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Argues that African American literature must take into account the rich diversity of African American life and culture.
In this wide-ranging analysis, W. Lawrence Hogue argues that African American life and history is more diverse than even African American critics generally acknowledge. Focusing on literary representations of African American males in particular, Hogue examines works by James Weldon Johnson, William Melvin Kelley, Charles Wright, Nathan Heard, Clarence Major, James Earl Hardy, and Don Belton to see how they portray middle-class, Christian, subaltern, voodoo, urban, jazz/blues, postmodern, and gay African American cultures. Hogue shows that this polycentric perspective can move beyond a "racial uplift" approach to African American literature and history and help paint a clearer picture of the rich diversity of African American life and culture.
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Approaching African American Life, History, Literature, and Criticism Polycentrically
2. History, the White/Black Binary, and the Construction of the African American as Other
3. The White/Black Binary and the African American Sociopolitical Mission of Racial Uplift
4. Finding Freedom in Sameness: James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
5. Disrupting the White/Black Binary: William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer
6. Exposing Limiting, Racialized Heterological Critical Sites: An Existential Reading of Charles Wright's The Messenger
7. The Blue Idiom Lifestyle, Counter-Hegemony, and Clarence Major's Dirty Bird Blues
8. Naming the Subaltern: The Swinging Life and Nathan Heard's Howard Street
9. Identity Politics, Sexual Fluidity, and James Earl Hardy's B-Boy Blues
10. Voodoo, A Different African American Experience, and Don Belton's Almost Midnight
11. Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index