Table of Contents

Introduction D. Quentin Miller; Part I. The Expanding Canon Rich Blint: 1. Those dazzling African American women writers of the 1980s Trudier Harris; 2. Innovations and institutions in African American poetry of the 1980s Laura Vrana; 3. Wideman's family stories and the carceral archipelago D. Quentin Miller; 4. A queer reckoning for Black masculinity Kevin Quashie; 5. August Wilson's time and history's Black bottom Alan Nadel; Part II. New Directions / New Literary Forms D. Quentin Miller: 6. The Trey Ellis eighties and the launching of an artistic 'school' Bertram Ashe; 7. Hip-hop in transition Joseph G. Schloss; 8. Reframing and reappropriating Blackness in 1980s satire Danielle Morgan; Part III. Global Connections Rich Blint: 9.Decolonial poetics and queer resistance in Anglophone Afro-Caribbean women's literature Angelique Nixon; 10. Transnational visions of Black women writing Shaundra Myers; 11. Ruination and a dramaturgical reading of Jamaican women's transnational literature in 1980s North America Danielle Bainbridge.

Promotional Information

Analyzes Black expressive culture in the 1980s as authors grappled with the contradictory legacies of the civil rights era.

About the Author

D. Quentin Miller is Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of fourteen books and more than thirty articles and book chapters. His recent scholarly books relevant to this project include The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature (2016), American Literature in Transition 1980-1990 (2017), Understanding John Edgar Wideman (2018), and James Baldwin in Context (2019). Forthcoming projects include the textbooks The Bedford Introduction to Literature (13th Edition) and Literature to Go (5th edition) and The Routledge Introduction to the American Novel. Rich Blint is is assistant professor of Literature and director of the Program in Race and Ethnicity at The New School. His upcoming books include A Radical Interiority: James Baldwin and the Personified Self in Modern American Culture, and Duppy Umbrella and Other Stories. His writing has appeared in African American Review, James Baldwin Review, Anthropology Now, The Believer, McSweeney's, The Brooklyn Rail, sx visualities, and the A-Line: a journal of progressive thought where he serves as editor-at-large.