Description: Analyzing works by James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Jamaica Kincaid, Percival Everett, Sapphire, and Toni Morrison, Lesley Larkin covers a century of African American literature in search of the concepts and strategies that black writers have developed in order to address and theorize a diverse audience, and outlines the special contributions modern and contemporary African American literature makes to the fields of reader ethics and antiracist literary pedagogy.
Review Quotes:
"A fact never to be forgotten is that reading was prohibited for slaves, an act that 'marked literacy as a paradoxical sign of both outlaw status and freedom.'"--AMERICAN LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP
"An illuminating study that promises to make significant inroads in the field of African American literary criticism and American studies. Larkin poses a series of provocative queries about the 'politics' of writing, reading, and interpreting 20th century literature by African and Caribbean American writers."--Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination