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This critical edition of the works of Jupiter Hammon, the first black writer in America, modernized for 20th-century readers, includes vital background on Jupiter Hammon's life and times. Lack of information on striking similarities between northern slavery (particularly in Hammon's home state, New York) and the southern colonies, and on the slaves' survival strategies, has led to misinterpretation and lack of evaluation of works by 18th-century slave writers like Hammon, Wheatley, Occum, Equiano, and others. Equally important is the explication of Biblical symbolism that these writers used in surreptitious code to inspire rebellion against slavery. ... Read more

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In this provocative and original exploration of racial subjugation and its aftermath, Carlyle Van Thompson illumines the racialized sexual desire that reduces Black people to commodities for consumption. Eating the Black Body examines the often-sadistic forms of sexual violence during the period of slavery and its aftermath. By looking at one poem and three novels-Richard Wright's Between the World and Me, John Oliver Killens' Youngblood, Gayl Jones'and Octavia Butler's Kindred-that examine slavery and the Jim Crow period, Thompson investigates a wide variety of Black bodies as sites of miscegenation and sexual desire. Thompson also examines a horrific case of White male police brutality in New York City in which a Black man was sodomized. Bold and persuasively argued, Eating the Black Body will engage readers in a broad range of literary, historical, and cultural studies. ... Read more

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Scarring and the act of scarring are recurrent images in African American literature. In Scarring the Black Body, Carol E. Henderson analyzes the cultural and historical implications of scarring in a number of African American texts that feature the trope of the scar, including works by Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. ... Read more

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Argues that a "racial uplift" approach to African-American literature fails to appreciate the rich diversity of African American experience. ... Read more

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Examines the tradition of self-consciousness in African American literature. The book points to the shortcomings of theories of metafiction founded on studies of Anglo-American literature. It analyzes and evaluates these theories, providing a model for the evaluation of other Eurocentric theories. ... Read more

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Since her forced migration to the United States, the African American woman has consciously developed a literary tradition based on fundamental evolutionary principles of mind and body. She has consistently resisted attempts by patriarchs and matriarchs alike to romanticize and redefine that biologically-based literary heritage. This volume of ten classic texts, including such nineteenth-century writers as Jarena Lee, Harriet Jacobs, and Angelina Grimké, documents for teachers and general readers how African American female self-portraits gradually crystallized over some three centuries of brutality imposed by white men and their surrogates, who legally raped and then branded her immoral, precisely because she was black and female. This anthology also explores how her literary features were further defined during the postbellum era of Jim Crow segregation and civil rights abuses. Readers cannot adequately understand this woman’s unique story without learning how and, more importantly, why mental and physical atrocities so gruesome that most people cringe to think of them were inflicted upon her black female self in this land. ... Read more

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Dozens of works and nine different authors make up this collection of African American Literature with an active table of contents.

Works and authors include:
William Wells Brown
Clotel, or The President's Daughter
Clotelle, or The Colored Heroine
The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave
Three Years in Europe

Frederick Douglass
My Bondage and My Freedom
My Escape from Slavery
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

W.E.B. Du Bois
The Conservation of Races
Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil
The Negro
Quest of the Silver Fleece
The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870

Matthew A. Henson
Negro Explorer at the North Pole

Langston Hughes and Zora Hurston
Mule-Bone

Zora Neale Hurston
De Turkey and De Law
Poker!
Three Plays

Harriet Jacobs
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Booker T. Washington
Future of the American Negro
Negro Problem
Up From Slavery: An Autobiography

Harriet E. Wilson
Our Nig ... Read more

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Looking at texts including Jean Toomer's Cane, Toni Morrison's Beloved, James Baldwin's Another Country, and Beat poetry by Bob Kaufmann, in this original study, Parham describes the phenomena of haunting, displacement, and ghostliness as endemic to modern African American literature and culture. Not only does memory--conscious and unconscious, individual and collective--often drive African American cultural production, but such memory often arrives to artists from elsewhere, from other times, spaces, and experiences. ... Read more

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More than a decade in the making, Call and Response is a ground-breaking anthology of African American literature, unique in its placing equal emphasis on the written and the oral dimensions of the black aesthetic.It traces the centuries-long emergence of this distinct literary tradition from its earliest roots in African proverbs, folktales, and chants to its latest flowering in the works of such writers as Rita Dove, August Wilson, and Terry McMillan.Here, in 2,000 pages and 550 selections, is (in the words of Richard Wright) the "long black song" of African American life, sung in a great choir of voices, from the slaves of the 1600s to the rap artists, orators, novelists, and poets of today.

Among the works included are Frederick Douglass's Life and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye--both presented complete and unabridged.Here too are hundreds of spirituals and work songs, jazz and blues lyrics, poems, plays, stories, and speeches.An audio CD, produced in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution, features many of the texts as spoken or sung by their creators. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

A different perspective
I'm not going to pretend to be an expert in literary criticism - there are others who are far more qualified for such endeavors. However, I will say that this textbook opened my eyes to how differently a similar topic is treated depending upon the authors'/editors' position in the world. I recently took an American Lit course which touched on many of the same literary works, i.e., Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, etc. What caught my attention was the extensiveness with with the introductory material was reviewed. The American Lit intro had a more white/American perspective where as Call & Response, as one would expect, had an African-American perspective and, as such, provided more foundational information about the author and the period itself. I now feel that I have a better and fuller understanding of the position these authors were writing from. Additionally, this text covers the early years of slavery through contemporary authors such as Toni Morrison.

While I purchased this book for an African-American lit course I am taking, it would be beneficial reading for anyone seeking insight into this literary discourse Needless to say, this text will remain a part of my personal library.

Excellent source
I need this book for a class I'm taking, and will keep it. It is an excellent source for reading all about African-American literature that may not be found elsewhere.

This book sings to me
This is no mere literary anthology.It's a history, a cultural statement and a new way of looking at the African American tradition. Song lyrics weave themselves through the poems, around the stories, under the essays and beyond the non-fiction articles. Where else could anyone find the rhetoric ofHenry Louis Gates, Jr. and the old down home Virginny blues of Jimmy Reed?

This has the speech that Jesse Jackson gave to the Democraticconvention in San Francisco in 1984. I was there. It was a big moment at the time but I didn't recognize it as an historical event until I found it printed here.

The book itself feels like the typical blues song.We Rhythm and Blues kids used to call it a 12 bar blues. This is a song where the first two lines were repeated and then came the summary. In section IV, the subtitle reads, "Play the blues, play the blues for me." Section V repeats the same words. Section VI has the summary line: "No other music'll ease my misery." I can put these words to the standard 12 bar blues tune in my mind.

Hill delicately reaches back to the lyrics from spirituals, prison songs, rural blues, ragtime and back to slave work songs and their African origins. She advances the music through R & B into Avant-Garde Jazz and Rap and Hip Hop.The book contains a CD with songs and speeches.

The music entices us into the literary content. There's more here than the usual fiction, drama, poetry and essays.I found sermons, toasts, prayers, and folktales, both slave and African.Readers may be unfamiliar with some of the classifications -- Conjure tales, Griot's chant, haunt tales and "Call and Response."

We follow the history of a people through the writings of slave poets, the abolitionist orators, the fugitive slave narratives, preacher tales, and the voices of reconstruction. It continuesthrough to contemporary fiction and non-fiction writers.

It's not an easy book to read because every time I look for one idea, I get distracted by selections like, "Sketches from a Black-Nappy-Headed Poet,"or "Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane."

I confess, I know more about the music than the literature. This book draws me in with artists like Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, Howlin' Wolf, Oscar Brown, Jr., Public Enemy and Ice T. After I'm involved, I'm learning about Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frances Watkins Harper and Sojourner Truth.

I'm afraid that if I were to ask the average American high school student to name three African American literary figures, he or she would say:Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughs and then stop there. Some might add Alice Walker. This text puts those writers in their place and, given the wealth of content here, they occupy a small place compared with all who surround them.

I came upon this book as I was participating in the Urban Dreams Program, a federal project to train high school teachers in computer technology. Pat Hill spoke to our group.She impressed us all with her spirit, her knowledge and her comprehensive understanding of the African American tradition. To the degree that I've been positively influenced by her dynamic presence, I caution the reader of this review to be aware than I may have elevated her book higher than if I had not seen Hill in person.Other than that, this book is one of my personal favorites which will never be loaned out to anyone, ever. So please, my friends, don't even ask.

Difficult to use book
Although there is no faulting the content of this book, I do have issues with its presentation. As a literature textbook, it offers little to the user in the way of navigation. The page headers refer not to the authors or works on those pages, but instead to the abritrary titles of the Editors' sections. In this way, it is well-nigh impossible to find anything in the book. Further, the book could have done with explanatory footnotes in the texts and even something so simple as a publication/writing date for each of the selections.

The editor's notes are quite extensive, perhaps too much so. They spend a lot of time advancing their theories about the development of African American literature when they should be presenting the texts and leaving the reader to decide.

However, as I said, I cannot fault the content itself, which is very good, allowing the student a wide breadth of material, much of it by authors who are otherwise ignored by other anthologies. But much of this material is also covered in other anthologies which are much easier to navigate.

Destined for greatness
I found this to be a truly valuable resource put together by some very smart people.It's packed with insightful essays, rich overviews and enough great black literature to keep me busy for a good long while. I onlywish it had been written years ago. ... Read more

Product Description
Here is an innovative exploration of the blues aesthetic that reflects the literary work created by Black authors and illustrators for the Black child reader. This book examines literature written for Black children, using critical and creative writings—by artists, scholars, and critics—that define the blues within Black "adult" literature, poetry, and the visual arts. The book identifies Black children’s literature published in the past forty years by authors and illustrators who can be classified as blues artists, and whose work reflects social, political, economical, and historical developments of the Black experience throughout the United States. Referencing work created by Jacqueline Woodson, Walter Dean Myers, John Steptoe, Tom Feelings, Sherley Anne Williams, and others, this book demonstrates how the blues aesthetic now includes the literature dedicated to Black children. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Nancy Tolsen rocks
Nancy has written a wonderful book. She should be read by every teacher, parent and student interested in literature, and by every person who needs to understand Black children's literature better. I love her writing style, it's accessible to all readers not just scholars. ... Read more

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This wonderfully illustrated introduction to the art and literature of and about African-Americans has been specially compiled for young readers. From slavery and colonial times through the Civil Rights movement and up to the present, the African-American experience is vividly evoked through nearly 100 poems, songs, and text excerpts. These are accompanied by historical photographs and stunning reproductions of paintings and sculpture by well-known African-American artists. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Great Works
Poetry,Songs,and Other writing by over 27 authors such as
James Baldwin, Benjamin Banneker, Imamu Amiri Baaka, Arna Bontemps, Gwedolyn Brooks Margaret Danner, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois, Boby Dylan, Mari Evans. Lorraine Hansberry, France E.W. Harper, Robert Hayden, Julia Ward Howe, Langston Hughes, Thomas Jefferson, James Weldon Johnson, Absalom Jones, Martin Luther King, Jr. Abraham Lincoln, Dudley Randall, Harry S Truman, Mark Twain, Margaret Walker, Booker T. Washingto, Phillis Wheatley, Walter Whitman and others.

Paintings, Drawings, Photographs, and other works of Art by over 30 people
a wondeful for children and adults alike.

An attractive introduction for kids
This book presents an attractive and appealing introduction for children. It provides brief biographical notes (1-2 sentence) and many of the poems and prose are simply snippets, but it's designed to whet the appetite for something more, something it does admirably.

Celebrate you, the arts & success in the middle school class
Have you ever tried to teach a classroom of 30 or more 8th graders of varying abilities to read and focus? Try it, and I recommend this book in your classroom, also a textbook called African American Literature (Holt, Rinehart, & Winston), lyrics to new popular songs and golden oldies... etc.

Back to the book, VERY much fun. Has poetry by Langston Huges, Gwendolyn Brooks, etc. A plethora of unique artwork! Interesting biographical notes in the back of the famous African Americans referred to in the book such as James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, and Jimi Hendrix.

MOST IMPORTANT BOOK
"This is the most important book of the decade."Around Town, WETA-TV, Washington, D ... Read more

Product Description
A groundbreaking study, A Spirit of Dialogue examines through extensive, interdisciplinary research, theory, and close reading the intricate reconstructions, extensions, and resonances of the West African myth of spirit children, the "Born-to-Die," in contemporary African American neo-slave narratives. Arguing that the myth, called "Ợgbañje" in Igbo language and "àbíkú" in Yoruba, has had over thirty years of uncharted presence in African American literature, Okonkwo advances a compelling case absent in extant scholarship. He traces Ợgbañje/the Born-to-Die's appearance in African American texts to a convergence of factors. They include but are not limited to: the impact of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart; the 1960s emergence of the contemporary neo-slave narrative; the 1960s and 1970s black consciousness/Black Power movement and the cultural agenda, gendered politics, and centripetal philosophy of the Black Arts movement's nationalist aesthetic; African American identity questions of the post-civil rights and the multicultural eras; and the thematic shifts, as well as the African diaspora orientation of African American fiction of the post-nationalist aesthetic period.

A Spirit of Dialogue focuses on the sometimes neglected and understudied works of four canonical African American writers: Octavia E. Butler's Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, Tananarive Due's The Between, John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing, and Toni Morrison's Sula and Beloved. Okonkwo demonstrates persuasively how the mythic spirit child informs the content and form of these novels, offering Butler, Due, Wideman, and Morrison a non-occidental "code" by which to engage collectively with the various issues integral to the history and experience of African-descended people. The paradigm functions, then, as the nexus of a life-affirmative dialogue among the six novels, as well as between them and other works of African religious and literary imagination, particularly Things Fall Apart and Ben Okri's The Famished Road. ... Read more

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From the earliest texts of the colonial period to works contemporary with Emancipation, African American literature has been a dialogue across color lines, and a medium through which black writers have been able to exert considerable authority on both sides of that racial demarcation.

Dickson D. Bruce argues that contrary to prevailing perceptions of African American voices as silenced and excluded from American history, those voices were loud and clear. Within the context of the wider culture, these writers offered powerful, widely read, and widely appreciated commentaries on American ideals and ambitions. The Origins of African American Literature provides strong evidence to demonstrate just how much writers engaged in a surprising number of dialogues with society as a whole.

Along with an extensive discussion of major authors and texts, including Phillis Wheatley's poetry, Frederick Douglass's Narrative, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Martin Delany's Blake, Bruce explores less-prominent works and writers as well, thereby grounding African American writing in its changing historical settings. The Origins of African American Literature is an invaluable revelation of the emergence and sources of the specifically African American literary tradition and the forces that helped shape it.

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Introduce Your Students to a Rich Literary Heritage

Glencoe's new collection of ethnic anthologies gives students access to a wealth of literature written by some of the best classic authors and the finest contemporary voices. Each anthology, organized thematically into five relevant themes, combines literature and art as powerful expressions of the group's cultural story. Authors featured in African American Literature include Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Martin Luther King Jr., W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Walker, and James Baldwin.

Product Description
Dozens of works and nine different authors make up this collection of African American Literature with an active table of contents.

Works and authors include:
William Wells Brown
Clotel, or The President's Daughter
Clotelle, or The Colored Heroine
The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave
Three Years in Europe

Frederick Douglass
My Bondage and My Freedom
My Escape from Slavery
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

W.E.B. Du Bois
The Conservation of Races
Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil
The Negro
Quest of the Silver Fleece
The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870

Matthew A. Henson
Negro Explorer at the North Pole

Langston Hughes and Zora Hurston
Mule-Bone

Zora Neale Hurston
De Turkey and De Law
Poker!
Three Plays

Harriet Jacobs
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Booker T. Washington
Future of the American Negro
Negro Problem
Up From Slavery: An Autobiography

Harriet E. Wilson
Our Nig
... Read more

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-- Cheryl A. Wall, Rutgers University

Customer Reviews (2)

Art and Writing a Beautiful Marriage
Not only is the writing insightful but the artwork is phenomenal.I would love to see more of his work enhancing books.

Interesting and informative
I am fascinated with the style of writing and the subject matter of this book, which critiques authors of other books writing about Jazz and its relationship to home. ... Read more

Product Description
Excerpts from the writings of African American authors, including James Baldwin, Ja A. Jahannes, John Henrik Clarke, Mildred D. Taylor, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, and Ossie Davis. ... Read more