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Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture

Phillip Brian Harper

This book advocates for what it calls African American aesthetic abstractionism—a representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its ... More

This book advocates for what it calls African American aesthetic abstractionism—a representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its essentially artificial character. It argues that while realist representation potentially reaffirms the very social facts that it might have been understood to challenge (such as politically problematic racial regimes), abstractionism shows up the actual constructedness of those facts, thereby subjecting them to critical scrutiny and making them amenable to transformation. The book thus reconceives abstractive principles as a potential boon to African Americanist social critique, rather than as the antithesis to black cultural engagement that they are routinely taken to be. It further finds that literature is better able to serve an abstractionist function than either visual art or music, and that experimental prose is the literary genre within which abstractionism can be most critically effective. Ultimately then, the book argues for the displacement of realism as the primary mode of African American representational aesthetics, for the recentering of literature as a principal site of African American cultural politics, and for the elevation of experimental prose within the domain of African American literature. It makes its case by reviewing a variety of visual, musical, and literary works by artists such as Fred Wilson, Kara Walker, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Cecil Taylor, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and John Keene.Less

Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present

Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett (eds)

This volume brings together scholars of childhood, adulthood, and old age to explore how and why particular ages—such as sixteen, twenty-one, and sixty-five—have come to define the rights and ... More

This volume brings together scholars of childhood, adulthood, and old age to explore how and why particular ages—such as sixteen, twenty-one, and sixty-five—have come to define the rights and obligations of American citizens. From the colonial period to the present, Americans have relied on chronological age to determine matters as diverse as who can cast a vote, marry, buy a drink, or qualify for a pension. Contributors to this volume explore what meanings people in the past ascribed to specific ages and whether or not earlier Americans believed the same things about particular ages as we do. The means by which Americans imposed chronological boundaries upon the ongoing and variable process of growing up and growing old offers a paradigmatic example of how people construct cultural meaning and social hierarchy from embodied experience. Further, as the contributors to this volume argue, chronological age always intersects with other socially constructed categories such as gender, race, and sexuality. What makes age different from other categories such as whiteness and maleness is that, if we are lucky to live long enough, we will all pass through the chronological markers that define us as first young, then middle aged, and finally old.Less

American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century Imaginary

Jacob Rama Berman

This book examines representations of Arabs, Islam, and the Near East in nineteenth-century American culture, arguing that these representations play a significant role in the development of American ... More

This book examines representations of Arabs, Islam, and the Near East in nineteenth-century American culture, arguing that these representations play a significant role in the development of American national identity over the century, revealing largely unexplored exchanges between these two cultural traditions that will alter how we understand them today. Moving from the period of America's engagement in the Barbary Wars through the Holy Land travel mania in the years of Jacksonian expansion and into the writings of romantics such as Edgar Allan Poe, the book argues that not only were Arabs and Muslims prominently featured in nineteenth-century literature, but that the differences that writers established between figures such as Moors, Bedouins, Turks and Orientals provide proof of the transnational scope of domestic racial politics. Drawing on both English and Arabic language sources, the book contends that the fluidity and instability of the term Arab as it appears in captivity narratives, travel narratives, imaginative literature, and ethnic literature simultaneously instantiate and undermine definitions of the American nation and American citizenship.Less

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, ... More

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Rather than applying a pre-given philosophical framework to literature and visual culture, Becoming Human provides a model for reading African diasporic literature and visual art for the philosophical premises, interventions, and implications of these forms and traditions. Becoming Human argues that African diasporic cultural production does not coalesce into a unified tradition that merely seeks inclusion into the dominant conception of “the human” but, rather, frequently alters the meaning and significance of being (human) and engages in imaginative practices of worlding from the perspective of a history of blackness’s bestialization and thingification: the process of imagining a black person as an empty vessel, a nonbeing, a nothing, an ontological zero, coupled with the violent imposition of colonial myths and racial hierarchy. In complementary but highly distinct ways, the literary and visual texts in Becoming Human articulate being (human) in a manner that neither relies on animal denigration nor reestablishes liberal humanism as the authority on being (human). What emerges from this questioning is a radically unruly sense of being/knowing/feeling existence, one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of the current hegemonic mode of “the human.”Less

Before Chicano: Citizenship and the Making of Mexican American Manhood, 1848-1959

Alberto Varon

Before Chicano: Citizenship and the Making of Mexican American Manhood, 1848-1959 is the first book-length study of Latino manhood before the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Mexican Americans are ... More

Before Chicano: Citizenship and the Making of Mexican American Manhood, 1848-1959 is the first book-length study of Latino manhood before the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Mexican Americans are typically overlooked or omitted from American cultural life of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite their long-standing presence in the U.S. This book dislodges the association between Mexican Americans and immigration and calls for a new framework for understanding Mexican American cultural production and U.S. culture, but doing so requires an expanded archive and a multilingual approach to U.S. culture.Working at the intersection of culture and politics, Mexican Americans drew upon American democratic ideals and U.S. foundational myths to develop evolving standards of manhood and political participation. Through an analysis of Mexican American print culture (including fiction, newspapers and periodicals, government documents, essays, unpublished manuscripts, images, travelogues, and other genres), it demonstrates that Mexican Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries envisioned themselves as U.S. national citizens through cultural depictions of manhood. Before Chicano moves beyond the resistance paradigm that has dominated Latino Studies and uncovers a long history of how Latinos shaped—and were shaped by—American cultural life.Less

Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam

Sylvia Chan-Malik

Being U.S. Muslims: A Cultural History of Women of Color and American Islam offers a previously untold story of Islam in the United States that foregrounds the voices, experiences, and images of ... More

Being U.S. Muslims: A Cultural History of Women of Color and American Islam offers a previously untold story of Islam in the United States that foregrounds the voices, experiences, and images of women of color in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. Until the late 1960s, the majority of Muslim women in the U.S.—as well as almost all U.S. Muslim women who appeared in the American press or popular culture, were African American. Thus, the book contends that the lives and labors of African American Muslim women have—and continue to—forcefully shaped the meanings and presence of American Islam, and are critical to approaching issues confronting Muslim women in the contemporary U.S. At the heart of U.S. Muslim women’s encounters with Islam, the volume demonstrates, is a desire for gender justice that is rooted in how issues of race and religion have shaped women’s daily lives. Women of color’s ways of “being U.S. Muslims” have been consistently forged against commonsense notions of racial, gendered, and religious belonging and citizenship. From narratives of African American women who engage Islam as a form of social protest, through intersections of “Islam” and “feminism” in the media, and into contemporary expressions of racial and gender justice in U.S. Muslim communities, Being U.S. Muslims demonstrates that it is this continual againstness— which the book names affective insurgency—that is the central hall marks of U.S. Muslim women’s lives.Less

Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life

Habiba Ibrahim

In the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, an observation saliently circulated in public: Black children are not seen as children. Yet when and how is black embodiment of any age accurately ... More

In the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, an observation saliently circulated in public: Black children are not seen as children. Yet when and how is black embodiment of any age accurately seen? Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life argues that age for people of the black diaspora has been historically constituted as “untimely.” Over various phases of the transatlantic slave trade, the black body had been separated from hegemonic relations to human time. Black age became contingent, malleable, and suited for the needs of enslavement. As a result, black embodiment became figural of any age at all, and age itself came to signify the inhumanness of blackness. Black Age posits that age is an analytical category that reveals where alternative humanisms exist, and is a figure of a counter-historical temporality of modernity. By building on Hortense Spillers’s influential theorization of blackness as having been “ungendered” during transport across the Atlantic Ocean, this book argues that blackness is concomitantly “unaged,” a process thought of as “Oceanic lifespans.” This book uncovers how critical observations of black age’s untimeliness arise from black feminist critiques of liberal humanism from the 1970s onward. By focusing on black literary culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this book examines how the history of transatlantic slavery and the constitution of modern blackness has been reimagined through the embodiment of age. Black Age tracks the struggle between the abuses of black exclusion from western humanism and the reclamation of non-normative black life.Less

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible

Malik Gaines

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left uses the notion of excess—its transgression, multiplicity, and ambivalence—to consider performances of the sixties that circulated a black political ... More

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left uses the notion of excess—its transgression, multiplicity, and ambivalence—to consider performances of the sixties that circulated a black political discourse capable of unsettling standard understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Following a route from the United States to West Africa, Europe, and back, these performances staged imaginative subjectivities that could not be contained by disciplinary or national boundaries. Looking broadly at performances found in music, theater, film, and everyday life, the performers considered brought Marxist political strains into contact with black expressive strategies, restaging ideas of the subject that are proposed by each tradition. Attention to their work helps illuminate the role black theatricality played in what is understood as the radical energy of the sixties, and further reveals the abilities of blackness to transform social conditions. Following a transnational route forged by W.E.B. Du Bois and other modern political actors, this book considers the ways artists negotiated at once the local, national, and diasporic frames through which race has been represented. In the works of American singer and pianist Nina Simone, Ghanaian playwrights Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann, and California-based performer Sylvester, shared signs of racial legacy and resistance politics are articulated with regional specificity. Further, each artist explores the ways blackness responds to gender and sexuality as it proliferates images of difference. They bring important attention to the imbrication of these conditions.Less

Black Radical Tragic: "Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution"

Jeremy Matthew Glick

The Black Radical Tragic examines twentieth-century performances and historiography as repetitions of the late-eighteenth-century Haitian Revolution as it relates to struggles for Black freedom and ... More

The Black Radical Tragic examines twentieth-century performances and historiography as repetitions of the late-eighteenth-century Haitian Revolution as it relates to struggles for Black freedom and Black self-determination. It engages work by Lorraine Hansberry, Sergei Eisenstein, Frantz Fanon, Raymond Williams, Edouard Glissant, Eugene O’Neill, Orson Welles, Hegel, Malcolm X on Hamlet and Baruch Spinoza, and others. The book enacts a speculative encounter between Bertolt Brecht and C.L.R. James to mine questions of immediacy and mediation, repetition, self-determination, and political theater at the intersection of performance studies and Black studies.Less

Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America

James B. Salazar

From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siècle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character, that curiously formable yet ... More

From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siècle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character, that curiously formable yet equally formidable “stuff,” has had a long and checkered history giving shape to the American national identity. This book reconceives this pivotal category of nineteenth-century literature and culture by charting the development of the concept of “character” in the fictional genres, social reform movements, and political cultures of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. By reading novelists such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside a diverse collection of texts concerned with the mission of building character, including child-rearing guides, muscle-building magazines, libel and naturalization law, Scout handbooks, and success manuals, the book uncovers how the cultural practices of representing character operated in tandem with the character-building strategies of social reformers. The book offers a radical revision of this defining category in U.S. literature and culture, arguing that character was the keystone of a cultural politics of embodiment, a politics that played a critical role in determining—and contesting—the social mobility, political authority, and cultural meaning of the raced and gendered body.Less

Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present

Dixa Ramírez

Colonial Phantoms argues that Dominican cultural expression from the late nineteenth century to the present day reveals the ghosted singularities of Dominican history and demographic composition. For ... More

Colonial Phantoms argues that Dominican cultural expression from the late nineteenth century to the present day reveals the ghosted singularities of Dominican history and demographic composition. For centuries, the territory hosted a majority mixed-race free population whose negotiations with colonial power were deeply ambivalent. Disquieted by the predominating black freedom, Western discourses ghosted—mis-categorized or erased—the Dominican Republic from the most important global conversations and decisions of the 19th century. What kind of national culture do you create when leaders of the world powers, on whose recognition you depend, rarely remember your nation’s name? Dominicans, both island and diasporic, have expressed their dissatisfaction with dominant descriptors and interpellations through literature, music, and speech acts. These expressions run the gamut from ultra-conservative, anti-Haitian nationalist literature to present-day Afro-Latinx activism. Dominant fields of knowledge constructed to account for various modes of being in the Americas have not been able to discern, and, in some cases, have helped to obscure, the kinds of free black subjectivity that emerged in the Dominican Republic. Analyzing literature, government documents, music, the visual arts, public monuments, film, and ephemeral and stage performance, this book intervenes at the level of knowledge production and analysis by disrupting some of the fields. In so doing, it establishes a framework for placing Dominican expressive culture and historical formations at the forefront of a number of scholarly investigations of colonial modernity in the Americas, the African diaspora, geographic displacement (e.g., migration and exile), and international divisions of labor.Less

The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography

Ariane Cruz

The Color of Kink explores black women's representations and performances within American pornography and BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadism and masochism) from the ... More

The Color of Kink explores black women's representations and performances within American pornography and BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadism and masochism) from the 1930s to the present, revealing the ways in which they illustrate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power for black women. Based on personal interviews conducted with pornography performers, producers, and professional dominatrices, visual and textual analysis, and extensive archival research, Ariane Cruz reveals BDSM and pornography as critical sites from which to rethink the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. She explores how violence becomes not just a vehicle of pleasure but also a mode of accessing and contesting power. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Cruz argues that BDSM is a productive space from which to consider the complexity and diverseness of black women's sexual practice and the mutability of black female sexuality. Illuminating the cross-pollination of black sexuality and BDSM, The Color of Kink makes a unique contribution to the growing scholarship on racialized sexuality, pornography, and sexual cultures.Less

Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging

Carol Fadda-Conrey

The last couple of decades have witnessed a flourishing of Arab-American literature across multiple genres. Yet, increased interest in this literature is ironically paralleled by a prevalent bias ... More

The last couple of decades have witnessed a flourishing of Arab-American literature across multiple genres. Yet, increased interest in this literature is ironically paralleled by a prevalent bias against Arabs and Muslims that portrays their long presence in the U.S. as a recent and unwelcome phenomenon. Spanning the 1990s to the present, this book takes in the sweep of literary and cultural texts by Arab-American writers in order to understand the ways in which their depictions of Arab homelands, whether actual or imagined, play a crucial role in shaping cultural articulations of U.S. citizenship and belonging. By asserting themselves within a U.S. framework while maintaining connections to their homelands, Arab-Americans contest the blanket representations of themselves as dictated by the U.S. nation-state. Deploying a multidisciplinary framework at the intersection of Middle-Eastern studies, U.S. ethnic studies, and diaspora studies, the book argues for a transnational discourse that overturns the often rigid affiliations embedded in ethnic labels. Tracing the shifts in transnational perspectives, from the founders of Arab-American literature, like Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, to modern writers such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Joseph Geha, Randa Jarrar, and Suhei Hammad, the book finds that contemporary Arab-American writers depict strong yet complex attachments to the U.S. landscape. It explores how the idea of home is negotiated between immigrant parents and subsequent generations, alongside analyses of texts that work toward fostering more nuanced understandings of Arab and Muslim identities in the wake of post-9/11 anti-Arab sentiments.Less

Cosmopolitanisms

Bruce Robbins, Paulo Lemos Horta, and Kwame Anthony Appiah (eds)

Cosmopolitanism is less an ideal than a description. It merely assumes that wherever and whenever history has set peoples in motion across national boundaries, sometimes by force, many of them and ... More

Cosmopolitanism is less an ideal than a description. It merely assumes that wherever and whenever history has set peoples in motion across national boundaries, sometimes by force, many of them and their descendants will show signs of divided loyalties and a hybrid identity. Cosmopolitanism should no longer be conceived as singular—an overrriding loyalty to humanity as a whole—but plural. Instead of an unhealthily skinny ethical abstraction, we now have many blooming, fleshed-out particulars. How much do these variants have in common with each other? How much of the concept’s old normative sense is preserved or transformed by these empirical particulars? What is it exactly that makes them interesting, makes them valuable? Cosmopolitanism can now be defined as any one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping. There are more kinds of cosmopolitanism out there to be explored and observed. Social scientists, cultural critics, and historians can stake claims to a concept that had largely belonged to philosophers and political theorists. No longer a badge of privilege, it is now possible to speak of the cosmopolitanism of the poor.Less

The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University

Mark Chiang

Originating in the 1968 student-led strike at San Francisco State University, Asian American Studies was founded as a result of student and community protests that sought to make education more ... More

Originating in the 1968 student-led strike at San Francisco State University, Asian American Studies was founded as a result of student and community protests that sought to make education more accessible and relevant. While members of the Asian American communities initially served on the departmental advisory boards, planning and developing areas of the curriculum, university pressures eventually dictated their expulsion. At that moment in history, the intellectual work of the field was split off from its relation to the community at large, giving rise to the entire problematic of representation in the academic sphere. Even as the original objectives of the field have remained elusive, Asian American studies has nevertheless managed to establish itself in the university. This book argues that the fundamental precondition of institutionalization within the university is the production of cultural capital, and that in the case of Asian American Studies (as well as other fields of minority studies) the accumulation of cultural capital has come primarily from the conversion of political capital. In this way, the definition of cultural capital becomes the primary terrain of political struggle in the university, and outlines the very conditions of possibility for political work within the academy. This book articulates a new and innovative model of cultural and academic politics, illuminating the position of ethnic studies within the American university.Less

The Cultural Politics of U.S. Immigration: Gender, Race, and Media

Leah Perry

This book argues that 1980s immigration discourse in law and popular media was a crucial ingredient in the cohesion of the neoliberal idea of democracy. In the 1980s, amid increasing immigration from ... More

This book argues that 1980s immigration discourse in law and popular media was a crucial ingredient in the cohesion of the neoliberal idea of democracy. In the 1980s, amid increasing immigration from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia, the circle of who was considered American seemed to broaden, reflecting the democratic gains made by racial minorities and women. Although this expanded circle was increasingly visible in the daily lives of Americans through TV shows, films, and popular news media, these gains were circumscribed by the discourse that certain immigrants, for instance single and working mothers, were feared, censured, or welcome exclusively as laborers. Blending critical legal analysis with a feminist media studies methodology over a range of sources, including legal documents, congressional debates, and popular culture, this book shows how even while “multicultural” immigrants were embraced, they were at the same time disciplined through gendered discourses of respectability. Examining the relationship between policy and media, this book weaves questions of legal status and gender into existing discussions about race and ethnicity to revise our understanding of both neoliberalism and immigration.Less

Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places

Brenda Jo Brueggemann

In an exploration of what it means to be deaf, the book goes beyond any simple notion of identity politics to explore the very nature of identity itself. Looking at a variety of cultural texts, it ... More

In an exploration of what it means to be deaf, the book goes beyond any simple notion of identity politics to explore the very nature of identity itself. Looking at a variety of cultural texts, it exposes and enriches our understanding of how deafness embodies itself in the world, in the visual, and in language. Taking on the creation of the modern deaf subject, the book ranges from the intersections of gender and deafness in the work of photographers Mary and Frances Allen at the turn of the last century, to the state of the field of Deaf Studies at the beginning of our new century. The book explores the power and potential of American Sign Language (ASL)—wedged between letter-bound language and visual ways of learning—and argues for a rhetorical approach and digital future for ASL literature. The narration of deaf lives through writing becomes a pivot around which to imagine how digital media and documentary can be used to convey deaf life stories. Finally, the book expands our notion of diversity within the deaf identity itself, takes on the complex relationship between deaf and hearing people, and offers compelling illustrations of the intertwined, and sometimes knotted, nature of individual and collective identities within deaf culture.Less

Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature

Rebecca Sanchez

Deafening Modernism tells the story of aesthetic modernism from the perspective of Deaf and disability insight. It traces the ways that considerations of Deaf culture provide a vital and largely ... More

Deafening Modernism tells the story of aesthetic modernism from the perspective of Deaf and disability insight. It traces the ways that considerations of Deaf culture provide a vital and largely untapped resource for understanding the history of American language politics and the impact that history has had on modernist aesthetic production by productively reframing questions that have been central to the field of modernist studies: the tension between an emerging celebrity culture and theories of impersonality, the apparent paradox of an aesthetic simultaneously fascinated with primitivism and making it new, the juxtaposition and indeterminacy at the heart of modernist difficulty, and the apparent disjunction between imagism and epic in the careers of many prominent modernist writers. In discussing Deaf studies in these unexpected contexts, Deafening Modernism aims to highlight the contributions of Deaf and crip insight to broader discussions of the intersections between images, bodies and text, demonstrating the importance of the field even and especially in places where no literal deafness or disability is located.Less

The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture

Vincent Woodard

Justin A. Joyce and Dwight McBride (eds)

Scholars of U.S. and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. This book takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption ... More

Scholars of U.S. and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. This book takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the literal starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacks experienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence. This book explores these connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and U.S. slave culture. Utilizing many staples of African American literature and culture, such as the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, as well as other less circulated materials like James L. Smith's slave narrative, runaway slave advertisements, and numerous articles from Black newspapers published in the nineteenth century, the book traces the racial assumptions, political aspirations, gender codes, and philosophical frameworks that dictated both European and white American arousal towards Black males and hunger for Black male flesh. The book uses these texts to unpick how slaves struggled not only against social consumption, but also against endemic mechanisms of starvation and hunger designed to break them. It concludes with an examination of the controversial chain gang oral sex scene in Toni Morrison's Beloved, suggesting that even at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, we are still at a loss for language with which to describe Black male hunger within a plantation culture of consumption.Less

Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic

Samantha Pinto

This book demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics in defining the relationship between race, gender, and location. Thinking beyond national identity to include African, African American, ... More

This book demonstrates the crucial 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, it brings together an innovative archive of twentieth-century texts marked by their break with conventional literary structures. These understudied resources mix genres, as in the memoir/ethnography/travel narrative Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston, and eschew linear narratives, as illustrated in the book-length, non-narrative poem by M. Nourbese Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Such an aesthetics, which protests against stable categories and fixed divisions, both reveals and obscures that which it seeks to represent: the experiences of Black women writers in the African diaspora. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist scholarship the book argues for the critical importance of cultural form and demands that we resist the impulse to prioritize traditional notions of geographic boundaries. Locating correspondences between seemingly disparate times and places, and across genres, the book fully engages the unique possibilities of literature and culture to redefine race and gender studies.Less