Abstract
What has hitherto been little more than a regional division of anglophone fiction, partly modified by the trope of the “stepmother tongue”, clearly assumes new dimensions with the above heading. Unlike Asia, Africa, or the South Pacific, Afro-America does not exist as a geographical entity on any map; and as to its possible status as a region of the mind, the burden of proof still rests with the critic. Furthermore, the inclusion of Afro-American fiction under any heading and its classification with Caribbean writing are not self-evident procedures. Black American writing is not conventionally regarded as post-colonial literature, and is even remoter from the British Commonwealth. Either Africa or “mainstream” America itself might seem logically closer entities with which to link it — they do, after all, provide the constituent elements for the label itself — and some justification of the present policy is therefore required.
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Further Reading
The major theoretical models are those discussed above: Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) and
Houston Baker’s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984). A good overview of Black fiction is
Bernard W. Bell’s The Afro-American Novel and its Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). A more general idea of Black literature (with only editorial headnotes) can be obtained from the second and enlarged edition of
Richard Long and Eugenia Collier’s Afro-American Writing. An Anthology of Prose and Poetry (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).
The Dictionary of Literary Biography series includes Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955 (vol. 33, 1984), edited by Thadious M. Davies and Trudier Harris, and
Afro-American Writers, 1940–1955 (vol. 76, 1988), edited by Harris alone.
Black Women Writers, 1950–1980, edited by Mari Evans (London: Pluto, 1985) has both interviews and critical evaluations. A recent more specialised study is
Eva Lennox Birch’s Black American Women’s Writing (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994).
John O’Brien’s Interviews with Black Writers (New York: Liveright, 1973), although slightly dated, features 17 African American writers, including Ellison, Gaines, Reed and a very young Alice Walker.
The great linguistic authority in this context is J. L. Dillard, all of whose work, but particularly Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States (New York: Random House, 1972), is most helpful.
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© 1998 John Skinner
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Skinner, J. (1998). Afro-America. In: The Stepmother Tongue. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26898-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26898-6_5
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