Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• McCarthy, Jesse

Titel

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay by Cheryl A. Wall (review)

Ist Teil von

• African American Review, 2020-07, Vol.53 (2), p.145-147

Ort / Verlag

Saint Louis: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Cheryl A. Wall's On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay, reminds us that Morrison is not an outlier so much as a consummate example of a self-fashioning essayistic tradition deeply rooted in African American literary history. [...]only two full monographs published a decade apart, Gerald Early's pioneering study, Speech and Power: The African-American Essay and Its Cultural Context (Ecco, 1993), and Cheryl Butler's The Art of the Black Essay: From Meditation to Transcendence (Routledge, 2003), have been devoted to the subject. From Walker's Appeal and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" and Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" in the hands of James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison, gathered in Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider or Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, why do so many landmarks in the African American tradition take the form of essays or collections of them? Ardent demands for freedom, equality and justice are, unsurprisingly, recurrent features of these occasional works in prose; but over time the form gets mobilized for a wide variety of purposes whether it be "channeling the voices of the disenfranchised into the official discourse of democracy," the voices of writers, "foregrounding the pain of their individual alienation," or "to announce and enact the cultural freedom that African Americans achieved even in the face of political oppression" (10).