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

This book examines the works of African American writers and intellectuals which defined the community through historical, economic, and social changes in the United States.

Initially 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 the power of the human will to reconcile tensions between civilization 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.

Rather, the last generation of African American critics actually lived to see a practical revolution in Civil Rights and a desegregation of the major research universities in the American South. Today African Americans find themselves at the turn of a new millennium in which the critical imperatives of the ancestors must be remembered.