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This study of atheist African American writers poses a substantive challenge to those who see atheism in despairing and nihilistic terms. The author argues that while most white atheists mourn the loss of faith, many black atheists — believing the “God-concept” spawns racism and oppression — consider the death of God a cause for personal and political hope. Focusing on a little-discussed aspect of African American literature, this analysis of African American atheists' treatment of God fills a huge gap in studies that consistently ignore their contributions. Examining how a belief in God and His “chosen people” necessitates a politics of superiority and inferiority, the author considers the degree to which religious faith is responsible for justifying oppression, even acts of physical and psychological violence. In their secular vision of social and political justice, black atheists argue that only when the culture adopts and internalizes a truly atheist politics — one based on pluralism, tolerance, and freedom — will radical democracy be achieved.

Toni Morrison herself has long urged for organic critical readings of her works. This book delves into African spiritual traditions, explaining the meanings of African cosmology and epistemology as manifest in Morrison's novels. The result is a critical investigation of such works as The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Paradise, Love, Beloved, and Jazz. While others have studied the African spiritual ideas and values encoded in Morrison's work, the author of this study explores a wide range of complex concepts, including African deities, ancestral ideas, spiritual archetypes, mythic trope, and lyrical prose representing African spiritual continuities. She writes this book, not only as a literary critic but also as a practicing Obatala priest in the Yoruba spiritual tradition and a Mama Nganga in the Kongo spiritual system. She analyzes tensions between communal and individual values and moral codes as represented in Morrison's novels. She also uses interviews with and non-fiction written by Morrison to further build her critical paradigm.

Black Well-Being analyzes conflicting, oftentimes messy, articulations of black selfhood. From the classical healthy mind-in-body ideal to the disabled physique, the portrayals of black physicality in the literature analyzed here offer a striking range of strategic approaches to creating a nineteenth-century politics of well-being opposed to as well as independent of medically and legally informed systems of subjugation. These authors’ wide-ranging analyses of black well-being expose the instability of national and colonial, social and geopolitical constructs and the mythologies that support them, such as, for example, American exceptionalism, the civilizing enterprise of imperial Britain, and colonial Canada’s role as a safe haven from American slavery and racism. Their considerations of well-being, a fundamental, desirable aspect of selfhood, demonstrate the broad and complex scope of their early-to-mid-nineteenth-century black political philosophy. Their varied articulations bolster the need for an urgent reassessment of our twenty-first-century approaches to biopolitics, health, law, literature, personhood, and humanness toward the development of theories and models of ethical practice that truly account for the contextually discursive composition of the self.

“Sasha” was the code name adopted by Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay (1889–1948) to foil investigations of his life and work. Over a period of two decades, the FBI, U.S. State Department, British police and intelligence, and French law enforcement and colonial authorities took turns harassing McKay, an openly gay, Marxist, Jamaican expatriate who had left the United States and was living in Europe. This study of four of McKay's texts—a literary, cultural, and historical analysis to address the multilayered “queer black anarchism” in McKay's writings—argues that McKay's “fringe” perspective not only targeted him for investigation but also contributed to a declining literary reputation. Perceived as mystifying and unacceptable because of his dedication to communism, McKay is perplexing and difficult to classify within the traditional constructs of the Harlem Renaissance. This book analyzes three of the most important works in McKay's career—the Jazz Age bestseller Home to Harlem, the négritude manifesto Banjo, and the unpublished Romance in Marseille. The book uncovers ways in which Home to Harlem assembles a home-front queer black anarchism, and treats Banjo as a novel that portrays Marxist internationalist sexual dissidence. It assesses the consequence of McKay's landmark Romance in Marseille, a text that is, despite its absence from broad public access for nearly 80 years, conceivably the most significant early black Diaspora text. Finally, it examines McKay's extensive FBI file and his late-1930s autobiography,A Long Way from Home, in which McKay disguises his past as a means of eluding his harassers.

Western European mythology and history tend to view spirituality and sexuality as opposite extremes. But sex can be more than a function of the body and religion more than a function of the mind, as exemplified in the works and characters of such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Opal Palmer Adisa, and Edwidge Danticat. This book builds on the work of previous scholars who have identified the ways that black women's narratives often contain a form of spirituality rooted in African cosmology, which consistently grounds their characters' self-empowerment and quest for autonomy. What the author adds to the discussion is an emphasis on the importance of sexuality in the development of black female subjectivity, beginning with Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and continuing into contemporary black women's writings. She supports her thesis with close readings of various texts, including Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Morrison's Beloved. She reveals how these writers highlight the interplay between the spiritual and the sexual through religious symbols found in Vodoun, Santería, Candomblé, Kumina, and Hoodoo.

From Phillis Wheatley to Alice Walker, the figural readings of Psalm 68:31—”Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God”—have been instrumental in the articulation of black American historical subjectivity, imagination, knowledge, agency, and figurations of Ethiopia. This book maps the various allusions to and interpretations and citations of Psalm 68:31—a largely Protestant and Anglophone phenomenon—in black American letters, to show how it was read and to trace the readings it produced. Its method is twofold. First, the book demonstrates how black readers emerged as historical subjects through reading, arguing that reading is a material, eventful, performative, and transformative practice. Second, it shows how black readers read Psalm 68:31, also known as the Ethiopian Prophecy. For some readers, the psalm pointed to the Christianization and modernization of black peoples in both America and Africa, engendering, for instance, romantic ideas of race and the development of racial narratives such as the Afro-Asiatic myth. For other readers, Psalm 68:31 signified the emancipation of black slaves in America and their full inclusion as American citizens, or the end of colonialism and the rise of African independence. Another collection of black exegetes read the verse as one fragment in a vast textual storehouse that could be re-woven to create new poetic figures, narratives, and possibilities for black people and humanity. What the book demonstrates is the plasticity of Ethiopia as a figure of black imagination and thinking.

Furiously Funny: Comic Rage from Ralph Ellison to Chris Rock explores the simultaneous expression of militancy and humor in African American literature that came to fruition in the post–World War II moment. This book traces the increasing presence of African American works containing a combustible mix of fury and radicalism, of pathos and pain, of wit and love that fuse to create what I refer to as comic rage. I employ Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to argue that works of comic rage centralize African American experience and tradition in direct challenges to dominant (white) narratives and (black) counter-narratives about race, identity, and nation. Works of comic rage sit at the center of the discourse through humor’s connection to the familiar and the recognizable in mainstream and African America. Comic rage capitalizes on the inability of African Americans to be fully expelled from mainstream American constructions of its identity and culture. Therefore, as with the abject that cannot be expelled, works of comic rage cause the narratives and counter-narratives to collapse and initiate a re-visioning of fundamental, destructive assumptions within white supremacy. Whether those assumptions involve history, literature, or (white) superiority, comic rage aggressively promotes an African American subjectivity that rejects white stereotypes of blackness and African American responses that remain dependent on the power dynamics that reinforce white supremacy (master vs. slave, perpetrator vs. victim).

More than 200,000 African American soldiers fought in World War I, and returning troops frequently spoke of “color-blind” France. Such cosmopolitan experiences, along with the brutal, often desegregated no-man's-land between the trenches, forced African American artists and writers to re-examine their relationship to mainstream (white) American culture. The war represented a seminal moment for African Americans, and in the 1920s and 1930s it became a touchstone for such diverse cultural concerns as the pan-African impulse, the burgeoning civil rights movement, and the redefinition of black masculinity. In examining the legacy of the Great War on African American culture, this book considers the work of such canonical writers as W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Alain Locke. In addition, it considers the legacy of the war for African Americans as represented in film, photography, and anthropology, with a particular focus on the photographer James Van Der Zee.

Langston Hughes never knew of an America where lynching was absent from the cultural landscape. This book investigates the nearly three dozen poems written by Hughes on the subject of lynching to explore its varying effects on survivors, victims, and accomplices as they resisted, accepted, and executed this brutal form of sadistic torture. Starting from Hughes's life as a teenager during the Red Summer of 1919 and moving through the civil rights movement that took place toward the end of Hughes's life, the book initiates an important dialogue between America's neglected history of lynching and some of the world's most significant poems. This extended study of the centrality of these heinous acts to Hughes's artistic development, aesthetics, and activism represents a significant and long-overdue contribution to our understanding of the art and politics of Langston Hughes.

Since Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, some scholars have privately suspected that King’s “dream” was connected to Langston Hughes’s poetry. Drawing on archival materials, including notes, correspondence, and marginalia, W. Jason Miller provides a completely original and compelling argument that Hughes’s influence on King’s rhetoric was, in fact, evident in more than just the one famous speech. King’s staff had been wiretapped by J. Edgar Hoover and suffered accusations of communist influence, so quoting or naming the leader of the Harlem Renaissance—who had his own reputation as a communist—would only have intensified the threats against the civil rights activist. Thus, the link was purposefully veiled through careful allusions in King’s orations. In Origins of the Dream, Miller lifts that veil and shows how Hughes’s revolutionary poetry inflected King’s voice. He contends that by employing Hughes’s metaphors in his speeches, King negotiated a political climate that sought to silence the poet’s subversive voice. By separating Hughes’s identity from his poems, King helped the nation unconsciously embrace the incendiary ideas behind his poetry.

Precarious Passages investigates how one type of cultural production, fiction written in English, participates in the ongoing construction of black diasporic identity within the old Anglophone African diaspora in the Western world. Because the dispersed communities of the African diaspora are not united around any shared religion, secular culture in its various forms plays a major role in producing and reproducing the African diasporic imaginary—that is, in creating symbolic communities and in keeping alive the sense that there is something that can be called a black diasporic community and something that can be called a black diasporic identity, however nonprescriptively defined. Precarious Passages analyzes eleven novels of movement and migration written by eight contemporary novelists of African or African Caribbean descent (Charles Johnson, Lawrence Hill, Toni Morrison, George Lamming, Caryl Phillips, Andrea Levy, Cecil Foster, and Edwidge Danticat), reading these texts as cultural mediators of black diasporic memory and as active participants in the formation of black diasporic identity. In the process, Precarious Passages advances our understanding of current black Anglophone diasporic fiction by placing novels usually classified as “African American,” “black Canadian,” “black British,” or “postcolonial African Caribbean” in dialogue with each other. Works falling into these categories are traditionally read, interpreted, and anthologized separately, but Precarious Passages shows that the concept and empirical reality of the African diaspora facilitates an integrative approach to the black Atlantic literary imagination.

A reimagining of liberal ideologies of selfhood, privilege, and consent is a significant legacy of nineteenth-century black feminist knowledge production. Yet, analyses of black women’s critical engagement with theliberal problematic—the disjunction between democratic promise and dispossession, between freedom and subjection in the American nation-state—remain incomplete. Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival repositions a spectrum of discourses, from canonical nineteenth-century American literary studies to black women’s history, to interrogate black women’s disruptions of the liberal problematic as a medium of resistance. It deploys African-Americanist and feminist literary criticism by scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Lindon Barrett, post-1960s histories of enslavement and black political consciousness by Stephanie M. H. Camp, and rhetorical theories developed by Shirley Wilson Logan and Vorris Nunley, to expand the bounds of contemporary critical inquiry in two key ways. First, Resistance Reimagined spotlights nineteenth-century black women’s intervention into the effects of liberalism as juridical, economic, and affective performance. This unsettles sedimented perspectives of black resistance as inherently militant, male, and vernacular, while problematizing how scholars have read nineteenth-century African-American women’s activism—against Sojourner Truth or Ida B. Wells-Barnett, for instance—as inauthentic or accommodationist. Second, the text juxtaposes early writers and thinkers, including Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper, with authors of modern neo-slave narrative, including Sherley Anne Williams, to grapple more effectively with the neoliberal present.

This study argues that Catholicism informs a major genre of African American literature in ways and with a significance that has gone largely unrecognized. Since their emergence in the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary narratives of slavery have challenged the traditional historiography of American slavery, radically revising how we remember that “peculiar institution.” These fictional works disrupt the form and content of slave autobiography, suggesting that the conventions of Enlightenment rationalism to which antebellum texts were bound could not adequately represent the experience and memory of enslavement. Scholarship on the genre has thus tended to focus on the way it undermines the rationalizing impulse of Enlightenment discourse, which in the U.S. as well as in Europe was determined by the ideals of the Protestant Reformation. But while the scholarly attention to Protestantism has yielded valuable insights, it cannot account for the striking presence of Catholicism at the margins of these texts, nor for the way that the religion is imaginatively linked to radical moments of historical revision. Sacraments of Memory thus proposes a new framework for understanding the revisionist aims of these works, contextualizing the skepticism they exhibit towards historical realism in terms of a Catholic counter-tradition in American literature that has long been associated with superstition and irrationality. The authors in the books all marshal this anti-Enlightenment orientation of Catholicism to disrupt the conventional historiography of American slavery and, this book argues, ultimately, to imagine and embody radically different means of remembering the past.

This book contributes to the fields of African American, ecocritical, and literary studies, as it offers a sustained treatise on watercourses in the African American expressive tradition. It builds on the scholarship on the trans-Atlantic voyage, specifically reading the Middle Passage as a trope in African diasporic writing, and expanding studies of the Atlantic by reading this seminal water crossing in relation to other bodies of water. The African American expressive tradition positions bodies of water as haunted by the bodies of those who lost their lives in their currents. Water, then, the course of travel, marks severed paths to home, family, land, and even life, yet this break in the waters inaugurated a transatlantic culture. In this way, water is not merely the site of disconnection, trauma, and loss, but a source of new life. Further, while ecocritical theory is gaining increasing importance, to date there has been very little analysis of the environmental dimension of African American writing. The inclusion of African American literature in this field—and specifically reading water as a site of memory and history—meaningfully expands the ecocritical canon. Beyond proposing a new theoretical map for conceptualizing the African Diaspora and considering the ways in which collective memory is grafted onto waterways, this study offers a series of close readings of major African American literary, filmic, and blues texts.