Reading Africa into American Literature : Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales

by Cartwright, Keith

• ISBN13: 9780813122205
• ISBN10: 0813122201
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-12-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Kentucky

Summary

The literature often considered the most American is rooted not only in European and Western culture but also in African and American Creole cultures. Keith Cartwright places the literary texts of such noted authors as George Washington Cable, W.E.B. DuBois, Alex Haley, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Joel Chandler Harris, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, and many others in the context of the history, spiritual traditions, folklore, music, linguistics, and politics out of which they were written.

Cartwright grounds his study of American writings in texts from the Senegambian/Old Mali region of Africa. Reading epics, fables, and gothic tales from the crossroads of this region and the American South, he reveals that America's foundational African presence, along with a complex set of reactions to it, is an integral but unacknowledged source of the national culture, identity, and literature.

Author Biography

Keith Cartwright, assistant professor of English at Roanoke College in Roanoke. Virginia, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal. He is the author of a number of articles about Afro-Creole literature and two books of poetry

Table of Contents

Introduction. Tropical Tress: Towards a Hippikat Poetics	1	(24)
Part I. Epic Impulses/Narratives of Ancestry
Imperial Mother Wit, Gumbo Erotics: From Sunjata to The Souls of Black Folk	25	(23)
Of Root Figures and Buggy Jiving: Toomer, Hurston, and Ellison	48	(20)
Myth-making, Mother-child-ness, and Epic Renamings: Malcolm X, Kunta Kinte, and Milkman Dead	68	(25)
Part II. Bound Cultures/The Creolization of Dixie
``Two Heads Fighting'': African Roots, Geechee/Gombo Tales	93	(21)
Creole Self-Fashioning: Joel Chandler Harris's ``Other Fellow''	114	(16)
Searching for Spiritual Soil: Milk Bonds and the ``Maumer Tongue''	130	(27)
Part III. Shadows of Africans/Gothic Representations
The Spears of the Party of the Merciful: Senegambian Muslims, Scriptural Mercy, and Plantation Slavery	157	(24)
Babo and Bras Coupe: Malign Machinations, Gothic Plots	181	(22)
``Never Once but Like Ripples'': On Boomeranging Trumps, Rememory, and the Novel as Medium	203	(28)
Notes	231	(10)
Works Cited	241	(18)
Index	259