Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader

A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader

Joyce, Justin a.
McBride, Dwight a.

Paperback

Letters & EssaysLiterary CriticismFiction Anthologies

ISBN10: 1604738634
ISBN13: 9781604738636
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: May 21 2010
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.54
Height: 0.44 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Essays on literature and life from the activist and scholar Over the course of his brief career, Melvin Dixon (1950-1992) became an important critical voice for African American scholarship as well as a widely read chronicler of the African American gay experience. His novels Trouble the Water and Vanishing Rooms still receive considerable attention, as do his collections of poetry and his major work of criticism, Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature. In A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader, scholars Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride have collected, for the first time in a single volume, the eight critical essays Dixon published during his lifetime. The volume divides Dixon's critical output into three categories-Writing Black Diaspora Theory, Writing African American Cultural Theory, and Writing African American Literary Criticism-and closes with a speech Dixon gave to the queer writers' conference, OutWrite, in 1992, just months before he succumbed to an AIDS-related illness. What emerges from the essays collected here is the voice of a confident, engaging scholar, who tackles a wide range of literary and cultural topics. Dixon examines the trickster characters of Charles W. Chesnutt, the friendship between the Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain and Langston Hughes, and the aesthetic importance of black speech in the novels of Gayl Jones. His address to OutWrite serves as a poignant record of Dixon's knack to wax elegiac and poetic and to synthesize criticism, activism, and art. The introduction places Dixon in the contexts of African American cultural history and gay/lesbian critical discourse. Justin A. Joyce is a doctoral candidate in the department of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Dwight A. McBride is Leon Forrest Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Northwestern University and the author of Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality in America and Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony.

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