Both Zora Neale Hurston’s literary and anthropological work was centered on various sites of diaspora within the broader Black community. Though much of her work is focused on African-American communities in the South, Hurston also traveled to Central America and the Caribbean, writing on Black communities in the Bahamas, Honduras, Jamaica, and Haiti. In doing so, Hurston explored areas of cultural continuity, overlap, and difference which emerged among Black populations scattered throughout the New World as a result of chattel slavery. Her research, which often focused on oral testimonies, traditions, folklore, and religious/spiritual practices, helped solidify Black diasporic history and culture as something to be documented, studied, and overall remembered. The various linkages offered by her findings helped articulate the way that Black people across the diaspora remain connected through shared ancestry.
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was an educator, author, and orator who founded historically Black Tuskegee University. Washington argued that Black progress could most effectively be secured through education and entrepreneurship, rather than through directly challenging the Jim Crow segregation. Though Northern Black activists and scholars like WEB DuBois would disagree with Washington, Zora, a fellow Southerner, was an avid supporter of his and was deeply inspired by his values.
Charles S. Johnson (1893-1956) was a sociologist and college administrator who served as the first black president of historically Black Fisk University. He was the founder of Opportunity magazine, which published some of Zora's early works. Zora would eventually become one of the winners of Opportunity's literary contest. Johnson would later encourage Zora to move to New York City, which led her to settle in Harlem, where she would connect with several notable figures of the Harlem Renaissance.
Gloria Naylor (1950-2016) was an American novelist whose works centered on portrayals of Afro-Diasporic womanhood, folklore, and spirituality. Naylor achieved national eminence and critical praise when her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, appeared in 1982. In this novel as in her later works, Naylor explores the association between sexism and racism and suggests that through communal bonds individuals can survive these forces. Naylor, like many African American feminists, uses multiple voices to depict the strength of the represented communities. - Gale
"It was in my college years that I began to learn about [black women] writers like Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. . . . [H]aving those role models around helped me when I began to feel that I could be a writer." - Naylor, for Callaloo Literary Journal
The Women of Brewster Place
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The National Book Award-winning novel-and contemporary classic-that launched the brilliant career of Gloria Naylor " A shrewd and lyrical portrayal of many of the realities of black life . . .Miss Naylor bravely risks sentimentality and melodrama to write her compassion and outrage large, and she pulls it off triumphantly." -The New York Times Book Review In her heralded first novel, Gloria Naylor weaves together the stories of seven women living in Brewster Place, a bleak-inner city sanctuary, creating a powerful, moving portrait of the strengths, struggles, and hopes of black women in America. Vulnerable and resilient, openhanded and openhearted, these women forge their lives in a place that in turn threatens and protects-a common prison and a shared home. Naylor renders both loving and painful human experiences with simple eloquence and uncommon intuition. Adapted into a 1989 ABC miniseries starring Oprah Winfrey,The Women of Brewster Placeis a touching and unforgettable read.
Mama Day
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For better readers, a love story set in a black community off the Atlantic coast of Georgia.
Edwidge Danticat (1969-) is a Haitian novelist whose works primarily contend with themes of Haitian national idenitity, Black Haitian women and their interpersonal relationships, and the politics surrounding diaspora. A Barnard graduate (CO 1990; BA, French Literature), Danticat is currently the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. - Columbia University
Krik? Krak!
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Krik? Krak!, originally released in 1996 following the publication of Edwidge Danticat's extraordinary Breath, Eyes, Memory (abacus, 1996) confirms her as a remarkably gifted writer. Examining the lives of ordinary Haitians, particularly those struggling to survive under the brutal Duvalier regime, Danticat illuminates the distance between people's desires and the stifling reality of their lives. These short stories inform and enrich one another, as the female characters reveal a common ancestry and ties to the fictional Ville Rose.
The Farming of Bones
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It is 1937 and Amabelle Désir, a young Haitian woman living in the Dominican Republic, has built herself a life as the servant and companion of the wife of a wealthy colonel. She and Sebastien, a cane worker, are deeply in love and plan to marry. But Amabelle's world collapses when a wave of genocidal violence, driven by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, leads to the slaughter of Haitian workers. Amabelle and Sebastien are separated, and she desperately flees the tide of violence for a Haiti she barely remembers. Already acknowledged as a classic, this harrowing story of love and survival--from one of the most important voices of her generation--is an unforgettable memorial to the victims of the Parsley Massacre and a testimony to the power of human memory.
Create Dangerously
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An eloquent and moving personal account of art and exile from award-winning writer Edwidge Danticat "Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them."--Create Dangerously In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist from a country in crisis. Inspired by Albert Camus' lecture, "Create Dangerously," and combining memoir and essay, Danticat tells the stories of artists, including herself, who create despite, or because of, the horrors that drove them from their homelands and that continue to haunt them. Danticat eulogizes an aunt who guarded her family's homestead in the Haitian countryside, a cousin who died of AIDS while living in Miami as an undocumented alien, and a renowned Haitian radio journalist whose political assassination shocked the world. Danticat writes about the Haitian novelists she first read as a girl at the Brooklyn Public Library, a woman mutilated in a machete attack who became a public witness against torture, and the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and other artists of Haitian descent. Danticat also suggests that the aftermaths of natural disasters in Haiti and the United States reveal that the countries are not as different as many Americans might like to believe. Create Dangerously is an eloquent and moving expression of Danticat's belief that immigrant artists are obliged to bear witness when their countries of origin are suffering from violence, oppression, poverty, and tragedy.
Randall Kenan (1963-2020) was an author and professor best known for his novel A Visitation of Spirits and his collection of stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and The Fire This Time. His novels maintained recurring themes of magic realism, as well as the realities queer black life in the southern United States, namely his home state of North Carolina. - Gale
The Fire This Time
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James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" was one of the essential books of the sixties, and one of the most galvanizing statements of the American civil rights movement. Now, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with a new generation of Americans confronting what Baldwin called our "racial nightmare," acclaimed writer Randall Kenan asks: How far have we come? Combining elements of memoir and commentary, Kenan's critical eye ranges from his childhood to the present to observe that, while there have been dramatic advances, some old issues have combined with new ones to bedevil us. Published to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of James Baldwin's epochal work, this homage by novelist, essayist, and Baldwin biographer Kenan is itself a piercing consideration of the times, and an impassioned call to transcend them.
A Visitation of Spirits
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Horace Cross, the 16-year-old descendent of slaves and deacons of the church, spends a horror-filled spring night wrestling with the demons and angels of his brief life. Brilliant, popular, and the bright promise of his elders, Horace struggles with the guilt of discovering who he is, a young man attracted to other men and yearning to escape the narrow confines of Tim's Creek. His cousin, the Reverend James Greene, tries to help Horace but finds he is no more prepared than the older generation to save Horace's soul or his life. And as he views the aftermath of Horace's horrible night, he is left with only questions and the passing of generations. In his powerful first novel, Randall Kenan--recipient of the Prix de Rome, the Whiting Award, and other accolades--shows us the effects of a proud family heritage on a generation that must confront a world far removed from anything they are prepared for. Told in a montage of voices and memories, A Visitation of the Spirits shows just how richly populated a family's present is with the spirits of the past and the future.
