Reclaiming community in contemporary African-American fiction

At the crossroads

"Always yes and always no": affirmation and doubt in John Edgar Wideman's fiction

"Across the borders": imagining the future in Toni Cade Bambara's The salt eaters

"As within, so it is without": the composite self in Charles Johnson's Oxherding tale and Middle passage

"Listening below the surface": beyond the boundaries in Gloria Naylor's fiction

"You don't see what I don't see": communal construction of meaning in Ernest Gaines's fiction

Performing cultural work.