Black on black : twentieth-century African American writing about Africa / John Cullen Gruesser.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Cover; Half-title; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Preface; 1. Historical and Theoretical Introduction to African American Writing about Africa; The Origins, Evolution, and Influence of ethiopianism; Discourse and Genre Tensions in African American Depictions of Africa; 2. Double-Consciousness, Ethiopianism, and Africa; The ""Warring Ideals"" of Africa and America in the Novels of Sutton C. Griggs; Pauline flopkins's Excavation of a Usable African Past in Of One Blood; John E. Bruce's Ethiopianist Investigation of Anglo-Saxon Race Prejudice in The Black Sleuth.

3. The New Negro and AfricaShirley Graham's Forging of Dramatic Links between African and African American Art and Experience in Tom-Tom; Harry Dean and the Dream of an Ethiopian Empire; from Life to Literature in The Big Sea; Saving a ""White"" Woman (and Liberia, Too) in Henry r. Downing's The American Cavalryman; Exporting Manifest Destiny and Economic Prosperity to Africa in Gilbert Lubin's The Promised Land; Realism, Melodrama, and Allegory in George S. Schuyler's Slaves Today; 4. The African American Literary Response to the Ethiopian Crisis; The Italo-Cthiopian War and Black America.

Langston Hughes and Melvin Tolson's Shift from a Racial to a Marxian Approach to the Ethiopian ConflictGeorge Schuyler's Strongest Attacks on Race Chauvinism in the Black empire Novels; Pan-African Resistance to fascism in George Schuyler's ""Revolt in Ethiopia""; 5. The Promise of Africa-To-Be in Melvin Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia; 6. The Movement Away from Ethiopianism in African American Writing about Africa; Attempting to Escape Prepossessions in Black Power; Lorraine Hansberry's Answer to Heart of Darkness in Les Blancs; The End of Ethiopianism in The Color Purple.

NotesWorks Cited; Index.

Black on Black provides the first comprehensive analysis of the modern African American literary response to Africa, from W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk to Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Combining cutting-edge theory, extensive historical and archival research, and close readings of individual texts, Gruesser reveals the diversity of the African American response to Countee Cullen's question, ""What is Africa to Me?""John Gruesser uses the concept of Ethiopianism--the biblically inspired belief that black Americans would someday lead Africans and people of the diaspora to a brig.

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