2 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Several black writers of the 1980s and 1990s attracted a general audience,
including Terry McMillan, author of Disappearing Acts (1989), Waiting to Exhale
(1992), and How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996), all featuring African Ameri-
can women and their relationships. McMillan also edited the influential Breaking
Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Fiction (1990). Bebe Moore
Campbell’s 1994 novel, Brothers and Sisters, initiated discussions of race, sex, and
class. Ten novels about gay black life by E. Lynn Harris, a gay black male, reached
The New York Times best-seller list. Harris’s work presents homosexual issues with
a warmth and humor that make the historically taboo subject accessible. Randall
Kenan, a writer and professor, has published several books that address gay black
identity in the South and that feature the magical realism that often appears in
the works of such popular female writers as Morrison, Walker, and Naylor. His
first novel, A Visitation of Spirits (1989), is set in the fictional Tims Creek, North
Carolina, as is his nationally acclaimed collection of stories Let the Dead Bury
Their Dead (1992). His nonfiction work The Fire This Time (2007), part memoir
and part homage to James Baldwin, looks at where America is now with regard to
the issues Baldwin raised forty-four years earlier in The Fire Next Time.
Students interested in Postmodernism and African American literature will
find several recent black authors who have taken up explicitly Postmodernist proj-
ects. Trey Ellis received critical attention for his metafictional first novel, Platitudes
(1988). The following year he published the influential essay “The New Black
Aesthetic,” in which he describes middle- and upper-class African American males
as “cultural mulattos” who feel as much connection to the late white rock icon Jim
Morrison as they do to the black novelist Toni Morrison. Colson Whitehead has
garnered both critical and popular success writing for publications such as the Vil-
lage Voice and Salon .com. He received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in
- His most noteworthy works include The Intuitionist (1999), John Henry Days
(2001), and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006). Influenced by Thomas Pynchon and Ralph
Ellison, Whitehead is attracted to popular-culture forms and inflects his work with
references to the media and new technologies. Danzy Senna also looks to past
African American masters while employing contemporary—often Postmodern-
ist—techniques. Her debut novel, Caucasia (1998), offers a case study of race in
America. Her first-person narrator extends the conversation begun in Nella Larsen’s
Passing (1929) and Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) by questioning the privilege and
normative status of whiteness in America.
African American drama is discussed in the Study Guide on General Topics
“Contemporary American Drama” in this volume, and a Study Guide on Works
and Writers is devoted to the most prominent contemporary African American
playwright, August Wilson. Students interested in innovations in drama early
in the period might consider the work of Ntozake Shange, who created a new
theatrical form, the “choreopoem”—a merging of poetry, prose, music, song, and
dance—in for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
(1975). Anna Deavere Smith, a playwright, actress, and recipient of a MacArthur
grant, is well known for her documentary-style dramas exploring race and com-
munity. Her one-woman plays Fires in the Mirror (1992) and Twilight: Los Angeles
1992 (1993) won Obie (Off Broadway) Awards, and her 2008 solo show, Let