From Booklist
Alexander, the author of three indelible poetry collections, including Antebellum Dream Book (2001), now shares the aesthetic and intellectual wellspring from which her poems arise in a fresh and penetrating inquiry into African American creativity, or what she calls the "black interior." An exhilaratingly precise and mind-expanding essayist and critic, Alexander writes with striking insight about the poetry of Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Michael Harper; the black arts movement; the paintings of Romare Bearden and Kerry James Marshall; and the films of Denzel Washington. In each finely structured essay, she shrewdly assesses the historical and social context within which black artists work and how "public and communal pressures" to create art that is of service to the black community "dramatically affect the choices" black artists make. Erudite, witty, and profound, Alexander also celebrates the influence of Jet magazine and considers the terrible fates and legacies of Emmett Till and Rodney King. This original and electrifying collection greatly enriches and extends understanding of African American culture and its essential role in American culture as a whole. Donna Seaman
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Review
"Elizabeth Alexander is one of the brightest stars in our literary sky . . . a superb, invaluable commentator on the American scene." --Arnold Rampersad


Book Description
With a poet's precision and an intellectually adventurous spirit, Elizabeth Alexander explores a wide spectrum of contemporary African American artistic life through literature, paintings, popular media, and films, and discusses its place in current culture. In The Black Interior, she examines the vital roles of such heavyweight literary figures as Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Rita Dove, as well as lesser known, yet vibrant, new creative voices. She offers a reconsideration of "afro-outré" painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, the concept of "race-pride" in Jet magazine, and her take on Denzel Washington's career as a complex black male icon in a post-affirmative action era. Also available is Alexander's much heralded essay on Rodney King, Emmett Till, and the collective memory of racial violence.

Alexander, who has been a professor at the University of Chicago and Smith College, and recently at Yale University, has taught and lectured on African American art and culture across the country and abroad for nearly two decades. In The Black Interior, she directs her scrupulous poet's eye to the urgent cultural issues of the day. This lively collection is a crucial volume for understanding current thinking on race, art, and culture in America.


About the Author
Elizabeth Alexander is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Antebellum Dream Book. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

With a poet's precision and an intellectually adventurous spirit, Elizabeth Alexander explores a wide spectrum of contemporary African American artistic life through literature, paintings, popular media, and films, and discusses its place in current culture. In The Black Interior, she examines the vital roles of such heavyweight literary figures as Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Rita Dove, as well as lesser known, yet vibrant, new creative voices. She offers a reconsideration of "afro-outré" painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, the concept of "race-pride" in Jet magazine, and her take on Denzel Washington's career as a complex black male icon in a post-affirmative action era. Also available is Alexander's much heralded essay on Rodney King, Emmett Till, and the collective memory of racial violence.

Alexander, who has been a professor at the University of Chicago and Smith College, and recently at Yale University, has taught and lectured on African American art and culture across the country and abroad for nearly two decades. In The Black Interior, she directs her scrupulous poet's eye to the urgent cultural issues of the day. This lively collection is a crucial volume for understanding current thinking on race, art, and culture in America.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

This fascinating collection of essays seeks to elucidate what poet Alexander (Antebellum Dream Book) conceives as "the black interior": "black life and creativity behind the public face of stereotype and limited imagination." Currently a professor of English and African American studies at Yale, Alexander explores the state of African American artistic life through examples from popular media, literature, and film. Each essay takes as its starting point a prominent figure of the black interior (e.g., Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Michael Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Denzel Washington, and Rodney King) and explores the way in which the very notion of an African American "culture" impedes attempts at self-understanding and self-definition by its individual members. In one chapter, Anna Cooper (the fourth African American woman to earn a Ph.D., daughter of a slave, writer, and educator, whose Voice from the South would predate W.E.B. DuBois's Souls of Black Folk by 11 years) is forced to choose a restroom at an English train station: "I see two dingy little rooms `for ladies' and `for colored people.'." Highly recommended for public libraries; essential for academic libraries.-Felicity D. Walsh, Southern Polytechnic State Univ., Marietta, GA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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