It is widely accepted that the canon of African American literature has racial realism at its core: African American protagonists, social settings, cultural sym
The political value of African American literature has long been a topic of great debate among American writers, both black and white, from Thomas Jefferson to
For a work to be considered African American literature, does it need to focus on black characters or political themes? Must it represent these within a specifi
Winner of the SAMLA Studies Award Honorable Mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent pe
This book tells the story of African Americans' evolving attitudes towards lynching from the 1880s to the present. Unlike most histories of lynching, it explain
