Full Description
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.
Contents
1 At the Crossroads of Continuity and Disruption: Exploring the Contemporary African American Novel
Raphaël Lambert and Anna Pochmara
2 Creative Practices of Resistance in Contemporary Narratives of Slavery of the Twenty-First Century
Luana de Souza Sutter
3 Agency and Property in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad
Raphaël Lambert
4 Remembering Generations in Homegoing: Rewriting Roots for the Twenty-First Century
Miguel Sanz Jiménez
5 Ifemelu's Online Linguistic and Identity Performances in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah
Dorottya Mozes
6 The New African Diaspora and Afropolitanism in the Work of Taiye Selasi
Elisa Bordin
7 Exposure in Teju Cole's Photography and Fiction
Nicholas Gamso
8 "How Does it Feel to Be Free of One's Illusions?": Erasure and the Anti-Essentialist Ethos of Percival Everett
Kamil Chrzczonowicz
9 From Freedom to Struggle: Colson Whitehead's Apex Hides the Hurt as a Denouncement of Surface Fetishism
Mirosław Aleksander Miernik
10 Voluntary Slavery and Omnipresent Black Fathers: The Thirdspace of Blackness in Paul Beatty's The Sellout
Anna Pochmara
11 Modes of Change in the Africanfuturism of Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death
Brian Willems
12 Afrofuturist Alternate History in the Post-Race Era: Justina Ireland's Dread Nation
Julia Lindsay
13 Same As It Ever Was: Dehumanizing the American Cityscape in Colson Whitehead's Zone One
Jamie Brummer
14 "This Is a Place for the Dead": Reading the Child Ghost in Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing
Lucy Arnold
15 "Hey, Celestial": Loving Girls and Aging in Toni Morrison's Love
Mar Gallego
Index
