Crossing Borders is a gathering of twenty original, interdisciplinary essays on the paradigm of borders in African American literature, multi-ethnic U.S. studies, and South Asian studies. These essays by established and mid-career scholars from around the globe employ a variety of approaches to the idea of "border crossings" and represent important contributions to the discourses on modernity, diasporic mobility, populism, migration, exile, sub-nation, trans-nation, as well as the formation of nationalities, communities, and identities. Borders, in these contexts, signify social and national inequities and hierarchies and also the ways to challenge and transgress entrenched barriers sanctioned by habit, custom, and law. The volume also honors and celebrates the life and work of Amritjit Singh as a teacher, mentor, author, scholar, and editor over half a century.

The powerful, thrilling, and tragic tale about the fluidity of racial identity that continues to resonate today, with an introduction by Emily Bernard. A Penguin Vitae Edition Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a racist white man unaware of her African American heritage, and has severed all ties to her past after deciding to pass as a white woman. Clare's childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community, and is simultaneously allured and repelled by Clare's risky decision to engage in racial masquerade for personal and societal gain. After frequenting African American-centric gatherings together in Harlem, Clare's interest in Irene turns into a homoerotic longing for Irene's black identity that she abandoned and can never embrace again, and she is forced to grapple with her decision to pass for white in a way that is both tragic and telling. Penguin Classics launches a new hardcover series with five American classics that are relevant and timeless in their power, and part of a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from almost seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.

Understanding Alice Walker serves both as an introduction to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner's large body of work and as a critical analysis of her multifaceted canon. Thadious M. Davis begins with Walker's biography and her formative experiences in the South and then presents ways of accessing and reading Walker's complex, interconnected, and sociopolitically invested career in writing fiction, poetry, critical essays, and meditations. Although best known for her novel The Color Purple and her landmark essays In Search of Our Mothers's Gardens: Womanist Prose, Walker began her career with Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. She has remained committed not merely to writing in multiple genres but also to conveying narratives of the hope and transformation possible within the human condition and as visualized through the lens of race and gender.

In this innovative approach to southern literary cultures, Thadious Davis analyzes how black southern writers use their spatial location to articulate the vexed connections between society and environment, particularly under segregation and its legacies. Basing her analysis on texts by Ernest Gaines, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Natasha Trethewey, Olympia Vernon, Brenda Marie Osbey, Sybil Kein, and others, Davis reveals how these writers reconstitute racial exclusion as creative black space, rather than a site of trauma and resistance. Utilizing the social and political separation epitomized by segregation to forge a spatial and racial vantage point, Davis argues, allows these writers to imagine and represent their own subject matter and aesthetic concerns. Focusing particularly on Louisiana and Mississippi, Davis deploys new geographical discourses of space to expand analyses of black writers' relationship to the South and to consider the informing aspects of spatial narratives on their literary production. She argues that African American writers not only are central to the production of southern literature and new southern studies, but also are crucial to understanding the shift from modernism to postmodernism in southern letters. A paradigm-shifting work, Southscapes restores African American writers to their rightful place in the regional imagination, while calling for a more inclusive conception of region.

Though one of America's best known and loved novels, Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn "has often been the object of fierce controversy because of its racist language and reliance on racial stereotypes. This collection of fifteen essays by prominent African American scholars and critics examines the novel's racist elements and assesses the degree to which Twain's ironies succeed or fail to turn those elements into a satirical attack on racism.
Ranging from the laudatory to the openly hostile, these essays include personal impressions of "Huckleberry Finn," descriptions of classroom experience with the book, evaluations of its ironic and allegorical aspects, explorations of its nineteenth-century context, and appraisal of its effects on twentieth-century African American writers. Among the issues the authors contend with are Twain's pervasive use of the word "nigger," his portrayal of the slave Jim according to the conventions of the minstrel show "darky," and the thematic chaos created by the "evasion" depicted in the novel's final chapters.
Sure to provoke thought and stir debate, "Satire or Evasion?" provides a variety of new perspectives on one of this country's most troubling classics.
"Contributors. "Richard K. Barksdale, Bernard W. Bell, Mary Kemp Davis, Peaches M. Henry, Betty Harris Jones, Rhett S. Jones, Julius Lester, Donnarae MacCann, Charles H. Nichols, Charles H. Nilon, Arnold Rampersad, David L. Smith, Carmen Dubryan, John H. Wallace, Kenny Jackson Williams, Fredrick Woodard