Using Call And Response As A Teaching Tool
I've spent years working with undergraduate literature courses, and Call And Response The Riverside Anthology Of The African American Literary Tradition comes up more often than most textbooks. It's not the easiest read for first-year students, but it's one of the few collections that actually maps the conversation between different periods and voices. The book is organized thematically rather than strictly chronologically, which means you have to guide students through how these dialogues work. The anthology arranges texts so that one piece answers or challenges another across centuries. A poem by Countee Cullen sits next to a spiritual, and an essay by Claudia Rankine responds to something by Richard Wright. The concept of call and response comes directly from Black musical and oral traditions, so the structure isn't arbitrary. Gates and Anderson designed it so students can trace how writers have been talking to each other throughout the tradition. The problem is that students don't always see the connections immediately. I had a class last semester where nobody made the link between Zora Neale Hurston's folk writing and the earlier slave narratives until I spent a full session mapping specific motifs. They saw the individual texts fine. The architecture between them was invisible without direct instruction.
How To Get Students To Actually Use It
Don't assign the whole thing. It's too dense for that. Pick three or four paired sections per week and have students write one page tracking the dialogue. I usually start by asking them to identify what the "call" is in the first text, then find the "response" in the second. That's it. Simple structure. Most of them can handle that in about twenty minutes if they're reading carefully. The tricky part is when the pairing isn't obvious. Some sections in Call And Response The Riverside Anthology Of The African American Literary Tradition rely on subtle thematic echoes rather than direct references. I learned this the hard way during a seminar on 1960s poetry. I assigned a section pairing Gwendolyn Brooks with Amiri Baraka, expecting the students to catch the ideological shift between them. Half the class thought the texts were thematically similar rather than in tension. I had to reframe the question entirely, pointing out the specific formal choices in each poem that signaled a break. Took twenty extra minutes. Never again without prep work. One workaround that actually sticks: have students create a visual timeline or dialogue chart before discussion. I've them draw lines connecting ideas, phrases, or images between the paired texts. It forces them to engage with the structure rather than just summarizing each piece independently. Saves about fifteen minutes of discussion time going nowhere, which adds up over a semester.
Pitfalls I've Seen Repeatedly
The biggest issue is treating the anthology as a replacement for historical context. It's not. You still need to teach the periods, the movements, the biographical details. The call and response framework assumes students already know enough background to recognize what's being answered. Without that foundation, the whole system collapses into vague thematic hand-waving. Another problem: the later sections get heavier. The contemporary material can feel forced if the preceding units didn't build strong enough connections. I've adjusted my syllabus to slow down in the mid-century sections because the jump to present-day work is genuinely jarring without more bridge-building. The anthology also has some gaps that matter for certain courses. Caribbean and diasporic writers are underrepresented compared to U.S.-based authors. If your class includes those perspectives, you'll need supplementary readings regardless. Nothing personal against the editors, but the scope has limits.
Get the Full Details
Where To Find It
The current edition is available through Bedford/St. Martin's directly, and most university bookstores carry it. Used copies surface regularly on Amazon and AbeBooks, sometimes at half the price. Digital access through VitalSource or CourseReserve works fine for most students, though I prefer the physical copy because pagination matters for seminar discussions and students often annotate heavily. Marginalia in this book tends to be where the actual learning happens. If you're teaching this, plan for the pairing method to require more lead time than a standard textbook unit. Budget an extra class session per major section transition. The payoff is real, but the setup isn't automatic.
