I guess in retrospect this was a really silly thing to do since I haven't read *any* of the literature he's criticizing in it but whatevs, it's done now. After reading it I think I am slotting two of the novels covered (Mumbo Jumbo and Their Eyes Were Watching God) into my queue somewhere because they sound pretty cool so I guess it did well by me in that respect.

Overall, I'd say it's a good survey of some very interesting literature, interspersed with some fascinatingly incisive insights here and there but which taken all in all isn't cohering for me as a whole the way the author intended. As a piece of literary criticism, great, but as the foundation of an entirely new theory/framework of criticism... enh, I'm not sold.

It's possible that I'm not fully appreciating the import of the book because I'm reading it in 2012 without any real knowledge of what Black Studies looked like in the late 1980s. Maybe the idea of taking black vernacular oral tradition seriously enough to apply it to lit criticism was just so absolutely revolutionary at the time that thinking to do it at all constituted a landmark achievement? ( )