Abstract
This chapter examines Africanisms and African Islamic influences or parallels in Zora Neal Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1992), three of the most celebrated works of twentieth-century African-American literature. It shows examples of African Islamic traditions that either survived in African-American culture or have stark similarities there, and how these surviving African traditions can be identified and better understood by comparing Senegalese and African-American ways of worshipping, living, communing, and speaking. The chapter helps to develop a new method of studying African-American literature by focusing on African retentions and parallels in the black Atlantic world.
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M’Baye, B. (2020). African Islamic Influences in Selected African-American Literary Writings. In: Ngom, F., Kurfi, M.H., Falola, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Islam in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45759-4_22
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