... 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...

... 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...

...Mark A. Tabone This article focuses on the representation of history in African American author John A. Williams’s 1999 novel, Clifford’s Blues , a fictional account of a Black, queer American expatriate’s internment and enslavement in a Nazi concentration camp . Through a critical perspective that...

... 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...

... 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...

... affinities that bind Himes to more 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...

... 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...

..., how does it contend with the African American and Latino/Chicano scholarly traditions, which emphasize the distinctiveness of their respective literary cultures rather than their resemblance to the white avant-garde? Yu’s book at times seems vulnerable to Silliman’s critique of Bernstein...

... 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...

... ; Gabbin 1999 ; Leonard 2005 ; Moten 2003 ; North 1994 ; 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...

... representative of the tribe 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...

... the fact that his work, despite obvious cultural and geo­ graphical distances, spoke to Duncan and Spicer, two gay 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...

... Dubey’s 2003 study Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism demonstrates how anti-realist 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...

... 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 Baker contends that African American writers at the beginning of the twentieth...

...” bout His 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...

... from the banalities of the dominant white culture, it also makes him irrelevant to that culture and, more generally, to its monopolistic claims on the human race. This is accomplished, in part, by imagining African Americans as more “animal” than human. Mr. Vander explains, “My definition of a...

... 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 narrator to reflect on the failures of the Confederacy. In...

... important new scholarship on the connections between pragmatist thought and African American culture, such as the work of Ross Posnock and Michael Magee. Magee’s book Emancipating Pragmatism concludes with a chapter on the Baraka-O’Hara relationship, and Epstein draws extensively on it (citing 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. Discussing William Wells Brown’s Clotel , or The...

... ideas” ( Mackenzie 1999 : 225) intended to smother the increased calls for independence from West African and Indian politicians. 9 See Laura Winkiel’s (2005) nuanced account of West’s participation in the Vorticist project. 8 For analysis of West’s conflict with Bloomsbury intellectuals...