Download or read book Ride Out the Wilderness written by Melvin Dixon and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Often considered alienated from mainstream culture and consigned to negative environments, Afro-American writers have created alternative spatial and geographical metaphors to develop a positive sense of individual and cultural identity. Melvin Dixon demonstrates how three principal figures of the land--the wilderness, the underground, and the mountaintop--have become places of refuge and cultural revitalization for the performance of identity, from early slave songs and fugitive narratives to modern and contemporary fiction"--Jacket.