Masters of the Drum: Black Lit/oratures Across the Continuum

by Robert E. Fox

Overview

Masters of the Drum, comprising eight essays and two interviews, examines both celebrated and insufficiently explored Caribbean, African, and African-American lit/orature that asserts the interface between the scribal and the spoken/gestural in Black word art. This triple play—engagement with the three principal regions of the Black world—reflects the author's interest in Black comparative studies, wherein the expressions and emphases of the Black Atlantic tradition (Africa and its diasporas) are deeply exposed and revealingly juxtaposed. The book's apparent eclecticism is intended to help flex the boundaries of Black literary and cultural studies in response to the dangers of a narrow construction of the newly canonical and of an overly particularist critical stance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313292965
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/14/1995
Series:	Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies: Contemporary Black Poets , #17
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

ROBERT ELLIOT FOX is Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He has been a visiting scholar at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard and is the recipient of a senior fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the author of Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany (Greenwood, 1987).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Modality, in Continuum
Drumtalk: Black Rhetorics, Black Rhythms, Black Writings
Wayfaring Roots
To Reveal and to Heal: Some Thoughts on African-American Literature and Criticism Since the Sixties
Blacking the Zero: Toward a Semiotics of Neo-Hoodoo
Blue Syntaxophones: The Poetry of Bob Kaufman
Vibration Positive
Derek Walcott: History as Dis-ease
Re/Vision and Resistance in Caribbean Women's Writing
Working Toward the Light: A Conversation with Lorna Goodison
Set Your Minds to Africa
The Untold Stories in Armah's Why Are We So Blest?
Theory and Its Discontents: An African Instance
Occupying Ambiguous Territory: A Conversation with Nuruddin Farah
Index

Editorial Reviews

Taking the drum as the central metaphor, Fox (English, Southern Illinois U.-Carbondale) explores the pan-Atlantic currents of African culture. The seven essays include such topics as African American literature and criticism, neo-hoodoo the poetry of Bob Kaufman, and Caribbean women's writings. Also included are interviews with Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah and Jamaican poet and painter Lorna Goodison. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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