Speculative Film and Moving Images by or about Black Women and Girls: Watch It! examines depictions of African-descended women and girls in twentieth and twenty-first century speculative filmmaking. Topics include a discursive analysis of stereotypes; roles garnered by Halle Berry, the only Black woman to receive an Oscar for Best Actress; the promise of characters, relationships and scripts found in works ranging from Altered Carbon, Lovecraft Country, and HBO's Watchmen series; anda closing chapter that considers the legacy of Black women in Horror. Jeffrey illustrates the ways in which recent texts link this Sci-Fi genre to the trauma endured by people of African descent in the United States of America. In doing so, this book provides a compelling interpretation of popular, prevalent, and recurring images of Black women and girls in American Popular Culture.

In Depictions of Home in African American Literature, Trudier Harris analyzes fictional homespaces in African American literature from those set in the time of slavery to modern urban configurations of the homespace. She argues that African American writers often inadvertently create and follow a tradition of portraying dysfunctional and physically or emotionally violent homespaces. Harris explores the roles race and religion play in the creation of homespaces and how geography, space, and character all influence these spaces. Although many characters in African American literature crave safe, happy homespaces and frequently carry such images with them through their mental or physical migrations, few characters experience the formation of healthy homespaces by the end of their journeys. Harris studies the historical, cultural, and literary portrayals of the home in works from well-known authors such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and August Wilson as well as lesser-studied authors such as Daniel Black, A.J. Verdelle, Margaret Walker, and Dorothy West.

In their search for a relationship, whether long- or short-term, how do desiring subjects signify their identities and those of their desiring subjects? The essays in Racialized Politics of Desire in Personal Ads take up this question by exploring how writers of personal ads fashion themselves and those with whom they seek a connection. More specifically, these essays explore the politics of desire how complex intersections among the social categories of race, gender and sexuality within personal ads reveal a dynamic tapestry of power relations and hierarchies. By focusing on how, in each instance, African Americans both construct and are constructed discursively in the brief narrative space of personals, this collection offers a substantively new genre-based exploration of the politics of desire and makes an important contribution to studies of language and self; identity politics; cultural studies; gendered, sexualized and racialized discourses; and the performance of everyday texts that occupy scholarly attention in a variety of different disciplines. Those interested in American Cultural Studies, African American Studies, Sociology, Communication, Rhetoric, Queer Studies, Critical Race Theory, Women's Studies, Gender Studies, and Race Relations on a professional or lay basis will find this book informative and engaging."

In their search for a relationship, whether long- or short-term, how do desiring subjects signify their identities and those of their desiring subjects? The essays in Racialized Politics of Desire in Personal Ads take up this question by exploring how writers of personal ads fashion themselves and those with whom they seek a connection. More specifically, these essays explore the politics of desire_how complex intersections among the social categories of race, gender and sexuality within personal ads reveal a dynamic tapestry of power relations and hierarchies. By focusing on how, in each instance, African Americans both construct and are constructed discursively in the brief narrative space of personals, this collection offers a substantively new genre-based exploration of the politics of desire and makes an important contribution to studies of language and self; identity politics; cultural studies; gendered, sexualized and racialized discourses; and the performance of everyday texts that occupy scholarly attention in a variety of different disciplines. Those interested in American Cultural Studies, African American Studies, Sociology, Communication, Rhetoric, Queer Studies, Critical Race Theory, Women's Studies, Gender Studies, and Race Relations on a professional or lay basis will find this book informative and engaging.

Contemporary African American dramatists such as Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, August Wilson, and Suzan-Lori Parks as well as Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, and Pearl Cleage find their creative inspiration in historical events from slavery to the civil rights movement. From the Emmett Till-inspired character in Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie to Parks's recreation of Lincoln and Booth, these playwrights show that history is the mirror that shapes the identities of African American writers and characters.

James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, has gained a wide readership and much critical acclaim since its publication in 1953. While most critics have seen it as focusing exclusively on the African-American fundamentalist church and its effect on characters brought up within its tradition, these scholars posit that issues of homosexuality, the social construction of identity, anthropological conceptions of community, and the quest for an artistic identity provide more elucidating approaches to the novel.

James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, has gained a wide readership and much critical acclaim since its publication in 1953. While most critics have seen it as focusing exclusively on the African-American fundamentalist church and its effect on characters brought up within its tradition, these scholars posit that issues of homosexuality, the social construction of identity, anthropological conceptions of community, and the quest for an artistic identity provide more elucidating approaches to the novel.

Four of Ida B. Wells-Barnett's moving anti-lynching essays are presented in this volume. Written during the height of the lynching craze at the turn of the century, they elegantly speak to the pain and loss caused by racist thought and action.

In this volume, Lovalerie King and Shirley Moody-Turner have compiled a collection of essays that offer access to some of the most innovative contemporary black fiction while addressing important issues in current African American literary studies. Distinguished scholars Houston Baker, Trudier Harris, Darryl Dickson-Carr, and Maryemma Graham join writers and younger scholars to explore the work of Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, Trey Ellis, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, Kyle Baker, Danzy Senna, Nikki Turner, and many others. The collection is bracketed by a foreword by novelist and graphic artist Mat Johnson, one of the most exciting and innovative contemporary African American writers, and an afterword by Alice Randall, author of the controversial parody The Wind Done Gone. Together, King and Moody-Turner make the case that diversity, innovation, and canon expansion are essential to maintaining the vitality of African American literary studies.

A breathtaking achievement, this Concise Companion is a suitable crown to the astonishing production in African American literature and criticism that has swept over American literary studies in the last two decades. It offers an enormous range of writers-from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass, from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison, and from Toni Morrison to August Wilson. It contains entries on major works (including synopses of novels), such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Richard Wright's Native Son, and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. It also incorporates information on literary characters such as Bigger Thomas, Coffin Ed Johnson, Kunta Kinte, Sula Peace, as well as on character types such as Aunt Jemima, Brer Rabbit, John Henry, Stackolee, and the trickster. Icons of black culture are addressed, including vivid details about the lives of Muhammad Ali, John Coltrane, Marcus Garvey, Jackie Robinson, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman.

Here, too, are general articles on poetry, fiction, and drama; on autobiography, slave narratives, Sunday School literature, and oratory; as well as on a wide spectrum of related topics. Compact yet thorough, this handy volume gathers works from a vast array of sources--from the black periodical press to women's clubs--making it one of the most substantial guides available on the growing, exciting world of African American literature.

New Yorker James Baldwin once declared that a black man can look at a map of the United States, contemplate the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus scare himself to death. In The Scary Mason-Dixon Line, renowned literary scholar Trudier Harris explores why black writers, whether born in Mississippi, New York, or elsewhere, have consistently both loved and hated the South. Harris explains that for these authors the South represents not so much a place or even a culture as a rite of passage. Not one of them can consider himself or herself a true African American writer without confronting the idea of the South in a decisive way. Harris considers native-born black southerners Raymond Andrews, Ernest J. Gaines, Edward P. Jones, Tayari Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, and Phyllis Alesia Perry, and nonsouthern writers James Baldwin, Sherley Anne Williams, and Octavia E. Butler. The works Harris examines date from Baldwin s Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964) to Edward P. Jones s The Known World (2003). By including Komunyakaa s poems and Baldwin s play, as well as male and female authors, Harris demonstrates that the writers preoccupation with the South cuts across lines of genre and gender. Whether their writings focus on slavery, migration from the South to the North, or violence on southern soil, and whether they celebrate the triumph of black southern heritage over repression or castigate the South for its treatment of blacks, these authors cannot escape the call of the South. Indeed, Harris asserts that creative engagement with the South represents a defining characteristic of African American writing. A singular work by one of the foremost literary scholars writing today, The Scary Mason-Dixon Line superbly demonstrates how history and memory continue to figure powerfully in African American literary creativity.

Southern literature is often celebrated for its "told," rather than "written," qualities. Drawing on her own experiences of front-porch storytelling among family, friends, and neighbors, Trudier Harris looks across the generations of twentieth-century southern writers to focus on three African Americans who possess the "power of the porch." In ways that are highly individual, says Harris, yet still within a shared oral tradition, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan skillfully use storytelling techniques to define their audiences, reach out and draw them in, and fill them with anticipation. Considering how such dynamics come into play in Hurston's Mules and Men, Naylor's Mama Day, and Kenan's Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Harris shows how the "power of the porch" resides in readers as well, who, in giving themselves over to a story, confer it on the writer. Against this background of give and take, anticipation and fulfillment, Harris considers Zora Neale Hurston's special challenges as a black woman writer in the thirties, and how her various roles as an anthropologist, folklorist, and novelist intermingle in her work. In Gloria Naylor's writing, Harris finds particularly satisfying themes and characters. A New York native, Naylor came to a knowledge of the South through her parents and during her stay on the Sea Islands while she wrote Mama Day. A southerner by birth, Randall Kenan is particularly adept in getting his readers to accept aspects of African American culture that their rational minds might have wanted to reject. Although Kenan is set apart from Hurston and Naylor by his alliances with a new generation of writers intent upon broaching certain taboo subjects (in his case gay life in small southern towns), Kenan's Time Creek is as rife with the otherworldly and the fantastic as Hurston's New Orleans and Naylor's Willow Springs. The back and forth, the presentation and response of porch sitters and porch watchers, says Harris, is a power wielded skillfully by the best black storytellers of the South. Through tales of Brer Rabbit, John and Ole Marster, dog ghosts and other revenants, they have established and perpetuated an oral tradition that in turn shapes both the creation and enjoyment of the written word.

In this volume, Lovalerie King and Shirley Moody-Turner have compiled a collection of essays that offer access to some of the most innovative contemporary black fiction while addressing important issues in current African American literary studies. Distinguished scholars Houston Baker, Trudier Harris, Darryl Dickson-Carr, and Maryemma Graham join writers and younger scholars to explore the work of Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, Trey Ellis, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, Kyle Baker, Danzy Senna, Nikki Turner, and many others. The collection is bracketed by a foreword by novelist and graphic artist Mat Johnson, one of the most exciting and innovative contemporary African American writers, and an afterword by Alice Randall, author of the controversial parody The Wind Done Gone. Together, King and Moody-Turner make the case that diversity, innovation, and canon expansion are essential to maintaining the vitality of African American literary studies.

By lynching, burning, castrating, raping, and mutilating black people, contends Trudier Harris, white Americans were perfomring a rite of exorcism designedto eradicate the "black beast" from their midst, or, at the very least, to renderhim powerless and emasculated. Black writers have graphically portrayed such tragicincidents in their writings. In doing so, they seem to be acting out a communal role-- a perpetuation of an oral tradition bent on the survival of the race.

Exorcising Blackness demonstrates that the closeness andintensity of black people's historical experiences sometimes overshadows, frequentlyinfuses and enhances, and definitely makes richer in texture the art of blackwriters. By reviewing the historical and literary interconnections of the rituals ofexorcism, Harris opens up the hidden psyche -- the soul -- of black Americanwriters.

Southern literature is often celebrated for its 'told' rather than 'written' qualities. Drawing on her own experiences of front-porch storytelling among family, friends, and neighbors, Trudier Harris looks across the generations of twentieth-century southern writers to focus on three African Americans who possess the "power of the porch." In ways that are highly individual, says Harris, yet still within a shared oral tradition, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan skillfully use storytelling techniques to define their audiences, reach out and draw them in, and fill them with anticipation. Considering how such dynamics come into play in Hurston's Mules and Men, Naylor's Mama Day, and Kenan's Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Harris shows how the "power of the porch" resides in readers as well, who, in giving themselves over to a story, confer it on the writer. Against this background of give and take, anticipation and fulfillment, Harris considers Zora Neale Hurston's special challenges as a black woman writer in the thirties, and how her various roles as an anthropologist, folklorist, and novelist intermingle in her work. In Gloria Naylor's writing, Harris finds particularly satisfying themes and characters. A New York native, Naylor came to a knowledge of the South through her parents and during her stay on the Sea Islands while she wrote Mama Day. A southerner by birth, Randall Kenan is particularly adept in getting his readers to accept aspects of African American culture that their rational minds might have wanted to reject. Although Kenan is set apart from Hurston and Naylor by his alliances with a new generation of writers intent upon broaching certain taboo subjects (in his case gay life in small southern towns), Kenan's Time Creek is as rife with the otherworldly and the fantastic as Hurston's New Orleans and Naylor's Willow Springs. The back and forth, the presentation and response of porch sitters and porch watchers, says Harris, is a power wielded skillfully by the best black storytellers of the South. Through tales of Brer Rabbit, John and Ole Marster, dog ghosts and other revenants, they have established and perpetuated an oral tradition that in turn shapes both the creation and enjoyment of the written word.