Clarence Major and His Art: Portraits of an African American Postmodernist - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807825867 ISBN 13: 9780807825860

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001

Synopsis

Poet, novelist, essayist, editor, anthologist, lexicographer and painter, Clarence Major is one of the most challenging, prolific, yet underappreciated contemporary African-American artists. This collection combines poetry, prose and art by Major with critical essays that showcase his aesthetic movement across literary, cultural and political boundaries, and illuminates the complex relationship between his writing and painting. Although Major's artistic vision is grounded in the historical experiences of black and Native American peoples, he experiments with crossing boundaries of all types. His use of different narrative voices is evidence of what editor Bernard Bell calls Major's ""double consciousness"" as an African-American artist. This collection highlights the breadth of Major's work, his transformation into a postmodern artist, and the hybrid voices of his literary and visual productions.

About this title

Review

Bernard Bell's expansive anthology of writings by and about this protean figure in American arts is itself a major venture. It is an excellent collection of instigating essays that present valuable debates among themselves, debates about the changing nature of contemporary African-American writing and disputatious views on the subject of the postmodern. (Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Loyola Marymount University) Employing his formidable critical skills, Bernard W. Bell investigates the work of one of the century's most complex artists. (Ishmael Reed, University of California, Berkeley)

About the Author

Bernard W. Bell is professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is editor of W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics (1996), coeditor of Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998), and editor of Clarence Major and His Art: Portraits of an African American Postmodernist (2001).

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0807825867
• ISBN 13: 9780807825860
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Bell Bernard W.