Series editor's foreword / Daniel Albright -- Introduction: the agency of sound in African American fiction / Saadi A. Simawe -- Singing the unsayable: theorizing music in Dessa Rose / Jacquelyn A. Fox-Good -- Claude McKay: music, sexuality, and literary cosmopolitanism / Tom Lutz -- Black moves, white way, every body's blues: orphic power in Langston Hughes's The ways of white folks / Jane Olmsted -- Black and blue: the female body of blues writing in Jean Toomer, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones / Katherine Boutry -- That old black magic? Gender and music in Ann Petry's fiction / Johanna X.K. Garvey -- "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing": jazz's many uses for Toni Morrison / Alan J. Rice -- Shange and her three sisters "sing a liberation song": variations on the orphic theme / Maria V. Johnson -- Nathaniel Mackey's unit structures / Joseph Allen -- Shamans of song: music and the politics of culture in Alice Walker's early fiction / Saadi A. Simawe
Summary
In twentieth-century African American fiction, music has been elevated to the level of religion primarily because of its power as a medium of freedom. This collection explores literary invocations of music
