Description: It is precisely the New World American location of these writers, Frydman concludes, that makes possible this revisionary perspective on the idea of (Old) World literature.
Review Quotes:
Sounding the Break deftly situates the literatures of the African diaspora not just within world literature but as the latter's shaping poetics. Turning to canonical writers of the black modernist and postmodernist traditions, Frydman elegantly reveals an 'archive of palimpsests' marked by shuttling relays between texts, persistent imbrications of local and global identifications, hybrid intersections between vernacular orality and cosmopolitan intertextuality, and the constant ghosting of the present by the past. Taking up Melvin Dixon's musing on 'a world black literature, ' Frydman gives us an archive, a history, and a method that realizes the category.
--Vilashini Cooppan, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing