Depictions of Home in African American Literature

Trudier Harris's Depictions of Home in African American Literature is destined to have an impact on the shaping of literary and cultural discourses and on the teaching of African American literature in the future. Harris makes a nuanced, persuasive case for re-examining the tension between idealized notions of home and the actual use of the concept in the production of literary genres. Analyzing works by well-known and lesser-known writers, Harris illuminates how history, race, power, and economics influence the understanding of home as space and place. Thus, the book makes an important contribution to scholarship and pedagogy.

-- Jerry W. Ward Jr., author of The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery

Has the field of African American literary studies ever produced a more thoughtful, prolific reader-scholar than Trudier Harris? Article after article, book after book, decade after decade, she has consistently pursued a fantastic quest to illuminate the underpinnings of black artistic writing. In Depictions of Home in African American Literature, the newest phase of her journey, she charts explorations of homespaces in works by James Baldwin, Countee Cullen, Toni Morrison, Suzan-Lori Parks, A. J. Verdelle, Margaret Walker, and several others. Harris demonstrates that home, a complex and in many cases unsettling place in the literature, offers wonderous creative opportunities for black writers.

-- Howard Rambsy II, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and author of Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers

Depictions of Home in African American Literature is a moving literary experienceabout home in black life and culture. Trudier Harris, in what amounts to a corporatetestimony, rhetorically shouts out that since enslaved Africans arrived in America, homehas not been a hospitable environment or haven of shelter, of happiness or love; rather ithas been the site of a topography of pain. It has been a constant reminder of blackpeople's degraded condition: containment, confinement, control. This situation impedes theindividual from attaining maturity at all levels. Instead of the mythologized Americandream, home is a reminder of the American nightmare.

-- Dolan Hubbard, Morgan State Univer