African American Literature in Transition, 1980-1990: Volume 15

Description

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.

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 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.