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Oreo has all the hallmarks of a postmodern novel in its avoidance of profundity and its utterly playful spirit. The novel draws no conclusions and the quest leads to no giant revelatory payoffs. The father and his secret about her birth constitute, in the end—and without giving anything away—as absurdist and feminist a send-up of the patriarchal myth as one could hope to find. The novel at every turn embraces ambiguity. Its quest-driven plot is at every step diverted by wordplay and metareferences to itself. It feels in many ways more in line stylistically, aesthetically, with Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut than with Sonia Sanchez and Ntzoke Shange, to name two other black female writers of Ross’s time.

Oreo� was published seven years after this anthology; the second-wave feminist movement had come of age, and women were beginning to find their voices, cracking open the male literary establishment, bit by bit. By the nineteen-eighties, black literature was a dark male symphony no longer. Black women writers had come into vogue. And yet, in the nineteen-nineties, as I read “Oreo� in my apartment in Fort Greene, the birthplace of post-soul black bohemia, Ross felt to me like part of some future that had yet to arrive.

Paradoxically, as much as it was concerned with defining the cultural distinctiveness of African Americans, the Black Arts movement also helped to create unprecedented opportunities for the creative expression of African Americans to enter and influence “mainstream� American culture. Sometimes the more “black rage� was vented in the work, the more the writer was celebrated in the mainstream culture. In addition to this tense interaction of political, aesthetic, and commercial impulses, another contradiction that the Black Arts movement posed for authors was the idea that black Americans possessed no authentic literature or language of their own. Writers wrestled with the dilemma that they were severed from the spoken languages and oral traditions of their African ancestors, and had no intrinsic connection to the language and literature of their historical oppressors. The English language itself was perceived by some as a tool of oppression. The more fluent in standard English, or other European languages, the more immersed in established literary culture, the more likely one might be accused of forsaking one’s own traditions, or abandoning the black community � by writing works it could not comprehend, or enjoy, or draw upon for inspiration in the coming revolution that radical activists envisioned.

Fran Ross’s novel,ÌýOreo, was published in 1974, when the Black Arts movement had reached the height of its influence. Yet, as its title signals,ÌýOreoÌýdoes not claim to represent any singularly authentic black experience. More eccentric than Afrocentric, Ross’s novel calls attention to the hybridity rather than the racial or cultural purity of African Americans...

In Oreo’s interactions with members of both sides of her family, as well as with neighbors, friends, acquaintances, and strangers, Ross’s novel suggests that acculturation is not a one-way street, but is more like a subway system with graffiti-tagged cars that travel uptown as well as downtown, or even more like an interconnected network of multi-lane freeways. Particularly in racially diverse and integrated settings, immigrants of various races and national origins, on their way to becoming American, may emulate the cultural styles of black Americans, since African Americans, though a minority, are as much the founders of American culture as Anglo Americans. Anglos themselves are a minority of white Americans. Oreo’s biracial and bicultural heritage is not so exceptional when one considers that most native-born Americans, regardless of skin color, are products of racial hybridity, just as American culture and language are products of cultural and linguistic hybridity...