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Home is a powerful metaphor guiding the literature of African Americans throughout the twentieth century. While scholars have given considerable attention to the Great Migration and the role of the northern city as well as to the place of the South in African American literature, few have given specific notice to the site of "home." And in the twenty years since Houston A. Baker Jr.'s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature appeared, no one has offered a substantial challenge to his reading of the blues matrix. Burnin' Down the House creates new and sophisticated possibilities for a critical engagement with African American literature by presenting both a meaningful critique of the blues matrix and a careful examination of the place of home in five classic novels: Native Son by Richard Wright, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, and Corregidora by Gayl Jones. [Valerie_Sweeney_Prince]_Burnin'_Down_the_House_H_bookos-z1.org_

Some people have asked me how could I want a woman and a man. Some have called me greedy and some have called me confused. But I asked why not have both? Who wouldn't want the best of both worlds? Why should I have to choose? I love being in the arms of a strong man but I also love the feeling of a woman's soft lips on mines. Call me greedy or call me confused I think of it as free spirited. I'm going to take you into my world. Ladies do you know what you can use fruit roll ups or pop rocks for? Men do you know how to reach your woman's G-spot? Get lost in my sexual rendezvous. Experience exactly how I feel when I'm with a man or woman. Come share my erotic fantasies. See what has me gasping for air, clawing my nails into some ones back, and my eyes rolling behind my head. Welcome to Chronicles of a Confirmed Bachelorette: Girl Factor where every page will have you panting, aching, moaning, and quivering for more!

I've gotten used to living behind mirrors and smoke screens, it's easier to portray an image for the world to see. When I m alone I am haunted by my truth. A girl who entered this world in a jail cell. A girl who was served struggle with a side of pain on a broken platter. A girl who was thrown into a tank with sharks deep in a world whose motto is to eat or be eaten. I can still see the dirt underneath my nails; I've fought too hard to get where I am and I don t plan on looking back. However, there s always someone waiting to knock me down because they don t think I deserve it. Well I say to hell with them. I've put in too much to allow anyone to drag me down. So either you re riding with me or against me erica mena - underneath it all _la femme fatale publishing_ paperback

Civil rights advances in the last 25 years have included an awareness that the traditional canon of American literature excluded important minority authors. This study is a strong addition to the growing body of scholarly analysis examining the Afro-American contribution. Proceeding chronologically from William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853) to experimental novels of the 1980s, Bell comments on more than 150 works, with close readings of 41 novelists. His remarks are framed by an inquiry into the distinctive elements of Afro-American fiction. Bell's conclusions may provoke varied discussion, for the book is broadly accessible and will appeal to general readers and undergraduates as well as to literary scholars. [Bernard_W._Bell]_The_Afro-American_Novel_and_Its__bookos-z1.org_

Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle—a string of slaves— Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic “Book of Negroes.” This book, an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own. Aminata’s eventual return to Sierra Leone—passing ships carrying thousands of slaves bound for America—is an engrossing account of an obscure but important chapter in history that saw 1,200 former slaves embark on a harrowing back-to-Africa odyssey. Lawrence Hill is a master at transforming the neglected corners of history into brilliant imaginings, as engaging and revealing as only the best historical fiction can be. A sweeping story that transports the reader from a tribal African village to a plantation in the southern United States, from the teeming Halifax docks to the manor houses of London, The Book of Negroes introduces one of the strongest female characters in recent Canadian fiction, one who cuts a swath through a world hostile to her colour and her sex. [lawrence_hill]_the_book_of_negroes__aka_someone_k_bookos-z1.org_

In 1865, The Christian Recorder, the national newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, serialized The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, a novel written by Mrs. Julia C. Collins, an African American woman living in the small town of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The first novel ever published by a black American woman, it is set in antebellum Louisiana and Connecticut, and focuses on the lives of a beautiful mixed-race mother and daughter whose opportunities for fulfillment through love and marriage are threatened by slavery and caste prejudice. The text shares much with popular nineteenth-century women's fiction, while its dominant themes of interracial romance, hidden African ancestry, and ambiguous racial identity have parallels in the writings of both black and white authors from the period. Begun in the waning months of the Civil War, the novel was near its conclusion when Julia Collins died of tuberculosis in November of 1865. In this first-ever book publication of The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, the editors have composed a hopeful and a tragic ending, reflecting two alternatives Collins almost certainly would have considered for the closing of her unprecedented novel. In their introduction, the editors offer the most complete and current research on the life and community of an author who left few traces in the historical record, and provide extensive discussion of her novel's literary and historical significance. Collins's published essays, which provide intriguing glimpses into the mind of this gifted but overlooked writer, are included in what will prove to be the definitive edition of a major new discovery in African American literature. Its publication contributes immensely to our understanding of black American literature, religion, women's history, community life, and race relations during the era of United States emancipation. [Julia_C._Collins]_The_Curse_of_Caste;_or_The_Slav_bookos-z1.org_

Africanism and Authenticity traces the continuing influence of West African women's traditions and societies on late-twentieth-century literature by African-American women. The first half of the book focuses on how these influences permeate both theme and imagery in novels by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, and Gloria Naylor. The second half focuses on recent neo-slave narratives as works that sprang from the African experience rather than works that merely parallel the original slave narratives. Levin is one of the first writers to discuss Toni Morrison's Paradise and Gloria Naylor's Men of Brewster Place. Amy Levin's study is the first to focus so explicitly on the importance of West African women's traditions in contemporary writing by African-American women. Levin challenges feminist studies of these writings by revealing the extent to which those studies remain Eurocentric, even as they question Afrocentric readings that draw only on African male traditions as if they were the same as women's practices. In addressing these issues, Africanism and Authenticity helps to refine the current discussion of literary authenticity and documents a distinctive tradition that will be helpful to all future studies of African-American women's writing. [AMY_K._LEVIN]_Africanism_and_Authenticity_in_Afri_bookos-z1.org_