Contemporary African American fiction: new critical essays

are as varied as the ideologies, themes, tropes, and discourses the fiction engages.While each of these discourses holds its own significance for readers and writers alike, the intertextual dialogues that hold especial significance for me are those that attempt to answer the question Sonia Sanchez raises in 1975 in the subtitle of a play: "How do it free us?"The play's full title-Uh Huh, But How Do It Free Us?-asserts a particular stance before the it ever opens, before the first line is uttered.The affirmation-uh huh-acknowledges (if somewhat sarcastically) an unstated position; something has indeed been achieved.The inquiry-but how do it free us?-however, highlights the need for clear connections to be made between general progress or achievement and communal and personal liberation.The essays collected here investigate the ways in which contemporary African American fiction attempts to free us.Sensibly, they acknowledge that this attempt is not a new one.The African American literary tradition, as the emancipatory narratives remind us, has always been about survival and liberation.It has similarly always been about probing, challenging, changing, and redirecting accepted ways of thinking to ensure the wellness and the freedom of its community cohorts.In their acknowledgment of these truths' always, already-ness, the essays thus identify new ways contemporary African American fiction continues the tradition's liberatory inclinations; they interrogate the ways in which antecedent texts and traditions influence contemporary texts to create Da N a a .w i l l i a m s I would argue that Jennifer A. Jordan's essay, "Ideological Tension: Cultural Nationalism and Multiculturalism in the Novels of Ishmael Reed," especially meets Young's call for scholarship that reads literary texts to seek an understanding of the works as they relate to both the author and to the culture out of which they emerge, thereby offering real illumination of the texts.Jordan conducts close readings of Reed's novels to investigate whether Reed's representation of himself as a multiculturalist rather than as a cultural nationalist is one that his fiction supports.Arguing that "a careful examination of Reed's novels from Free-Lance Pallbearers to Japanese by Spring reveals an ongoing cultural nationalism which is consistent with many of the precepts of the Black Arts Movement and which deconstructs the multiculturalism that coexists with it," Jordan points out that even Japanese by Spring, Reed's last novel, "despite a continual attempt to reinforce cultural diversity, returns to a black cultural nationalism which represents African culture as a solution to the trauma inflicted by an increasingly aggressive and global conservatism."To develop her argument, Jordan conducts, first, a thorough review of the varied representations of the black nationalism of the 1960s, citing both primary and secondary texts, and, second, an equally effective examination of the advent and subsequent growth of multiculturalism.She then traces Reed's struggle to balance his nationalist impulses with what she calls his eclectic "intellectual and social inclinations" before highlighting Reed's use of satire and parody in his novels to critique the Black Arts and Black Nationalist movements.After the decline of these movements, Reed shifts his most aggressive critique to global capitalism, which, as Jordan points out, he presents as "the major source of racism," even as his "responses to the problem of the domination of global capitalism vary greatly."Finally, she investigates how effectively or ineffectively Reed's fiction promotes the multiculturalism he claims to espouse.Multiculturalism assumes a broader meaning in Mildred R. Mickle's essay "The Politics of Addiction and Adaptation: Dis/ease Transmission in Octavia E. Butler's Survivor and Fledgling."Here, Mickle highlights how Butler uses alien species and their struggle with humans for dominance to critique humans' relentless quest for power and their obsession with discrimination as a way of asserting superiority.In her examination of these novels, Mickle uses "addiction as a lens for exploring human dis/ease" and argues that "Butler's point in focusing on the addictiveness of racism in Survivor and Fledgling is to stress that if humans continue to engage in racial addiction, they will not progress."In this sense, Butler's novels have liberating possibilities, as they encourage