Placing James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison side by side, as contemporaries who chose to write novels for the purpose of limning the depths of the American scene, is a critical enterprise that insists as much on a critical leap forward as it does a harkening back. The reasons for this, of course, have a great deal to do with the state of American literary and racial politics in the years following World War II. At that time, with the Civil Rights Movement bringing about calls for racial integration and equal protection under the law for African American citizens, there grew to be a great need for black writers to fulfill the role of articulating what would come to be understood as “the black experience,” by an audience often bewildered by the malevolence of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and the unwavering insistence by Martin Luther King Jr. that justice could only be achieved by peaceful means. How could a people deemed at one time so incapable of eloquence and critical thought suddenly be so persistent in their claims for equality, in their demands that their humanity be fully recognized? Who among them could bring clarity to their motivations?

While the location and duration of the movement popularly known as the Harlem Renaissance remain highly contested, its importance in the development of African American literature - and “modernism ” in general - is more widely accepted today than ever. Central to the movement then known as the “Negro Renaissance ” was the effort of black writers and artists after World War I to re-conceptualize “the Negro ” independent of white myths and stereotypes that had affected African Americans' own relationship to their heritage and each other - independent, too, of Victorian moral values and bourgeois shame about those features of African American life that whites might take to confirm racist beliefs. The struggle with onedimensional mainstream stereotypes was, of course, far from over, and it was hardly new; a central feature of the work of Frances E.W. Harper and Charles Chesnutt in the 1890s, it played a major role in such novelistic “forerunners ” to “renaissance ” fiction as James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man andW. E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece.

For many commentators, some of the most distinctively African American elements that readers encounter in African American novels are reflections of the blues tradition. However, the phrase “blues novel” might seem to some to be so incongruous as to approach the level of oxymoron. After all, the two terms comprise widely different genres stylistically. The novel as we know it today, though it has roots in the XIIth Dynasty Middle Kingdom Egyptian prose fiction and appeared in embryonic form in Boccaccio's Decameron and The Arabian Entertainments, emerged most forcefully in the English literary tradition in the eighteenth century with the work of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne. Novels are traditionally extended written prose narratives with some amount of plot and character development, though the genre has proven very pliable over the years.

Recent work in African American literary studies has attempted to define an “Afro-modernism,” an aesthetic position that participates in the project of modernity while not being subsumed by or subordinated to the “high” modernism of the early twentieth century. While Houston A. Baker has identified this practice as “mastery of form/deformation of mastery,” Richard Powell and others have defined it as a “blues aesthetic,” clearly linking it to the African American vernacular tradition. While these are highly useful constructions, they are not quite adequate to much of modern and contemporary black writing. These theorizations have created a “difference from” high modernism when at least some artists - Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Ralph Ellison are clear examples - have chosen to position themselves within the tradition of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and William Faulkner. At the same time, they have also made use of the vernacular tradition, but this should not be surprising, since many of the “high” modernists themselves, whether in poetry, fiction, or the visual arts, found the vernacular to be an important resource.

The list of early African American fictions is unexpectedly provisional. Presently it includes “The Heroic Slave” (1853) by Frederick Douglass, Clotel, or the President's Daughter (1853) by William Wells Brown, The Garies and Their Friends (1857) by Frank J. Webb, The Bondwoman's Narrative (1857?) by Hannah Crafts, Our Nig or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) by Harriet E. Wilson, Blake, Or the Huts of America (1859-62) by Martin R. Delany, and “The Two Offers” (1859) by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. But the list has been evolving. The full text of Blake was not made available until 1969. Our Nig was not identified as an African American novel until 1982; The Bondwoman's Narrative was not discovered to be an African American fiction until 2001. It has been identified by several kinds of forensic and scholarly tests as a manuscript written by an escaped slave woman. On the authority of its finder, Henry Louis Gates Jr., it is proper to treat that manuscript as authentic, but it is so newly found that it is also proper to retain the possibility that it might prove to be otherwise.

While the location and duration of the movement popularly known as the Harlem Renaissance remain highly contested, its importance in the development of African American literature - and “modernism” in general - is more widely accepted today than ever. Central to the movement then known as the “Negro Renaissance” was the effort of black writers and artists after World War I to re-conceptualize “the Negro” independent of white myths and stereotypes that had affected African Americans' own relationship to their heritage and each other - independent, too, of Victorian moral values and bourgeois shame about those features of African American life that whites might take to confirm racist beliefs. The struggle with onedimensional mainstream stereotypes was, of course, far from over, and it was hardly new; a central feature of the work of Frances E.W. Harper and Charles Chesnutt in the 1890s, it played a major role in such novelistic “forerunners” to “renaissance” fiction as James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece.

One hundred and fifty years ago the first known African American novel was published by the fugitive slave William Wells Brown. Brown was as uncertain about the audience for Clotel, a story about American miscegenation, as he was about the kind of text he was creating. He continued to experiment with the form and “test” his audience by publishing variations of the story for a decade. For a people prevented from reading and writing by law, it is not surprising that novel writing and novelists have since become highly valued within African American culture. The very idea of an “African American novel” then and now precipitates an intense debate about the form and function of any belletristic genre. Embedded in the term is a history of achievement and a cultural heritage that raises as many questions as it answers.

A considerable number of African American novels written after 1970 are inspired by postmodernist themes and strategies. The postmodernist novel is essentially antimimetic; it frequently questions the linearity of plot structure, confuses time sequences, blends levels of reality and fictionality, fragments characters, looks at events through several focalizing lenses arranged one behind the other, enjoys unreliable narrators, falls short of expectations, breaks rules, undermines conventions, and sometimes even resists interpretation. All this it does with an excessive blending of wit, irony, and paradox. In short, it favors experimental, avant-garde, progressive literary techniques and approaches.

The African-Caribbean presence in the United States can be read as a paradox of discrimination: “first, an invisibility (in Ellisonian terms) because the blackness of their skin color, which relegates them to classification as Afro-Americans, which leaves their special needs as immigrants relatively unattended; and second, a double visibility - as blacks to whites, and as foreigners to native blacks.” Literary representations of the dynamics between African diasporic populations in the US - from the erasure and/or collapsing of all cultural differences, to contention between US-born African Americans and Caribbean immigrants, to calls for social and political allegiances - will be the focus of this chapter. Particular attention will be paid to the works of Caribbean-American writers, such as Paule Marshall and Edwidge Danticat.

Coming of age - reaching the age of “maturity” or “discretion” - is variously a process, a moment, or a scene akin to the structural “scenes of instruction” inherent in African American narratives described by Dexter Fisher (1990). The discovery of American society's racism is the major event in the protagonist's development and in his “education.” Emphasis is placed upon being an African American in America, where ownership, belonging, and their negation, and dispossession, are central to the notion of identity. How can one own one's destiny - be self-determined - when one does not own oneself and faces an irrevocable loss? The recognition of belonging takes place within the narrower circles of the family and of the black community, while society as a whole is often viewed as a threat, if not as the enemy. For the black adolescent, “The Man,” slang for the white man, translates the contradiction set up by racism between maturation and manhood. Indeed the characters' acquisition of a sense of belonging and its opposite, independence, leads to various questions: What are the major events in the protagonist's growth from individual self into social being? Who and what functions as the “educator” in the African American novel?

Because reading Reed's fiction is like savoring and devouring Gombo Févi or Gumbo à la Creole, two metaphors that Reed develops in the poem “The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic” and the novel The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), a thorough analysis of Reed's novels must start by recognizing their underlying postcolonial discourse, African Diaspora reconnection, and multicultural poetics. Because so far very little attention has been directed toward the intertextuality that pervades his work (novels, poems, plays, essays), Reed has been rightly complaining about both readers and critics' failure to investigate the allusions used in his work. By failing to both investigate the multiplicity of allusions in Reed's novels and to regard Neo-HooDooism as a poetics of multiculturalism, critics have either misread or misinterpreted Reed's novels. In his Writin' Is Fightin': Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper (1990), Reed complains that when he “set out to add fresh interpretations to an ancient Afro-American oral literature by modernizing its styles so as to reach contemporary readers,” he knew that his work would be greeted with controversy. He further states that he knew that some critics “would dismiss the material [included in his work] as arcane, when millions of people in North, South, and Central America, the Caribbean, and Africa are acquainted with the structures [he] used” (137).

Zora Neale Hurston's work in the woman-centered narrative, particularly Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), connects African American women's literary production in the second half of the twentieth century to African American women's literary production in the nineteenth century. Alice Walker epitomizes this connection in her acknowledgment of Hurston's significance in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), the volume prefaced by Walker's four-part womanist aesthetic. Critics and other readers recognize Walker's resurrection of Hurston's exuberant spirit in Shug Avery of The Color Purple (1982). Walker pays tribute to Hurston and other black foremothers who paved the way, even under the most difficult circumstances. She acknowledges, as well, the efforts of her sisters in struggle in the mid-twentieth-century social movements: “Women have, over the last twenty years, really forged a community of readers, writers, and activists. That is what we're seeing. We're seeing that feminists and womanists have actually come of age, so that we are able to talk to each other.”

The republication, starting in the 1960s, of many long-unavailable nineteenth-century African American novels, and the wealth of critical discourses on those recovered texts that have flourished since the 1970s, have led to a profound rethinking of traditional critical evaluations of the fiction written by African Americans after slavery. Rather than as a historically valuable but artistically less significant bridge between the antebellum origins of the African American novel and the celebrated explosion of literary creativity during the New Negro Renaissance, postbellum African American fiction is now being reevaluated as important in its own right for its formal experimentation with, and revision of, a large variety of novelistic genres.

The field of popular fiction is a relatively unexplored terrain in African American as well as American literary history and criticism. Reasons for this exclusion or oversight are manifold and range from academic practices and aesthetic standards that qualify a text for inclusion in the canon, to the politics of publishing, and the stereotypes or myths that persist about African American readers and their reading habits. In the fields of literary criticism and the teaching of African American literature, for example, scholars and critics alike have restricted their efforts to reviewing, promoting, and canonizing only those texts that fit the prevailing aesthetic and literary standards. While this paradigm - the New Criticism and the reading practices it has encouraged - has allowed for the inclusion of a few women writers and writers of color, it has kept in place a rigid division between high and low, or elite and mass culture, an emphasis on invention over convention, and a distinction between literary and commercial forms of literature that have shaped literary scholarship and reading practices to this day.

The relationship between cultural production and power politics in Germany, and to a lesser extent in the rest of German-speaking Europe, has often been uneasy, characterised by reluctant accommodation if not by tension and mutual distrust. Whilst it has often been said that German intellectuals, including writers, emphasised the superiority of the spirit (Geist) over politics, denying the reality of Germany's socio-political development, it is undeniable that from the cultural philistinism of the Wilhelmine state to the postmodern aesthetics of the present day, German culture, and not least literary output, has rarely remained indifferent to, and has often existed in a state of tension with, the prevailing political authority. The following discussion of the major social and economic developments and politically transformative moments in the modern history of German-speaking Europe (Austria is treated as an independent state but part of the wider German cultural nation) will, I hope, provide a contextual background against which not only the writers considered in this volume, but also their readers, should be understood. The leitmotiv running through this brief historical panorama is the disjuncture between society and culture on the one hand, and politics on the other.