Over the course of his brief career, Melvin Dixon (1950-1992)
became an important critical voice for African American scholarship
as well as a widely read chronicler of the African American gay
experience. His novels "Trouble the Water" and "Vanishing Rooms"
still receive considerable attention, as do his collections of
poetry and his major work of criticism, "Ride Out the Wilderness:
Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature."
In "A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader," scholars Justin A. Joyce
and Dwight A. McBride have collected, for the first time in a
single volume, the eight critical essays Dixon published during his
lifetime. The volume divides Dixon's critical output into three
categories--"Writing Black Diaspora Theory," "Writing African
American Cultural Theory," and "Writing African American Literary
Criticism"--and closes with a speech Dixon gave to the queer
writers' conference, OutWrite, in 1992, just months before he
succumbed to an AIDS-related illness.
What emerges from the essays collected here is the voice of a
confident, engaging scholar, who tackles a wide range of literary
and cultural topics. Dixon examines the trickster characters of
Charles W. Chesnutt, the friendship between the Haitian novelist
Jacques Roumain and Langston Hughes, and the aesthetic importance
of black speech in the novels of Gayl Jones. His address to
OutWrite serves as a poignant record of Dixon's knack to wax
elegiac and poetic and to synthesize criticism, activism, and art.
The introduction places Dixon in the contexts of African American
cultural history and gay/lesbian critical discourse.
Justin A. Joyce is a doctoral candidate in the department of
English at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Dwight A. McBride is
Leon Forrest Professor and Chair of African American Studies at
Northwestern University and the author of "Why I Hate Abercrombie
& Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality in America" and
"Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave
Testimony."
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