Darryl Dickson-Carr. The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction.

Darryl Dickson-Carr. The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. 280 pp. $60.00.

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested," wrote Sir Francis Bacon in "Of Studies." As even a cursory examination today of the uneven quality of the numerous texts in the Columbia University Press reference and guide books series reveal, the cogency of Bacon's observation is as prescient as it is pithy. Like The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (OCAAL 1997), Darryl Dickson-Carr's The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction (CGCAAF 2005) is a highly useful reference book rather than a sustained critical study like his African American Satire (2001). Research for this study apparently produced some of the spicier items for CGCAAF. Although the larger reference book sets a more expansive and lavish feast before readers, Dickson-Carr provides more than enough food for thought and reflection in his more specialized generic guide. CGCAAF therefore ranks high among the few books whose rich factual and interpretive information satisfy the intellectual and cultural hunger of general readers, students, and young scholars of contemporary African American fiction. Unlike the distaste of many academic critics for the strong racial essentialism of much pre1970's black art, Dickson-Carr boldly and sympathetically acknowledges that the Black Arts Movement "brought about a sea change in the ... scope and content" of African American literary art. Consequently, it is disappointing that his reference guide is only one of two books on African American literature and authors in the long list of titles in the Columbia series; the other is on Toni Morrison, apparently by a British author. Among other things, this development (or lack of) should remind readers that, in literature as in life in the United States, the death of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights martyrs has not, except perhaps for a few critically successful African American novelists and more than a few commercially successful authors of paraliterature and creators of rap music, produced equality and justice for all citizens in the post-civil rights new social, economic, and cultural order.

Paraliterature is a term that I borrowed in The Contemporary African American Novel (2004) from Samuel Delany to compare the formal, traditional, and critical literary standards of established African American writers to the formulaic, commercial, and practical interests of popular, mass marketed, or self-published vernacular literature by "Post-Soul" writers. Paraliterature thus ranges from African American science/speculative, gay/lesbian, and detective/mystery novels and romances to such black pulp romances and blaxploitation novels as "gangsta lit," "urban lit," "street lit," "ghetto lit," "ghetto fiction," and "hip-hop lit," choice popular post-1970's terms characterizing fiction whose primary audience is black and, in the latter category, predominantly female. (Given that "Sister Novel" and "Girlfriends' book" appear among his terms, it is surprising that Dickson-Carr omits "chick lit.") Dickson-Carr uses "Post-Soul" to describe "the works emerging from the generation of writers that were born during or after the Civil Rights/Black Power eras or who reached personal and artistic maturity from the late 1970s forward" (190). But he is misleading (or himself misled) at best to argue that the satire and experiments with neorealism by "Post-Soul" writers is "virtually synonymous with the new black aesthetic that author Trey Ellis" outlined in 1989 in Callaloo. According to Ellis, the New Black Aesthetic generation of writers reject racial essentialism because they are "cultural mulattoes," that is, "blacks who grew up in white neighborhoods" but "now live in black neighborhoods" and "alienated (junior) intellectuals ... educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures," who have inherited from parents who came of age in the civil rights or black nationalist eras a "postliberated aesthetic" with a "leftist, neo-Nationalist politic."

Although some of the 164 entries on the 257 pages of CGCAAF are more intellectually satisfying than others, especially those on unknown or little known post-civil rights or "Post-Soul" generation fictionists such as Lolita Files, Alexs D. Pate, and April Sinclair, the variety of information on a wide range of new and established African American fiction authors published since 1970 is quite a treat for students and general readers. After stimulating the readers' appetite with a splendid, tantalizing overview of "the key historical and literary events" that inspired or influenced authors included in his guide book, Dickson-Carr provides us with an alphabetized structure, general style, and sympathetic tone of language in a main course that "reviews authors, movements, institutions, and publications that emerged between 1970 and 2000" in a manner that is as accessible as it is digestible (ix). Surprisingly missing, however, are such important facts and events as the following: the fratricidal ideological conflict primarily on the West Coast between the black cultural nationalists of Maulana Karenga's US and the neo-Marxist revolutionary nationalists of Huey Newton's Black Panther Party; the major role of Nathan Hare in founding the first Black Studies program at San Francisco State University/College in 1968 and co-founding the important Black Studies journal The Black Scholar in 1969; the first text in Black Studies published during the era by Abdul Alkalimat/Gerald McWorter and Associates, Introduction to Afro-American Studies (1973); and the major focus on poetry and theatre rather than fiction during the Black Arts Movement as demonstrated by Dudley Randall founding Broadside Press in 1965, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones founding the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem in 1965, and Stephen Henderson publishing Understanding the New Black Poetry in 1973.

Most of the topics, events, and authors, many not included in the OCAAL, are reviewed in a column or two of the double-columned pages of the book. On rare occasions, such as fallaciously identifying John A. Williams's Clifford's Blues (1999) as "a book of travel fiction" and my The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987) as "one of the most complete reviews of the African American novel," Dickson-Carr disappoints specialists in the field. As I state in The Contemporary African American Novel (2004), Clifford's Blues is "an epistolary narrative of a black gay jazz musician who survives imprisonment in Dachau by playing [piano] and leading a band [of prisoners] in a club for Nazi SS officers." And my first major study is much more than a review. As a theoretical and critical interpretive history that approaches "the novel holistically as a socially symbolic act, examining the formal text as a rewriting of the survival strategies, especially the use of the vernacular ... by which black Americans as an ethnic group came to consciousness of themselves and celebrated their quest for personal and social freedom, literacy, and wholeness," The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition has fulfilled Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,'s prediction of becoming "the definitive book in the field." In any event, because of Dickson-Carr's research and scholarship in African American satire and literature, both specialists and general readers will be delighted to find that the quality of the information on emerging writers in CGCAAF that is unavailable in other references books is generally both valuable and reliable. By the quantity of their coverage and the quality of their critical achievements and influence, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, and Alice Walker are identified as the most outstanding fiction writers of the post-1970 period. They receive six pages of coverage each, with at least a page devoted to long lists of scholarship in books and articles on their literary achievements that reveal the problematics of their unprecedented impact on American and African American art and letters, as well as on the tradition of African American fiction. For further research and reflection by readers, the reference guide concludes with a partially annotated, short selected general bibliography that supplements the selected list of scholarship on the work of each author in the main section of the book.

"Critical and scholarly attention to African American authors," Dickson-Carr argues with understandable exaggeration, "has grown in the last three decades to the point that it is now virtually unthinkable for major literary journals specializing in American literature to ignore black authors" (4). Even though many established and emerging black authors are still ignored by major American literature journals, Dickson-Carr's The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction, like the more voluminous The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, achieves with distinction its primary aim of providing a valuable reference book that promotes the knowledge of and respect for African American post-1970's literatures and cultures that they deserve.

Reviewed by

Bernard W. Bell

Pennsylvania State University