Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Every Tongue Got to Confess -- Introduction -- Memoir: On Becoming an African American Scholar Activist -- 1. Double Consciousness as the Sign of African American Difference -- I. The African American Jeremiad and Frederick Douglass's Fourth of July 1852 Speech -- African American Double Consciousness -- The Sacred and Secular Origins of the American Jeremiad -- The African American Jeremiad -- That Most Foul and Fiendish of All Human Decrees -- What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? -- Notes -- II. Genealogical Shifts in Du Bois's Discourse on Double Consciousness as the Sign of African American Difference -- III. Booker T. and W. E. B.: The Authority, Authenticity, and Agency of African American Double Consciousness -- 2. The Roots and Branches of the African American Literary Tradition -- I. The African American Literary Tradition -- II. African American Writers -- 1 -- 2 -- 3 -- III. The Image of Africa in the Afro-American Novel -- White Images of Africa in Western Culture -- Early Images of Africa in the Afro-American Novel -- Images of Africa in the Pre-World War II Novel -- Images of Africa in the Post-World War II Novel -- Notes -- IV. Jean Toomer's "Blue Meridian": The Poet as Prophet of a New Order of Man -- V. The Legacy of James Baldwin: The Artist as Redemptive Lover and Righteous Witness -- Manchild of the Promised Land -- Artist of Redemptive Love -- Modern Black Writer as Righteous Witness -- Notes -- 3. Modern and Contemporary African American Vernacular and Literary Voices -- I. The Blues Voices in John Edgar Wideman's Two Cities -- II. Clarence Major's Homecoming Voice in Such Was the Season.

III. Charles Johnson's Philosophical Fiction: Slave Revolt in the Quest for Unity of Being in Middle Passage -- The Narrative of Slave Revolt -- Slavery's Impact on Culture and Character -- IV. Trey Ellis's Voice of the New Black Aesthetic in Platitudes -- Notes -- 4. Womanist African American Vernacular and Literary Voices -- I. Ann Petry's Demythologizing of American Culture and Afro-American Character -- II. Nails, Snails, and Puppy-Dog Tails: Black Male Stereotypes in the Fiction of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Terry McMillan -- III. The Liberating Literary and African American Vernacular Voices of Gayl Jones -- Notes -- IV. Toni Morrison's Blues People in a Jazz World -- V. Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative -- or, Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past -- 5. Bearing Witness to the Changing Same: Representations of Black American Identity in American and African American Literature -- I. Three Vernacular Theories for Teaching African American Literature for the Twenty-First Century -- II. Mark Twain's "Nigger" Jim: The Tragic Face behind the Minstrel Mask -- Twain's Socialization in the Ethics of Jim Crow -- Twain's Relationship to His Audience, Huck, and Jim -- Notes -- III. "The Negro" as Metonym, Metaphor, and Marginal Man in William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses -- IV. William Styron's Nat Turner: A White Southerner's Meditation on a Legendary Slave Revolt -- Notes -- V. Deconstructing the American Melting Pot and Literary Mainstream: Validating and Valorizing African American Literature in the College Curriculum -- Works Cited -- Index -- BackCover.