Bearing Witness to African American Literature: Validating and Valorizing Its Authority, Authenticity, and Agency

Contents

@ v CONTENTS Preface Every Tongue Got to Confess vii Introduction Memoir: On Becoming an African American Scholar Activist 1 1. Double Consciousness as the Sign of African American Difference 25 I. The African American Jeremiad and Frederick Douglass’s Fourth of July 1852 Speech 25 II. Genealogical Shifts in Du Bois’s Discourse on Double Consciousness as the Sign of African American Difference 41 III. Booker T. and W. E. B.: The Authority, Authenticity, and Agency of African American Double Consciousness 63 2. The Roots and Branches of the African American Literary Tradition 73 I. The African American Literary Tradition 73 II. African American Writers 85 III. The Image of Africa in the Afro-American Novel 111 IV. Jean Toomer’s “Blue Meridian”: The Poet as Prophet of a New Order of Man 126 V. The Legacy of James Baldwin: The Artist as Redemptive Lover and Righteous Witness 137 3. Modern and Contemporary African American Vernacular and Literary Voices 149 I. The Blues Voices in John Edgar Wideman’s Two Cities 149 II. Clarence Major’s Homecoming Voice in Such Was the Season 154 III. Charles Johnson’s Philosophical Fiction: Slave Revolt in the Quest for Unity of Being in Middle Passage 163 IV. Trey Ellis’s Voice of the New Black Aesthetic in Platitudes 169 vi @ Contents 4. Womanist African American Vernacular and Literary Voices 185 I. Ann Petry’s Demythologizing of American Culture and Afro-American Character 185 II. Nails, Snails, and Puppy-Dog Tails: Black Male Stereotypes in the Fiction of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Terry McMillan 195 III. The Liberating Literary and African American Vernacular Voices of Gayl Jones 206 IV. Toni Morrison’s Blues People in a Jazz World 218 V. Beloved: A Womanist Neo–Slave Narrative; or, Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past 227 5. Bearing Witness to the Changing Same: Representations of Black American Identity in American and African American Literature 239 I. Three Vernacular Theories for Teaching African American Literature for the Twenty-First Century 239 II. Mark Twain’s “Nigger” Jim: The Tragic Face behind the Minstrel Mask 260 III. “The Negro” as Metonym, Metaphor, and Marginal Man in William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses 275 IV. William Styron’s Nat Turner: A White Southerner’s Meditation on a Legendary Slave Revolt 283 V. Deconstructing the American Melting Pot and Literary Mainstream: Validating and Valorizing African American Literature in the College Curriculum 292 Works Cited 309 Index 323 ...