Remembering the past in contemporary African American fiction

James E. Smethurst, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

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DOI: 10.2307/25095283

Abstract

In his useful new survey of African American fiction written since 1980, Keith Byerman points out that for several decades before the 1980s, relatively few black writers attempted to write “historical” novels in which the characters engaged large (and small) social and political events of the past with any specificity. Yet in the last decades of the twentieth century, what might be considered the high point of postmodern art, and certainly of postmodern theorizing, black authors wrote many novels dealing with slavery, Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, the world wars, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, black power, and the era of deindustrialization and urban decline.