A Literary Criticism of Five Generations of African American Writing: The Artistry of Memory

Ten of the seventeen essays published here--all pioneering and inspirational--have never appeared as part of any hardback. They are written for all literates of the African American experience, along with those who care to study cultured texts with appreciation, ranging from the talented college sophomore to the post-doctoral scholar. Especially the Preface and the concluding introspection on the College Language Association have never appeared in print before. Nearly every other essay has been substantially revised for the temper and the times. Original titles have been rewritten to fit a new design. Intitially there is the autobiographical memory of slavery, then the fictive reinvention of slave memory. Subsequently, a historical remembrance of the Harlem Renaissance prepares for a reflection of a literary generation situated between world wars. By 1945 the world had passed from a modern faith in power of the human will to reconcile tensions between civilzation and barbarism, to a post-modern atheism. A disingenuous strategy was to make the scholarly word a literary god unto itself. Rarely did African American thinkers flirt with such Nietschean self-deification. During the previous four hundred years--and across sixteen generations--a miraculous survival of black folk signified to them that there must be a God somewhere. Today we find ourselves at the turn of a new millennium in which the critical imperatives of the ancestors must be remembered.