2 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (1991) and Karla
F. C. Holloway’s Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black
Women’s Literature (1992). Students might find it interesting to look for traces
of oral tradition in the prose or poetry of some of the writers mentioned in the
essay above, examining such features in one work or comparatively across texts.
- Many contemporary African American texts—especially prose works—feature
ancestral figures: older people who serve as culture bearers, carrying forward
the stories and traditions of the past and acting as teachers of the younger
generations. Such characters include Pilate in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon,
Minnie Ransom in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, and Miranda Day in
Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, as well as many instances in Wideman’s novels and
stories and the poetry of Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, and Michael S. Harper.
Ernest J. Gaines’s novel A Gathering of Old Men (1983) also offers interesting
examples. Using any of these works or other available possibilities, ask what
strengths and flaws tend to characterize these figures. How do they stand in
for the past, and what do they say about it? How can ancestral figures help
those who are struggling with issues of identity or how to accomplish their
goals? Might it be important to move past them in some ways? The works by
Holloway, Trudier Harris, and Houston Baker cited in “Resources” offer start-
ing places for such an investigation.
- During the Harlem Renaissance, which began after World War I and lasted
until the mid 1930s, authors such as Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown
became noted for adapting jazz rhythms and blues music into their poetry.
In an interview Dove explored the intricacies of this connection: “there’s a
way of incorporating into a poem the rhythms of speech, which are a source
for both music and poetry. I’m thinking in particular of Langston Hughes,
who could pull out the flavor of bebop and render it linguistically. You know:
‘Good morning, Daddy! / Ain’t you heard / The boogie-woogie rumble / Of
a dream deferred?’ He didn’t try to make the poem into music; rather, he took
the rhythms of a particular musical style, found the equivalent rhythms in
the language spoken in his neighborhood, and made it into poetry” (Robb
St. Lawrence, “‘Taking the Cards You’re Dealt and Building a House’: An
Interview with Rita Dove,” Bellingham Review, 29 [Fall 2006]: 77–84; also
available at http://people.virginia.edu/~rfd4b/Bellingham%20Review.pdf
[accessed 7 January 2010]). This tradition continues in contemporary African
American literature in work by such authors as Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Harper,
and Kevin Young. Students might find it fruitful to compare an earlier African
American poet’s use of forms and strategies from music to that of a contem-
porary poet—for instance, Hughes to Harper or Young, or Claude McKay’s
“The Harlem Dancer” (1917) to Dove’s poems about ballroom dancing. How
do hip-hop and rap factor into this equation?
- African American cultural and political expression, especially during the Civil
Rights Movement, has had significant impact on the national consciousness.
Earlier civil-rights leaders such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. used
songs, speeches, and pamphlets for rhetorical and persuasive purposes. The black
rhetoric of the 1960s was aggressive, employing specific strategies to “move the
