Examines the oral tradition in African American poetry, short fiction, and novels.
Jones offers readings of works by Michael S. Harper, Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker,
Ernest J. Gaines, and Toni Morrison, as well as earlier authors.
Angelyn Mitchell, ed., Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Lit-
erary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1994).
Includes two sections that are most relevant to those interested in contemporary
literature: “Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and the African American Critic”
and “Gender, Theory, and African American Feminist Criticism.”
David Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became
White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic
Books, 2005).
Examines the intersections between race and class through an exploration of how
Italian, Jewish, Polish, and other immigrants to America who were not considered
“white” in the nineteenth century melded into the mass of “white people” over the
course of the twentieth century.
Valerie Smith, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz, eds., African American Writers:
Prof iles of Their Lives and Works—From the 1700s to the Present (New York:
Collier, 1993).
Twenty-seven biographical/critical essays on African American writers. Figures
from the contemporary period include Amiri Baraka, Ernest J. Gaines, Audre
Lorde, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Ntozake
Shange, Alice Walker, and John Edgar Wideman.
Kevin J. Wetmore and Alycia Smith-Howard, eds., Suzan-Lori Parks: A Casebook
(New York: Routledge, 2007).
Offers a chronology, an introduction surveying Parks’s career, eight essays on vari-
ous plays and on such topics as gender, language, and metatheater, as well as an
interview by Wetmore.
PEOPLE OF INTEREST
Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995)
Considered one of the best of African American short-story writers for her col-
lections Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The Seabirds Are Still Alive (1977). She is
also noted for her novels The Salt Eaters (1980) and the posthumously published
Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), based on the murders of forty black children
in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981. Her essays and interviews were edited by Toni
Morrison as Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations
(1996).
Amiri Baraka (1934– )
Poet, playwright, dramatist, essayist, music critic, literary theorist, activist, and
founder of the Black Arts Movement; born LeRoi Jones. His play Dutchman
(1963) is considered a landmark of African American theater. Collections of his