Description: This anthology offers perspectives on war, national loyalty, and freedom from a sweeping range of writers including Phillis Wheatley, James Weldon Johnson, Natasha Trethewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, Vievee Francis, Michael S. Harper, Ann Petry, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many more.
Brief description: A Yemisi Jimoh is professor of African American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction: Living In Paradox.
Review Quotes:
"These primary source documents--poems, pamphlets, oral histories--speak to the black experience of war and citizenship."--Library Journal
"[An] impressive array of readings. . . . This is a volume for anyone seeking to understand the wide diversity of responses to war and citizenship in African American literary history."--Choice
"This anthology is the first of its kind, assembling an impressive array of African American voices on war and citizenship from the colonial period to the present. . . . No other anthology provides such a comprehensive insight into the crucial nexus between war, race, and nation in black history and literature."--American Literary History
"Provides a ready and accessible means to access the frustrations of African Americans trying to reconcile war, American values, and their own place within a racial hierarchy. The expanse of the anthology's selections attests to the pervasive nature of the issue in African American thought."--H-Net