[Published or not, and loved or unloved: we persist — June Jordan]
Bibliographer’s Statement
African American studies is an academic field that “combines general intellectual history, academic scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities, and a radical movement for fundamental educational reform” (Alkalimat 1). The sociologist Nathan Hare coordinated the first black studies program and thereafter the department was created in 1968 at San Francisco which gained official status in 1969. Although it burgeoned out of social compulsions and survived, as it were, the hostile institutional climate, African American studies as a programmatic academic inquiry has in recent times unequivocally established within mainstream as well as minority curriculum. With the originary objectives to rediscover, rejuvenate and establish a distinguishable black tradition, the African American department seeks to explore the “structures, moorings, and anchors” (Morrison “Interview” 151) of the black expressive arts such as music, arts and films besides literature, history, sociology from various interdisciplinary perspectives. Skeptics who forecast a premature demise of African American studies—for instance, Shelby Steele at Stanford University observes, “It [African American studies] was a bogus concept from the beginning because it was an idea grounded in politics, not in a particular methodology”—citing its ideological origins and prescriptive nature have been disproved by the explosion of black cultural production and decisive roles of African American departments.
In recent times, African American studies has moved ‘beyond’ the categorical confines of ‘nation’ with a mission to explore the international and transnational linkages among the people of African descent. Clustering the black Atlantic geographical entities on the basis of epistemology and ontology of slavery, this diasporal approach concerns the global black consciousness and further, systematically examines the subterranean “connections between the formation of intellectuals, the development of self-help economic institutions, or the construction of cultural and social groupings, which cut across the African Diaspora,” as Manning Marable puts it. Though Laura Chrisman differentiates black internationalism from black Atlantic studies based on its methods, archives and conclusions, the transnational and international mores of these theoretical prototypes remain intact. Paul Gilory’s “The Black Atlantic,” Brent Hayes Edwards’s “The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism,” Alan Rice’s “Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic,” among others, are paradigmatic texts that uncover hybrid character of the black Atlantica.
Unlike the West, India does not have specialized and dedicated African American departments and therefore, in most instances, it remains a component of general literature. African American literature is invariably part of American literature, Feminist Literature, Ethnic/Minority Literatures, World Literatures where the students are introduced to staple black writers such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Alex Haley, Toni Morrison, and, Alice Walker. Though one can take respite claiming that India is removed from the political and social mores of African Americans, it remains a fact that India hasn’t really caught up with the international African American literary and cultural scene. Despite these limitations, African American literary studies and cultural criticism are steadily gaining significance in the Indian academia. Increasing number of dissertations and themed special issues such as IRWLE are cases in point. Similarly, academic societies such as MELUS-India (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) capture the multicultural America and “take a look at Indian literatures and place them in a global context.”
To conclude, with institutionalization and internationalization of African American studies, there has been a proliferation of books, journals, e-journals, monographs, bibliographies, anthologies and, dissertations making the task of a bibliographer arduous and challenging. Thus, given the breadth and scope of the subject, the following bibliography does not claim to be a comprehensive and exhaustive list but intends to catalogue major articles/books published after 1960s with a special reference to African American literary theory and cultural criticism. With large number of documents and archives available online, this bibliography is supplemented by a webiliography and a list of referred black studies journals.
A Selected Bibliography
Abel, Elizabeth, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen. Eds. Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. U Of California P, 1997.
Adell, Sandra. Double Consciousness/Double Blind: Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Ammons, Elizabeth, and Annette White-Parks. Eds. Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994.
Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford Press, 1991.
Andrews, William L. Ed. African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993.
Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
Andrews, William L., Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. Eds. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
Baker, Houston A. Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972.
Bambara, Toni Cade. Ed. The Black Woman: An Anthology. New York: The New American Library, 1970.
Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.
Boelhower, William. Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Braxton, Joanne. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.
Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877-1915. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.
Callahan, John F. In the African-American Grain: Call-and-Response in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction. CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1990.
Carby, Hazel V. Race Men. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.
---. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. NY: Oxford UP, 1987.
Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990.
Crouch, Stanley and Playthell Benjamin. Reconsidering the Souls of Black Folk: Thoughts on the Groundbreaking Classic Work of W.E.B. Du Bois. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2002.
Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. London: W. H. Allen, 1969.
Davies, Carole Boyce. Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Davis, Charles T., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Slave’s Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, 1995.
Dubey, Madhu. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
duCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Early, Gerald L. This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003.
Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Ervin, Hazel A. The Handbook of African American Literature. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2004.
Foster, Frances Smith. The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives. 2nd. ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
---. Loose Canons. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
---. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
---. Ed. Black Literature and Literary Theory. New York: Methuen, 1984.
Greene, J. Lee. Blacks in Eden: The African American Novel’s First Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Who Set you Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Gunning, Sandra. Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890-1912. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Gay, Geneva, and Willie L. Baber. Eds. Expressively Black: The Cultural Basis of Ethnic Identity. New York: Praeger, 1987.
Gayle, Addison, comp. Black Aesthetic. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.
---. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1975.
Harris, Trudier. From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.
Holton, Sylvia Wallace. Down Home and Uptown: The Representation of Black Speech in American Fiction. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984.
hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981.
---. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984.
---. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Hudson, Theodore R. From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973.
Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Hull, Gloria T. Color, Sex & Poetry: Three Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Jackson, Blyden. Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974.
---. The History of Afro-American Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.
Johnson, Charles Richard. Being & Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Jordan, Casper LeRoy. A Bibliographical Guide to African-American Women Writers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Levine, Robert. Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Lewis, David L. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Knopf, 1981.
McDowell, Deborah E., Ed. The Chan gin Same: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1995.
McDowell, Deborah E., and Arnold Rampersad, Eds. Slavery and the Literary Imagination. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Mishkin, Tracy. Ed. Literary Influence and African-American Writers: Collected Essays. New York: Garland, 1996.
Mitchell, Angelyn. Ed. Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
Montgomery, Maxine Lavon. The Apocalypse in African-American Fiction. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Holloway, Karla F.C. Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women’s Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
Hubbard, Dolan. The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994.
Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford U P, 1971.
Hull, Gloria. Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1987.
Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard U P, 1995.
Painter, Nell. Southern History Across the Color Line. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, April 2002.
Patton, Venetria K. Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: SUNY Press, 1999.
Pryse, Marjorie, and Hortense J. Spillers. Ed. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.
Rice, Alan. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. New York and London: Continuum, 2003.
Schoener, Allon. Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968. New York: Random House, 1969.
Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Sollors, Werner. Neither Black nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. New York: Oxford U P, 1997.
Stepto, Robert. From Behind The Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
Sundquist, Eric. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993.
Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the turn of the Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Thompson, Carlyle V. Eating the Black Body: Miscegenation as Sexual Consumption in African American Literature and Culture. NY: Peter Lang, 2006.
Tischler, Nancy Marie Patterson. Black Masks: Negro Characters in Modern Southern Fiction. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969.
Tracy, Stephen C. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Venkatesan, Sathyaraj and G. Neelakantan. “Toni Morrison’s quarrel with the Civil Rights Ideology in Love.” The International Fiction Review Vol. 34 (2007): 139–146.
Viswanathan, Meera and Evangelina Manickam. “Is Black Woman to White As Female is to Male? Restoring Alice Walker’s Womanist Prose to the Heart of Feminist Literary Criticism.” Indian Journal of American Studies 28 (1998): 15-20.
Wade-Gayles, Gloria. No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Sex in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984.
Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.
Wall, Cheryl. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.
---. Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005.
Wallace, Michelle. “Anger in Isolation: A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood.” Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought. Ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall. New York: The New Press, 1995.
Warren, Kenneth W. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Washington, Mary Helen. Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary Women Writers. New York: Doubleday, 1980.
Washington, Mary H. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960. Garden City: Anchor-Doubleday, 1987.
Werner, Craig H. Black American Women Novelists: An Annotated Bibliography. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1989.
West, Cornel. The Cornel West Reader. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999.
West, Cornel, and Henry Louis, Jr. Gates. The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country. New York: Free Press, 2000.
White, Deborah G. Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W.W. Norton, 1985.
Whitlow, Roger. Black American Literature: A Critical History. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1976.
Williams, Shirley Anne. Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990.
Wormley, Stanton Lawrence, and Lewis H. Fenderson. Many Shades of Black. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1969.
Zabel, Darcy A. The (Underground) Railroad in African American Literature. NY: Peter Lang, 2004.
Zackodnik, Teresa C. The Mulatta and the Politics of Race. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2004.
Selected Scholarly Journals
- African American Review
- Black American Literature Forum
- Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research Black Sociologist
- CLA Journal
- Callaloo: A Black South Journal of Arts and Letters
- First World: An International Journal of Black Thought
- Journal of Black Psychology
- Journal of Black Studies
- Journal of Negro Education
- Journal of Negro History
- MELUS
- Obsidian: Black Literature in Review
- Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture
- Review of Black Political Economy
- Studia Africana: An International Journal of Africana Studies
- Western Journal of Black Studies