IDEOLOGY AND FOUR POST-1960 AFRO-AMERICAN NOVELISTS (KILLENS, KELLEY, REED, WALKER)

The study focuses on novels written by John Oliver Killens, William Melvin Kelley, Ishmael Reed, and Alice Walker. With the exception of Killens' Youngblood (1954), all the novels studied were written between 1962 and 1982, a period in Black American literary history that included, among other literary theories, the Black Aesthetic.; In the mid-1960s, several young black writers rejected Western aesthetic orthodoxy and elaborated the Black Aesthetic, an aesthetic ideology that prescribed a literature that would contribute to the psychological and cultural liberation of Black Americans. This ideology, which I suggest was inspired by Frantz Fanon's theory of decolonization and Malcolm X's political thought, created for many post-1960 Afro-American writers an atmosphere in which art and politics were no longer viewed to be incompatible.; My approach in the discussion of the four novelists above is borrowed from Louis Althusser's theory of ideology and the literary theory that it has generated, namely the criticism of Pierre Macherey, Terry Eagleton, and Tony Bennett.; From Section III through Section VI of the dissertation, I focus on individual writers. Killens' novels, I argue, are political bildungsromans which exemplify the break with integrationism and the practice of the Black Aesthetic in the novel form. In Section IV, I suggest that Kelley's novels show a transition from his principle of the autonomy of art to a politically committed art, particularly the education of the assimilated elite. In Section V, I trace the African and Afro-American folkloric origins of Reed's Neo-HooDoo aesthetic, and discuss his subversion of the Judeo-Christian cultural hegemony. Finally, I examine the ideologies of patriarchy and manhood in relation to Walker's feminist aesthetics.