Sustaining Black Music and Culture during COVID-19: #Verzuz and Club Quarantine argues that Instagram is a premier digital leisure space to celebrate and promote Black American culture and identity, particularly evidenced during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic as the United States grappled with mandated shelter-in-place orders. Club Quarantine (CQ) and Verzuz emerged as highly successful Black music-listening events streamed on Instagram Live, collectively ushering Black (techno)culture through a once-in-a-generation pandemic and beyond. Contributors to this collection explore the communicative and cultural significance of these events as respite from social isolation and as a rearticulated space for Black cultural engagement in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and increased racial tensions in the United States.

When Black runway models began throwing phones and VH1's "Divas Live" riveted viewers, a new paradigm for Black women had fully evolved in the form of the Black Diva. Tracing the trajectory of the Diva figure from the Italian castrati to Ntozake Shange's Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter suggests a way around staid and fixed stereotypes about Black womanhood. The Black Diva performs her demands as a quintessential act of survival in a hostile and racist world; she is both a product of and a mark against the male gaze, Black and white. Ultimately, Tipping on a Tightrope: Divas in African American Literature uses present popular culture incarnations of the Diva to detail her long relationship with Black American literary culture.