Description: "Robert J. Patterson and his contributors interrogate how African American writers and cultural producers use black modes of cultural expressivity to engage, make, and change history in order to imagine the future and to provide alternate ways of thinking, existing, and being for black subjects in particular, and American citizens in general, in the midst of this historical paradox. This volume insists that black cultural production during the 1970s anchors the philosophical, aesthetic, and political debates that animate contemporary debates in African American studies, and insists that, despite abject social and political conditions, black cultural production keeps imagining black thriving. Simultaneously, it demonstrates the specific ways that the cultural production itself re(imagines) ways to transform that which prevents black thriving. Thus, the volume argues that African American cultural production continues to engage in social critique and transformation and remains an important site for the (re)making of black politics"--
Review Quotes: "Deeply informed and persuasively argued, this wide-ranging yet cohesive collection of original essays illuminates the inter-workings of black activism and expressive culture in and beyond the 1970s. With its rigorous historical contextualization and compelling commentary on how the 1970s anticipated and influenced our own moment, Black Cultural Production After Civil Rights is sure to become an invaluable resource for contemporary scholars working in the fields of African American literature and print culture; film studies; popular culture; feminist history and theory; and trauma and memory studies."--Aida Levy-Hussen, author of How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation