Contemporary Afro-American theatre is an exciting spectacle of an emerging black identity during a period when blacks have come to the forefront of political activity in the United States. Genevieve Fabre brings us the vast and rich production of black drama since 1945, placing it in historical and cultural context as a platform for political statement. Two strains emerge: the militant theatre of protest, and the ethnic theatre of black experience.

Militant theatre breaks free from dominant white traditions and seeks to mobilize members of the community into common action. Masks and...

Leopold Sedar Senghor was not only president of the Republic of Senegal from 1960 to 1981, he is also Africa's most famous poet. A cofounder of the Negritude cultural movement, he is recognized as one of the most significant figures in African literature. This bilingual edition of Senghor's complete poems made his work available for the first time to English-speaking audiences. His poetry, alive with sensual imagery, contrasts the lushness and wonder of Africa's past with the alienation and loss associated with assimilation into European culture. Translator Melvin Dixon places Senghor's...

Over the course of his brief career, Melvin Dixon (1950-1992) became an important critical voice for African American scholarship as well as a widely read chronicler of the African American gay experience. His novels Trouble the Water and Vanishing Rooms still receive considerable attention, as do his collections of poetry and his major work of criticism, Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature.

In A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader, scholars Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride have collected, for the first time in a single...