Black Studies: Literary Criticism

Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon by Lovalerie King (Editor); Shirley Moody-Turner (Editor) In this volume, Lovalerie King and Shirley Moody-Turner have compiled a collection of essays that offer access to some of the most innovative contemporary black fiction while addressing important issues in current African American literary studies.

Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination by Kristen Lillvis Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination examines the future-oriented visions of black subjectivity in works by contemporary black women writers, filmmakers, and musicians, including Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Julie Dash, and Janelle Monáe.

Searching for Sycorax: Black Women's Hauntings of Contemporary Horror by Kinitra D. Brooks Searching for Sycorax highlights the unique position of Black women in horror as both characters and creators. Kinitra D. Brooks creates a racially gendered critical analysis of African diasporic women, challenging the horror genre's historic themes and interrogating forms of literature that have often been ignored by Black feminist theory.

Precarious Passages: The Diasporic Imagination in Contemporary Black Anglophone Fiction by Tuire Valkeakari Makes a compelling case for a rethinking of narrative moments including slavery, the Middle Passage, and colonization that have defined the fiction produced in a transatlantic geography. Provokes a reassessment of notions of Africa as an ur-home and figurations of nation-state. A

Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing About Africa by John Cullen Gruesser Black on Black provides the first comprehensive analysis of the modern African American literary response to Africa, from W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk to Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Combining cutting-edge theory, extensive historical and archival research, and close readings of individual texts.

Crossing B(l)ack: Mixed-Race Identity in Modern American Fiction and Culture by Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins Dagbovie-Mullins adds a new dimension to this dialogue as she investigates the ways in which various mixed-race writers and public figures have redefined both “blackness” and “whiteness” by invoking multiple racial identities. Focusing on several key novels—Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), Lucinda Roy's Lady Moses (1998), and Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998)

The Search for Wholeness and Diaspora Literacy in Contemporary African American Literature by Silvia Pilar Castro-Borrego This volume has as a cohesive argument the exploration of the different manifestations of the search for wholeness and spirituality in the writings of contemporary African American women writers, covering different literary genres such as fiction (both novels and short stories), drama and poetry.

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century by Nazera Sadiq Wright Long portrayed as a masculine endeavor, the African American struggle for progress often found expression through an unlikely literary figure: the black girl. Nazera Sadiq Wright uses heavy archival research on a wide range of texts about African American girls to explore this understudied phenomenon.

Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic by Stefan M. Wheelock Wheelock shows how black antislavery writers were able to counteract ideologies of white supremacy while fostering a sense of racial community and identity. The major figures he discusses—Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, and Maria Stewart—engaged the concepts of democracy, freedom, and equality as these ideas ripened within the context of racial terror and colonial hegemony.

Black Well-Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black Literature by Andrea Stone Analyzing slave narratives, emigration polemics, a murder trial, and black-authored fiction, Andrea Stone highlights the central role physical and mental health and well-being played in antebellum black literary constructions of selfhood. At a time when political and medical theorists emphasized black well-being in their arguments for or against slavery, African American men and women developed their own theories about what it means to be healthy and well in contexts of injury, illness, sexual abuse, disease, and disability.

Literary and Sociopolitical Writings of the Black Diaspora in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries by Kersuze Simeon-Jones Literary and Sociopolitical Writings of the Black Diaspora in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries traces the historiography of literary and sociopolitical movements of the Black Diaspora in the writings of key political figures.

Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America by Tess Chakkalakal 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 material concerning the actual marriages of authors such as Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, and Frank J. Webb.

Mutha' Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture by L. H. Stallings Mutha' is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture explores the importance of sexual desire in the formation of radical Black females' subjectivities in Black women's culture through the trope of the indefinable trickster figure.

Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore. by Alan Dundes Exploring the scope, diversity, and vitality of black culture, here is a fascinating collection of more than sixty articles from some of the most perceptive and authoritative commentators upon the black experience--Zora Neale Hurston, J. Mason Brewer, Sterling A. Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, Willis Laurence James, John Lovell Jr., Langston Hughes, Charles W. Chesnutt, Alan Lomax, Ralph Ellison, A. Philip Randolph, Newbell Niles Puckett, Roger D. Abrahams, and many others.

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual by Robert Reid-Pharr Reid-Pharr asserts that these and other post-World War II intellectuals announced the very themes of race, gender, and sexuality with which so many contemporary critics are now engaged. While at its most elemental Once You Go Black is an homage to these thinkers, it is at the same time a reconsideration of black Americans as agents, and not simply products, of history.

Ezili's Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders by Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley From the dagger mistress Ezili Je Wouj and the gender-bending mermaid Lasiren to the beautiful femme queen Ezili Freda, the Ezili pantheon of Vodoun spirits represents the divine forces of love, sexuality, prosperity, pleasure, maternity, creativity, and fertility. Drawing on her background as a literary critic Tinsley theorizes black Atlantic sexuality by tracing how contemporary queer Caribbean and African American writers and performers evoke Ezili.

Mutha' Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture by L. H. Stallings Mutha' is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture explores the importance of sexual desire in the formation of radical Black females' subjectivities in Black women's culture through the trope of the indefinable trickster figure.

On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility by Ernesto Javier Martínez On Making Sense juxtaposes texts produced by black, Latino, and Asian queer writers and artists to understand how knowledge is acquired and produced in contexts of racial and gender oppression. From James Baldwin's 1960s novel Another Country to Margaret Cho's turn-of-the-century stand-up comedy, these works all exhibit a preoccupation with intelligibility, or the labor of making sense of oneself and of making sense to others.

Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture by Stefanie K. Dunning Dunning explores the ways in which the interracial intersects with queerness, blackness, whiteness, class, and black national identity. She shows that representations of interracial desire do not follow the logic of racial exclusion. Instead they are metaphorical and anti-biological. Rather than diluting race, interracial desire makes race visible. By invoking the interracial, black gay and lesbian artists can remake our conception of blackness.

In the Life and in the Spirit: Homoerotic Spirituality in African American Literature by Marlon Rachquel Moore Examines a range of fiction that challenges widespread assumptions about what it means to be a black person of faith.

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination by Darieck Scott Challenging the conception of empowerment associated with the Black Power Movement and its political and intellectual legacies in the present, Darieck Scott contends that power can be found not only in martial resistance, but, surprisingly, where the black body has been inflicted with harm or humiliation.Theorizing the relation between blackness and abjection by foregrounding often neglected depictions of the sexual exploitation and humiliation of men in works by James Weldon Johnson, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Samuel R. Delany

Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts by Juda Bennett Offers the first queer reading of all ten of Morrison's novels.

Heroism in the New Black Poetry by D. H. Melhem The six poets interviewed here have participated in and shaped the vanguard of this movement. Their poetry reflects the critical alternatives of African American life -- separatism and integration, feminism and sexual identity, religion and spirituality, humanism and Marxism, nationalism and internationalism. They unite in their commitment to Black solidarity and advancement.

Aphrodite's Daughters: Three Modernist Poets of the Harlem Renaissance by Maureen Honey Aphrodite's Daughters introduces us to three amazing women who were at the forefront of all these developments, poetic iconoclasts who pioneered new and candidly erotic forms of female self-expression. Maureen Honey paints a vivid portrait of three African American women—Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery—who came from very different backgrounds but converged in late 1920s Harlem to leave a major mark on the literary landscape.

In the Heart of the Beat: the Poetry of Rap by Alexs Pate Pate argues for a fresh understanding of rap as an example of powerful and effective poetry, rather than a negative cultural phenomenon.Pate articulates a way of'reading'rap that makes visible both its contemporary and historical literary values. He encourages the reader to step beyond the dominance of the beat and the raw language and come to an appreciation of rap's literary and poetic dimensions. What emerges is a vision of rap as an exemplary form of literary expression, rather than a profane and trendy musical genre.

Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing by Anthony Reed Through extended analyses of works by African American and Afro-Caribbean writers—including N. H. Pritchard, Suzan-Lori Parks, NourbeSe Philip, Kamau Brathwaite, Claudia Rankine, Douglas Kearney, Harryette Mullen, and Nathaniel Mackey—Reed develops a new sense of the literary politics of formally innovative writing and the connections between literature and politics since the 1960s.

Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic by Houston A. Baker When Houston A. Baker, Jr., one of America’s foremost literary critics, first published Afro-American Poetics in 1988, it was hailed as a major revisionist history of both African American culture and criticism.

Jazz Griots: Music As History in the 1960s African American Poem by Jean-Philippe Marcoux This study is about how four representative African American poets in the 1960s, Langston Hughes, Umbra's David Henderson, and the Black Arts Movement's Sonia Sanchez, and Amiri Baraka engage, in the tradition of African griots, in poetic dialogues with aesthetics, music, politics, and Black History, and in so doing narrate, using jazz as meta-language, genealogies, etymologies, cultural legacies, and Black (hi)stories.

Difficult Diasporas: the Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic by Samantha Pinto In this comparative study of contemporary black atlantic women writers, the author demonstrates the role of aesthetics in defining the relationship between race, gender, and location. Thinking beyond national identity to include African, African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Black British literature, this publication brings together an innovative archive of twentieth-century texts marked by their break with conventional literary structures.

New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000 by Barbara Christian; Gloria Bowles (Editor); M. Giulia Fabi (Editor); Ariene R. Keizer (Editor) A passionate and celebrated pioneer in her own words New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000 collects a selection of essays and reviews from Barbara Christian, one of the founding voices in black feminist literary criticism.

Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995 by Cheryl Higashida Black Internationalist Feminism examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This vital yet largely overlooked feminist tradition built upon and critically retheorized the postwar Left's'nationalist internationalism,'which connected the liberation of Blacks in the United States to the liberation of Third World nations and the worldwide proletariat.

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to "put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature...draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World--without the mandate for conquest."

Writing Through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature by Ayesha K. Hardison Hardison examines African American literature and its representation of black women during the pivotal but frequently overlooked decades of the 1940s and 1950s. At the height of Jim Crow racial segregation—a time of transition between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement and between World War II and the modern civil rights movement—black writers also addressed the effects of'Jane Crow,'the interconnected racial, gender, and sexual oppression that black women experienced.

Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature: From Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison by Geneva Cobb Moore; Andrew Billingsley (Foreword by) Geneva Cobb Moore deftly combines literature, history, criticism, and theory in Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature by offering insight into the historical black experience from slavery to freedom as depicted in the literature of nine female writers across several centuries. Moore traces black women writers' creation of feminine and maternal metaphors of power in literature.