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

by Keith Cartwright

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813189949
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	12/14/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	504 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Keith Cartwright, assistant professor of English at Roanoke College in Roanoke, Virginia, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

No matter how obvious the political demand to acknowledge the unacknowledged is, we need the research, the scholarly guidance, and the close, comparative readings that Cartwright offers in order to make acknowledgement more than a half-informed political gesture, to make it fully appreciative.

Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies - Zoltan Abadi-Nagy

Cartwright's purpose is simple-to show the importance of African culture in United States literature, and he succeeds in fulfilling the essential goal. In so doing, his insights are often surprising and almost invariably interesting.

College Literature

"Cartwright's purpose is simple-to show the importance of African culture in United States literature, and he succeeds in fulfilling the essential goal. In so doing, his insights are often surprising and almost invariably interesting." — College Literature

"No matter how obvious the political demand to acknowledge the unacknowledged is, we need the research, the scholarly guidance, and the close, comparative readings that Cartwright offers in order to make acknowledgement more than a half-informed political gesture, to make it fully appreciative." — Zoltan Abadi-Nagy, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies

From the Publisher