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Edward M. Pavlic. Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African-American Literary Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. 314 pp. $22.50.
Ed Pavlic's study of African American modernism draws upon a wide ranee of literary critcism, literary and cultural theory, philosophy, music and religious studies to map the fundamental understandings of self and community expressed in black modernist writing in twentieth-century American literature. Providing extended readings of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Robert Hayden and Zora Neale Hurston, Crossroads Modernism also offers considerations of writers David Bradley, James Baldwin, Yusef Komunyakaa, Toni Morrison, and Harlem Renaissance women poets.
Pavlic identifies two main strands of African American literary modernism: "Afro-modernism," which exhibits close affinities with European and American modernist concerns and is predominantly solitary; and "diasporic modernism," which seeks alternatives that emphasize the communal. The location of the crossroads - drawing upon a definition provided by Komunyakaa - stands as the book's prevailing metaphor, representing the juncture of these two strands and their attendant concerns. In this study, the crossroads explored is the symbolic geography or meta-patterns of black modernity. Pavlic grounds much of his understanding of this geography in the published work of Robert Stepto on ascent and immersion narratives and also in the 1 990 dissertation of Judylyn Ryan.
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