Howard Thurman, an African-American theologian, when he was a boy, would read The Bible aloud to his grandmother. However, his grandmother never allowed him to read from the Epistles of Paul. When a perplexed Thurman asked his grandmother the reason, she told him that during the days of slavery, the white minister on the plantation often preached from the Pauline letters—“Slaves, be obedient to your masters” (Ephesians 6:5). “I vowed to myself,” he quotes her as saying, “that if freedom ever came and I learned to read, I would never read that part of the Bible!”

That account, given in Slavery in American Society, demonstrates how the black slaves had, even in the pre-abolition days, started asserting their free will by being selective in choosing only those parts of The Bible that affirmed their independent notions. The slave songs, for example, reveal the survival of the important elements of the African heritage, not just as quaint vestiges of their deracinated roots, but as dynamic elements of a tradition that was waiting to assert itself. Naturally, the Jesus of the New Testament often transformed into a warrior god of Africa in slave songs. According to Nancy Williams, a slave, quoted in the book mentioned above, “Dat ole white preachin’ wasn’t nothin’. Ole white preachers used to talk wid dey tongues widdout sayin’ nothin’ but Jesus told us slaves to talk wid our hearts.” And, as the African-Americans began talking with their hearts, they felt, what Frederick Douglass, abolitionist and author, called, “the necessity of standing erect.” For too long had the blacks “generally occupied menial positions” urged against them. “This must be changed; this is being changed.” ‘Change’ then is the theme of the first three papers of this issue.

In the first paper, “Poetry and the Black Arts Movement: Articulation of Cohesion and Subversion,” Shimi M Doley shows how the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s not only strove for the emancipation and empowerment of the African-Americans but also introduced a new paradigm of cultural nationalism in arts, which used arts as an important means to register protest and inform the black masses, thus making literature an identity.

In the second paper, “Empowering Oneself to Break Free from a European Psychology and Framework: A Study of Ntozake Shange’s Choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” Melissa Helen discusses how the conflicts, challenges, and opportunities of the decades mentioned above led Shange to reject the old modes of writing plays and create a new kind of theater, a choreopoem, where the ‘colored girls’ by sharing their experiences trace their evolution from nonbeing to self-love to self-assertion.

In the third paper, “A Novel in Stories: A Reading of Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place,” Rajyashree Khushu-Lahiri shows how Naylor conflates the western narrative with the ethnic, which includes the hoary female and oral heritage of storytelling, in her novel of seven “interconnected short stories,” placing her story cycle in the space between the dual frames of reference, thus opening up new construal and connection, enabling historical revision.

Writers like Sinclair Lewis, Norman Mailer, and Saul Bellow proactively examined the American culture and society, the disorienting vortex of modern civilization, and the human predicament.

In the fourth paper, “History in the Future Tense: Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here,” Nibir K Ghosh takes a close look at the various conditions that initiate and sustain fascism and explicates how Lewis, by presenting the ideology unvarnished in his novel, plays the role of a keeper of nation’s conscience. In the fifth paper, “Revolution in the Consciousness of Time: The Clarion Call of Norman Mailer,” R V Jayanth Kasyap delineates Mailer’s existentialist philosophy that celebrates life over everything else and highlights his ‘clarion call’ for man to stand up and live life on his own terms, finding his salvation in human dignity and personal freedom.

In the sixth paper, “Self-Assertion and Affirmation in Saul Bellow’s The Victim,” Binod Mishra and Narinder Kumar Sharma, through a textual analysis of the interactions between Asa Leventhal and Allbee, characters in Bellow’s novel, examine the themes of human existence, intra and interrelations, accountability, and belongingness.

While art does imitate life, life often finds its meaning in art. And sometimes, the line dividing both gets blurred to create a coalescence of fact and fiction, reality and imagination, perception and confusion.

In the seventh paper, “Scriptorium as a Zone of Signifiers: Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium,” Adrene Freeda D’cruz views the scriptorium in Paul Auster’s novel as a metaphor for language and the travel in the scriptorium as a journey into a complex network of deferral signifiers, which with its infinite possibilities and intricate structures defies understanding and yet resists closure.

In the eighth paper, “Interrelations Between Literature and Life: Literary Mentors in Philip Roth’s The Professor of Desire,” Gustavo Sánchez Canales shows how David Kepesh, the protagonist of Roth’s novel, is influenced and inspired by Anton Chekhov’s ‘romantic disillusionment’ and Franz Kafka’s ‘spiritual imprisonment’ to develop a ‘literature-as-therapy’ philosophy to find meaning and balance in his life.

In the ninth paper, “Imagination and Reality: An Overview of Wallace Stevens’s Poetry,” Smita Jha examines the concepts of reality and imagination in Stevens’s works and shows how Stevens believed that reality remains static and imperceptible when it is not inferred through imagination.

Hemingway’s male protagonists were largely ‘men without women.’ In the tenth paper, “Depiction of Women in Hemingway’s Short Stories,” Samina Azhar, while granting that the American icon may be a male chauvinist, exonerates him of the accusation that he was a misogynist, and reminds the readers that Hemingway’s was a representative voice of his times, including its dilemma, disenchantment, and stoicism.

Venice could be the city that launched a thousand poets. The “Ocean’s nursling,” as P B Shelley called it, with its celebrated domes, tombs, pinnacles, salt-marsh grasses, not only fired the imagination of Ezra Pound, among others, but also provided him his first and lifelong themes. In the eleventh paper, “The ‘Venice’ of Pound and Meena Alexander,” Hoshang Merchant talks about the Venice poem of Meena Alexander in the light of Venetian Pound.

The body of Wendell Berry’s works reveals two things: that Berry is proficient in many literary genres, and that environmental and agrarian concerns are the predominant themes of his writings. To Berry, culture and agriculture are two sides of the same coin. In the twelfth paper, “Wendell Berry: High Priest of Kentucky Nature,” S S Prabhakar Rao, quoting extensively from Berry’s poems, introduces Berry, the man and the poet with Thoreauvian simplicities and Wordsworthian passion for nature.

-- R Venkatesan Iyenger
consulting Editor