Léopold Sédar Senghor

Melvin Dixon

Leopold Sedar Senghor was not only president of the Republic of Senegal from 1960 to 1981, he is also Africa's most famous poet. A cofounder of the Negritude cultural movement, he is recognized as one of the most significant figures in African literature. This bilingual edition of Senghor's complete poems made his work available for the first time to English-speaking audiences. His poetry, alive with sensual imagery, contrasts the lushness and wonder of Africa's past with the alienation and loss associated with assimilation into European culture. Translator Melvin Dixon places Senghor's writing in historical persepctive by relating it to both his political involvement and his intellectual development.

The Collected Poetry

Prior to Dixon's death from AIDS in 1992 when he was on the verge of breaking out as an acclaimed novelist, his talent was compared to that of James Baldwin. In "Vanishing Rooms", the author demonstrates his literary promise with a compelling love story of interracial sex and urban violence set in Manhattan's West Village in the 1970s.

Vanishing Rooms

Dwight A. McBride

Justin A. Joyce

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.

A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader

"Often considered alienated from mainstream culture and consigned to negative environments, Afro-American writers have created alternative spatial and geographical metaphors to develop a positive sense of individual and cultural identity. Melvin Dixon demonstrates how three principal figures of the land--the wilderness, the underground, and the mountaintop--have become places of refuge and cultural revitalization for the performance of identity, from early slave songs and fugitive narratives to modern and contemporary fiction"--Jacket.

Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature

Ride Out the Wilderness

Jesse Durand, a gay black dancer, suffers depression and emotional isolation when Metro, his white boyfriend, dies as a result of "gay bashing," in a tenth anniversary edition of the landmark novel about gay life in 1970s Manhattan. Reprint.

Melvin Dixon

About

Books

Join the club