The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

   PDF

2. Modern, Modernist, Afro-Modernist: Melvin B. Tolson in the 1930s and 1940s

   • Kathy Lou Schultz

   Pages 1-35

3. A Poem for the Futurafrique: Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia

   • Kathy Lou Schultz

   Pages 37-63

4. “In the Modern Vein”: Tolson’s Harlem Gallery

   • Kathy Lou Schultz

   Pages 65-89

5. Bound By Law—Langston Hughes in/and the 1950s

   • Kathy Lou Schultz

   Pages 91-118

6. Toward An Afro-Modernist Future: Langston’s Hughes’s ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ

   • Kathy Lou Schultz

   Pages 119-149

7. Amiri Baraka’s Wise Why’s Y’s: Lineages of the Afro-Modernist Epic

   • Kathy Lou Schultz

   Pages 151-188

8. Back Matter

   Pages 189-236

   PDF

Analyzing the poets Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Amiri Baraka, this study charts the Afro-Modernist epic. Within the context of Classical epic traditions, early 20th-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa, Schultz reveals diasporic consciousness in the representation of African American identities.

• America
• epic
• history of literature
• poem

“Kathy Lou Schultz’s The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka is a useful contribution to scholarship on the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, with an extended chapter concluding the study on Amiri Baraka.” (A Year's Work in English Studies, 2015)

"In a revelatory remapping of the African American literary tradition, Kathy Lou Schultz tracks the emergence of 'Afro-modernist' poetics among a lineage of writers whose work defies the limitations of our habitual compartmentalization of history into discrete periods such as the 'Harlem Renaissance' or the 'Black Arts Movement.' If the book first of all delivers a compelling and much-needed case for Tolson's importance, it also offers new insights into the long-form experiments of Hughes and Baraka, finding in the black adoption of the epic form an impatience with cramp and constriction; an impulse for constellation and montage; an aspiration towards a diasporic poetry that would combine the unpredictability of music with the authority of the archive." - Brent Hayes Edwards, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA and author of The Practice of Diaspora

"A major contribution to African American literary studies and to the larger field of American Poetry. This will be one of those discourse-changing books." - Aldon Lynn Nielsen, The George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature, The Pennsylvania State University, USA

'A major contribution to African American literary studies and to the larger field of American poetry. This will be one of those discourse-changing books.' - Aldon Nielsen, George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature, The Pennsylvania State University, USA

Kathy Lou Schultz is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Memphis, USA where she directs the Honors Program.

Policies and ethics