The Time of Breach: Class Division and the Contemporary African American Novel

Abstract

Literary and cultural critics have tended to interpret African American literary postmodernism as a broad threat to the cohesion of racial community. Alternatively, this essay submits that contemporary novels by Charles Johnson, Andrea Lee, and others have also construed these changes in racial collectivism as opportunities to recast the political and formal protocols of black fiction. More specifically, these writers draw on the class divisions that intellectuals have viewed primarily through the lens of crisis as a means to challenge existing models of racial solidarity and to renovate the formal features of narrative itself.