Charles Johnson's quest for black freedom in 'Oxherding Tale.'

From: African American Review | Date: December 22, 1995| Author: Coleman, James W. | Copyright information

'Oxherding Tale' was written by Charles Johnson. Johnson attempts to achieve freedom from the hegemony of the narrow tradition of black written textuality. This tradition controls black images by stereotyping them as victims of racism and describing the black experience as a struggle against whiteness. French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty has greatly influenced Johnson on the concept of a Lifeworld of language and experience.

Charles Johnson's main emphasis in Oxherding Tale (...

Read all of this article with a FREE trial to HighBeam Research

Related newspaper, magazine, and journal articles from HighBeam Research

Charles Johnson's quest for black freedom in 'Oxherding Tale.'
African American Review ; Charles Johnson's main emphasis in Oxherding Tale (1982) is on black written textuality. Oxherding Tale tries to achieve freedom from the hegemony of what Johnson sees as a narrow, limiting tradition of written black texts. This tradition, according to Johnson, propagandistically controls black
'Oxherding Tale' and 'Siddhartha:' philosophy, fiction, and the emergence of a hidden tradition. (novel by Charles Johnson; novel by German author Herman Hesse)
African American Review ; Charles Johnson has written a searching introduction to the Plume edition of Oxherding Tale, originally published in 1982, in which he carefully sets forth the genesis and publishing history of his second novel. This edition of Oxherding Tale is the first instance in which Johnson, within the
Books: A full term in the school of hard knocks Oxherding Tale by Charles Johnson Payback pounds 6.99
The Independent - London ; Charles Johnson's tales are set in the slavery days of the Deep South and deal with miscegenation, racism and buddhism. They involve young men with confusion-creating identities falling under the spell of older women with life-endangering tendencies. So when Flo Hatfield, a boa constrictor of a
A Conversation with Charles Johnson.(Interview)
TriQuarterly ; Novelist, short story writer, essayist, screenwriter, and cartoonist Charles Johnson received both his bachelor's degree in journalism and his master's in philosophy from Southern Illinois University before studying with the legendary John Gardner at SUNY-Stony Brook. Johnson has published two
Pensive portrait of a physicist who never actually existed
The Boston Globe ; Physicist Russell McCormmach's "Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist" (Harvard University Press, $9.95) is the portrait of a German theoretical physicist, Victor Jacob, in the early years of this century. Jacob actually never existed, but McCormmach has created a composite from an exploration of
"Nothing was Lost in the Masquerade": The Protean Performance of Genre and Identity in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale.(Critical Essay)
African American Review ; As many times as we reopen slavery's closure, we are hurtled rapidly forward into the dizzying motions of a symbolic enterprise, and it becomes increasingly clear that the cultural synthesis we call slavery was never homogeneous in its practices and conception, nor unitary in the faces it has
Page-Turning Excitement
The Washington Post ; YOU'VE SEEN the bumper stickers. Some folks brake for animals, some for seafood, some for Elvis Presley impersonators. And then, in a class by themselves, are those who brake for used books. Anywhere. Anytime. They're the sort who have never met a used book they didn't like. Or a used bookshop.
Mutiny On the Republic
The Washington Post ; MIDDLE PASSAGE By Charles Johnson Atheneum. 209 pp. $17.95 CHARLES JOHNSON's third novel, Middle Passage, is a curious romp through 19th-century America. Written in the form of a ship's log, the novel recounts the misadventures of Rutherford Calhoun, a former slave, a thief and ne'er-do-well from
Imagining slavery: Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson.
Studies in American Fiction ; ... shapeshifter, who teaches it to Andrew. At first, Bannon's lesson cannot sink in because Andrew is too busy trying to absorb the news that Bannon had snuffed his father. Andrew sees his impending death as the confirmation of his father's conviction that the slave ...
A selected checklist of works by and about Charles Johnson. (tabular data only)
African American Review ; Books by Johnson Black Humor [cartoons]. Chicago: Johnson publishing, 1970. Half-Past Nation-Time [cartoons]. California: Aware P, 1972. Faith and the Good Thing [novel]. New York: Viking, 1974. Oxherding Tale [novel]. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Tales and Conjurations