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The literature often considered the most American is rooted not only in European and Western culture but also in African and American Creole cultures. Keith Cartwright places the literary texts of such noted authors as George Washington Cable, W.E.B. DuBois, Alex Haley, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Joel Chandler Harris, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, and many others in the context of the history, spiritual traditions, folklore, music, linguistics, and politics out of which they were written.

Cartwright grounds his study of American writings in texts from the Senegambian/Old Mali region of Africa. Reading epics, fables, and gothic tales from the crossroads of this region and the American South, he reveals that America's foundational African presence, along with a complex set of reactions to it, is an integral but unacknowledged source of the national culture, identity, and literature.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
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  1. Contents
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  1. Introduction. Tropical Trees: Towards a Hippikat Poetics
  2. pp. 1-22
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  1. Part I. Epic Impulses/Narratives of Ancestry
  1. 1. Imperial Mother Wit, Gumbo Erotics: From Sunjata to The Souls of Black Folk
  2. pp. 25-47
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  1. 2. Of Root Figures and Buggy Jiving: Toomer, Hurston, and Ellison
  2. pp. 48-67
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  1. 3. Myth-making, Mother-child-ness, and Epic Renamings: Malcolm X, Kunta Kinte, and Milkman Dead
  2. pp. 68-90
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  1. Part II. Bound Cultures/The Creolization of Dixie
  1. 4. "Two Heads Fighting": African Roots, Geechee/Gombo Tales
  2. pp. 93-113
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  1. 5. Creole Self-Fashioning: Joel Chandler Harris's "Other Fellow"
  2. pp. 114-129
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  1. 6. Searching for Spiritual Soil: Milk Bonds and the "Maumer Tongue"
  2. pp. 130-154
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  1. Part III. Shadows of Africans/Gothic Representations
  1. 7. The Spears of the Party of the Merciful: Senegambian Muslims, Scriptural Mercy, and Plantation Slavery
  2. pp. 157-180
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  1. 8. Babo and Bras Coupe: Malign Machinations, Gothic Plots
  2. pp. 181-202
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  1. 9. "Never Once but Like Ripples": On Boomeranging Trumps, Rememory, and the Novel as Medium
  2. pp. 203-230
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  1. Notes
  2. pp. 231-240
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  1. Works Cited
  2. pp. 241-258
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 259-272
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