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Caribbean Languages and Societies

English Faculty Publications

African American literature

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African American Literature By Writers Of Caribbean Descent, Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 2011

African American Literature By Writers Of Caribbean Descent, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

They dubbed it the Port of No Return. When their ancestors left that port at Elmira Beach, Ghana – or Goree Island, Senegal, or any of a number of similar African ports – and set out on the perilous journey over the ocean to the Americas, there was no going back for the New World Negroes. That is what for most Africans in the Americas was the beginning of their history. Whether resident in a small island nation or in the American colonies, whether under the domain of a British, Spanish, French, or Dutch colonial power, and whether shuttled back …


Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives And The Second Generation By Lisa D. Mcgill (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 2007

Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives And The Second Generation By Lisa D. Mcgill (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Using second generation Americans Harry Belafonte, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Piri Thomas, and the meringue hip hop group Proyecto Uno, Lisa D. McGill considers in Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation the issues of identity formation of those whose heritage ultimately includes Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, most often New York City. Though her subjects come from different national, racial, and language backgrounds; though they have made their names in different media; and though they have different views of race, identity, and culture, she convincingly makes the argument that "African America becomes powerful site …


Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, And Survival By Meredith M. Gadsby (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 2007

Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, And Survival By Meredith M. Gadsby (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

The folk will tell you that salt can either save you or destroy you. Toni Cade Bambara's Velma of The Salteaters realized that her survival depended on learning "the difference between eating salt as an antidote to snakebite and turning into salt, succumbing to the serpent." The lesson of similar folk wisdom is the subject of Meredith M. Gasby's Sucking Salt, where she propses as a new framework for the examination of Caribbean women's writing the survival techiniques implied in "sucking salt," techiniques suggested in her aunt's reflections on people she knew. Tantie expounded: "Little salt won't kill …


In Search Of Nella Larsen: A Biography Of The Color Line By George Hutchinson (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 2006

In Search Of Nella Larsen: A Biography Of The Color Line By George Hutchinson (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

With In Search of Nella Larsen, George Hutchinson makes the third major attempt to provide a biography of the elusive Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891-1964), the mulatto daughter of immigrants from Denmark and the Danish West Indies whose life and fiction were shaped largely by her mixed emotions about her racial heritage and her feelings of abandonment by her white mother, stepfather, and sister. In his introduction, Hutchinson makes much of the errors of prior Larsen biographers Charles R. Larson (Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen [1993]) and Thadious M. Davis (Nella Larsen, Novelist of …


African-American Proverbs In Context By Sw. Anand Prahlad (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance Oct 1997

African-American Proverbs In Context By Sw. Anand Prahlad (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Growing up in Hanover, Virginia, "surrounded by people who cast the world in vibrant and poetic colors," Sw. Anand Prahlad "fell in love with proverbs at an early age" (ix). This lifelong love affair has resulted in a rich collection of African American proverbs that expanded as Prahlad went through college and graduate school, and did postgraduate research. All the while, he was sharpening his critical skills and developing the theoretical framework to establish a model for use in examining the varied components of proverbial speech in the African American community, proceeding on the assumption that in order to understand …


Moore, Opal, Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 1997

Moore, Opal, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Moore, Opal (b. 1953), poet, short story writer, essayist, educator, and critic of children's literature. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Opal Moore was influenced from childhood by the particular dynamics of the Pentecostal church; echoes of that institution reverberate in her plots, themes, characters, tone, and language. When Moore entered Illinois Wesleyan University's School of Art in 1970, she was so shocked by her first real encounter with racism and her sens~ of powerlessness in the face of it that she sought some control over what was happening to her by writing, thus initiating her first journals. She also …


Notice The Mistletoe, Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 1996

Notice The Mistletoe, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Selection of African-American folklore on the winter holidays.


Various Black Virginians As Told To Daryl Cumber Dance, Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 1994

Various Black Virginians As Told To Daryl Cumber Dance, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Shuckin' and Jivin': Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans, published in 1978, derived from fieldwork done far a doctoral dissertation at Virginia Commonwealth University by Daryl Cumber Dance (the only woman named Daryl I have heard of aside from Daryl Hannah). She gathered stories and verses from black Virginians in colleges, senior citizens' centers, and a penitentiary. Though she doesn't bring to the party an editorial touch as enlivening as Zora Neale Hurston's, she has an ear and-unlike far, far too many assiduous collectors of folktales - knows how to capture vocal rhythms on a page.


"He's Long Gone": The Theme Of Escape In Black Folklore And Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 1992

"He's Long Gone": The Theme Of Escape In Black Folklore And Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Throughout their experiences in this country, certain segments of the Black population have viewed themselves as enslaved, whether they were chattel owned by slaveowners prior to emancipation, whether they were impressed into peonage and forced to work on white plantations and in chain gangs after slavery, whether they were victims of sharecropping systems that virtually reenslaved them during the twentieth century, whether they were the repressed and disfranchised and persecuted in Southern Jim Crow towns throughout the first half of the twentieth century, whether they are those trapped by unemployment and poverty today, or whether they are among the Blacks …


An Interview Of Paule Marshall, Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 1992

An Interview Of Paule Marshall, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

This Interview was conducted at the home of Paule Marshall in Richmond, Virginia, on June 14, 1991. Much of our discussion focused on Ms. Marshall's recently completed novel, Daughters, published this fall by Atheneum, which she characterizes here as "perhaps my most personal novel." There are, of course, frequent references to her earlier works, which include Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961). The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), Praisesong for the Widow (1983), and Reena and Other Stories (1983).


You Can't Go Home Again: James Baldwin And The South, Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 1988

You Can't Go Home Again: James Baldwin And The South, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

James Baldwin, like innumerable other Black artists, has found that in his efforts to express the plight of the Black man in America, he has been forced to deal over and over again with that inescapable dilemma of the Black American - the lack of sense of a positive self-identity. Time after time in his writings he has shown an awareness of the fact that identity contains, as Erik Erikson so accurately indicates, "a complementarity of past and future both in the individual and in society." Baldwin wrote in "Many Thousands Gone," "We cannot escape our origins, however hard we …


"Learn It To The Younguns": Passing On Folk Wisdom, Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 1988

"Learn It To The Younguns": Passing On Folk Wisdom, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

This is the book I had been planning to write for the past fifteen years, it was inevitable that if I kept procrastinating, someone would more expeditiously respond to the obvious void. Finally H. Nigel Thomas has provided the kind of exploration and explication of the use, influence, and impact of Black folklore on literature that I perceived was so much needed. Despite the numerous published commentaries on the influence of Afro-American folklore on individual works and specific authors, and the occasional consideration of its influence on a particular genre or a limited period (such as Keith Byerman's focus on …


Bosom Buddies And Lonely Hearts, Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 1984

Bosom Buddies And Lonely Hearts, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In Ossie Davis' Purlie Victorius, Ol' Cap'n nostalgically reminisces about the good old days when he enjoyed what he recollects as close loving relationships with Blacks. He recalls to Gitlow "how you and me growed up together. Had the same mammy - my mammy was your mother." And Gitlow responds, "Yessir! Bosom buddies." Despite the satire and irony with which Ossie Davis consciously invests this scene, it suggest to me another irony - one which Davis certainly did not intend - and that is that one of the images of the Black woman which has frequently been shared by …


Following In Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks: Autobiographical Notes By The Author Of Shuckin' And Jivin', Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 1979

Following In Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks: Autobiographical Notes By The Author Of Shuckin' And Jivin', Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

As I began to peruse collections and studies of black folklore, I found that although considerable work had been done from which I was l earning a great deal, there were some aspects of black folklore with which I was personally familiar (from my childhood in Charles City, Virginia, my college days in Petersburg, and my adult life in Richmond) that I had observed as influence in numerous literary works, particularly on temporary works, that were not included in the material was finding, or were not presented in anything even vaguely resembling the versions I knew and saw represented in …


Black Eve Or Madonna? A Study Of The Antithetical Views Of The Mother In Black American Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 1979

Black Eve Or Madonna? A Study Of The Antithetical Views Of The Mother In Black American Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Within these two extreme views of woman - the mother who brings death and destruction versus the mother who brings life and salvation - where does the Black American mother stand? It seems to me that it would not be inappropriate to look at the literature, not as mere fiction, but rather as an interpretation and compilation of history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and a host of other areas. Thus the true literary artist reveals life more accurately and with more insight than any historical facts and statistical details, because he deals with the truth of the human heart, with the …


James Baldwin, Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 1978

James Baldwin, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

James Baldwin is one of America's best known and most controversial writers. If there is some figurative truth in his declarations "Nobody Knows My Name" and "No Name in the Street," on a realistic level practically everyone knows his name, from people on the street to scholars in the most prestigious universities-and they all respond to him. Those responses are as diverse and as antithetical as the respondents. Indeed, there is little unanimity in the criticism of James Baldwin: some view him as a prophet preaching love and salvation, others as a soothsayer forecasting death and destruction; some see him …


In The Beginning: A New View Of Black American Etiological Tales, Daryl Cumber Dance Jan 1977

In The Beginning: A New View Of Black American Etiological Tales, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

A substantial number of Black folktales may be designated as etiological "myths" in that they tend to focus on the world as it evolved and to frequently portray the role of God in explaining why the Negro is, to quote from one tale, "so messed up," why he is black, why he has big, ugly feet and hands, why his hair is kinky, and why he must remain a poor laborer in a rich society. The causes of all of these "inferior" traits of the Negro appear to be certain alleged defects in his character-his tardiness, his ignorance, his disobedience …