists? Why not be content with their separate existence, their separate culture? The answer, I think, reflects the fact that this novel is less about race, or its...

... postwar African- American fiction performs a version of the cultural and historical labor that critics continue to arrogate to realist modes of minority literature. Moreover, in making her argument for the utility of postmodernism 296 as a periodizing concept in regards to African-American...

... of the landscape of failure, stretching from the Civil War into the twentieth century. Sterling Brown, in the persona of a white Southern woman, famously glossed Harlem nightlife as the “logical outcome of Appomattox” (1996, 169). The splendor of everyday African American culture in the urban North forces Brown’s...

..., to finger its jagged grain, to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of a personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.” A distinctly African American form of cultural signifying...

... viral across the Internet.) As not only an African American but also a woman, Larsen seems to have been that much more susceptible to the charge. 12 Robert Levine’s analysis of “cultural revisioning” in the work of American authors offers a helpful framework for thinking about this project...

... and blues, those metonyms for African American expressive culture are the pianist’s bailiwick and joy. Such oppositions are profoundly tested by the widow’s possessiveness and erotic disquiet over the young Black woman’s personal and professional choices, reminding us of Lorde’s definition of the erotic...