Mihai Eminescu | Ce te legeni…

Our humanity has been so little explored and so little made available to us through art that sometimes we doubt it ourselves and live one-dimensional lives because that’s all we imagine can be possible. Literature, if it does nothing else, should stimulate one’s...

If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot (McKay 1997, 984)). The major conflict in my work is when the black male attempts to go beyond the line that is drawn for him. But you’ve also got conflict between young and old, between...

A lot of my books, people say, are all fiction, but Flight to Canada, and some of the rest of them, are based on research. So there’s fact there, too (Reed, in Martin 1983, 2). With myth-bending ingenuity, Reed merges history, fantasy, political reality, and high...

[I]f all the ramifications that the term [race] demands are taken seriously, the bases of Western civilization will require re-thinking. Thus, in spite of its implicit and explicit acknowledgement, “race” is still a virtually unspeakable thing (Morrison 1989, 9). When...

Apart from constituting the physical displacement of Africans from their homelands… [the Middle Passage] effectively transformed the cultures of Europeans and Africans alike, binding them in an uneven, yet symbiotic relationship. In other words, something new was...

The revival of ethnic consciousness as a major expression of the new pluralism and the deep tension created by the divergent process of acculturation (the assimilation of values of a common civil culture) and ethnification (the assertion of difference as a form of...

We must read the texts that black writers inscribed between the lines of America’s master texts (Nielsen 1994, 24). Obviously we will have to learn to read the Afro-American literary tradition in new ways, for continuing in the old way is impossible (Washington 1987,...

For help, patience, and support, I would like to thank several individuals. Their insightful remarks have proved to be signposts of reference on the road to configuring the complex itineraries of my polytropic heroes. I first acknowledge with gratitude the guidance...