Traces the development of the new Black aesthetic criticism, describing the works of writers such as Addison Gayle, Houston Baker, and Amiri Baraka. Points out how, despite many parallels with mainstream White criticism, Black criticism is ignored by the literary establishment. (ARH)

Argues that the exclusion of the literature of women, of black, ethnic, and working-class writers from the established literary canon has less to do with valuations of literary quality than with the social distribution of power. (SRT)

Notes that Black women writers of the 70s were writing about a new woman with a consistently heroic and articulate voice, and suggests that critics, especially feminist critics, should take note. Provides examples of characters from the works of Black women writers. (MKM)

Broadens the space for a discussion of reading based in some degree of theorizing that has already occurred within the community of African-American critics and scholars. Argues that those engaged in reader-oriented approaches to literature need to intervene in the canonical debates and the critical practices of noncanonical literatures through…

The only way English teachers and their students can have an appreciation for literature by black writers is to have appreciation for the writers themselves and for the world, past and present, they occupy. (MM)

Adds to the growing dialogue on diaspora literature in relation to women's writings. Examines Anglophone West African, African-American, and Caribbean women writers for hidden and not so hidden commonalities in their works. (RS)

Argues that the clarity of Ishmael Reed's later novels is part of a complex and innovative style that is "rhetorical" in the broadest sense. Notes that his narrative strategies are constructed primarily on the way the audience will read and even misread the novel. Explores the rhetorical workings in Reed's novel "Reckless…

Recent Afro-American initiation novels stressing the community as the source of life stand in antithesis to novels by Black and White Americans describing a life of isolation, negation, and alienation. (DD)

Discusses two recent novels that employ techniques more familiar to science fiction than to historical fiction to probe questions of history and authenticity. Considers how these novels expose the way that those who attempt to bear witness to the history of slavery are ostracized, pathologized, and even institutionalized. (SG)

Examines Black men's negative responses and White women's positive responses to works by Black women writers. Suggests that by trying to understand how and why the works by Black women writers affect readers, readers can begin to strip away their own ethnocentrism, racism, and sexism. (MM)

Discusses the acute representations of familial and historical relations as depicted in Octavia Butler's novel, "Kindred." Suggests that the novel is best understood as a novel of memory, functioning as a means of reconstructing a sense of place and home. (HB)

Revised version of a paper presented at Conference on Comparative Literature (4th, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, April 16-17, 1970). (Editor/RD)

A paper presented at annual convention of National Council of Teachers of English (Atlanta, November 27, 1970). (Editor/RD)