Literary Criticism

One of the most provocative and original voices in contemporary literature, Chinua Achebe here considers the place of literature and art in our society in a collection of essays spanning his best writing and lectures from the last twenty-three years. For...

Vivid poems of "breakdown and spiritual disarray." Writing these, Walker says, "led me eventually into a larger understanding of the psyche, and of the world." What finally marks this volume is the strong sense of change and, ultimately, of forgiveness...

The Encyclopedia of Black Comics, focuses on people of African descent who have published significant works in the United States or have worked across various aspects of the comics industry. The book focuses on creators in the field of comics: inkers,...

This close study of the first six novels of Toni Morrison--The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz--situates her as an African American writer within the American literary tradition who interrogates national identity and...

By the time of her death, at the tragically young age of thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry had created two electrifying masterpieces of the American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry gave this country its most movingly authentic portrayal of...

Easy Rawlins is on the verge of losing everything--until he gets an offer from the FBI that he has no choice but to accept. For most Black Americans, the 1960s were times of hope. For former P.I. Easy Rawlins, Los Angeles's mean streets were never...

Mapping the Gullah-Geechee diaspora across time and space Gullah-Geechee Diasporas counters romantic portrayals of Gullah-Geechee culture as a static, geographically isolated remnant of the past. Across eight interdisciplinary essays, the book's...

Mapping the Gullah-Geechee diaspora across time and space Gullah-Geechee Diasporas counters romantic portrayals of Gullah-Geechee culture as a static, geographically isolated remnant of the past. Across eight interdisciplinary essays, the book's...

A long-overdue analysis of how Black lesbians have asserted their lived experience through creative practice, pushing back against heteropatriarchal systems that deny them visibility. "We Must Document Ourselves Now" examines the essential but...

A long-overdue analysis of how Black lesbians have asserted their lived experience through creative practice, pushing back against heteropatriarchal systems that deny them visibility. "We Must Document Ourselves Now" examines the essential but...

A critical biography of Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer and his lifelong struggle to transcend race, by an award-winning author The poet and novelist Jean Toomer (1894-1967) was among the most influential figures of the Harlem Renaissance,...

Captive Ecologies makes a case for the ecological significance of slavery's afterlife, tracing the complex entanglements between racial capitalism and Black ecological freedom. Attending to the ways that racial capitalism implicates both captive bodies...