The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History
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Overview
Argues that a racial uplift approach to African-American literature fails to appreciate the rich diversity of African American experience.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.
Author Biography: W. Lawrence Hogue is Professor of English at the University of Houston. He is the author of Race, Modernity, Postmodernity: A Look at the History and the Literatures of People of Color Since the 1960s, also published by SUNY Press, and Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text.
Synopsis
Examining the literary depictions of African American men, Hogue (English, University of Houston) stresses the diversity of the African American experience. Among the texts discussed are Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Kelley's Different Drummer, Wright's Messenger, Major's Dirty Bird Blues, and Belton's Almost Midnight. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR