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Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance comprehensively explores
the contours and content of the Black Chicago Renaissance, a
creative movement that emerged from the crucible of rigid
segregation in Chicago's "Black Belt" from the 1930s through the
1960s. Heavily influenced by the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago
Renaissance of white writers, its participants were invested in
political activism and social change as much as literature, art,
and aesthetics. The revolutionary writing of this era produced some
of the first great accolades for African American literature and
set up much of the important writing that came to fruition in the
Black Arts Movement. The volume covers a vast collection of
subjects, including many important writers such as Richard Wright,
Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry as well as cultural
products such as black newspapers, music, and theater. The book
includes individual entries by experts on each subject; a
discography and filmography that highlight important writers,
musicians, films, and cultural presentations; and an introduction
that relates the Harlem Renaissance, the White Chicago Renaissance,
the Black Chicago Renaissance, and the Black Arts Movement.
Contributors are Robert Butler, Robert H. Cataliotti, Maryemma
Graham, James C. Hall, James L. Hill, Michael Hill, Lovalerie King,
Lawrence Jackson, Angelene Jamison-Hall, Keith Leonard, Lisbeth
Lipari, Bill V. Mullen, Patrick Naick, William R. Nash, Charlene
Regester, Kimberly Ruffin, Elizabeth Schultz, Joyce Hope Scott,
James Smethurst, Kimberly M. Stanley, Kathryn Waddell Takara,
Steven C. Tracy, Zoe Trodd, Alan Wald, Jamal Eric Watson, Donyel
Hobbs Williams, Stephen Caldwell Wright, and Richard Yarborough.
Ralph Ellison has been a controversial figure, both lionized and
vilified, since he seemed to burst onto the national literary scene
in 1952 with the publication of Invisible Man. In this volume
Steven C. Tracy has gathered a broad range of critics who look not
only at Ellison's seminal novel but also at the fiction and
nonfiction work that both preceded and followed it, focusing on
important historical and cultural influences that help
contextualize Ellison's thematic concerns and artistic aesthetic.
These essays, all previously unpublished, explore how Ellison's
various apprenticeships--in politics as a Black radical; in music
as an admirer and practitioner of European, American, and
African-American music; and in literature as heir to his realist,
naturalist, and modernist forebears--affected his mature literary
productions, including his own careful molding of his literary
reputation. They present us with a man negotiating the difficult
sociopolitical, intellectual, and artistic terrain facing African
Americans as America was increasingly forced to confront its own
failures with regard to the promise of the American dream to its
diverse populations. These wide-ranging historical essays, along
with a brief biography and an illustrated chronology, provide a
concise yet authoritative discussion of a twentieth-century
American writer whose continued presence on the stage of American
and world literature and culture is now assured.
Exploring the deep and enduring relationship between music and
literature, Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American
Literature examines the diverse ways in which African American
“hot” music influenced American culture—particularly
literature—in early twentieth century America. Steven C. Tracy
provides a history of the fusion of African and European elements
that formed African American “hot” music, and considers how terms
like ragtime, jazz, and blues developed their own particular
meanings for American music and society. He draws from the fields
of literature, literary criticism, cultural anthropology, American
studies, and folklore to demonstrate how blues as a musical and
poetic form has been a critical influence on American literature.
 Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American
Literature begins by highlighting instances in which American
writers, including Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, and Gertrude
Stein, use African American culture and music in their work, and
then characterizes the social context of the Jazz Age, discussing
how African American music reflected the wild abandon of the time.
Tracy focuses on how a variety of schools of early twentieth
century writers, from modernists to members of the Harlem
Renaissance to dramatists and more, used their connections with
“hot” music to give their own work meaning.  Tracy’s
extensive and detailed understanding of how African American
“hot” music operates has produced a fresh and original
perspective on its influence on mainstream American literature and
culture. An experienced blues musician himself, Tracy draws on his
performance background to offer an added dimension to his analysis.
Where another blues scholar might only analyze blues language,
Tracy shows how the language is actually performed. Â Hot
Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature is the
first book to offer such a refreshingly broad interdisciplinary
vision of the influence of African American “hot” music on
American literature. It is an essential addition to the library of
serious scholars of American and African American literature and
culture and blues aficionados alike.
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