I New York! At first I was bewildered by your beauty, Those huge, long-legged, golden girls. So shy, at first, before your blue metallic eyes and icy smile, So shy. And full of despair at the end of skyscraper streets… Read More ›
African Literature
Analysis of Wole Soyinka’s Telephone Conversation
Paradoxically apologetic and bitingly sarcastic, Soyinka’s Telephone Conversation is a 35-line poem dealing with bigotry and the absurdity of racist hierarchies. Written in free verse, the poem portrays an African’s attempt to rent an apartment in London. Describing a conversation with… Read More ›
Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby
Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, changes location from the geographical boundaries of the United States to the larger context of the Caribbean and Europe. In part, the novel is the story of two families, the Streets and the Childs,… Read More ›
Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Sula
Sula (1974) is Toni Morrison’s second published novel. Like The Bluest Eye, the novel is a story of two girls coming of age. As children, the two girls in question, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, function as two halves of… Read More ›
Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon
Like Morrison’s first two novels, The Bluest Eye and Sula, Song of Solomon (1977) is a coming of age story. Unlike her first two novels, Song of Solomon centrally is the saga of a young man. In fact, Song of… Read More ›
Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Jazz
Jazz (1992) is the second of a trilogy of Morrison’s novels reflecting on the idea of love and its manifestations. The idea for the novel originated with a James Van Der Zee photograph of a dead teenaged woman who, knowing… Read More ›
Analysis of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
The Bluest Eye (1970) is Toni Morrison’s first published novel. The novel takes place in the 1940s in the industrial northeast of Lorian, Ohio, and tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young African-American woman who is marginalized by her… Read More ›
African Literary Theory and Criticism
African literary theory and criticism has emerged out of a discourse of nationalism/continentalism constituted in a political and cultural act of resistance. Ironically the components of African nationalist ideology are often derived from the colonial-imperial discourse against which this nationalism… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place
Described on the cover as “a novel in seven stories,” The Women of Brewster Place chronicles the lives of seven black women as they struggle to survive in a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood. Most of the women have arrived at the… Read More ›
Analysis of V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River
A Bend in the River is V. S. Naipaul’s (17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018) masterwork of displacement and dispossession, a summary statement from a distinguished writing career documenting what John Updike has called “one of the contemporary world’s… Read More ›
Harlem Renaissance
Between 1919 and 1934 African-American artists flocked to New York City, specifically to Harlem. This era was to become one of the most prolific periods of African-American writing. What Alain Locke called in 1925 a “New Negro Movement” was later… Read More ›
An Introduction to the Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts movement was a controversial literary faction that emerged in the mid-1960s as the artistic and aesthetic arm of the Black Power movement, a militant political operation that rejected the integrationist purposes and practices of the Civil Rights… Read More ›
Analysis of Alice Walker’s Stories
The heroism of black women in the face of turmoil of all kinds rings from both volumes of Alice Walker’s (born February 9, 1944) short stories like the refrain of a protest song. In Love and Trouble reveals the extremes… Read More ›
Analysis of Nadine Gordimer’s Stories
Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 – 13 July 2014) is a distinguished novelist and short-story writer. About Selected Stories, drawn from her earlier volumes of stories, a reviewer said that the stories “are marked by the courage of moral vision… Read More ›
Analysis of Amiri Baraka’s Plays
Working with forms ranging from the morality play to avant-garde expressionism, Amiri Baraka (October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014) throughout his career sought to create dramatic rituals expressing the intensity of the physical and psychological violence that dominates his… Read More ›
Analysis of Buchi Emecheta’s Novels
Buchi Emecheta’s (21 July 1944 – 25 January 2017) novels deal principally with the life experiences of Nigerian women, who are subordinated in an indigenous society deeply influenced by the Western values introduced by British colonists. Other Nigerian women, those… Read More ›
Analysis of Wole Soyinka’s Novels
Like other novelists in Africa during the years just before and after independence, Wole Soyinka faced the question of ethnic and cultural identity. The now notorious negritude movement, begun in the 1930’s, had attempted to promote a pan-African identity by… Read More ›
Analysis of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Novels
Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s (born 5 January 1938) fiction, like that of many contemporary African novelists, is highly political: It portrays the traumatic transition from colonized culture to an independent African society. His novels illustrate with unmatched clarity the problems created by… Read More ›
Analysis of J. M. Coetzee’s Novels
Although contemporary South Africa is seldom mentioned or referred to explicitly in most of J. M. Coetzee’s (born 9 February 1940) novels, the land and the concerns of that country permeate his works. One may see this indirect approach as… Read More ›
Analysis of Nadine Gordimer’s Novels
Until 1991, when the last of South Africa’s apartheid laws was repealed, to be personally liberated and to be South African was to be doomed to a continuing struggle between the desire for further freedom and development for oneself and… Read More ›