Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Criticism in the jungle / Henry Louis Gates, Jr. -- The critic and society : Barthes, leftocracy and other mythologies / Wole Soyinka -- Repetition as a figure of black culture / James A. Snead -- Structural analysis of the Afro-American trickster tale / Jay Edwards -- Negritude, structuralism, deconstruction / Sunday O. Anozie -- Strictures on structures : the prospects for a structuralist poetics of African fiction / Anthony Appiah -- I yam what I am : the topos of (un)naming in Afro-American literature / Kimberly W. Benston -- Storytelling in early Afro-American fiction : Frederick Douglass's 'The heroic slave' / Robert B. Stepto -- Untroubled voice : call and response in Cane / Barbara E. Bowen -- Metaphor, metonymy and voice in Their eyes were watching God / Barbara Johnson -- To move without moving : creativity and commerce in Ralph Ellison's Trueblood episode / Houston A. Baker, Jr. -- 'Taming all that anger down' : rage and silence in Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha / Mary Helen Washington -- Eruptions of funk : historicizing Toni Morrison / Susan Willis -- The blackness of blackness : a critique of the sign and the Signifying monkey / Henry Louis Gates, Jr.