This book explores how African American social and political movements, African American studies, independent scholars, and traditional cultural forms revisit and challenge the representation of the African American as deviant other. After surveying African American history and cultural politics, W. Lawrence Hogue provides original and insightful readings of six experimental/postmodern African American texts: John Edgar Wideman s "Philadelphia Fire"; Percival Everett s "Erasure"; Toni Morrison s "Jazz"; Bonnie Greer s "Hanging by Her Teeth"; Clarence Major s "Reflex and Bone Structure"; and Xam Wilson Cartier s "Muse-Echo Blues." Using traditional cultural and western forms, including the blues, jazz, voodoo, virtuality, radical democracy, Jungian/African American Collective Unconscious, Yoruba gods, black folk culture, and black working class culture, Hogue reveals that these authors uncover spaces with different definitions of life that still retain a wildness and have not been completely mapped out and trademarked by normative American culture. Redefining the African American novel and the African American outside the logic, rules, and values of western binary reason, these writers leave open the possibility of psychic liberation of African Americans in the West."

Product Description: Although literary postmodernism has been defined in terms of difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and plurality, some of the most vaunted authors of postmodern American fiction--such as Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, and other white male authors--often fail to adequately represent the distinct subjectivities of African Americans, American Indians, Latinos and Latinas, women, the poor, and the global periphery...read more

Product Description: Analyzes the connections and shared themes in eight novels by modern African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American writers, discussing works such as Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon with reference to their treatment of the philosophical tenets and epistemological concepts of modernity and postmodernity...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)