0 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
explosion of writing by African American women in the last three decades of the
twentieth century.
Sterling Lecater Bland Jr., “Fire and Romance: African American Literature,” in
A Concise Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture, edited by
Josephine G. Hendin (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 263–289.
A useful overview of contemporary African American literature, mainly fiction.
Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2003).
Discusses works by Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney, Trey Ellis, Charles John-
son, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar
Wideman in the context of Postmodernism and urbanity.
Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997).
Examines why whiteness goes unexamined as the norm and demonstrates how
it is presented as the aesthetic ideal in film, painting, photography, and other
visual media.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American
Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
A landmark of African American criticism that provides insight into how past
African traditions and tropes are reflected in African American literature. With
the exceptions of Alice Walker and Ishmael Reed, the authors discussed predate
the period treated in the present volume.
Trudier Harris, Saints, Sinners, and Saviors: Strong Black Women in African
American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
Focuses on the positive and negative aspects of the figure of the strong black
woman that appears in much contemporary African American literature.
Authors whose works are discussed include Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison,
Toni Cade Bambara, J. California Cooper, Ernest J. Gaines, Octavia Butler,
and Pearl Cleage.
Karla F. C. Holloway, Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in
Black Women’s Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1992).
Focuses on ancestral figures, oral traditions, and figurative metaphors from
Africa as they are reimagined in works by such writers as Gloria Naylor, Alice
Walker, Ntozake Shange, Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. The
book is challenging but highly useful.
Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., Race Traitor (New York: Routledge,
1996).
Eclectic collection of pieces from Race Traitor, a polemical journal devoted to
critiquing “whiteness” and demonstrating that it is a historical, not a natural,
classification.
Gayl Jones, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature
(New York: Penguin, 1991).