An examination of how the works of five African-American writers reveal the power of communal bonds
As a reaction against persistent black exclusion
from white American society, the novels of some recent African-American
writers boldly celebrate the heritage of black culture. They acclaim a
people once dispersed by racism and humiliation but now restoring its legacy
of rich community life.
For close examination of this theme, Philip
Page brings together five novelists who are in the forefront of contemporary
fiction--Toni Cade Bambara, Ernest Gaines, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor,
and John Edgar Wideman. As their voices combine for an ongoing dialogue
on the importance of community in the African-American world, they articulate
the problems and the potential for African-American culture and for America
itself.
Page's lucid explications of seventeen
of their works show these authors speaking more thoroughly and more forcefully
than any other contemporary writers on the meaning of community to the
lives of individuals combating forces that alienate them. Their novels
discover that the complex bonds uniting and redeeming the community also
empower individuals. In the achievement of the African-American community
each novelist sees ways to rebuild and reshape America.
Gaining its special force through voicing
national concerns and through never backing away from the truth in the
face of stubborn opposition, the fiction of these five writers contributes
to postmodernist debates on race, the repressed past, and the contemporary
American conscience.
Philip Page is a professor of English at California State University
at San Bernardino. He is the author of Dangerous Freedom: Fusion
and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison's Novels (University Press of Mississippi).
256 pp.