| Contents |
pt. I. Epic impulses/narratives of ancestry -- Imperial mother wit, gumbo erotics: from Sunjata to The souls of Black folk -- Of root figures and buggy jiving: Toomer, Hurston, and Ellison -- Myth-making, mother-child-ness, and epic renamings: Malcolm X, Kunta Kinte, and Milkman Dead -- pt. II. Bound cultures/the creolization of Dixie -- "Two heads fighting": African roots, geechee/gombo tales -- Creole self-fashioning: Joel Chandler Harris's "other fellow" -- Searching for spiritual soil: milk bonds and the "maumer tongue" -- pt. III. Shadows of Africans/gothic representations -- The spears of the party of the merciful: Senegambian Muslims, scriptural mercy, and plantation slavery -- Babo and bras coupé: malign machinations, gothic plots -- "Never once but like ripples": on boomeranging trumps, rememory, and the novel as medium. |
