Literary Criticism

A New York Times Notable Book "Henry Louis Gates is a national treasure. Here, he returns with an intellectual and at times deeply personal meditation on the hard-fought evolution and the very meaning of African American identity, calling upon our...

Growing out of the music scene, afrofuturism has emerged as an important aesthetic through films such as Black Panther and Get Out. While the significance of these sonic and visual avenues for afrofuturism cannot be underestimated, literature remains...

Ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates's case for reparations to Toni Morrison's revolutionary humanism to D'Angelo's simmering blend of R&B and racial justice, Jesse McCarthy's bracing essays investigate with virtuosic intensity the art, music, literature, and...

A landmark anthology of forty poets that brought serious attention to writers such as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. The poetry, the prefaces, and Johnson's critical notes have made this book a classic. Indices.

With the same intellectual incisiveness and supple, stylish prose he brought to his classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison examines his antecedents and in so doing illuminates the literature, music, and culture of both black and white America. His...

NAUTILUS BOOKS AWARDS GOLD MEDAL WINNER Special Honors as 2020 Nautilus Best of Anthology The Beautiful New Treasury of Poetry in Endangered Languages, in Association with the National Poetry Library Featuring award-winning poets from cultures as...

Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison, investigates Black characters in the American literary canon and the way they shaped the nation's collective unconscious In a dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a...

An authoritative anthology tracing the history of one of the most important concepts Black people drew on to challenge the brutal, totalizing system of Jim Crow racism This book brings together a wealth of readings on the metaphor of the "New Negro,"...

Juxtaposing the world-building of afrofuturism and the world-negating of afropessimism to show how both movements have offered us critical resources of hope. Science fiction imagines aliens and global crises as world-unifying events, both a threat and...

The first book to trace the critical reception of the great African American woman writer, attending not only to her fiction but to her nonfiction and critical writings. Winner of the Toni Morrison Society Book Prize for Best Single-Authored Book,...

"Even though writing is a solitary act, when I sit with words that I trust will be read by someone, I know that I can never be truly alone." --bell hooks, "women who write too much"In this timeless essay collection on the writing life, award-winning...