Angelyn Mitchell

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Voices Within the Circle: A Historical Overview of African American Literary Criticism 1

I. The Harlem Renaissance

The New Negro / Alain Locke 21

The Negro in American Literature / William Stanley Braithwaite 32

The Gift of Laughter / Jessie Fauset 45

The Negro-Art Hokum / George S. Schuyler 51

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain / Langston Hughes 55

Criteria of Negro Art / W.E.B. DuBois 60

Our Literary Audience / Sterling A. Brown 69

Characteristics of Negro Expression / Zora Neale Hurston 79

II. Humanistic/Ethical Criticism and the Protest Tradition

Blueprint for Negro Writing / Richard Wright 97

American Negro Literature / J. Saunders Redding 107

What White Publishers Won't Print / Zora Neale Hurston 117

New Poets / Margaret Walker 122

Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity / Ralph Ellison 134

Everybody's Protest Novel / James Baldwin 149

Integration and Race Literature / Arthur P. Davis 156

III. The Black Arts Movement

The Myth of a "Negro Literature" / LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) 165

Ethnic Impact in American Literature: Reflections on a Course / George E. Kent 172

The Black Arts Movement / Larry Neal 184

Towards a Black Aesthetic / Hoyt W. Fuller 199

Cultural Strangulation: Black Literature and the White Aesthetic / Addison Gayle, Jr. 207

Toward a Definition: Black Poetry of the Sixties (After LeRoi Jones) / Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) 213

Tripping with Black Writing / Sarah Webster Fabio 224

IV. Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and the African-American Critic

Preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext / Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 245

I Rose and Found My Voice: Narration, Authentication, and Authored Control in Four Slave Narratives / Robert B. Stepto 256

Generational Shifts and the Recent Criticism of Afro-American Literature / Houston A. Baker, Jr. 282

Literary Production: A Silence in Afro-American Critical Practice / W. Lawrence Hogue 329

The Race for Theory / Barbara Christian 348

Appropriate Gestures: Theory and Afro-American Literary Criticism / Michael Awkward 360

Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature / Toni Morrison 368

V. Gender, Theory, and African-American Feminist Criticism

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens / Alice walker 401

Toward a Black Feminist Criticism / Barbara Smith 410

New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism / Deborah E. McDowell 428

"The Darkened Eye Restored": Notes Toward a Literary History of Black Women / Mary Helen Washington 442

Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book / Hortense J. Spillers 454

Gender and Afro-Americanist Literary Theory and Criticism / Valerie Smith 482

But What Do We Think We're Doing Anyway: The State of Black Feminist Criticism(s) or My Version of a Little Bit of History / Barbara Christian 499

Some Implications for Related Reading 523

Acknowledgment of Copyrights 526

About the Critics 528

Index of Selected Names 531