Black Orpheus : music in African American fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison

The legendary Greek figure Orpheus was said to have possessed magical powers capable of moving all living and inanimate things through the sound of his lyre and voice. Over time, the Orphic theme has come to indicate the power of music to unsettle, subvert, and ultimately bring down oppressive realities in order to liberate the soul and expand human life without limits. The liberating effect of music has been a particularly important theme in twentieth-century African American literature.

The nine original essays in Black Orpheus examines the Orphic theme in the fiction of such African American writers as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Nathaniel Mackey, Sherley Anne Williams, Ann Petry, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. The authors discussed in this volume depict music as a mystical, shamanistic, and spiritual power that can miraculously transform the realities of the soul and of the world. Here, the musician uses his or her music as a weapon to shield and protect his or her spirituality. Written by scholars of English, music, women's studies, American studies, cultural theory, and black and Africana studies, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection ultimately explore the thematic, linguistic structural presence of music in twentieth-century African American fiction.

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"Black Orpheus" refers to the use of music in African American culture to plumb the depths of one's soul, to find psychological wholeness in a fragmentary existence. Simawe (Grinnell College) has gathered essays that provide ample evidence of Orpheus at work in the fiction and poetry of 20th-century African American writers. Focusing largely on jazz and blues in the writing of Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, et al., the essays are uniformly well written and illuminating. Others have explored this theme--for instance, Houston Baker in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (CH, Sep'85) and Craig Hansen Werner in Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse (CH, Oct'95). But Simawe has infused this collection with a new slant by including essays that focus on French feminist analysis, the female body in blues writing, and gender construction. The second half of the book concerns Morrison, Walker, Ntozake Shange, and Gayl Jones almost exclusively. A welcome addition to the scholarship, particularly for those studying or teaching the texts and authors discussed. J. Tharp; University of Wisconsin Colleges

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Series Editor's Foreword	p. xi
Introduction: The Agency of Sound in African American Fiction	p. xix
1. Singing the Unsayable: Theorizing Music in Dessa Rose	p. 1
2. Claude McKay: Music, Sexuality, and Literary Cosmopolitanism	p. 41
3. Black Moves, White Ways, Every Body's Blues: Orphic Power in Langston Hughes's The Ways of White Folks	p. 65
4. Black and Blue: The Female Body of Blues Writing in Jean Toomer, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones	p. 91
5. That Old Black Magic? Gender and Music in Ann Petry's Fiction	p. 119
6. "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing": Jazz's Many Uses for Toni Morrison	p. 153
7. Shange and Her Three Sisters "Sing a Liberation Song": Variations on the Orphic Theme	p. 181
8. Nathaniel Mackey's Unit Structures	p. 205
9. Shamans of Song: Music and the Politics of Culture in Alice Walker's Early Fiction	p. 231
Contributors	p. 269
Index of Names	p. 273

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