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African American Literature in Transition, 1980–1990

African American Literature in Transition, 1980–1990

African American Literature in Transition, 1980–1990

Volume 15:
D. Quentin Miller, Suffolk University, Massachusetts
Rich Blint, The New School, New York
February 2023
15
Available
Hardback
9781009179348
$122.00
USD
Hardback
USD
eBook

    African American Literature in Transition, 1980–1990 tracks Black expressive culture in the 1980s as novelists, poets, dramatists, filmmakers, and performers grappled with the contradictory legacies of the civil rights era, and the start of culture wars and policy machinations that would come to characterize the 1990s. The volume is necessarily interdisciplinary and critically promiscuous in its methodologies and objects of study as it reconsiders conventional temporal, spatial, and moral understandings of how African American letters emerged immediately after the movement James Baldwin describes as the 'latest slave rebellion.' As such, the question of the state of America's democratic project as refracted through the literature of the shaping presence of African Americans is one of the guiding concerns of this volume preoccupied with a moment in American literary history still burdened by the legacies of the 1960s, while imagining the contours of an African Americanist future in the new millennium.

    • Provides a systematic critical appraisal of the literary activity of African Americans writers during the historically important decade of the 1980s
    • Accounts for African American literature during a particularly important decade, but yet refuses strict periodization
    • Offers readers an interdisciplinary and transnational account of African American literature during the 1980s

    Product details

    February 2023
    Hardback
    9781009179348
    400 pages
    235 × 158 × 22 mm
    0.56kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction D. Quentin Miller
    • Part I. The Expanding Canon Rich Blint:
    • 1. Those dazzling African American women writers of the 1980s Trudier Harris
    • 2. Innovations and institutions in African American poetry of the 1980s Laura Vrana
    • 3. Wideman's family stories and the carceral archipelago D. Quentin Miller
    • 4. A queer reckoning for Black masculinity Kevin Quashie
    • 5. August Wilson's time and history's Black bottom Alan Nadel
    • Part II. New Directions / New Literary Forms D. Quentin Miller:
    • 6. The Trey Ellis eighties and the launching of an artistic 'school' Bertram Ashe
    • 7. Hip-hop in transition Joseph G. Schloss
    • 8. Reframing and reappropriating Blackness in 1980s satire Danielle Morgan
    • Part III. Global Connections Rich Blint:
    • 9.Decolonial poetics and queer resistance in Anglophone Afro-Caribbean women's literature Angelique Nixon
    • 10. Transnational visions of Black women writing Shaundra Myers
    • 11. Ruination and a dramaturgical reading of Jamaican women's transnational literature in 1980s North America Danielle Bainbridge.
      Contributors
    • D. Quentin Miller, Rich Blint, Trudier Harris, Laura Vrana, Kevin Quashie, Alan Nadel, Bertram Ashe, Joseph G. Schloss, Danielle Morgan, Angelique Nixon, Shaundra Myers, Danielle Bainbridge

    • Editors
    • D. Quentin Miller , Suffolk University, Massachusetts

      D. Quentin Miller is Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of fourteen books and more than thirty articles and book chapters. His recent scholarly books relevant to this project include The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature (2016), American Literature in Transition 1980–1990 (2017), Understanding John Edgar Wideman (2018), and James Baldwin in Context (2019). Forthcoming projects include the textbooks The Bedford Introduction to Literature (13th Edition) and Literature to Go (5th edition) and The Routledge Introduction to the American Novel.

    • Rich Blint , The New School, New York

      Rich Blint is is assistant professor of Literature and director of the Program in Race and Ethnicity at The New School. His upcoming books include A Radical Interiority: James Baldwin and the Personified Self in Modern American Culture, and Duppy Umbrella and Other Stories. His writing has appeared in African American Review, James Baldwin Review, Anthropology Now, The Believer, McSweeney's, The Brooklyn Rail, sx visualities, and the A-Line: a journal of progressive thought where he serves as editor-at-large.