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America: A Prophecy is a narrative poem consisting of two parts, a 37-line section titled “Preludium” and a longer, 226-line section entitled “A Prophecy.” It is written in long, unrhymed lines that seem to have been inspired in their shape both by the epic meter of Homer and by the iambic pentameter of John Milton, but that conform to neither.

Jean-François Lyotard was an intellectual committed to political action whose life’s work in philosophy emerged slowly. He was a secondary school teacher in French Algeria from 1950 to 1952 before the start of the Algerian war for national liberation, a cause he actively and publicly supported. In 1954, he published his first book, Phenomenology, a work heavily influenced by the philosopher Martin Heidegger. In this book, Lyotard defined the intellectual’s role as that of understanding history in terms made available through phenomenology. Subsequently, his politics became increasingly radical, and he adopted an anti-Soviet form of Marxism. From 1954 to 1964, he was a member of the editorial board of Socialisme ou Barbarisme, a Marxist periodical that was critical of the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. During this time, he also contributed articles to the periodical Pouvoir ouvrier (worker power). His antagonism to authoritarianism led him to join an intellectual movement that in May, 1968, expressed its sympathies with the student and worker riots that shook French life; many of the student organizers of these riots were students of Lyotard, who was working as a lecturer at Nanterre University at that point.

Ridin’ the Moon in Texas , the collection of poems containing “irrepressibly bronze, beautiful and mine,” responds to particular works of art. The artwork to which “irrepressibly bronze” specifically responds is an untitled photograph of a man’s back by acclaimed and controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The poem, occupying four and one-half pages, is not an extended description of the photograph; rather, it is a poem on a topic—black men—inspired by it.

“Tar” is a poem divided into three stanzas, set around the poet’s own experience of the Three Mile Island nuclear-reactor accident. In March, 1979, this accident threw many people around the nation (and especially people in Pennsylvania, where the poet lived and where the reactor is located) into a state of alarm over the danger of a full-scale nuclear meltdown that would have unleashed a cloud of deadly radioactive gases over a wide area.

X/Self is a book-length work divided into five parts, which are further divided into individual, closely connected poems. The thematic and stylistic connection among these shorter poems is so strong that the work is best thought of as a single, unified poem. As such, it is also the final third of a larger sequence that Edward Brathwaite began with the publication of Mother Poem (1977), continued in Sun Poem (1982), and concluded in X/Self.

A daughter, in characteristic teenage fashion, is wary of her mother and yet wants her acceptance. The distance that grows between them is portrayed several times in intensely lyrical images. For example, after her breasts develop, she says, "Between my mother and me now were the tears I had cried, and I gathered up some stones and banked them in so that they formed a small pond" of thick black liquid in which only invertebrates can live. She and her mother now watch each other cautiously, making sure to shower each other with artificial words of love.

Clarence Pickett, a young boy in “Clarence and the Dead.” At the age of three, he begins to pass on advice from dead residents of the town to living ones, usually concerning people and details the young boy could have no way of knowing.

“Political Poem” is a fairly short poem of twenty-eight lines, divided into three stanzas, written in free verse. Despite the title, it is no more political than most of Amiri Baraka’s poems; rather, it is a poem about the politics in American poetry.

Return to My Native Land is an extended lyric meditation (1,055 lines in the original French). Aimé Césaire wrote the first version in the late 1930’s, having completed his studies in France, upon his return to his native Martinique (revised versions appeared in 1947 and 1956). Although the general mode of the poem is lyric, it mixes modes frequently. It has some epic qualities, especially evidenced by the narrator who, as an epic hero should, is trying to embody in himself the best qualities of his race. Further, about half the poem is written in prose.

Lucy Gayheart, a music student in Chicago. She is a bright, willful, and talented young pianist, the darling of her home-town of Haverford, Nebraska. She is particularly prized by her father, Jacob Gayheart, and the heir to the local bank, Howard Gordon. While studying music under her mentor, Paul Auerbach, Lucy attends a recital by Clement Sebastian, a concert singer. Later, while working with Clement, Lucy falls in love with him, as both a man and an artist. Pleased and surprised to learn that he shares her feelings, although he has a wife in England, she lies to Howard Gordon that she and Sebastian have been lovers. In late spring, Sebastian leaves for a tour of Europe, and Lucy is devastated in September to hear that he has died in a boating accident. She returns to Haverford depressed, amid much curiosity and gossip, but tells no one her tale. Barely tolerated by her older sister, Pauline Gayheart, she is completely scorned by Howard Gordon, who has married another woman. After an argument with Pauline in the middle of winter, she walks down to an old ice-skating area, unaware that while she was away in Chicago, the riverbed shifted and that the area is no longer safe for skating. The ice breaks, she falls in, her feet get caught on a log, and she drowns.

Although each of his books of poetry earned him critical acclaim and an ever-larger audience of readers, few could have foreseen Seamus Heaney’s growth from a skillful bard of provincial Irish life to a Nobel laureate who deservingly commands the attention of the world. The fourth Irishman—after William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and Samuel Beckett—to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Heaney is a man whose subtle facility with the art of poetry has led him to make politically important aesthetic judgments.

Cooter and his brother Loftis break into the apartment of Elnora Bailey, an old black woman whose apartment is down their own hall. The woman has not been seen for a while, and although these two young men are not criminals by habit, they believe she will be an easy mark.

John Lloyd Stephens, an American lawyer, diplomat, explorer, and travel writer. After practicing law for several years, the adventurous Stephens has traveled for two years in Africa, Europe, and Asia and written two well-received books on his travels. He comes across a report by Colonel Juan Galindo that mentions seeing some strange old buildings in the wilds of the Yucatán and Central America. He decides to find these ruins. He enlists his friend, Frederick Catherwood, as the expedition's artist. Equipped with an unexpected appointment as President Martin Van Buren's confidential agent to the Central American Confederation, this versatile and adaptable man sets out to find the Indian ruins. After landing in a country in the midst of civil war, then coping with treacherous terrain and a troublesome muleteer who deliberately misguides them, he and Catherwood at last find the ruins of Copan, an ancient Mayan city of worship, now overgrown with centuries of vegetation. Although beset by mosquitoes and hot weather, Stephens sets about the task of clearing idols and monuments, and Catherwood draws them. Later, he and Catherwood set out on a long trek across Central America to the ruins at Palenque. Despite bouts with malaria, mosquitoes, and other parasites, he and Catherwood manage to explore these ruins, as well as another set at Uxmal. Stephens dies in 1852 of malaria contracted while he is president of the Panama Railway Company, never having returned to the ruins he uncovered at Copan. His work there was largely forgotten until the 1940's.

Annie Victoria John, a smart, sensitive young black girl growing up in Antigua, in the British West Indies. Annie identifies with her mother and has a hard time separating herself, but she is a bright, imaginative, high-spirited girl who has a hard time following her mother's instructions and orders. She leaves home at the age of seventeen.

Rufus Scott, a jazz drummer. Handsome, talented, and black, Rufus is the pivotal character in the novel, although he commits suicide at the end of the first chapter. He meets his girlfriend, Leona, a white woman from the South, while playing a gig. Their unstable relationship is torn apart by racial and other tensions between them. He beats her until his friend, Vivaldo Moore, intercedes. Rufus' ensuing depression results in his suicide: He walks out onto the George Washington Bridge and jumps. Rufus' struggle initiates the questions the novel explores, concerning the pain of sexual and racial identity.

David,anAmericanlivinginFrance.Davidisinhismid-to late twenties, and he is a selfish and self-deceiving man. The story is told through his recollections on the eve of the morning that Giovanni is to be executed for murder. As a boy, David had a mutually fulfilling sexual encounter with another boy, Joey, but felt ashamed and left early the next morning. He ignored Joey the rest of the summer. As a penniless young man living in Paris, he becomes involved with a woman, Hella Lincoln. He also becomes involved in another homosexual relationship, this time with Giovanni, an Italian bartender. David ends this relationship as cruelly as he did his first homosexual encounter, and he becomes engaged to Hella in an effort to deny his true sexuality. All of David's actions ultimately become ruled by his homosexual desire or his desire to escape his homosexuality.

Eva Medina Canada, a deeply disturbed forty-three-year-old black woman who is incarcerated in an insane asylum after having murdered and sexually mutilated her lover, Davis Carter. The novel traces her response to the repeated requests of the asylum psychiatrists and her roommate, Elvira Moody, to explain why she committed this grisly act. Eva herself is not so much sincerely trying to understand this murder as she is browsing through memories that come back to her, some repeatedly and some with distortions, but most of which focus on her sexual history. As a girl, she learns to keep quiet after some very early encounters with sexuality, and the silence she maintains on these occasions recurs throughout her life when she is faced with problems. For example, when the police question her, as a teenager, about stabbing Moses Tripp, she lets Moses talk but says nothing herself. After being judged insane for the murder of Davis Carter, she is locked up with Elvira Moody, also a murderer. The novel ends with Eva acquiescing, after much resistance, to Elvira's desire to make love to her but with little reason to believe that Eva's memories will ever coalesce into understanding of her actions on her part.

Let the Dead Bury Their Dead is a series of loosely related short stories all set in Tims Creek, North Carolina, the fictional predominantly black rural town Randall Kenan first explored in his novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989). Besides being linked by a setting, the characters in these stories are also linked by a vague search for meaning, particularly in spiritual beliefs and, not infrequently, in sexual desire. Because many of these characters have lived lives that have forced them to suppress any personal search for spiritual or sexual understanding or fulfillment, they are often surprised to the point of near total disorientation when they find themselves forced to attain some new level of understanding in either realm.

American writer. Joel Chandler Harris was the illegitimate son of an Irish laborer who deserted his family shortly after Harris was born; however, Harris spent a rather ordinary boyhood in rural Georgia. He was not very interested in school and seems to have preferred playing pranks to studying. At the age of fourteen, Harris was given a job as a printer’s devil by Addison Turner, an eccentric planter who published a rural weekly newspaper, The Countryman, on his nearby plantation. It is impossible to overestimate Turner’s influence on young Harris, for in addition to allowing him to contribute pieces to the paper, Turner also encouraged him to read extensively in his private library and to roam around his thousand-acre plantation. It was here that Harris first heard the black folk narratives that were later to become the heart of the Uncle Remus stories. After working for Turner for four years, Harris held brief jobs at several newspapers around the South. In 1873 he married Esther LaRose and soon settled in Atlanta, where he lived until his death in 1908.

James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) created a stir even before the book was published. By 1962, Baldwin had delayed for three years writing an article on Africa that The New Yorker, perhaps the most influential popular literary magazine in the United States, had commissioned. Baldwin received an advance from the magazine and did in fact travel to Africa, but he never finished the series of articles that he had promised. He did, however, finish an article suggested by Norman Podhoretz, then the new editor of Commentary, called “Down at the Cross,” based on Baldwin’s meeting with Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Black Muslims.

Sam Lucas, a handsome, one-armed confidence man. Sam's usual con is to repent his gambling ways at revival meetings, then support himself for a while on the church community's generosity toward him as a reformed sinner. When he arrives in Harlem, Mattie Johnson, an attractive young black woman, is swept away in her enthusiasm at his example, and she joins the church and falls in love with him. They marry, and Sam moves in with her and her Aunt Mandy, but the marriage begins to dissolve as Sam stops going to church and Mattie devotes increasing energy to it. Eventually, Sam moves in with Emma May, an usher at the theater where Sam takes tickets, but he moves back with Mattie when he becomes sick. On his deathbed, Sam lies, telling Mattie that he hears music and sees a bright light, so that she will believe that his soul has been saved.

In writing Mules and Men, Hurston not only found a way to make a crucial bridge between her anthropological and literary ambitions but also created a lasting treasure of stories that captured the authentic voices of southern black storytellers in the late 1920’s. The book is divided into two parts. The first part details her collecting of folklore in Florida, the second part in New Orleans. The order in which the tales are related is ostensibly random, simply the order in which people told them to her, but as her biographer Robert Hemenway points out, and as inspection of the text reveals, the clusters of the stories are, to some extent, thematic.

Although Charlotte Lottie Forten Grimké was a teacher as well as a minor essayist, poet, and translator, it was her personal journal, which she started keeping at the age of sixteen, that proved to be her most lasting contribution to African American letters. She began her journal in May, 1854, beginning with a preface that explains her intention to use this journal to chart her own intellectual growth. The first dated entry, from May 24, is typical of her early diary in that it begins with her expressing disapproval that by awakening at 5:00 a.m., she let the sun rise several hours before she did; this, she declares, is an advantage she will not let the sun have over her again any time soon. She goes on to note that she has just begun reading Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) and is certain that she will enjoy it. Her first entry, like many of the entries to follow, reveals her absolute drive that she must work incessantly to improve herself. Growing up at a time when slavery was still an active institution in southern states, and when inferiority of African Americans was assumed by many white Americans, including many of Charlotte’s fellow Northerners living in and around Philadelphia and Salem, Charlotte was driven not only by the need to develop her own talents and abilities but also by the need to prove, through her example, the talents and abilities of black Americans.

Kwame Anthony Appiah (also known as Anthony Appiah and K. Anthony Appiah) was born in London, England, to Enid Margaret Appiah, an English art historian and writer, and Joe Emmanuel Appiah, a lawyer, diplomat, and politician from Ghana. He grew up principally in Kumasi, Ghana. In his preface to In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992), Appiah describes growing up in his father’s world—filled with barrister wigs and dark suits—and in that of the palace royalty of the Ashanti people (to which he was closely related on his father’s side) without experiencing any sense that they were separate worlds or that they were radically different from the world of his mother’s family in England. When Appiah was eight years old and hospitalized for an illness, he was visited by both Queen Elizabeth and President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana on the same day. This acceptance of differences without the identification of contradictions would inform his adult writing, which is often animated by the recognition of the diversity of cultural inheritances.