Experimental writer Carlene Hatcher Polite reflects her political and artistic concerns in a unique fictional style that has helped to establish the innovative modes popularized by Ishmael Reed. Her first novel, The Flagellants, published in English in 1967, ushered in an era in which Afro-American fiction moved beyond the conventions of realism. Marked by a mastery of language and a love of rhetoric, especially that of black cultural revolution, Polite's work evidences her struggle with fictional forms and reflects her doubts about the traditional novel as medium for her art. Yet, she has written almost exclusively in the novel form. Both The Flagellants and Sister X and The Victims of Foul Play (1975) exhibit her special talent for stylistic innovations used to break out of the constraints of naturalistic plot and character development. Her two novels have earned Polite a place among contemporary Afro-American literary experimentators, particularly Charles Wright, William...