The African American Novel in the Early Twenty-First Century - (European Perspectives on the United States) (Hardcover)

About the Book

The African American Novel in the Early Twenty-First Century is a collection of fourteen essays that probes the originality and complexity of the Black literary imagination while also showing how the African American experience interacts with the larger world.

Book Synopsis

The African American Novel in the Early Twenty-First Century comprises fourteen essays, each focussing on recent, widely known fiction by acclaimed African American authors. This volume showcases the originality, diversity, and vitality of contemporary African American literature, which has reached a bewildering yet exhilarating stage of disruption and continuity between today and yesterday, homegrown and diasporic identities, and local and global interrelatedness. Additionally, it delves into the complexity of the Black literary imagination and its interaction with broader cultural contexts. Lastly, it reflects on the evolution of the African American community, its tribulations, triumphs, challenges, and prospects.

About the Author

Anna Pochmara is Associate Professor at the University of Warsaw. She authored The Making of the New Negro (UAP, 2011) and The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel (UGAP, 2021).

Raphaël Lambert is a Professor of African American studies at Kansai University in Osaka, Japan. He is the author of Narrating the Slave Trade, Theorizing Community (Brill, 2019) and Black Hopes/Black Woes: Early African American Optimism and Twenty-first Century Afro-pessimism (Routledge, forthcoming).