Full Description
The figure of the violent man in the African American imagination has a long history. He can be found in 19th-century bad man ballads like "Stagolee" and "John Hardy," as well as in the black convict recitations that influenced "gangsta" rap. "Born in a Mighty Bad Land" connects this figure with similar characters in African American fiction. Many writers McKay and Hurston in the Harlem Renaissance; Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison in the '40s and '50s; Himes in the '50s and '60s saw the "bad nigger" as an archetypal figure in the black imagination and psyche. "Blaxploitation" novels in the '70s made him a virtually mythical character. More recently, Mosley, Wideman, and Morrison have presented him as ghetto philosopher and cultural adventurer. Behind the folklore and fiction, many theories have been proposed to explain the source of the bad man's intra-racial violence. Jerry H. Bryant explores all of these elements in a wide-ranging and illuminating look at one of the most misunderstood figures in African American culture.
Contents
Introduction 1. The Classic Badman and the Ballad The Badman Boaster; The Faces of Stagolee 2. Postbellum Violence and Its Causes: "Displaced Rage" in a Preindustrial Culture 3. Between the Wars: The Genteel Novel, Counter Stereotypes, and Initial Probes Religion, Romance, and Race Paul Laurence Dunbar: Southern Innocence, Northern Sin; James Weldon Johnson: Murder in Ragtime; James D. Corrothers and The Black Cat Club 4. From the Genteel to the Primitive: The Twenties and Thirties The "New Negro" Finds the Folk; Rudolph Fisher's Harlem Tour; Claude McKay's Home to Harlem; Arna Bontemps's "Don't-Care Folk"; Zora Neale Hurston: Country Men and Women 5. The Ghetto Bildungsroman: From the Forties to the Seventies Richard Wright: Bigger Thomas and a New Consciousness; James Baldwin: Escaping from Violence; Ralph Ellison's Rinehart; The Ghetto Setting; The Nurturing Ghetto I (Mark Kennedy and Herbert Simmons); The Nurturing Ghetto II: The Autobiographical Vision (Claude Brown); The Struggle for Moral Character (Ronald Fair and George Cain); The Code of the Street: The Bildungsroman World Updated 6. Toasts: Tales of the "Bad Nigger" The Toast and Its Mysteries; Return to Stagolee; The Put-Down; The Fall 7. Chester Himes: Harlem Absurd A Man of Anger; The Harlem Novels; The Badmen; Coffin Ed and Grave Digger 8. A "Toast" Novel: Pimps, Hoodlums and Hit Men The Struggle Between the "Hip" and the "Lame"; The "Hip" Victorious; Anger Over White Racism; The Violent Style; The Fantasy of Sexual Dominance; Instinct, Justice, and the Allure of The Life; A Special Kind of Squalor, A Special Kind of Guilt; Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines 9. Walter Mosley and the Violent Men of Watts Socrates Fortlow; Raymond "Mouse" Alexander; Easy Rawlins 10. Rap: Going Commercial 11. The Badman and the Storyteller: John Edgar Wideman's Homewood Trilogy Brothers and Keepers: A Family Matter; Hiding Place: Looking for Manhood; Rot and Renewal; Sent for You Yesterday: The Skeins of History and the Sacrament of Storytelling 12. Toni Morrison: Ulysses, Badmen, and Archetypes: Abandoning Violence Outlaws Laying the Foundation: The Bluest Eye and Sula; Into the Limelight: Song of Solomon and Tar Baby; Trilogy: Three Stages of the Badman Loving Appendix: Analysis of Thirty Prototype Ballads
