Canaan Bound

The Great Migration--the exodus of more than six million blacks fromtheir southern homes hoping for better lives in the North--is a definingevent of post-emancipation African-American life and a central featureof twentieth-century black literature. Lawrence Rodgers explores the historicaland literary significance of this event and in the process identifiesthe Great Migration novel as a literary form that intertwines geographyand identity.Drawing on a wide range of major literary voices, including Richard Wright,Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, as well as lesser-known writers suchas William Attaway (Blood on the Forge) and Dorothy West (The Living IsEasy), Rodgers conducts a kind of literary archaeology of the Great Migration.He mines the writers' biographical connections to migration and teasesapart the ways in which individual novels relate to one another, to thehistorical situation of black America, and to African-American literatureas a whole.In reading migration novels in relation to African-American literarytexts such as slave narratives, folk tales, and urban fiction, Rodgersaffirms the southern folk roots of African-American culture and arguesfor a need to stem the erosion of southern memory.