Black Novels Research Articles

The contemporary African American novel: its folk roots and modern literary branches

In 1987 Bernard W. Bell published The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, a comprehensive interpretive history of more than 150 novels written by African Americans from 1853 to 1983. The book won the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the College Language Association and was reprinted five times. Now Bell has produced a new volume that serves as a sequel and companion to the earlier work, expanding the coverage to 2001. Bell also refines and extends his interpretive model for reading texts by African American writers, a model based on the vernacular forms of expression of his childhood, the literary theories of Ralph Ellison, and the writings on double-consciousness of W. E. B. Du Bois. T he book begins with a personal essay in which Bell traces the evolution of his thinking about sociohistorical and sociocultural approaches to literature. He goes on to apply these approaches to the work of hundreds of black novelists whose work has been published since 1853. His primary focus, however, is on some forty novels and romances published between 1983 and 2001, including works by Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Albert Murray, Gloria Naylor, Al Young, David Bradley, Leon Forrest, and Charles Johnson, as well as the neo-Black Aesthetic novelists Nathaniel Mackey, Trey Ellis, Percival L. Everett, and Colson Whitehead. In acknowledging the diversity of the tradition of the novel, Bell also examines the science fiction of Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler, the gay novels of E. Lynn Harris, Larry Duplechan, and Randall Kenan, and the detective narratives of Barbara Neely and Walter Mosley. The result is a book of impressive scope and accomplishment - an essential work for any serious student of African American literature.

Orality in the Black Zimbabwean Novel in English

The question of the extent to which African orality exerts an influence on the black Zimbabwean novel in English has taken centre stage in recent critical debates. One view is that a revived African cultural nationalism during the war of liberation claimed for its own purposes that African orality was always resistant to colonial policies. According to this view, colonialism’s attempt to suppress African culture instead generated among Africans a sense of oneness, producing a united community with the single aim of achieving freedom. This assumption that resistance was inherent in orality, both before colonisation and during the struggle, is complicated by evidence that, in the periods in question, orality communicated absolutely everything, including authoritarian and hegemonic ideas. Because orality occupied a highly volatile cultural space in the lived contexts of African societies, serving multiple and sometimes apparently contradictory purposes, it is not surprising that the same paradoxical uses of orality can be traced in the black novel. The challenge for black Zimbabwean novelists was whether they would attempt to make use only of specific ‘traditional’ protest genres within orality or whether they felt that the mere evocation of orality was enough to give an anti-colonial authenticity to their novels. Referring to Feso,1 Waiting for the Rain,2 Bones3 and Black Sunlight,4 this article argues that, in fact, Zimbabwean authors use orality to confront the reader with an array of unstable meanings that potentially subvert narratives of resistance. The article demonstrates that there are ideological differences and conflicting views underlying the ways in which authors use orality. There are also, ironically, ideological inconsistencies and conflicting perspectives in the use of orality within a novel by an individual author. As a consequence of these paradoxes, the article concludes by suggesting that orality is a tool to express any social vision rather than a mark that confers ‘authenticity’ onto the black Zimbabwean novel in English.

White Family Values in Ann Petry's Country Place

Hired by Columbia Pictures in 1957, Ann Petry wrote a script called That Hill Girl for a movie featuring Hollywood glamour girl Kim Novak. The job must have been a dream come true for Petry. In autobiographical essay for Contemporary Authors, she confessed to an absolute passion for the movies: I'm addicted to them-good ones, bad ones, indifferent ones (266). Petry sold the rights to her third novel, The Narrows (1953), though it never materialized on the silver screen. The black novelist speculated, no doubt correctly, that the interracial affair at the center of the narrative proved too controversial for the 1950s movie industry. Petry's second novel, Country Place, would have been controversial, too, but for a different reason. Published in 1947, the novel mocks the sentimentality of postwar family narratives such as William Wyler's award-winning film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which dramatizes the difficult homecomings of three veterans. Country Place tells a similar story about folks, but without the happily-ever-after ending. Country Place belongs to a group of white life novels published by black writers in the years following World War Two. Some of these novels, like Frank Yerby's Foxes of Harrow (1946) and Willard Motley's Knock on Any Door (1947), became bestsellers and then major Hollywood films. Although such novels were generally well received when first published, subsequent critics have too quickly dismissed the works that Langston Hughes,

Signs and cities: black literary postmodernism

Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy. Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression

W. E. B. Du Bois and Jews: A Lifetime of Opposing Anti-Semitism

The decline of comity in Black-Jewish relations during past thirty years has been acknowledged by several scholars on both sides of this ethnic divide. (1) Unfortunately, as Cornel West has observed, there was no golden age in which blacks and Jews were free of tension and friction. (2) Even prominent black novelist James Baldwin, writing in Commentary, a publication of American Jewish Committee, noted as early as 1948 that just as society must have a scapegoat, so hatred must have a symbol. Georgia has Negro and Harlem has Jew. (3) In last decade of twentieth century strain between these two groups that had frequently been allies in previous generations seemed stretched beyond breaking point with publication of anonymously authored Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews which claimed that Jews were key operatives in slave trade and bore responsibility for creating 'black holocaust. (4) This prompted Chair of Harvard's Afro-American Studies dep artment to write in New York Times that 'while anti-Semitism is generally on wane in this country, it has been on rise among black Americans. (5) After Lee Alcorn, president of Dallas NAACP, responded to selection of Senator Joseph Lieberman as Democratic Vice Presidential candidate by asking, on a radio talk show, If we get a Jew person...what is this movement for, he elicited immediate censure from Kweisi Mfume, national president of civil rights organization. Fortunately, one book, Jews and Blacks--Let Healing Begin, attempted to promote reconciliation. (6) Throughout last century many well-known African Americans consistently decried anti-Semitism of any origin, among them A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Bayard Rustin, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But no black voice was heard more often, more eloquently, and for a longer period of time than W. E. B. Du Bois in his denunciation of anti-Semitism and his praise of Jewish people in general. Because early in his career Du Bois had unflattering words to say about some transatlantic steerage passengers and a particular landlord in Georgia, whose practices may well have deserved rebuke from any sensitive observer, many scholars have erroneously questioned his sincerity, or even worse, ascribed anti-Semitic sentiments as motivation. Long overdue is a recounting of charges leveled at Du Bois, which can be rebutted in his own words, and an explanation of possible reasons for this inaccurate, unfair, and academically indefensible portrayal. The first biography of Du Bois stemmed from a doctoral dissertation at Harvard, same university that granted him his doctorate. Francis L. Broderick, to whom Du Bois had granted access to his personal notes and correspondence, acknowledged that Du Bois had witnessed anti-Semitism in his post-doctoral studies in Europe, but added accusation that: Du Bois appears to have absorbed some anti-Semitism himself. In his Diary of My Steerage Trip Across Atlantic (summer 1895) he says that he had seen aristocracy of Jewish race and low mean cheating pobel, but he had seldom seen the ordinary good hearted good intentioned man. He found two congenial Jews on trip, but he shunned rest--There is in them all that slyness, that lack of straight-forward openheartedness which goes straight against me. (7) Three publications in 1970s tarnished Du Bois's image vis-a-vis Jews in varying degrees. Robert G. Weisbord and Arthur Stein conceded that Du Bois's opinions about Jews were virtually all sympathetic, but also quoted his editorial in The Crisis of September 1933 to claim that he believed that Jews, under attack by Hitler's Germany, were not sufficiently vocal about oppression of African Americans: When only inferior peoples were niggers it was hard to get attention of The New York Times for little matters of race, lynching and mobs. …

The existential dimensions of Frederick Douglass’s autobiographical narrative

Frederick Douglass’s socio-political narrative is explored through an existential lens, arguing that Douglass is contesting the proposition that essence precedes existence. Douglass, through his fight with Covey, a white ‘slave breaker’, and his escape to freedom, affirms his existence (etymologically, ‘standing out’) as being for it-self ( pour-soi) over and against the reduction of his existence to that of being in-itself ( an-soi). Drawing from the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who was greatly influenced by the phenomenological and politico-praxic work of Black novelist Richard Wright, it is argued that Douglass disrupts the power/knowledge regime of white American slavery, exercising his existential capacity for transcendence. Examining whiteness as a species of what Beauvoir calls ‘the serious man’, it is argued that whites within Douglass’s text are in a state of flight, performing their whiteness as ‘the serious man’, that is, where whiteness is accepted as an unconditioned state of being. Douglass’s narrative depicts whiteness as a flight from freedom (bad faith); for his very act of protestation against whiteness demonstrates that whiteness is not an objective, hypostatized thing, but a performative choice that sustains white hegemony.

Tip-Toeing on the Tightrope: A Personal Essay on Black Writer Ambivalence

A drum roll roared, crowd hissed, cymbals clashed, and muscular young African woman finessed her way up the ladder to the landing, then to the wire. Fans around the world marveled at this glamorous Black woman with sparkly make-up and neon tights who danced on the high wire at the UniverSoul Circus, the world's first all-Black circus held recently on Chicago's South Side. I thought it was the first time I witnessed Black person walking the tightrope, until my genetic memory reminded me of the many times Black folks have had to, and will continue to, walk the tightrope. Welcome to my Big Top. Step right up as I walk you through the death-defying feats performed by and performed on Black writers who be ringmasters in the literary circus we call Academy if their greatness were not judged by the lions. Black writers - meaning those of African ancestry from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean - have been prolific and profound, writing volumes on the subject of Black writer ambivalence, the duality of attempting to amplify their writer's voice within the Black aesthetic while maintaining reverence to the Eurocentric aesthetic; projecting through one's words moral and political awakening while playing out the stereotypes some Whites still have for Black writers and other Negroes; continuing to treat this affliction with prescription of value-laden verbs while fighting disillusionment and constant explanations about duality to who wake up every morning never feeling the pangs of race and its relationship to class, gender, and sexual orientation. Black writers' ambivalence is aggravated by the need to be twice as good as White writers while receiving only third of the money and an eighth of the recognition. The tension between the two selves we battle as Black writers in White literary world is our exigence, our source of triumph as well as defeat - our source of immense satisfaction yet also the reservoir of our angst. From Du Bois to Danticat, scores of important Black writers have dissected the double-vision of the children of the ancient African diaspora. For example, author-lawyer Derrick Bell, in his essay Last Black Hero, details the schizophrenia afflicting his hero, writer-singer Paul Robeson (Faces 66), who was accepted for his art but not for his race - though my psychiatrist-wife frowns upon my apparent misuse of the precise clinical term schizophrenia, which she defines as a psychotic illness involving hallucinations, delusions, and bizarre behavior. Bell explains in Rules of Racial Standing that Blacks are denied legitimacy when they discuss their negative experiences with racism or even when they give positive evaluation of another Black person or his or her work (Faces 111). Saul Bellow detailed his feelings on this subject in 1952 when praised Ralph Ellison for finding way, as Black novelist, to go at their problems, just as there are Jewish and Italian 'ways.' According to Bellow, had Ellison adopted more strident tone - one typical of many of today's minority writers - he would have failed to establish true middle-of-consciousness for everyone (qtd. in Crouch 89). Antigua-born Jamaica Kincaid says that she had to flee from her Black island home to New York's White literati to begin her career, simply because she could not have become writer living among the people she knew best (162). Is this double-talk or double-vision? Author-curmudgeon Stanley Crouch illuminates the double-vision concept in his book The All-American Skin Game when explains: Conceived and laid out by W. E. B. Du Bois in the first chapter of his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, the condition somehow disallows consciousness of self and creates an aching split - 'this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. …

En quête d'une image indigéniste : Les romancières noires américaines

Black contemporary literature presents stunning female characters created by black female novelists.Indeed, with Zora Neale Hurston, the black woman character becomes non-conformist and complex and ceases to be the tragic mulatto woman or the weak victim usually portrayed in literature.Leading black female novelists, such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall and Alice Walker, give a new interpretation of the black American woman’s experience. The new characters they create clearly indicate their independent-mindedness and desire to impose a new vision of their community based on their own liberating experience of life.

Charles W. Chesnutt's "Future American"

At the turn of the last century, Booker T. Washington became white America's favorite black spokesman when he proposed a segregationist solution to the racial problems of this country. his Atlanta Exposition speech of 1895, he argued for racial accommodation through racial separation, saying: In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.1 At about the same time, however, Washington's friend and critic Charles W. Chesnutt, the first black novelist and short-story writer to be given serious literary attention, was advancing a very different racial theory.2In various articles and speeches, Chesnutt explicitly advocated the revolutionary-and highly unpopular-idea that miscegenation and intermarriage were the answer to racial problems in America and elsewhere. If all people were the same color, he reasoned, race could no longer serve as a basis for human disagreement, and racial conflict, at least, would necessarily disappear. Chesnutt made his most definitive and comprehensive statement on racial amalgamation-a major theme throughout his fiction-in American, a series of three articles published by the Boston Evening Transcript in the late summer of 1900.3 Although this newspaper supported the racial policies of Booker T. Washington, literary editor Joseph Edgar Chamberlin solicited the articles from Chesnutt after recalling a conversation with the novelist about a future, amalgamated race.4 Once his Transcript series was in print, Chesnutt considered the subject of miscegenation generally opened up for discussion, and inferentially for literary treatment.5 The appearance of these articles virtually coincided with the publication of his first novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), which makes the same racial argument in fictional form. The Future American series, then, has both historical and literary importance. It reveals a largely-overlooked side of Chesnutt the social critic and racial crusader, and also sheds new light on Chesnutt the writer. All three Transcript articles are reprinted here in their entirety to make them readily accessible to scholars and to provide a more complete picture of Charles W. Chesnutt.

Black Women and the Politics of Skin Color and Hair

Black Women and the Politics of Skin Color and Hair

Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston

Previous articleNext article No AccessThresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale HurstonBarbara JohnsonBarbara Johnson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 12, Number 1Autumn, 1985"Race," Writing, and Difference Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448330 Views: 94Total views on this site Citations: 48Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1985 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Leah Abuan Milne Jagged Harmonies of Knowledge and Black Representation in Hurston's Essays, The Journal of American Culture 12 (Aug 2022).https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.13398Rebecca R. Kastleman Staging Hurston's Heaven: Ethnographic Performance from the Pulpit to the Pews, Theatre Survey 25 (May 2022): 1–22.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000047Katrina M. Powell Zora Neale Hurston’s Craft and a Griot’s Refusal to Conform, (Jun 2021): 43–69.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64598-4_3Hugo Letiche Doubling: there’s no escape from terror/doubling: there’s an escape from commodification …?, Society and Business Review 11, no.22 (Jul 2016): 174–192.https://doi.org/10.1108/SBR-04-2016-0028Katherine Biers Practices of Enchantment: The Theatre of Zora Neale Hurston, TDR/The Drama Review 59, no.44 (Dec 2015): 67–82.https://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00497 The Critical Difference, (Jan 2014): 3–13.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-001 Translator’s Introduction to Dissemination (abridged), (Jan 2014): 14–25.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-002 Poetry and Syntax, (Jan 2014): 26–35.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-003 A Hound, a Bay Horse, and a Turtle Dove, (Jan 2014): 36–43.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-004 Strange Fits, (Jan 2014): 44–56.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-005 The Frame of Reference, (Jan 2014): 57–98.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-006 Euphemism, Understatement, and the Passive Voice, (Jan 2014): 101–107.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-007 Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God, (Jan 2014): 108–125.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-008 Moses and Intertexuality, (Jan 2014): 126–140.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-009 Lesbian Spectacles, (Jan 2014): 141–146.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-010 Bringing Out D. A. Miller, (Jan 2014): 147–154.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-011 Correctional Facilities, (Jan 2014): 155–178.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-012 My Monster/My Self, (Jan 2014): 179–190.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-013 Introduction to Freedom and Interpretation (abridged), (Jan 2014): 193–199.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-014 Muteness Envy, (Jan 2014): 200–216.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-015 Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion, (Jan 2014): 217–234.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-016 Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law, (Jan 2014): 235–261.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-017 Using People, (Jan 2014): 262–274.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-018 Ego Sum Game, (Jan 2014): 275–288.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-019 Melville’s Fist, (Jan 2014): 289–323.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-020 Nothing Fails Like Success, (Jan 2014): 327–333.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-021 Bad Writing, (Jan 2014): 334–346.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-022 Teaching Deconstructively, (Jan 2014): 347–356.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-023 Poison or Remedy? Paul de Man as Pharmakon, (Jan 2014): 357–370.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-024 Taking Fidelity Philosophically, (Jan 2014): 371–376.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-025 The Task of the Translator, (Jan 2014): 377–400.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-026 Teaching Ignorance, (Jan 2014): 401–420.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-027Shoshana Felman Afterword, (Jan 2014): 421–432.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-028 Bibliography, (Jan 2014): 433–436.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822399070-029 Introduction, (Jan 2011): 1–29.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822393894-001 “A Combination Madhouse, Burlesque Show and Coney Island, (Jan 2011): 33–71.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822393894-002 “Inanimate Hideosities”, (Jan 2011): 72–110.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822393894-003 “The Last American Frontier”, (Jan 2011): 113–151.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822393894-004 “Ah Gives Myself de Privilege to Go”, (Jan 2011): 152–188.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822393894-005 “Am I Laughing?”, (Jan 2011): 191–240.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822393894-006 Notes, (Jan 2011): 251–286.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822393894-007 Bibliography, (Jan 2011): 287–310.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822393894-008Jean‐Luc Moriceau, Hugo Letiche Doubling: there's an escape from commodification ...?, Society and Business Review 4, no.11 (Feb 2009): 8–25.https://doi.org/10.1108/17465680910932432 Elizabeth Abel Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation, Critical Inquiry 19, no.33 (Oct 2015): 470–498.https://doi.org/10.1086/448683Elizabeth Abel Black Writing, White Reading, (Jan 1993): 827–852.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14428-0_48Guenter H. Lenz “Ethnographies”: American Culture Studies and Postmodern Anthropology, Prospects 16 (Jul 2009): 1–40.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300004476Peter Messent A Medley of Voices: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, (Jan 1990): 243–287.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21117-3_8John Dorst Rereading Mules and Men: Toward the Death of the Ethnographer, Cultural Anthropology 2, no.33 (Aug 1987): 305–318.https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1987.2.3.02a00030

Ladell Payne, Black Novelists and the Southern Literary Tradition (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1981, $11.00). Pp. x, 117.

Ladell Payne, Black Novelists and the Southern Literary Tradition (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1981, $11.00). Pp. x, 117.

Black Novelists and the Southern Literary Tradition.

Black Novelists and the Southern Literary Tradition.

Richard Wright: A Black Novelist's Experience in Film

Richard Wright: A Black Novelist's Experience in Film

From Pastoralism to Industrial Antipathy in William Attaway's Blood on the Forge

William Attaway's Blood on the Forge W/HE,N Blood on the Forge by black novelist William Attaway was V published in 1941, it received little notice. The book, nevertheless, represented a literary achievement in its own right, and at the same time it realistically portrays the transition of a people from a structured, authoritarian, rural existence to an industrialized urban frontier (Attaway himself was a part of that northward migration of blacks coming from rural Mississippi to Chicago). On the one hand, Blood on the Forge continued a long tradition of and anti-pastoral literature proceeding from early nineteenth-century Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Mark Twain and Hamlin Garland in the Gilded Age, and ultimately to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and William Faulkner. At the same time, the novel is worthy of special attention as a powerful plea in behalf of a struggling race. In this sense Attaway rejects the traditional forms of agrarianism which call for a return to nature, and sounds the theme of alienation that marks the modern existential novel. In Blood on the Forge, the earlier paean to the qualities of the simple country landscape suddenly becomes an angry repudiation of life as destructive to human values. The focus then shifts from delicate scenes of lavish woods, succulent orchards, and flocks of sheep an idealization of nature from a distance as the moral symbol of the good life -to the horrible fact that man has already been swallowed up by the machine. This transition from bucolic nostalgia to industrial antipathy represents a literary consummation, but at the same time and most tragically, an individual act on the part of Southern blacks. In the first part of the novel, the author explores the futile attempts of a family of black farmers to apply agrarian values to a bleak environment in the red clay hills of Kentucky during World War I. Attaway's Joads are three brothersthe elder Big Mat, who represents the plodding strength and endurance of all Southern Negroes under their particular color-caste system; Melody, whose blues singing recreates and sustains the myth;1 and Chinatown, whose lazy, happy-go-lucky attitude reflects in part a psychological response to the subjugated position of Negroes. Throughout this pastoral section of the novel, Attaway testifies to the myth's fragility when faced by the reality of such an existence an existence characterized by images of hunger (one of Melody's songs is the Hungry Blues), barrenness (the soil as well as

Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, £4.00). Pp. xi, 343. - M. G. Cooke (ed.), Modern Black Novelists: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971, $5.95; paper $1.95). Pp. iv, 219. - Norman R. Shapiro (ed. and translator), Négritude: Black Poetry from Africa and the Caribbean (New York: October

Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, £4.00). Pp. xi, 343. - M. G. Cooke (ed.), Modern Black Novelists: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971, 20.00). Pp. xiii, 658. - Volume 6 Issue 2