The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History

Contents

Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Chapter One Introduction: Approaching African American Life, History, Literature, and Criticism Polycentrically 1 Chapter Two History, the White/Black Binary, and the Construction of the African American as Other 13 Chapter Three The White/Black Binary and the African American Sociopolitical Mission of Racial Uplift 35 Chapter Four Finding Freedom in Sameness: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man 67 Chapter Five Disrupting the White/Black Binary: William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer 93 Chapter Six Exposing Limiting, Racialized Heterological Critical Sites: An Existential Reading of Charles Wright’s The Messenger 119 Chapter Seven The Blue Idiom Lifestyle, Counter-Hegemony, and Clarence Major’s Dirty Bird Blues 147 Chapter Eight Naming the Subaltern: The Swinging Life and Nathan Heard’s Howard Street 171 Chapter Nine Identity Politics, Sexual Fluidity, and James Earl Hardy’s B-Boy Blues 199 Chapter Ten Voodoo, A Different African American Experience, and Don Belton’s Almost Midnight 225 Chapter Eleven Conclusion 253 Notes 257 Works Cited 273 Index 283 ...