"Masters of the Drum," comprising eight essays and two interviews, examines both celebrated and insufficiently explored Caribbean, African, and African-American lit/orature that asserts the interface between the scribal and the spoken/gestural in Black word art. This triple play--engagement with the three principal regions of the Black world--reflects the author's interest in Black comparative studies, wherein the expressions and emphases of the Black Atlantic tradition (Africa and its diasporas) are deeply exposed and revealingly juxtaposed. The book's apparent eclecticism is intended to help flex the boundaries of Black literary and cultural studies in response to the dangers of a narrow construction of the newly canonical and of an overly particularist critical stance.

Fox offers a clear and important, if brief, consideration of the fiction of Baraka, Reed, and Delany. He renders an especially important service by establishing the relationship among three fictionists whose work has been substantially neglected. . . . Readers will find this volume useful as a starting point for the investigation of recent Afro-American fiction and as an example of the application of poststructuralist criticism to Afro-American fiction. Choice This book is a provocative and enlightening study of the fiction of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Ishmael Reed and Samuel R. Delany, three black American writers who are among the most gifted literary artists of the past twenty-five years. These authors, who emerged in the tumultuous period of the 1960s, when the complacencies of the previous decade were being challenged throughout the country, are examined here within the context of Afro-American literature.