Toni Morrison has consciously inherited the legacy of the search for new perceptions of the African-American cosmology. This includes the reclamation of the African-American individual, community and freedom, and the search for a new literary discourse corresponding with the challenge of the new vision, from the committed discourses of the African-American leaders, philosophers, writers and audio-visual artists such as the Blues, right from the turn of the century to the present. Having been engaged in the construction of a multidimensional text since her The Bluest Eye and Beloved, Morrison, in her Playing in the Dark (1992), devotes her theoretical concerns to an Afrocentric perspective emerging from her historical and literary responses to the US and its White-American classics.

Since the publication of the poems of Langston Hughes, several African-American leaders, philosophers and artists have addressed themselves to a search for the real meaning of the African-American cosmology, in terms of balance, harmony and freedom from an oppressive reality, to what Hughes himself refers to as "the hidden but continuous strivings of the African-American spirit and soul" (Kalu, 1992, p. 1). W E B DuBois, at the turn of the 20^th century, articulated the concept of `double consciousness', and Martin Luther King Jr. focused on the virtues of Christian goodness as an instrument of obtaining civil rights nonviolently. Since then, the debate on the true identity of the African-American and its recognition, has engaged the attention of several writers in search of a harmonizing principle in the African-American thought. Their search for such a principle of completeness and complexity of the African-American has been compelled by the dominant culture's portrayal of the African image. To cite an instance, Alice Walker (1992, p. 85) states that Zora Neale Hurston's is characterized by "racial health; a sense of black people as a complete, complex, undiminished human beings". The standard European and American discourse, according to the African-American writers, tended to culminate in the creation of stereotypes of the African and the African-American as major points of reference. Bill Cosby's two television series, "The Cosby Show" and "It's a Different World", constitute the audio-visual reaffirmation of the African's and African-American's vision of freedom, attaining its fullest expression in the Blues. Cosby's discourse is considered a significant and radical departure from "the traditionally accepted African-American discursive modes" (Kalu, 1992, p. 7). It amounted to a paradigm of "the incremental nature of the process of theory construction" (Kalu, 1992, p. 8).

If Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods and William Wells Brown's Clotel; Or, The President's Daughter focused on the negation of stereotypes explored in the African-American experience of slavery, James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), Wright, Baldwin and others presented a closer examination of the negative issues of the African-American's predicament in a dominant culture.

English Studies Journal, television series, traditional textual structure, traditional folk tales, linguistic postures, project the implications, African-American sociocultural reality, episodic structure, national literature, working of power, proto-American Literature, Sign and symbol, strategize omissions, repetitions, disruptions, polarities, reifications, violence