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African American Literature of the Twenty-First Century and the Black Ar

The Case of John Edgar Wideman
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For nearly 50 years, a trend in African American literary history quarantined the Black Arts era of the 1960s and 1970s, separating it from the brilliantly creative and aesthetically experimental writing that took off in the 1980s. According to that history, the new literature discarded and distanced the anti-aesthetic posture of the Black Arts moment which emphasized racial tension, strident polemics, and romantic solidarity with the Black underclass. Yet according to the author, the six novels that John Edgar Wideman wrote from 1987 to 2017 complicate this reductive characterization of the black arts. They overflow with the criminal element: accused rapists and murderers; victims of unsanctioned lynching and sanctioned executions. As they engage in aesthetic experimentation, they express continuities with a spirit of restless invention and improvisation that derive from an ongoing engagement with African or Black Atlantic cosmology. They thus enable reassessment of the black arts legacy, entering the world on their own terms, producing their own reality, and working through the black arts notion of functional art. They are the result of a magical Black Atlantic craft that brings writing beyond written representation, transforming the novel itself into a functional tool - a charm -- of protection and healing.
Stephen Casmier is associate professor in the department of English at Saint Louis University.
Preface: What Comes Before in Wideman Scholarship Acknowledgements Introduction: Wideman, Contemporary Writers, and the Black Arts Chapter I: Reuben and the Sorcerer Chapter II: Philadelphia Fire and the Art of Bundling the Inchoate Chapter III: The Cattle Killing and the Art of the Slavery Narrative Conjure Chapter IV: Two Cities and the Art of Breaking Writing's "Spell" Chapter V: Fanon and the Art of Spiritualizing Narrative Chapter VI: Writing to Save a Life and the Art of Hagiography as Possessed Text (Texto Montado) Conclusion: A "Very Igbo Understanding" Works Cited Appendix: Interview with John Edgar Wideman, June 2019: Keeping the Language of Fiction Alive
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