Masters of the Drum

Masters of the Drum, comprising eight essays and two interviews, examines both celebrated and insufficiently explored Caribbean, African, and African-American lit/orature that asserts the interface between the scribal and the spoken/gestural in Black word art. This triple play—engagement with the three principal regions of the Black world—reflects the author's interest in Black comparative studies, wherein the expressions and emphases of the Black Atlantic tradition (Africa and its diasporas) are deeply exposed and revealingly juxtaposed. The book's apparent eclecticism is intended to help flex the boundaries of Black literary and cultural studies in response to the dangers of a narrow construction of the newly canonical and of an overly particularist critical stance.

ROBERT ELLIOT FOX is Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He has been a visiting scholar at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard and is the recipient of a senior fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the author of Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany (Greenwood, 1987).