Giant talk: An anthology of Third World writings

by Quincy Troupe (Contributor)

546 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1975

About the author

Quincy Thomas Troupe, Jr. is an American poet, editor, journalist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla, California. He is best known as the biographer of Miles Davis, the jazz musician.

Reviews

[Reader in Tokyo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was published in 1975 and was one of the earliest anthologies in English of Third World lit that I've seen. Defining the Third World as "the world of the politically and economically oppressed" regardless of race, class or geography, it included some 206 poems, 25 short stories and 21 excerpts from novels, from some 160 writers from the United States, Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. Slightly more than half the book is devoted to the prose. Nearly all the U.S. writers were African American or Native American. There was nothing from Asia or the Middle East.

The selections were grouped under the broad, often overlapping categories of oppression and protest, violence, crisis of identity, music/language/rhythm, humor, ritual and magic, and "conceptual voyage," which the compilers argued were phases of development of Third World consciousness. Most of the pieces were published in the 1960s and 1970s.

I wouldn't have opened this book for the poems alone, but was impressed by humane poetry by Chinua Achebe, Sterling Brown, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Claude McKay and Christopher Okigbo. Although many of the other poems were beyond me, I enjoyed the large number and variety of prose writers from the regions covered. The compilers' theoretical framework didn’t feel necessary to enjoy the works.

Favorites were an excerpt from Another Country by James Baldwin, for the sensitive description from a man's point of view of the start of a relationship, and the short stories "The Cat" by Mario Arregui, "The Man" by Juan Rulfo and When the Rain Stops" by Antonio Montana, for their especially vivid, expressionistic styles.

Other writers in the book included Asturias, Toni Bambara, Baraka, Barry Beckham, Carpentier, Cesaire, Cortazar, Cullen, William Demby, Depestre, Donoso, Ellison, Fuentes, Garcia Marquez, Langston Hughes, Momaday, Toni Morrison, Neruda, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Paz, Senghor, Soyinka, Toomer, Trevisan, Walcott and Alice Walker.

I'd recommend this book for the informed, ambitious selection of writers, but most of all for its prose.