How are certain African American cultural and social values retained in and through cultural artifacts — in this case, in quilts, music, and literature? Examining Alice Walker's still-revolutionary short stories "Everyday Use" and "Nineteen Fifty-Five," an excerpt from Ralph Ellison's classic "Invisible Man," and John Coltrane's parodic and transcendent "My Favorite Things," this paper explores how three great African American artists approach the questions of African American culture. What defines that culture? How does it change over time? Who owns it? And how does it survive and thrive amidst a U.S. American society and culture that is increasingly multicultural yet also commercially rapacious and stubbornly racist?

Cynthia Dobbs teaches courses in African American literature, American literature, creative writing, Ethnic Studies, and Gender Studies at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. She received her B.A. in English from Pomona College in 1987, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana, Africa, from 1987-1990, and then entered graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, where she received her Ph.D. in English in 1998. Her dissertation is a study of representations of racialized and gendered bodies in William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. Her intellectual interests range widely and include American modernism, African American literature, blues and jazz, Southern literature, feminist and psychoanalytic theory, and memoir.