In Black and White (series) Six Profiles of African American Authors (Series)

All 6 Volumes of In Black and White: Six Profiles of African American Authors can be licensed together or indivdually by volume.

EPISODES

VOL. 1: CHARLES JOHNSON(28 minutes)
VOL. 2: GLORIA NAYLOR (22 minutes)
VOL. 3: TONI MORRISON (25 minutes)
VOL. 4: ALICE WALKER (31 minutes)
VOL. 5: AUGUST WILSON (21 minutes)
VOL. 6: JOHN WIDEMAN (27 minutes)

In 1992 In Black and White was the first video series devoted to the life and work of contemporary African American authors. It introduces students and general readers to six of America's most talented and challenging writers: Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman and August Wilson.

These authors' work is helped to define a new multi-cultural American literary canon for the 21st Century. As Nobel Prize- winning novelist Toni Morrison observes in her program, "American literature is incoherent without the contribution of African Americans."

Teachers and librarians will want to use these "video prefaces" to encourage viewers to explore the exciting work of these six authors. Each program uses interviews with the writers and excerpts from their books to locate their work in the broader context of African American history and letters.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson, for example, feels his plays on Black history originate in "the blood's memory." Toni Morrison tries to heal the wounds of the African American past by confronting them in her novels. John Edgar Wideman draws on his own family's experiences to explore the painful contradictions of contemporary Black life. Gloria Naylor says that her sharply etched portraits of Black communities "help us celebrate voraciously that which is ours."

Novelist Charles Johnson, on the other hand, combines Black folklore and modern phenomenology to "seek the universal in the particulars of the Black experience." And Alice Walker explains how her "womanist" perspective has helped her reconcile her triple identity as a woman, an African American and a writer. "It's like having three eyes, three hearts," she says. Each author emphasizes the crucial role writing has played in African Americans' continuing struggle for self-definition.