Chronicles the lives and experiences of five Black Americans from colonial to modern times.

"From Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) to The Fisher King (2000), Paule Marshall's novels, novellas, and short stories include a rich cast of unforgettable men, women, and children who forge spiritual as well as emotional and geographical paths toward their ancestors. In this, the first critical study to address all of Marshall's fiction, Moira Ferguson argues that Marshall's work collectively constitutes a multigenerational saga of the African diaspora across centuries and continents. In creating a space for her characters' interrupted lives and those of their elders and ancestors, Ferguson argues, Marshall trains a spotlight on slavery's wake and engages her fiction in the service of healing deep global wounds."--Page 4 of cover.

"Heather Hathaway investigates the lives and writings of two of the most prominent African Caribbean immigrant authors in the United States, Claude McKay (1890-1948) and Paule Marshall (b. 1929). Although both writers traditionally have been studied within the realm of African American literature, their works are significantly shaped by their backgrounds as Caribbean immigrants." "Caribbean Waves explores the ways in which literature can probe the complexities of displacement and identity construction that often accompany migratory experiences. Analysis of McKay's and Marshall's works reveals how the forces of migration, racial and national affiliation, and "Americanization" can merge to produce uniquely hybridized, and at times profoundly homeless, black American immigrant identities."--Jacket.

"'Re/Visioning'" explores, analyzes, and contextualizes the literary voices of West Indian women writers living in the United States emerging in the 1980's. Despite having published since 1959, Barbadian American writer Paule Marshall is in the forefront of the movement. The autobiographical and cross-cultural dimensions of her four novels to date involve the reader in typical imaginative reverberations of cross-cultural experience and existence. General considerations about a sensible critical approach and the usefulness of autobiography criticism in this context are followed by a comprehensive analysis of Paule Marshall's oeuvre.

Focusing on Zola Neale Hurston, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara, this book explores both the ways in which black women's fictions have been shaped by the history of the United states, and the ways in which they intervene in that history. She sees the transition from an agrarian to an urban society as the critical moment of that history, and argues that writings by black women articulate that change in their content as well as form. ISBN 0-299-10890-2 : $19.95.