Through a series of essays that explore the forms, themes, genres, historical contexts, major authors, and latest critical approaches,A Companion to African American Literature presents a comprehensive chronological overview of African American literature from the eighteenth century to the modern dayExamines African American literature from its earliest origins, through the rise of antislavery literature in the decades leading into the Civil War, to the modern development of contemporary African American cultural media, literary aesthetics, and political ideologiesAddresses the latest critical and scholarly approaches to African American literatureFeatures essays by leading established literary scholars as well as newer voices

Gene Andrew Jarrett is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Boston University.  He is the author ofRepresenting the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (2011) andDeans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (2007), and the editor or co-editor of several volumes and collections of African American literature and literary criticism.

Notes on Contributors viii

Introduction 1Gene Andrew Jarrett

Part I. The Literatures of Africa, Middle Passage, Slavery, and Freedom: The Early and Antebellum Periods, c.17501865 9

1. Back to the Future: Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Black Authors 11Vincent Carretta

2. Africa in Early African American Literature 25James Sidbury

3. Ports of Call, Pulpits of Consultation: Rethinking the Origins of African American Literature 45Frances Smith Foster and Kim D. Green

4. The Constitution of Toussaint: Another Origin of African American Literature 59Michael J. Drexler and Ed White

5. Religion in Early African American Literature 75Joanna Brooks and Tyler Mabry

6. The Economies of the Slave Narrative 90Philip Gould

7. The 1850s: The First Renaissance of Black Letters 103Maurice S. Lee

8. African American Literary Nationalism 119Robert S. Levine

9. Periodicals, Print Culture, and African American Poetry 133Ivy G. Wilson

Part II. New Negro Aesthetics, Culture, and Politics: The Modern Period, 1865c.1940 149

10. Racial Uplift and the Literature of the New Negro 151Marlon B. Ross

11. The Dialect of New Negro Literature 169Gene Andrew Jarrett

12. African American Literary Realism, 18651914 185Andreá N. Williams

13. Folklore and African American Literature in the Post-Reconstruction Era 200Shirley Moody-Turner

14. The Harlem Renaissance: The New Negro at Home and Abroad 212Michelle Ann Stephens

15. Transatlantic Collaborations: Visual Culture in African American Literature 227Cherene Sherrard-Johnson

16. Aesthetic Hygiene: Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Work of Art 243Mark Christian Thompson

17. African American Modernism and State Surveillance 254William J. Maxwell

Part III. Reforming the Canon, Tradition, and Criticism of African American Literature: The Contemporary Period, c.1940Present 269 18. The Chicago Renaissance 271Michelle Yvonne Gordon

19. Jazz and African American Literature 286Keith D. Leonard

20. The Black Arts Movement 302James Edward Smethurst

21. Humor in African American Literature 315Glenda R. Carpio

22. Neo-Slave Narratives 332Madhu Dubey

23. Popular Black Womens Fiction and the Novels of Terry McMillan 347Robin V. Smiles

24. African American Science Fiction 360Jeffrey Allen Tucker

25. Latino/a Literature and the African Diaspora 376Theresa Delgadillo

26. African American Literature and Queer Studies: The Conundrum of James Baldwin 393Guy Mark Foster

27. African American Literature and Psychoanalysis 410Arlene R. Keizer

Name Index 421

Subject Index 442