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

From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to do

Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel restores to its rightful place a body of American literature that has long been overlooked, dismissed, or mis