SOURCE: “Public and Private Discourses and the Black Female Subject: Gayl Jones’ Eva's Man,” in Callaloo, Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter, 1996, pp. 193-208.

In the essay below, Basu discusses the political motivations behind critical reaction to Jones's work and argues that Eva's Man differs from other African-American writings.

In the past two decades at least, we have witnessed an increasing politicization of literature in the academy. The text has been dislocated from the fixed and autonomous position it occupied in New Critical theory and made to participate in the larger machinery of cultural production. Such a move may, in general, have the effect of liberating the text from narrowly defined limits, but such critical maneuvers may generate an entirely different set of meanings in different cultural configurations. For example, unlike New Criticism which examined “literature for literature’s sake,” critical discourses concerning themselves with African-American literature often did not treat...