Literary Criticism

José Felipe Alvergue examines anger in American poetry, while reflecting on the permissible/policed cultural affects of our time. By way of BIPOC and QTPOC poets engaging with negativity--frustration, anger, distress--Alvergue argues that affects that...

Black Surrealist. Poet. Collage artist. Jazz trumpeter. Painter. Member of the Beat Generation. Life-long wanderer. Pan-Africanist. Black Power agitator. Author of his own "poem-life." Ted Joans (1928-2003) was all of these things, and yet none of these...

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There--and in many other communities in the U.S. South,...

New insights into the work of an acclaimed science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), a pioneer of science fiction and foremother of Afrofuturism, is among the most influential science fiction writers of all time. Her work blurs the boundaries...

The origins and influence of Jim, Mark Twain's beloved yet polarizing literary figure Mark Twain's Jim, introduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is a shrewd, self-aware, and enormously admirable enslaved man, one of the first fully drawn...

Honorable Mention, 2024 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association 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...

Three groundbreaking texts on Black rhetoric by a renowned and award-winning scholar. Explore the influential prose of Keith Gilyard in this impressive collection, bringing together three seminal works that challenge and expand our understanding of...

The first collection of essays published on trailblazing nineteenth-century Black feminist, activist, journal, and educator, Mary Ann Shadd Cary Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823-1893) was a trailblazing Black feminist, activist, journalist, and educator whose...

This work examines African American children's poetry through a variety of lenses: jazz poetics, the blues, nonsense verse, gender and working-class studies. African American children's poetry reveals legacies of segregation, the Great Migration north,...

Investigating why Hurston's writing fell out of favor during her lifetime only to be appreciated years after her death"Genevieve West's impressive new study clearly documents the course of Zora Neale Hurston's remarkable literary career and her...

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,...

An imaginative, narratological reading of Chinua Achebe's novels, stories, poetry, and essays through a literary and historical framework. Toyin Falola analyzes fictional and historical cartographies of Africa in Achebe's literary works to offer a...