Critical Essay | Critical Essay by José David Saldivar

Critical Essay by José David Saldivar

SOURCE: “The Real and the Marvelous in Charleston, South Carolina: Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo,” in Genealogy and Literature, edited by Lee Quinby, University of Minnesota Press, 1991, pp. 175-92.

In the following essay, Saldivar traces the magic realism in the works of Ntozake Shange to both Latin-American and Afro-Caribbean influences.

It is probably true that critics of African and Afro-American literature were trained to think of the institution of literature essentially as a set of Western texts.

—Henry Louis Gates Jr. The Signifying Monkey

Ntozake Shange has been widely praised for her oppositional feminist “combat-breathing” poetics in her explosive Broadway choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1976) and for her powerful “lyricism” in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), but her use of Afro-Caribbean and Latin American magic realism has received little attention, owing to an inadequate understanding of a vast and rich...
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