Trudier Harris-Lopez
South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Pp. 230. $24.95

Reviewed by Axel Knoenagel

African American literature has by now become a well-established feature of international literary studies. Dozens of books and articles are published every year about the works of authors such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, or Ralph Ellison. Trudier Harris-Lopez, Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, has used the current climate to present a collection of essays that focuses on authors and texts less frequently found in scholarly discussion.

The articles collected in South of Tradition were written and rewritten over a period of fourteen years. As Harris-Lopez asserts, they "were not written originally with any deliberate thematic continuity in mind" (vii). Consequently, the book presents contributions on a wide variety of texts and authors. The "South" in the book's title should, incidentally, not be taken too literally. While most of the authors discussed in the essays stem from below the Mason-Dixon line, others-Ann Petry, for example-do not. What connects the pieces to each other and the South is, as Harris-Lopez asserts, a "focus on the South and southern African American folk and cultural traditions, reconceptualizations of and transcendence of Christianity, questions of racial and sexual identity, and issues of racial justice" (vii-viii).

Another common feature of the articles in the anthology is that they were originally written as conference papers, not geared for publication. That format means that Harris-Lopez is frequently less concerned with discussing previous critical work and more with presenting texts. This fact has significant consequences for the essays. Much space is taken up by retelling the plots of the novels with little attention paid to critical analysis.

What makes South of Tradition interesting is the selection of texts. Alice Walker's The Color Purple — scrutinized for its humorous aspects — James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are among the classics of the genre, but other texts are among the lesser known. Harris-Lopez's presentation of William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer and Henry Dumas's story "Ark of Bones" add aspects of African American literature not commonly read about.

Harris-Lopez's discussion of Ralph Ellison's posthumously published novel Juneteenth demonstrates one of the problems frequently found in South of Tradition. Juneteenth is a highly complex novel that defies the idea of brief summarization. Harris-Lopez attempts to go beyond mere summary and arrives at the conclusion that the language used by the main characters "ultimately becomes unreliable as a medium of explanation or communication" (193). Unfortunately, the presentation format does not allow Harris-Lopez sufficient space to substantiate her statements. The otherwise intriguing essay on William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer is equally hampered by the presentation format. The article makes no mention of any previous critical work on Kelly, who-since he is probably unknown to most readers-would deserve more of an introduction.

South of Tradition makes refreshing reading as an introduction to issues in African American literary studies beyond the immediate mainstream. Unfortunately, however, the book presents little more than that.