Post-civil Rights Research Articles

Heritage Not Hate? Confederate Flag Supporters Less Likely to Perceive Criminal Injustice, More Likely to View Police as Friends

Although the post-civil rights era has motivated many people to avoid appearing racist, they may still be unwilling to relinquish privileges derived from the U.S. racial hierarchy. Because the Confederacy fought to preserve slavery, which upheld this hierarchy, support for the Confederate flag may serve as a proxy measure for individuals’ commitment to maintaining privileges stemming from structural racism. Moreover, given that the modern legal system upholds this same racial hierarchy through anti-Black discrimination, individuals who prioritize protecting their privilege may soothe the guilt they feel for benefiting from structural racism by convincing themselves the legal system treats everyone equally. Similarly, because flag supporters identify with the symbol of a failed nation that considered northern states to have insufficiently policed Black people, they may view police as protectors of the racial hierarchy. Hypotheses were tested using randomly sampled CBS News national poll data. As anticipated, flag supporters were 66% less likely to perceive anti-Black criminal justice system bias, 60% less likely to perceive anti-Black police bias, 34% less likely to consider racial profiling widespread, and 55% more likely to view police as friends.

Institutional Racism in American Post-Civil Rights Movement in Dear Martin by Nic Stone (2017)

This thesis is an analysis of a novel written by Nic Stone entitled Dear Martin (2017). It explores the issue of institutional racism in the post-civil rights era. The concept of systemic racism by Joe R.Feagin is employed to analyze this novel. This analysis focuses on four issues of systemic racism as seen through several African-American characters. This analysis also depends on the narrator to determine which parts of the novel are used as the data. The result of the study shows that African-American characters experience four forms of institutional racism which are The White Racial Frame and Its Embedded Racist Ideology, Alienated Social Relations, Racial Hierarchy with Divergent Group Interest, and Related Racial Domination: Discrimination in Many Aspects. In conclusion, in this post-civil rights movement era, African-Americans still face institutional racism.

Racial Segregation under Slavery.

Social demographers and historians have devoted extensive research to patterns of racial segregation that emerged under Jim Crow and during the post-Civil Rights era but have paid less attention to the role of slavery in shaping the residential distribution of Black populations in the United States. One guiding assumption has been that slavery rendered racial segregation to be both unnecessary and impractical. In this study, I argue that apart from the master-slave relationship, slavery relentlessly produced racial segregation during the antebellum period through the residential isolation of slaves and free people of color. To explain this pattern, I draw on racial threat theory to test hypotheses regarding interracial economic competition and fear of slave mobilization using data from the 1850 Census, as well as an architectural survey of antebellum sites. Findings suggest that the residential segregation of free people of color increased with their local prevalence, whereas the segregation of slaves increased with the prevalence of the slave population. These patterns continue to hold after controlling for interracial competition over land or jobs and past slave rebellions or conspiracies.

Racial Metaphors

Racial Metaphors Nikhil Pal Singh (bio) Barack Obama sought the middle of the road. "It is incontrovertible that race relations have improved significantly in my lifetime," he told an interviewer in 2015. But, he added, "the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution in our lives … that's still part of our DNA that's passed on." Nikole Hannah-Jones is not so optimistic. "Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country," she wrote in the lead essay for the 1619 Project. The bequest of slavery, conjoined at the founding with America's vaunted claims to freedom and self-government, yielded a racial inheritance that we have not yet, and maybe never will, overcome. Saying "racism is in our DNA" is to speak metaphorically. The argument is not that racism is literally programmed in the genes. At the same time, the reference is curious, given the long, invidious association of genetics with the idea of "race" as embodied differences in moral character and cognitive ability. It is arguable that every instance of modern racism depends upon and returns to this intellectual source code. One might ask, then, why would anti-racists go there? To answer this question, we need a better account of the racial policy regimes and conflicts of the post–civil rights era. By the 1990s, three competing approaches with different conceptual vocabularies and legal arguments had emerged: one embraced the language of colorblindness, another emphasized the persistence of explicit racial bias, and a third focused on both more subtle and expansive notions of institutional or systemic racism. Until quite recently, colorblindness had won the law and policy argument. A curious metaphor in its own right, colorblindness suggests that the best way to address the stubborn and unpleasant fact of racial difference is by not seeing it with our full-spectrum capacities, if at all. Such a tortured conception belies an aggressive political project, inverting applications of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment to restrict antidiscrimination law, limit affirmative action and proactive school [End Page 103] desegregation, and provide race-neutral justifications for mass incarceration and voting rights restrictions. In the Obama years, whatever political truce had been forged among U.S. elites over colorblindness unraveled, particularly once states moved to limit voting after the Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby County v. Holder released them from federal oversight under the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, the persistent problem of racial disparities in police violence and criminal punishment erupted with a new intensity. The rise of Black Lives Matter protests gave decisive impetus to longstanding criticisms of the colorblind legal and policy regime, reinforcing the perception of racial stalemate during the post–civil rights era, with America's penal complex, according to a popular title, described as tantamount to a "new Jim Crow." The resurgent idea that "racism is in our DNA" has emerged as a shorthand for thinking about the historical continuities of racial domination and overturning the colorblind legal and policy approach. If colorblindness rests on the claim that the civil rights movement changed everything, the idea that racism is in our DNA borders on a fatalistic proposition that it changed little or nothing. Colorblindness counseled "benign neglect" in the face of persistent racial disparity, viewing the latter as a "tangle of pathology," which Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously argued was now "capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world." The claim that "racism is in our DNA" insists instead that racial disparities are evidence of social injustice produced by racism, demanding policy remediation. The metaphors we live by tell us a lot about our predicament. Colorblindness—an impairment of the senses—was always more about sanctioned indifference to racial inequality than ensuring fairness. To explain away enduring racial disparities, colorblind partisans reopened the door to racist science and culturalist explanations of poverty. But those who focus exclusively on racial disparity risk falling into a trap of their own by treating racial differentiation as if it stands outside of history and determines its course. The bitter irony is that essentialist thinking about racial inheritance has crept back into contemporary life, as we can see in the turn to epigenetic trauma, DNA...

Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way by Mical Raz

Reviewed by: Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way by Mical Raz Paul M. Renfro Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way. By Mical Raz. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. xvi + 162 pp. Paper $26.95, cloth $95. A mid the satanic ritual abuse panic of the 1980s, congresswoman Patricia Schroeder (D-Colorado) explained why such scares resonate with the American public. "You don't need to convince people that child abuse is bad," she proclaimed (114). Indeed, efforts intended to stamp out child abuse remain virtually unassailable. Yet, as historian Mical Raz illustrates in her terrific new book, understandings of child abuse—and thus the measures enacted to limit such abuse—have changed dramatically over the past half century or so. Abusive Policies explores the politics of child abuse from the late 1960s through the present, arguing that definitions of child abuse, neglect, and exploitation have expanded in the intervening years, while state and private mechanisms designed to curb abuse have grown more extensive, coercive, and punitive. Children and families of color, as well as poor and working-class families, have borne the brunt of these transformations, Raz shows, even as the racial, gender, and economic inequalities that enable and exacerbate child abuse remain largely unaddressed by the state and its private auxiliaries. Raz's story begins with the establishment in 1969 of Parents Anonymous, "a self-help group for parents who either abused or were concerned they might abuse their children." Originally called Mothers Anonymous—in keeping with the larger political and cultural "belief that mothers posed the greatest danger to their children"—Parents Anonymous "played a pivotal role in changing perceptions of child abuse" in the United States (9, 40). Specifically, Parents Anonymous helped shape the discourse surrounding the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). Signed into law in 1974, CAPTA "intentionally circumvented discussions of race and class" by "presenting child abuse as a scourge of all walks of society" (10, 11). As appealing as this framing might have been—particularly during the "post-civil rights" moment in which CAPTA passed—the act disregarded research that proved "that child abuse was more common in low-income families" and also foreclosed more robust, redistributive policy solutions (11). Raz reveals how such "social welfare" approaches—touted by researchers and advocates cognizant of the ways in which "poverty and social inequities" [End Page 317] precipitated child abuse—ultimately went "unheeded by politicians and policymakers" (32). These elite actors opted instead for ostensibly race- and class-neutral child abuse measures, a decision that reflected not only public skepticism of anti-poverty initiatives but also the increasing pathologization of poverty and crime, including the offense of child abuse. While supposedly race- and class-neutral, mandatory child abuse reporting requirements—which proliferated in the mid-to-late 1970s—"led to significant increases in reporting of low-income and minority families," even though "only a fraction of the[se] reports involved physical harm to children" (62). Many of these reports stemmed from alleged incidents of emotional or verbal harm, a consequence of the expanding definition of child abuse in the twentieth century's second half. This surge in reporting also prompted more muscular, more coercive, and more consistent state interventions in the lives of poor and working-class children and families, disproportionately those of color. These interventions often resulted in the criminalization of family members, the removal of children from familial and extended kinship networks, and the placement of children in foster homes. Further, such interventions offered little in the way of material support or other services for needy children and families. As Raz describes the situation in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s, "Foster care placement involved taking children from suboptimal homes that could have benefited from further support and placing them in homes where there was a greater danger of physical abuse and death" (84). Indeed, the placement of poor and working-class children in public foster care became increasingly common just as the foster care system desegregated and just as public assistance mechanisms grew more punitive and less generous, as scholars like Julilly Kohler-Hausmann...

Review: Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia, by Brent Tarter

Review: <i>Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia</i>, by Brent Tarter

Understanding White Nationalism in American Politics

This article analyzes the contribution of Ronald Walters to the development of white nationalism as a theory of white subjugation and domination of African Americans in the post–civil rights era. It also discusses why his work has been ignored by political science scholarship on the subject, and the relationship between white nationalism and white racism.

Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning by Rafia Zafar

Reviewed by: Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning by Rafia Zafar Ashley Rose Young Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning. By Rafia Zafar. Southern Foodways Alliance: Studies in Culture, People, and Place. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. Pp. x, 137. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5367-8; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5366-1.) In the late nineteenth century, Black community members in Austin, Texas, enjoyed tables laden with barbecue, fried catfish and chicken, cornbread, cakes, and ripe watermelon to celebrate Juneteenth. These foods—their ingredients and preparation—embody generations of culinary traditions and the ingenuity created and enacted by Black cooks. They have importance far beyond sustaining the body. In Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, Rafia Zafar demonstrates the power of food to feed both the body and soul of Black community members as they fought, and continue to fight, oppressive and violent conditions within the United States. In this book, Zafar presents seven case studies of Black authors using food as a mechanism of empowerment. She aims to provide an alternative understanding of Black culinary history and culture that emphasizes the long tradition of using food to uplift and celebrate Black communities while at the same time defying and breaking down harmful racial stereotypes. The chapters highlight many kinds of literary sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including slave narratives, hospitality manuals, cookbooks, memoirs, and novels, among others. This monograph builds on foundational scholarship in Black culinary history by authors such as Judith Ann Carney, Jessica B. Harris, and Rebecca Sharpless and can be placed in conversation with recent works by Marcia Chatelain, Kelley Fanto Deetz, and Kelly Kean Sharp that examine the agency embedded in food labor and entrepreneurship. Zafar’s work is [End Page 158] not a history of African Americans in the kitchen but rather a meditation on the meanings of food. Zafar’s opening chapter on Black men’s hospitality books articulates a close reading of three published works that go beyond the literal to reveal the Black entrepreneurs’ advice on how to navigate interracial relationships. Particularly compelling is her analysis of Tunis Campbell’s Hotel Keepers, Head Waiters, and Housekeepers’ Guide (1848); she argues that hospitality work established Black men’s credibility, enabling them to occupy public roles as cultural tastemakers. Zafar’s fifth chapter is equally persuasive, contending that Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor and Carole and Norma Jean Darden participated in a “culinary Black Reconstruction” in the post–civil rights era through the publication of their cookbooks (p. 57). Zafar notes that in Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family (New York, 1978), the Darden sisters transcribe, catalog, and share historic recipes to reclaim their Black heritage and build a new Black identity around it. In the subsequent chapter, Zafar makes a similar observation of Edna Lewis’s cookbook The Taste of Country Cooking (New York, 1976). This chapter, however, strays somewhat from the rest of the book as Zafar draws comparison between Lewis’s work and that of Alice B. Toklas, who wrote a self-titled cookbook delineating her experiences as a white American living abroad with her partner, famed writer Gertrude Stein. The juxtaposition of Lewis’s and Toklas’s work is somewhat jarring in a book that otherwise privileges and foregrounds the writings of Black authors. That being said, Zafar’s exploration of cookbooks as elegy, or a literary form that memorializes or mourns the loss of a person or place, is thoughtful and thought-provoking. Zafar questions the genre’s historical dominance by white men and encourages a more creative, inclusive study of elegy that incorporates cookbooks authored by women. Through these case studies, Zafar accomplishes her goal of sharing an alternative perspective on the culinary history of Black communities in the United States, one that has emerged at a pivotal moment in modern U.S. history. Today, both scholars and the broader public are looking to the past to understand the diverse ways Black intellectuals and professionals have fought for equality. Zafar’s work is a testament to the pivotal role of food in this effort. Ashley Rose Young Smithsonian’s National...

Eulogizing a Generation in Elizabeth Alexander’s “When”

Eulogizing a Generation in Elizabeth Alexander’s “When” Abdul Ali (bio) Black death has prompted a number of sonnets that have formed a literary record of how the poet reaffirms humanity in the face of racialized violence on the Black body. Whether we are discussing the latest protest—at this writing, it would be on behalf of Breonna Taylor, the African American woman who was murdered in her own home by agents of the state—or the untold number of Black people who were killed by mobs in 1919 and who inspired Claude McKay to write his canonical poem, “If We Must Die.” Taking McKay’s sonnet as exemplar, given its status in the canon of African American letters, we see Black death strictly through a masculine lens, calling for a lockstep militarized response to racialized violence that captures a measured scene of Black male rage, creating a template by which Black sonnets discussing Black death are judged. Nevertheless, our scholarly literature is finally catching up to the reality that Black women have been writing sonnets for a long time, dating back to Phillis Wheatley in the 18th century. Without the careful reading of Black women poets alongside Black men in our literary discourses on the sonnet, our record of Black life is incomplete, and so much of our humanity erased. There is much delight in reading the ways in which the poet Elizabeth Alexander, while responding to Black death, makes some radical revisions on what we call the “protest sonnet.” ________ Alexander’s and McKay’s poems offer a timely juxtaposition as they engage with the topic of Black death using the sonnet form and allow [End Page 179] us to measure attitudes about gender performance and respectability as it relates to living and dying. We can almost feel the heaviness of Black death from McKay’s “If We Must Die” as death is referenced six times. But as we read further, we understand that death is not the focal point of the sonnet. The question McKay raises is: “How” do we live? Death is a great possibility for Black people in the poem. Hence, the recurring line, “If We Must Die.” However, McKay does not treat death in absolute terms; he invokes the conjunction “if,” making it a conditional prospect. “If We Must Die / let it not be like hogs.” Again, McKay is concerned with how Black men live, if we die, extolling courage and honor as virtues to espouse. This poem is a call to arms. The speaker takes on the persona of a general preparing his troops for battle. In these 14 lines, we get a temperature for the year 1919—perhaps one of the bloodiest summers for Black Americans in history—but also of what the model of Black manhood should look like: fearless, ready for battle, a noble soldier. When we read McKay’s “If We Must Die,” there is little question as to whether it is a protest poem. The sonnet even ends with the words “fighting back.” However, Elizabeth Alexander illustrates Black men as the opposite of a soldier, and in so doing takes us off the battlefield. The Black men that inhabit this throwback to the 1980s are “divine,” “spea[k] French,” “ha[ve] read everything.” These are the Black men who likely attended Yale with the poet. These are post-Civil Rights Black men who can choose how and where they’d like to fight. It is only towards the poem’s final line that we see that the battle these Black men are fighting is an internal one. Alexander writes, “[they] photographed well, did not smoke, said ‘Ciao,’ // then all the men’s faces were spotted.” This final line describes lesions on the face that were consistent with those who were HIV+ during previous generations. The image is significant because it pivots the poem. We do not get any mention of death through the entire poem, and yet it waits ominously in the final [End Page 180] line. This choice speaks to Alexander’s dexterity as a poet: the poem becomes a double-enclosure; structurally it is silent about the AIDS epidemic within the poem, the way...

Racists without racism? From colourblind to entitlement racism online

ABSTRACT While colourblind racism has defined the post-Civil Rights era, there has been little evaluation of how everyday social actors conceptualize racism following the recent rise in overt racism and racist hate crimes. To evaluate if colourblind racism remains a central interpretive framework, I analyse 60 interviews with young adults about their experiences of racism. I argue that overt racism experienced online is a key feature of respondents’ everyday lives, which challenges their adoption of a colourblind framework. Yet, few classify their experiences as racism. I use Essed’s concept of entitlement racism to explain how respondents make sense of this “racists without racism” situation – by invoking the “right to be racist” online. Though colourblind frameworks are not used, the racial order is nevertheless ideologically justified by entitlement racism. By showing how racism is experienced online, this work holds implications for how sociologists theorize and address racism in the contemporary era.

Representation, Incorporation, and Corrections Spending: The Counterbalancing Effect of Black Political Incorporation

AbstractTheories concerning the adoption of punitive policies at the state level often cite two dynamics: conservative ideology and racial threat, that punitive policies are more likely in states with Republican politicians and a higher proportion of Black residents. I argue these theories lose their explanatory power in the post-Civil Rights era, and suggest Black political incorporation acts as a powerful antidote to the punitive impulses of government officials. I test my hypotheses on a dataset of state corrections spending from 1983 to 2011 and find evidence for the counterbalancing argument. States with increasing percentages of Black state legislators spend .36 fewer dollars per capita on corrections, suggesting Black political incorporation is an important mediator in the relationship between racial threat and corrections budgets. This paper has implications for the application of the social control theory as descriptive representation grows, but also for the study of the effect of minority politicians on budgets and policy more broadly. The adoption of policies deleterious to certain communities can be mitigated by the presence of representatives who legislate on behalf of those communities.

“We Must Not Let These Stores That Trade on Human Misery Proliferate”: Black Activism, Spatial Justice, and Liquor Stores in South Central Los Angeles, 1984–94

Abstract This article offers a new way of exploring African American protest in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s. It moves beyond reductive explanations of an inevitable economic and cultural conflict between African Americans and Koreans to examine the role of urban space and understanding of “spatial justice” in fostering anger and resentment. Activists in Black Los Angeles had for a long time targeted liquor stores as a form of neighborhood blight in South Central. The article considers three organizational approaches to protesting liquor stores: 1) The South Central Organizing Committee, a coalition of local Black churches, whose morality politics understood liquor stores as representing neighborhood blight and enabling local crime; 2) The Brotherhood Crusade, an organization steeped in Black nationalist thinking, which emphasized economic independence and community ownership in conjunction with xenophobic leanings toward Korean shopkeepers; 3) The Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment, which looked to deescalate racial tensions by refocusing the “problem” of liquor stores and their damaging effects on local quality of life as a public-health issue. Rethinking the controversy and tragedy caused by the death of Latasha Harlins as a conflict over contested spaces, rather than interracial hostility, helps us to understand the ways African Americans claimed space and connected social justice to physical spaces in the post-civil rights era despite differing tactics and objectives. Exploring these organizations leads to the conclusion that scholars need to take greater care to consider the role of space and the built environment when examining urban social movements.

Framing Black Performance

Recent African American film scholarship has called for an attention to the structures of black representation on screen. This work echoes the calls made in the 1990s by black feminist film and cultural scholars to resist the allure of reading for racial realism and to develop more appropriate critical tools and terms to acknowledge black artistic innovations. This essay takes up and reiterates that call, drawing attention to the problems of film interpretation that attend to a version of historical analysis without an understanding of form and medium. Foregrounding film as a terrain of struggle, the essay mobilizes an analysis of the 2014 film Selma to illuminate the multiple resonances of the concept representation. Focusing on the film’s representation of women and girl characters, the essay argues that cinematic play with the terms and conditions of representation comment powerfully on the limitations of cinematic and historical discourses to speak about the black femme as a political subject. Analysis of Selma exposes the key problems of reception and criticism facing contemporary African American film. The film speaks to the failure of de jure representational regimes in post–civil rights movement America and offers up the cinematic terrain as an important twenty-first-century site of African American struggle.

“We aren’t after a House Negro to prove our love for Black People”: the complicated relationship between George S. Schuyler and the John Birch society

ABSTRACT Scholars have taken great interest in black conservatism, but most focus on the ideology’s contours during the post-civil rights era. Few closely interrogate the relationship between black conservatives and white conservative groups, particularly during the height of the civil rights movement. This article takes a close look at the partnership between black conservative George S. Schuyler and the rabidly anticommunist John Birch Society during the 1960s and 1970s. Black conservatives like Schuyler have often been dismissed as race traitors. However, Schuyler often used his conservative platforms to challenge racism, even among his right-wing audience. This reveals a complicated relationship and an unexpected black conservative politics that encompassed elements of the black freedom struggle once thought reserved for black liberals and nationalists.

Reading and Leading: Interviews With RBPE Editors About the Past and the Future of the Review

The Review of Black Political Economy has been a leader on issues of race and economics, politics, sociology and area studies. After half a century of shaping minds, critical ideas and arguments, the time has come to look back and ask the editors of the Review what they saw when they were at the helm, and what they see ahead. While all their views are different, common themes emerged: 1. The need to embrace new technologies, 2. Making the Review the first pick for top scholars, 3. Relevancy in the post-civil rights era, and 4. Finance for the 21st century.

Prince as the Post-Civil Rights Archetype: Navigating between Assimilation and Self-Determination

ABSTRACT Prince opened the doors of diversity and opportunity for his race, ensuring that African Americans are seen as the beautiful bouquet that they are. By refusing to allow anyone but himself to define him, Prince practiced kujichagulia (self-determination). Thus, Prince became the archetype of the post-civil rights African American. His work identifies with a group of African Americans engaging life after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, with more freedoms and possibilities than ever before yet still grappling with the question of integration, which often encompasses assimilation, or Black Nationalism being the most effective mode of survival for African Americans.

Paradoxes of white moral experience

Paradoxes of white moral experience

Zora's Legacy: Black Love as Critical and Creative Inquiry

Zora's Legacy: Black Love as Critical and Creative Inquiry

“Armed and Dangerous”: The Criminalization of Angela Davis and the Cold War Myth of America’s Innocence

AbstractThis essay explores the arrest, imprisonment, and trial of Angela Davis as the most politically charged legal defense case of the détente era of the Cold War that drew international attention over a nearly two-year period (1970–72). It demonstrates that the life of this young black female intellectual in post-civil rights America became inseparable from securing (or contesting) the dominant narrative of U.S. democratic superiority. Davis, her family, and legal team insisted that racism and politics motivated the criminal charges against her and that a transnational movement was imperative to ensuring her safety as a black woman communist in the American justice system. U.S. leaders and mainstream journalists dismissed the veracity of such claims, ridiculed Davis’s fears for her safety, and asserted that political trials and racism existed only “over there” in the communist universe. They racialized Davis as a “black militant,” invoking traditional sexist–racist tropes of black women as emotionally unstable, sexual sirens, in order to reassure the American public of the righteousness of U.S. democracy and of Davis’s concomitant guilt. After an all-white jury acquitted Davis of all criminal charges, the mainstream press hailed the acquittal as evidence not of Davis’s innocence but as proof that she was wrong about America. Davis persisted in contesting on a world stage America’s Cold War claims of democratic moral superiority and traveled to the Soviet Union to thank leaders for helping spearhead the international campaign that she credited for saving her life.

Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-visioning History, Memory, and IdentityHow to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of InterpretationBlack Aesthetics and the Interior Life

Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-visioning History, Memory, and IdentityHow to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of InterpretationBlack Aesthetics and the Interior Life