| Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African
American Experienceedited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
~
Legendary scholar-activist W.E.B. Du Bois labored to
complete an "Encyclopedia Africana" before his death in
1963. Just over 35 years later, two Harvard educators, Henry
Louis Gates Jr. and Ghanaian-born Kwame Anthony Appiah, have
brought Du Bois's intellectual dream to life in "Africana,"
the most complete and comprehensive record of the
Pan-African diaspora compiled into one volume. Assembling
over 2 million words and 3,500 entries from more than 220
contributors, Appiah and Gates sought, as they put it, to
"give a sense of the wide diversity of peoples, cultures,
and traditions that we know about Africa in historical
times, a feel for the environment in which that history was
lived, and a broad outline of the contributions of people of
African descent, especially in the Americas, but, more
generally, around the world." A splendidly packaged
reference work that will adorn libraries and homes for years
to come, "Africana" defines the black experience in the same
sweeping way that the "Encyclopedia Britannica" defined
Euro-American civilization. More important for young
readers, the magnificent collection shows that Africans and
the continent's descendants are a truly global people who
have made tremendous contributions to human civilization. |
| Those Bones Are Not My
Childby Toni Cade Bambara
~
On a Friday night in July 1979, the first victim in what
would come to be called the Atlanta Child Murders
disappeared. Over the course of two years, more than 40
African American children would die--abused, mutilated,
strangled--before an arrest in 1981 apparently settled the
issue. Wayne Williams, a black man, was accused, tried, and
convicted of the murders, and the good citizens of Atlanta
breathed easy again, assured that the crimes had not been
racially motivated after all, and that the criminal was
behind bars. Or was he? In Toni Cade Bambara's posthumously
published novel, "Those Bones Are Not My Child," Marzala
Rawls Spencer is an African American mother of three,
managing--just--to raise her family, hold down three jobs,
and attend night school. When her 12-year-old son, Sundiata,
doesn't return from a camping trip, Zala finds herself
plunged into the nightmarish possibility that he has become
the latest victim in the series of murders rocking the "City
Too Busy to Hate." As she and her estranged husband, Spence,
frantically attempt to discover what has happened to their
child, the book takes them through the complicated morass of
politics, race relations, and class that bedevil
Atlanta--and perhaps obstruct the search for the true
killer.
|
| Cheaters
by Eric Jerome Dickey
~
After a brief detour to New York City for "Milk in My
Coffee," Eric Jerome Dickey returns to Southern California
for his fourth multitrack African American love story. The
main story is a "he said, she said" affair between Stephan
Mitchell, a well-to-do young software designer who's
determined not to let any one woman get in the way of his
good time, and Chante Marie Ellis, who's decided to start
turning the tables on men who try to play her for a
fool. From now on, she declares, "A dog gets what a dog gets
... dogged." As always, Dickey shows that he's on top of the
current scene, peppering his characters' lives with the
latest in black fashion and culture (if you ever find
yourself driving in the Los Angeles area, you'll know
exactly what your radio presets should be). Although the
ending might be a little too neatly wrapped up, you'll never
know before you get there whether the next chapter's going
to contain romance, comedy, heartache--or maybe a little of
each. Dickey's at the top of his form in "Cheaters,"
establishing yet another credential for his status as a
master of the contemporary urban romance. More Eric Jerome Dickey |
 Juneteenth
by Ralph Ellison |
Juneteenth -- PAPERBACK (June 2000)
by Ralph Ellison
~~ "Invisible Man," which Ralph Ellison published in 1952, was
one of the great debuts in contemporary literature, but his
follow-up seemed truly bedeviled--not only by its monumental
predecessor, but by fate itself. First, a large section of
the novel went up in flames when the author's house burned
in 1967. Then he spent decades reconstructing, revising, and
expanding his initial vision. When Ellison died in 1994, he
left behind some 2,000 pages of manuscript. Yet this
mythical mountain of prose was clearly unfinished, far too
sketchy and disjointed to publish. Apparently Ellison's
second novel would never appear. Or would it? Ellison's
literary executor, John Callahan, has now quarried a
smaller, more coherent work from all that raw material. Gone
are the epic proportions that Ellison so clearly envisioned.
Instead, "Juneteenth" revolves around just two characters:
Adam Sunraider, a white, race-baiting New England senator,
and Alonzo "Daddy" Hickman, a black Baptist minister who
turns out to have a paradoxical (and paternal) relationship
to his opposite number. As the book opens, Sunraider is
delivering a typically bigoted peroration on the Senate
floor when he's peppered by an assassin's bullets. Mortally
wounded, he summons the elderly Hickman to his bedside.
There the two commence a journey into their shared past,
which (unlike the rest of 1950s America) represents a true
model of racial integration. ~
Other Works by Ralph Ellison |
| I Call Myself an
Artistby Charles Johnson and others; edited by
Rudolph P. Byrd
~
As a literary and intellectual heir to Ralph Ellison and
Richard Wright, Charles Johnson articulates in his work the
struggles of Africa Americans' lives without denying its
fundamental Americanness. This book, compiled by Emory
University Professor Rudolph P. Byrd, contains 25 years'
worth of Johnson's essays, poetry, cartoons, reviews, novel
excerpts, interviews, and critiques. In the autobiographical
essay that titles the book, Johnson cites the influences of
Sartre, Malraux, and Melville in his attempt to forge a
"genuinely black American fiction." In other works, Johnson
investigates the worldwide image of black people, takes on
Spike Lee and Dinesh D'Souza, and illuminates Martin Luther
King's faded dream. Other writers--including Stanley Crouch,
Vera Kutzinski, and Ashraf H.A. Rushdy--examine the richness
and depth of Johnson's fictional characters and their
cultural and human adversities. "As a symbol and agent of
the process of communication, of communion," Byrd writes,
"Johnson is a writer of our age whose message will deliver
him, whole and engaging, to readers whose interests are as
varied and whose questions are as urgent as his own." |
|
| Mosquito
by Gayl Jones
~
Depending on your tolerance for digression, Gayl Jones's
"Mosquito" will either be hugely entertaining or absolutely
crazy-making. The heroine and narrator of this hefty tome is
Sojourner Jane Nadine Johnson--Mosquito, to her friends--an
African American truck driver with a mind as flighty as the
insect she's named for. You know what you're up against from
the very first paragraph, in which Mosquito expounds on
Texas border towns, tanning products, cacti, a teacup shaped
like a cactus, the town of Brownsville, and the Kiowa word
for Brownsville (which she can't remember). What raises this
novel above the merely picaresque is Jones's sophisticated
political sensibility: as Mosquito makes her physical
journey across the Southwest, she embarks on a cultural
odyssey as well, examining the struggles of all the "second
class peoples" to find a place for themselves in America. |
| Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of
the Twenty-First Centuryby Randall Kenan
~
Randall Kenan's delicious and diverse sampler of African
American life, culled from over 200 interviews, shows that
the American idea of "blackness" is as vast as the United
States itself and cannot be pinned down to simplistic
sociological cliches. "More than a book of analysis," Kenan
writes, "this is my book of soul searching. I am asking who
we are." Crisscrossing North America, he visits some
familiar settings--Oakland, New Orleans, and New York--and
some unusual places (including Bangor, Maine, and Maidstone,
Saskatchewan) to discover how everyday black folks deal with
issues of race, identity, and nationality. From a black
minister in Mormon Utah to a female judge in skinhead
country to the state of blacks in the would-be utopia of
Seattle, "Walking on Water" paints a revealing portrait of a
people whose presence and perseverance may forge a better
America. |
| Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA
Season by David Shields
~
A word of explanation: Technically speaking, "Black Planet"
is a chronicle of the Seattle SuperSonics during the
1994-1995 season. Since the team blew its shot at the
playoffs, there's no chance for an uplifting grand
finale. Yet David Shields had a different sort of hoop dream
in mind from the very beginning. "The NBA," he writes, "is a
place where, without ever acknowledging it--and because it's
never acknowledged, it's that much more potent and
telling--white fans and black players enact and quietly
explode virtually every racial issue and tension in the
culture at large. Race, the league's taboo topic, is the
league's true subject." It's the author's true subject, too,
and he goes at it from every angle--attending games,
recording call-in radio shows, and making some abortive
attempts to cozy up to the players. If Shields were simply
slapping society on the wrist for its half-submerged racism,
"Black Planet" would wear out its welcome in the first
quarter. But he's consistently hardest on himself, so the
book becomes not only a social critique but a critique of
social critiques, cutting the ground from under itself in an
infinite and entertaining loop-the-loop. Shields may not be
the first writer to transform a fan's notes into literary
gold--Frederick Exley beat him to the punch--but he's the
most rigorously intelligent one in a long, long time. Swish! |
| Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the
Underground Railroad by Jacqueline L. Tobin and
Raymond G. Dobard
~
When quiltmaker Ozella McDaniels told Jacqueline Tobin of
the Underground Railroad Quilt Code, it sparked Tobin to
place the tale within the history of the Underground
Railroad. "Hidden in Plain View" documents Tobin and Raymond
Dobard's journey of discovery, linking Ozella's stories to
other forms of hidden communication from history books,
codes, and songs. Each quilt, which could be laid out to air
without arousing suspicion, gave slaves directions for their
escape. Ozella tells Tobin how quilt patterns like the wagon
wheel, log cabin, and shoofly signaled slaves how and when
to prepare for their journey. Stitching and knots created
maps, showing slaves the way to safety. The authors
construct history around Ozella's story, finding evidence in
cultural artifacts such as slave narratives, folk songs,
spirituals, documented slave codes, and children's'
stories. Tobin and Dobard write that "from the time of
slavery until today, secrecy was one way the black community
could protect itself. If the white man didn't know what was
going on, he couldn't seek reprisals." "Hidden in Plain
View" is a multilayered and unique piece of scholarship,
oral history, and cultural exploration that reveals slaves
as deliberate agents in their own quest for freedom even as
it shows that history can sometimes be found where you least
expect it. |
| Kinship: A Family's Journey in Africa and
Americaby Philippe E. Wamba
~
With his bicultural heritage, journalist Philippe
Wamba--born of an African American mother and Congolese father and reared in California, Boston, Tanzania, and the
Congo--offers an evenhanded and encyclopedic examination of the facts and fictions that have grown on both sides of the
Atlantic. "My Blackness has been the bridge that has linked my two identities," he writes, "the commonality that my
split selves share." In the exceptional "Kinship," Wamba recounts the long history of the African image among black
Americans, from the 18th-century Senegal-born slave poet Phyllis Wheatley to Marcus Garvey, the fiery back-to-Africa
"race man" of the early 1900s. Across the water, Wamba tells how Africans waited for Afro-Americans to liberate them from
colonialism, and how their leaders, such as Haile Selassie, Kwame Nkrumah, and Patrice Lumumba, interacted with their
transatlantic brethren. Wamba also recalls how he was treated as a foreigner in Tanzania, the ambivalence his
mother received from his paternal relatives, and the idealism that U.S. blacks have of the continent, which at
times has led to uncritical support of corrupt dictators like the former Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko (who once
imprisoned Wamba's activist father). As he relates how Michael Jackson sneaks Swahili words in his songs while
African kids incorporate hip-hop slang into their vocabulary, Wamba lays out the past perils and, ultimately,
the future promise of transcontinental black unity. "I have discovered that African Americans and Africans are
culturally distinct," he says. "But through the evidence of history and my own personal experience, I have learned that
Africans and Black Americans can move beyond their real and perceived differences to celebrate and build on what they
share." |
| Other Titles Worth
Considering:
|
|
The
Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
|
|
The
Night Before Christmas Has Come and Gone...Now What?