PAPERBACK ISBN: 0-88258-166-X       $33.95

412 pages; 5.5 x 8.5 inches

Essays on Afro-American Literature and Culture, 1942-1981

by Charles T. Davis, Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The late Charles T. Davis was renowned for his avante-garde literary sensibilities and firm historical grounding, which produced a remarkable lens through which to view black literature.  A collection of his most important essays, Black is the Color of the Cosmos presents perhaps the fullest and sharpest images that exist of black writers working within the changing contexts of American literature and history.  Although the dimensions of black awareness vary from writer to writer, Davis shows how each faces questions of racial identity. Cosmos addresses the full spectrum of the black literary tradition—from the writers of the slave narratives, who rallied to cries for freedom; to Washington and DuBois, who debated the approach to black losses in economic and social standing; to the Harlem Renaissance writers, who claimed for themselves the ideals of cultural pluralism; to Ralph Ellison’s and James Baldwin’s stinging critiques of a predatory, dehumanized, and mechanized society; and finally to the Black Arts writers, who boldly expressed the resentment and anger that had been building up to the 1970s. 

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