[In the following excerpt, Davis criticizes the assimilation of mainstream white cultural values in Disappearing Acts and contemporary African-American literature.]

Now that the '90s are at hand, it's inevitable that someone will announce a new generation of writers, folks who'll be the bridge to the next century. (WOW!) The "new generation" of African-American writers, novelist Terry McMillan said not too long ago, are "different from a generation before" because "they are not as race oriented, and they are not as protest oriented." I wondered at first who she was talking about. The novelists being published right now are, for the most part, around 40. Most of them began getting published 20 years ago, but those who were the talk of the '70s seem wildly different—and I mean wildly—from the crew McMillan is describing. The young writers back then were full of the anger, rhythms, sexuality, and wicked humor of jazz, r&b, and the '60s. I doubt if anyone would have guessed that the next generation was going to be less "race oriented."

In the poets' cafes Ntozake Shange, Wesley Brown, Charlotte Carter, Pedro Pietri, Gylan Kain, Pat Parker, Victor Hernandez-Cruz, David Henderson, and Lorenzo Thomas were ripping the lid off our neat and tidy preconceptions. Floating from hand to hand were out-of-print copies of J. J. Phillips's Mojo Hand and Carlene Hatcher Polite's Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play. Ishmael Reed's early books introduced us to the trickster, and Gayl Jones's novels spared us nothing. The energy was outside the mainstream, as it usually is for young writers, and that energy became a credo: let it be raw and raggedy, intense, black, and yes, self-righteous. It was fun.

All of us who're now somewhere around 40—whether we were in the marches, or in the Panthers, or the lonely Negroes at Hendrix concerts, or none of the above—were in the first generation to go en masse into white institutions when the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action took force. Before that time, we knew white America, north or south, largely by way of television (which we watched with some restriction because it was new, and our parents were understandably frightened of it). Like our parents and grandparents, we were, and are still, different. We started out life in a truly separate culture inside America, and therefore first learned to think, like it or not, with Race Mind, the black half of what W. E. B. Du Bois called double-consciousness. African-American literature of the '60s and '70s made the self-conscious choice to give voice to that black language without the explanatory context of earlier work. In today's self-censoring atmosphere, Race Mind is carefully muted. The white half of that double-consciousness is more often used for public presentations: Jesse Jackson uses it in speeches, and yet his Race Mind is coded within what he says.

If four novels published in the past few months, including one by McMillan, are any indication, there is a crop of African-American fiction coming in the '90s, written by 40ish folk, that's less interested in race and protest. It speaks in the practiced tongue of white mainstream literature. Melvin Dixon, Marita Golden, Tina McElroy Ansa, and McMillan show in their work a silent—in some cases maybe unconscious—struggle with assimilation. Each of their books describes some part of the lonely, self-involved journey of the middle-class African American who has access to some little piece of the Dream and is as deeply ensconced in American mass culture as in our boisterous yet closely held black world.

More Bup Art than Black Art, these African-American writers' current work shares bourgeois mores and values with lots of other work by the 40-something generation. Buppism moves literature toward the middle of the road: conservative stylistic choices in form and language taken from mainstream American models; a personal focus, as opposed to the ever-enlarging world view that shifted from Mississippi to internationalism in the late '60s, '70s, and early '80s (and, in the case of Alice Walker, included several millennia); the death of the heroic figure, so prominent in black literature as recent as Beloved (Morrison raised questions about the nature of heroism in the African-American context); and an absence of protest, which has been replaced by homilies to survival.

Following Baldwin's edict to "take the language apart," African-American writers have been for some time revising or destroying forms to make them more expressionistic. The '90s writers return to story-telling as a private act, the exorcism of existential demons that could be viewed as nonracial. The old Race Mind, once a necessity for survival, is being lost to a naïve pragmatism: we can imitate and join. Despite many efforts to salvage them, the old sayings of the village have one by one been consigned to the place where America put the dog-tags, ankle-cuffs, and bills of sale for the village folk.

Twenty years after the introduction of Africana studies in American universities, African-American scholars have institutionalized the study of black life; they now argue that their black students need the courses to know who they are. As the culture continues to evolve, the language of black experience is disseminated and assimilated by the mass white audience almost as soon as it appears. Race Mind is marketed as late-night style with Arsenio Hall. The larger, more profound wisdom and practice is being lost to a culture that erases everything but success, and docs not replenish the spirit.

As we turn the corner of the century, the shared yearnings based on race, gender, generation, or family so common to black fiction could become inscrutable relics of the past, like the Motown records a Bup executive retrieves from the garbage in George Wolfe's play The Colored Museum, or those mama-on-the-couch shows he parodies, which actually did once say something about how we folks felt behind the veil in America….

Disappearing Acts, like Terry McMillan's first novel, Mama, is an energetic and earthy book that takes place wholly within the confines of an intense relationship. While the narrator of Mama sounded like a character in the story, in this book McMillan uses two alternating voices that speak directly to the reader. The whole world is filtered through the self-naming, self-mythologizing first-person monologue—from racism to masturbation, parental conflicts to staying on a diet. And because there's no one obvious for Zora Banks or Franklin Swift to tell it to—they are loners in every way—the question is whether these folks are for real. In many ways they are quite ordinary, in other ways they are hardly tangible.

Zora is a young black woman on the lookout for the right man while she pursues singing ambitions; Franklin is a construction worker frustrated by his inability to get steady work in a closed industry. Zora sounds a lot like the narrator of Mama, in spite of her Essence-style self-improvement rap: "When I started visualizing myself less abundant, and desirable again, that's how I think I was able to get here—to 139 pounds." She likes to tell you straight up how it is: "I've got two major weaknesses: tall black men and food." Though reviewers have said that Franklin dominates the book, he has the same brassy, up-front, I'm-gon'-tell-you-exactly style as Zora. "Don't ask me why I did some stupid shit like that. Ringing that woman's doorbell at that time of morning. And with a lame-ass line like, 'You drink coffee?'… She was still pretty, though, even with no makeup. Her skin looked like Lipton tea. I saw them thick nipples sticking out through that pink bathrobe, and I felt Tarzan rising." Yes, a tall black man whose swinging thing was made in Hollywood.

Even though Zora and Franklin are last-week contemporary, they are also like classic folklore characters come to life in Brooklyn. She's the wily black woman of yore, smart-talking Eve who's always got a little something on the rail for the lizard, as we used to say. She's also a sophisticated shopper who likes fancy cheeses and bottled water, and she says shit all the time. Zora has all the pulls and tugs of feminism versus the feminine that a modern black woman who's read Walker and Shange is supposed to have. She's not unlike Zora Neale Hurston's sassy folk women—characters Cosmo would never dare to pop-psychoanalyze.

Complicated as Franklin is supposed to be, he is a savvy urban John Henry—he don't take no tea fo' the fever. An intellectual Tina Turner meets a hardhat Ike. They are both bricks and though they may chip each other, they ain't never gonna blend. They live and work in New York City, but are in a very insulated world: their problems are completely personal. Their relationship is doomed by mutual expectations and ended by an outburst of gratuitous male violence. Let's just say it wasn't needed for the love affair to fall apart.

These two are as they are; like other folk heroes, they don't change much, or drag skeletons out of the closet, and they learn their lessons the hard way. They've been created by years of past mythologizing, drawn their images from popular culture, black and white. They arc black, sho'nuff—the last thing I would say about McMillan's people is that they ain't black—but they're black in big, bold strokes. And that means her work will continue to raise questions among African Americans about the fuzzy line between realism and popular misconception. And at the same time, McMillan is, as she said, less race-conscious. She confines herself to the day-to-day life struggle, as told from behind the mask Claude McKay so poignantly described. McMillan uses, almost exclusively, the performance side of black character, emphasizing the most public, most familiar aspects of us. If you smell a little song and dance in the self-sufficient ribaldry, it's there.

Still, hard as it may be to imagine, for me at least, I suppose the time had to come when race would cease to be the obsession of African-American writers, and in its place would be some form of ordinary life—stripped in varying degrees of "context," depoliticized. If I can feel it in the street—the dislocation that can no longer be healed by inspiring leaders—I shouldn't be surprised to find it in our literature. I hope for some understanding from novels about African-American life, but perhaps it isn't there to be had. Welcome to the '90s.

The work of Marita Golden, Melvin Dixon, Tina McElroy Ansa, and Terry McMillan seems ambivalent and narrowly focused after nearly two decades of uninterrupted literary conjuring from those fabulous wild women of the '70s and '80s black-lit boom. Morrison, Walker, and company continue to write books that are ambitious, intensely lyrical, and profoundly disturbing; yet clearly their work is only one end of the spectrum. These new novels show that African-American fiction is miscegenating. Though the white world does not intrude in the form of characters, it is very much alive—recognized or not—in the minds of the blacks. The African Americans in these four works have become garden-variety Americans. They seem confined by the African-American culture that has defined and nurtured writers before them.

In the '70s, cultural nationalists ranted about black women writers, vilifying them/us as purveyors of "mulatto consciousness." I was amused by the clumsiness of the term, and, as intended, insulted. Was black culture so circumscribed that we could not merengue, or talk about men, or whatever it was that upset this crew of fuddy-duddies? Or were they just talking about the lightness of certain writers' skin? That happened too. A few weeks ago I heard Trey Ellis, self-appointed propagandist for the New Black Aesthetic invented by my colleague Greg Tate, proudly defining HIS (30ish) generation as "cultural mulattoes." While I think Tale observed that cultural appropriation is a common denominator among a certain cadre of artists, Ellis seems to be defining his generation by the conditions of their upbringing: We are therefore we are, something like that. It sure ain't like announcing you're the New Negro.

The writers of the '90s are sitting in the middle of a big mess—among critics and other artists screaming "Who are we?" while the newspapers holler that black music and white performers equal popular magic. American culture has not been a blending pot so much as a river Lethe for all its peoples, their languages and arts. Have we baptized our children there only to wonder later to whom they pray? I think George Wolfe is right—this cultural nervous breakdown is likely to land us in the Colored Museum. Collard greens and bean pie will be served at the snack bar.