Legba's crossing : narratology in the African Atlantic / Heather Russell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Russell, Heather, 1970-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African diaspora in literature.

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

Caribbean literature (English)--Black authors--History and criticism.

Caribbean literature (English).

Discourse analysis, Narrative.

Narration (Rhetoric).

Race in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (217 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Athens : University of Georgia Press, c2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In Haiti, Papa Legba is the spirit whose permission must be sought to communicate with the spirit world. He stands at and for the crossroads of language, interpretation, and form and is considered to be like the voice of a god. This book examines how writers from the United States and the anglophone Caribbean challenge conventional Western narratives through innovative use, disruption, and reconfiguration of form. It analyzes the work of James Weldon Johnson, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, Earl Lovelace, and John Edgar Wideman in light of the West African aesthetic principle of ashe, a quality ascribed to art that transcends the prescribed boundaries of form. Ashe is linked to the characteristics of improvisation and flexibility that are central to jazz and other art forms. The author argues that African Atlantic writers self-consciously and self-reflexively manipulate dominant forms that prescribe a certain trajectory of, for example, enlightenment, civilization, or progress. She connects this seemingly postmodern meta-analysis to much older West African philosophy and its African Atlantic iterations, which she calls "the Legba Principle."

Contents:

Race, citizenship, and form : James Weldon Johnson's The autobiography of an ex-colored man

The poetics of biomythography : the work of Audre Lorde

Race, nation, and the imagination : Michelle Cliff's No telephone to heaven

Jazz imaginings of the nation-state : Earl Lovelace's Salt

Dis-ease, de-formity, and diaspora : John Edgar Wideman's The cattle killing.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781282553439

1282553437

9780820336107

0820336106

OCLC:

593302984

Publisher Number:

heb40071 hdl