The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka [Hardcover]

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.1: Modern, Modernist, Afro-Modernist: Melvin B. Tolson in the 1930s and 40s 2: A Poem for the Futurafrique: Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia 3: 'In the Modern Vein': Tolson's Harlem Gallery 4: Bound By LawLangston Hughes in/and the 1950s 5: Toward An Afro-Modernist Future: Langston's Hughes's ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ 6: Amiri Baraka's Wise Why's Y's: Lineages of the Afro-Modernist Epic

Kathy Lou Schultzs 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 lC¶