Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition is a compilation of literary and cultural works that originated from call and response patterns in African and African American cultural traditions. The 1997 anthology includes works representing the centuries-long emergence of this distinctly Black literary and cultural aesthetic in fiction, poetry, drama, essays, sermons, speeches, criticism, journals, and song lyrics from spirituals to rap. Writings ranging from Queen Latifah to Phyllis Wheatley and LeRoi Jones are included within this volume.
The anthology, published by the Houghton Mifflin Company, organizes its selections around three themes: the pattern of call and response, the journey toward freedom, and major historical events in the African American experience. The anthology editors have woven together selections, critical analysis of the texts, historical background, and biographies into a scholarly, unified, and chronological approach to African American literature and culture. Dr. Patricia Liggins Hill of the University of San Francisco served as general editor of the anthology.
Famous quotes containing the words call, riverside, anthology, african, american, literary and/or tradition:
“There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Upset at the young wife’s
first loss of virtue
in a riverside thicket,
a flock of birds
flies up,
mourning the loss
with their wings.”
—Hla Stavhana (c. 50 A.D.)
“I please
To plant some more dew-wet anemones
That they may weep.”
—Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.
AWP. Anthology of World Poetry, An. Mark Van Doren, ed. (Rev. and enl. Ed., 1936)
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)
“‘Tis the gift to be simple ‘tis the gift to be free
‘Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be
And when we find ourselves in the place just right
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.”
—Unknown. ‘Tis the Gift to Be Simple.
AH. American Hymns Old and New, Vols. I–II. Vol. I, with music; Vol. II, notes on the hymns and biographies of the authors and composers. Albert Christ-Janer, Charles W. Hughes, and Carleton Sprague Smith, eds. (1980)
“There was a literary gentleman present who who had dramatised in his time two hundred and forty-seven novels as fast as they had come out—and who was a literary gentleman in consequence.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“One might imagine that a movement which is so preoccupied with the fulfillment of human potential would have a measure of respect for those who nourish its source. But politics make strange bedfellows, and liberated women have elected to become part of a long tradition of hostility to mothers.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)