African American Women Writers

Set in Brooklyn during the Depression and World War II, this is the story of a Selina Boyce, the daughter of Barbadian immigrants. She is caught between the struggles of her hard-working, ambitious mother, who wants to "buy house" and educate her daughters, and her father, who longs to return to the land in Barbados. Selina seeks to define her own identity and values as she struggles to surmount the racism and poverty that surround her.

In 1949, Sonny-Rett Payne, a black jazz pianist, fled New York for Paris to escape both his family's disapproval of his art and the racism that shadowed his career. His spectacular success in Europe and his subsequent death there form the dramatic background of Paule Marshall's fifth novel, a moving and revelatory story of jazz, family conflict, and the artist's struggles in society.

Avey Johnson, a black, middle-aged, middle class widow has put the Harlem of her childhood behind her. Suddenly leaving a Caribbean cruise ship in the middle of the night, she finds unexpected and beautiful adventure that links culture and history.

Woven through these four diverse and fascinating short novels is a theme that unifies them despite sharp differences of character and background. In each a man moving toward the later reaches of life experiences a climatic confrontation. In each a woman is involved as both a creative and a destructive force. In each a man is reaching out desperately to grasp at his life before it is gone. None succeeds, but the moment involves is presented with such vividness and dramatic force that it reveals and illumines depths of human experience.

Traces the traditions of Black American literature and examines the novels of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.

Moira Ferguson argues that Marshall's work collectively constitutes a multigenerational saga of the African diaspora across centuries and continents. In creating a space for her characters' interrupted lives and those of their elders and ancestors, Ferguson argues, Marshall trains a spotlight on slavery's wake and engages her fiction in the service of healing deep global wounds.

The first study of Paule Marshall's work to focus explicitly on her contribution to feminism. It is also the first to identify one of her original contributions to narrative art-a technique of "superimposition" or "double exposure" through which her books have explored topics now at the heart of feminist debate. Centered around the subject of voice and silence, these issues include the interrelation between women's power and powerlessness, the interpenetration of the political and economic world with the world of the psyche, and the mechanisms through which oppressions on the basis of race, class, and gender operate as mutually shaping forces.