Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Literature West Meets East

by Hakutani, Yoshinobu

• ISBN13: 9780230113411
• ISBN10: 0230113419
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-04-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Just as American culture is the hybridization of Eastern and Western cultures, so is African American culture. Because the European and African cultural visions that Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and others acquired were buttressed by the universal humanism that is common to all cultures, this ideology was shown to transcend the problems of society.#xA0; Fascinated by Eastern thought and art, Wright, Alice Walker, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel wrote highly accomplished poetry and prose.#xA0; While modernism, especially Western modernism, smacks of elitism, postmodernism, as shown by the later Wright, Walker, and Toni Morrison, is widely concerned not only with the mundane but also with other kinds of knowledge and other cultures, especially Eastern cultures.#xA0; The most influential East-West artistic, cultural, and literary exchange that has taken place in modern and postmodern times was reading and writing of haiku.#xA0; Among others, Wright distinguished himself as a haiku poet by writing over 4,000 haiku in his last eighteen months of his life while in exile in Paris.#xA0; Wright's haiku have made an impact on some of the contemporary American poets, most notably Robert Haas, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel.#xA0; However historically different their ideas and representations may have been, African American modernists and postmodernists have both mediated upon the possibility of multiple worlds for human subjectivity.#xA0; This topic will be of interest to the readers who see African American literature as a cross-cultural movement.

Author Biography

Yoshinobu Hakutani is a Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at Kent State University. His recent books and editions include Haiku and Modernist Poetics; Art, Music and Literature 1897-1992 by Theodore Dreiser; Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Modernism: From Spatial Narrative to Jazz Haiku; Theodore Dreiser and American Culture: New Readings; and Haiku: This Other World by Richard Wright, With Robert L. Tener.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. ix
Summaries of Essays	p. xxi
Essays on Poetry
Richard Wright's Haiku, Zen, and the African ôPrimal Outlook upon Lifeö	p. 3
Richard Wright's Haiku, Japanese Poetics, and Classical Chinese Poetry	p. 23
Wordsworthian Nature Poetry, Ashanti Culture, and Richard Wright's Haiku: This Other World	p. 45
Cross-Cultural Poetics: Sonia Sanchez's Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums	p. 65
Jean Toomer Revisited in James Emanuel's Postmodernist Jazz Haiku	p. 81
Essays on Ideology
The Western and Eastern Thoughts of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man	p. 111
West, East, Africa: Richard Wright's Native Son and Classic Movie Monsters	p. 129
Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo through Confucianism	p. 157
ôA Beautiful Black Butterflyö: Eastern Aesthetics and Postmodernism in Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring	p. 177
ôAll Narratives Are Lies, Man, an Illusionö: Buddhism and Postmodernism Versus Racism in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage and Dreamer	p. 191
Contributors	p. 205
Index	p. 207
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