Product Description: Presenting an innovative approach to performance studies and literary history, Soyica Colbert argues for the centrality of black performance traditions to African American literature, including preaching, dancing, blues and gospel, and theatre itself, showing how these performance traditions create the 'performative ground' of African American literary texts...read more

Product Description: In All Stories Are True, Tracie Church Guzzio provides the first full-length study of John Edgar Wideman's entire oeuvre to date. Specifically, Guzzio examines the ways in which Wideman (b. 1941) engages with three crucial themes--history, myth, and trauma--throughout his career, showing how they intertwine...read more

Product Description: Authentic Blackness – «Real» Blackness explores and explains the idea of authenticity, of «keeping it real,» as it relates to the multi-faceted meanings of blackness in the United States and the world. Including reflections on hip-hop, comedy, literature, intellectual history, and autobiography, the collection gives both a broad overview of and intervenes in the debates concerning blackness...read more

Product Description: Authentic Blackness – «Real» Blackness explores and explains the idea of authenticity, of «keeping it real,» as it relates to the multi-faceted meanings of blackness in the United States and the world. Including reflections on hip-hop, comedy, literature, intellectual history, and autobiography, the collection gives both a broad overview of and intervenes in the debates concerning blackness...read more

Product Description: This book explores key texts of the black gay culture of the 1980s and ’90s. Starting with an analysis of the political discourse in anthologies such as In the Life and Brother to Brother, it identifies the references to the Harlem Renaissance and the Protest Era as common elements of black gay discourse...read more

Product Description: Black Men Worshipping analyzes the discursive spaces where Black masculinity is constructed, performed, and contested in American religion and culture. It judiciously considers the anxiety that emerges from Black male negotiations with these constructions

Product Description: This Companion offers fresh insight into the art and politics of James Baldwin, one of the most important writers and provocative cultural critics of the twentieth century. Black, gay, and gifted, he was hailed as a "spokesman for the race," although he personally, and controversially, eschewed titles and classifications of all kinds...read more

Since 1984, Canadian writers have achieved great international visibility and success in the fields of science fiction and fantasy with the publication of popular works by Guy Gavriel Kay, Timothy Finlay, William Gibson, and Margaret Atwood. This book surveys the history of Canadian science fiction and fantasy in English and French since 1839. Ketterer first discusses the factors that initially inhibited the writing of science fiction and fantasy, and the qualities, themes, and imagistic or audioloical biases that distinguish Canadian writing in the genre. He then identifies a canon of books that--on the basic of historical interest, literary merit, or both--deserve to be better known.

Carl Van Vechten was a white man with a passion for blackness who played a crucial role in helping the Harlem Renaissance, a black movement, come to understand itself. Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance is grounded in the dramas occasioned by the Harlem Renaissance, as it is called today, or New Negro Renaissance, as it was called in the 1920s, when it first came into being. Emily Bernard focuses on writing—the black and white of things—the articles, fiction, essays, and letters that Carl Van Vechten wrote to black people and about black culture, and the writing of the black people who wrote to and about him. Above all, she is interested in the interpersonal exchanges that inspired the writing, which are ultimately far more significant than the public records would suggest.This book is a partial biography of a once controversial figure. It is not a comprehensive history of an entire life, but rather a chronicle of one of his lives, his black life, which began in his boyhood and thrived until his death. The narrative at the core of Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance is not an attempt to answer the question of whether Van Vechten was good or bad for black people, or whether or not he hurt or helped black creative expression during the Harlem Renaissance. As Bernard writes, the book instead “enlarges that question into something much richer and more nuanced: a tale about the messy realities of race, and the complicated tangle of black and white.”

Product Description: During the 18th century, American Puritans introduced migrant and enslaved Africans to the Exodus story. In contrast to the ways white Americans appropriated the texts to defend the practice of slavery, African migrants and slaves would recast the Exodus in defense of freedom and equality, creating narratives that would ultimately propel abolition and result in a wellspring of powerful writing...read more

The original CliffsNotes study guides offer expert commentary on major themes, plots, characters, literary devices, and historical background.CliffsNotes on The Bluest Eye & Sula covers two of Toni Morrison’s unforgettable novels. The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel, focuses on Pecola Breedlove, a lonely, young black girl living in Ohio in the late 1940s. Through Pecola, Morrison exposes the power and cruelty of white, middle-class American definitions of beauty.Sula, Morrison’s second novel, focuses on a young black girl named Sula, who matures into a strong and determined woman in the face of adversity and the distrust, even hatred, of her by the black community in which she lives. Morrison delves into the strong female relationships and how these bonds nurture and threaten individual identity.This study guide will take you beneath the surface of Morrison’s complex characters to uncover their universal themes. Helpful background information about the author brings these novels into context for even greater understanding. Other features that help you study includeComplete character listsA character map that graphically illustrates the relationships among the charactersCharacter analyses of major playersGlossary of difficult terms Critical essaysReview questions and essay topicsClassic literature or modern modern-day treasure — you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides.

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