Bombingham: Anthony Grooms's Contribution to Constructing Control over Black Representations in Contemporary American Literature

Abstract

Some Critics complain that American literature has done a poor job of accurately depicting blacks and that an authentic portrait presenting the black man as a free American citizen has not yet been painted. In the main, these complaints draw upon the notion that early and modern American fiction confined the images of African Americans to stereotypically limited depictions, exemplified as primitive characters that needed the protection of the 'benevolent' whites they served. Black authors had found that obtaining access to correct narrativerepresentation was not simple: to turn the field into a viable space for black representation would require genuine social hanges that many whites were unwilling to make.A dramatic change took place, nevertheless. On the 15th of September, 1963, racially motivated bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killed four black girls, and this incident generated an unprecedented literary response from black writers, who started to gain more of a sense in black pride and cultural identity as well. This paper aims at examining how Anthony Grooms's novel Bombingham has contributed to representing black characters and constructing a black identity that challenges the stereotypical depictions dominating the pre-Birmingham era. Almost as soon as blacks could write, it seems, they set out to redefine – against already received racist stereotypes – who and what a black person was. (Henry Louis Gates: 1984, 131)..