African American & Black

Salvific Manhood foregrounds the radical power of male intimacy and vulnerability in surveying each of James Baldwin's six novels. Asserting that manhood and masculinity hold the potential for both tragedy and salvation, Ernest L. Gibson III highlights...

An artistic discussion on the critical potential of African American expressive culture In a major reassessment of African American culture, Phillip Brian Harper intervenes in the ongoing debate about the "proper" depiction of black people...

In Black Madness :: Mad Blackness Theri Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive. Pickens shows how Black speculative and science fiction authors such...

Toni Morrison features a collection of ten new essays by noted Morrison scholars, including recipients of the Toni Morrison Society Book Award. Focusing upon Morrison's most recently published novels (Paradise, Love, A Mercy) the contributors to this...

Black Atlas presents definitive new approaches to black geography. It focuses attention on the dynamic relationship between place and African American literature during the long nineteenth century, a volatile epoch of national expansion that gave rise to...

The Problem of the Future World is a compelling reassessment of the later writings of the iconic African American activist and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois. As Eric Porter points out, despite the outpouring of scholarship devoted to Du Bois, the broad...

As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial "order." Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to...

Neither Fugitive nor Free draws on the freedom suit as recorded in the press and court documents to offer a critically and historically engaged understanding of the freedom celebrated in the literary and cultural histories of transatlantic abolitionism...

Herman Beavers offers a richly nuanced study of Ernes J. Gaines, James Alan McPherson, and Ralph Ellison as writers who have found ways to invest circumstances that might otherwise be seen as sites of squalor or despair with a sense of cultural vitality...

The Blackademic Life critically examines academic fictions produced by black writers. In it, Lavelle Porter evaluates the depiction of academic and campus life in literature as a space for black writers to produce counternarratives that celebrate the...

How African American writers used Victorian literature to create a literature of their own Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this groundbreaking book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in...

Beginning in the 1830s, the white actor Thomas D. Rice took to the stage as Jim Crow, and the ragged and charismatic trickster of black folklore entered--and forever transformed--American popular culture. Jump Jim Crow brings together for the first time...

This book focuses on the collaborative illustrated volumes published during the Harlem Renaissance, in which African Americans used written and visual texts to shape ideas about themselves and to redefine African American identity. Anne Elizabeth Carroll...

Novel Bondage unravels the interconnections between marriage, slavery, and freedom through renewed readings of canonical nineteenth-century novels and short stories by black and white authors. Situating close readings of fiction alongside archival...

Recasting the history of African American literature, Shadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts-including Claude McKay's Amiable with Big Teeth-to tell the stories of black special collections and their struggle for institutional...

Constraints on freedom, education, and individual dignity have always been fundamental in determining who is able to write, when, and where. Taking the singular instance of the African American writer to heart, William W. Cook and James Tatum here argue...

ASALH 2023 Book Prize Finalist Reveals how disability and disablement have shaped Black social life in America Through both law and custom, the color line has cast Black people as innately disabled and thus unfit for freedom, incapable of...

A deep dive into mid-century African American newspapers, exploring how Black pulp fiction reassembled genre formulas in the service of racial justice In recent years, Jordan Peele's Get Out, Marvel's Black Panther, and HBO's Watchmen have been lauded...

The works of African American authors and artists are too often interpreted through the lens of authenticity. They are scrutinized for "positive" or "negative" representations of Black people and Black culture or are assumed to communicate some truth...

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) exemplified the ideal of the American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter, diplomat, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and first African American executive of the NAACP. Originally published...

Stowe's second anti-slavery novel is a primary text for students of literature and history - less well-known but now more pertinent than Uncle Tom's Cabin. This vigorous and compulsive read combines thought-provoking themes, rich characterisation, satire...

This volume brings together a broad range of key writings from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, among the most significant cultural movements in American history. The aesthetic counterpart of the Black Power movement, it burst onto the...

Thinking While Black brings together the work and ideas of the most notorious film critic in America, one of the most influential intellectuals in the United Kingdom, and a political and cultural generation that consumed images of rebellion and...

The uncontested center of the black pulp fiction universe for more than four decades was the Los Angeles publisher Holloway House. From the late 1960s until it closed in 2008, Holloway House specialized in cheap paperbacks with page-turning narratives...

The first volume to expound African American literary theory from the 1920s to present African American Literary Theory: A Reader is the first volume to document the central texts and arguments in African American literary theory from the 1920s through...

Ralph Ellison and Cinema reveals the crucial role of cinema throughout Ellison’s career. In his most famous work, Invisible Man (1952), cinema is part of a cultural and institutional landscape; as such, it is integral to the way the novel’s protagonist...

Radical Black feminist refusal through the works of mid-twentieth-century African American women writers Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction offers new and insightful readings of African American women’s writings in the 1930s–1950s, illustrating how...

The Roots of Cane proposes a new way to read one of the most significant works of the New Negro Renaissance, Jean Toomer’s Cane. Rather than focusing on the form of the book published by Boni and Liveright, what Toomer would later call a single textual...

Otherworldly Mothering argues that literary works by Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, and Toni Cade Bambara reimagine subjectivity in processual and relational terms through a rewriting of maternal praxis, a technique that...

One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June Jordan’s Brooklyn apartment to eat gumbo, drink champagne, and talk about their work. Calling themselves “The...

Introduction to Afrofuturism delivers a fresh and contemporary introduction to Afrofuturism, discussing key themes, understandings, and interdisciplinary topics across multiple genres in Black Literature, film, and music. From its origins to the present,...

Introduction to Afrofuturism delivers a fresh and contemporary introduction to Afrofuturism, discussing key themes, understandings, and interdisciplinary topics across multiple genres in Black Literature, film, and music. From its origins to the present,...