Letter," by Mariama Ba, "Devil on the Cross," by Ngug" wa Thiongo, and "July's People," by Nadine Gordimer. Specifically, it will discuss and explain gender and family in "So Long a Letter," the aspects of Colonialism and Imperialism in "Devil on the Cross," and cultural freedom and integrity in "July's People." THREE AFRICAN NOVELS In "So Long a Letter," Mariama Ba writes of Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese schoolteacher in her 50s, whose

The fact that this figure remains a guess says something important about what Morrison was up against in trying to find out the full story of the slave trade. Much of that story has been ignored, left behind, or simply lost. Through her works she attempted to retell the stories of grief associated with slavery and terror, her characters living their lives with greater understanding of its value than almost

" You figure, Williams explained to the author, you don't like what's happening at home in Chicago, and now in the U.S. Marines "...you finally get a chance to get away." Those were Williams' reasons for joining the military and participating in the Vietnam War as an African-American youth. Indeed Williams saw the military as not just an escape, but as "a form of incarceration" - but the war might

Social dissent and unrest should not be the result of multiculturalism, the authors point out, but nonetheless those are the social realities, in many instances, of the new global picture. There is now, like it or not, a "blurring of cultural borderlines," the authors report; and as a result, the notion of culture within the word "multiculturalism" no longer refers to habits and customs of a people in anthropological terms.

African-American Racial Passing in the Oxherding Tale This paper discusses references to the topic of racial passing in the novel Oxherding Tale by Charles Johnson. The discussion tries to answer the questions of why, how, and with what effects Charles Johnson mentions this theme in the novel. The main character in the novel is Andrew. He had his mother's hair. She was the wife of a plantation owner in South Carolina. His father

The two have a unity in their interactions, wanting essentially the same things. The family forms a social system based on the interactions among the members of the family. This is seen throughout the book as each member shows that what he or she has, needs and values depends upon the nature of the social system to which he or she belongs. In this case, Maya, as do other people,