Through a focus on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem “Praise Song for the Day,” and Amiri Baraka’s 9/11 poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” this chapter analyzes the twenty-first-century African American literary mood of melancholic hope (an inseparable fusion of melancholy and hope). When Citizen, “Praise Song for the Day,” and “Somebody Blew Up America” are read alongside each other, a profound tension emerges between the stasis of the afterlife of slavery and the movement of Black life that is not overdetermined by the afterlife of slavery. New ways of thinking about African American citizenship are one of the central focal points in the first decades of twenty-first-century African American literature. The simultaneity of the era of the first Black president (and the larger symbolism of a loosening of institutionalized antiblack racism) and the era of the Black Lives Matter movement continues to lead writers, working in the traditions of African American literature, to depictions of melancholic hope. This chapter ends with a focus on how the melancholic hope of twenty-first-century African American citizenship can produce a feeling of black transnational citizenship (the feeling of black collective unbelonging and a refusal of the imagined communities created by national borders).

The modern lyric, emerging in the late eighteenth century, is the genre par excellence of the private individual alone with their thoughts. The construction of material and psychic interiority for the normative bourgeois subject has relied on the violent dispossession of Black people through slavery, colonialism, and other forms of exploitation. This chapter first considers the possibilities of re-marking the lyric as Black – reading the claims of Theodor Adorno’s account of lyric’s social character through a history he does not consider – before turning to contemporary questions regarding the emergence of the lyric as the preeminent genre of African American poetry since the 1980s.

In the 1980s, a theoretical turn in African American literary criticism helped institutionalize the study of African American literature by insisting on its formal complexity and distinctiveness. The racial text could no longer be read as reducible to its social context. In that same decade, a materialist line of inquiry sought to reconcile formal and contextual analysis by examining the ways black-authored books were published by major companies and received by the critical establishment. Drawing on methods from book history and print culture studies, a sociology of African American literature developed as the academic field of study took shape around canon-building projects. Two approaches to African American literary sociology emerged out of the 1990s: skepticism about the book’s capacity to represent racial experience, and optimism about the commercial success of diverse authors. Over time, these approaches merged into general studies of the racial text’s shifting status in the literary marketplace. With that expanded focus, the sociology of African American literature today sheds light on the way culture and commerce intersect in the making, selling, and reading of black-authored books.

This chapter is an overview of the problems and uses that affect theory offers the study of African American literature. Defined as aside from the traditions of thought that made black literary fields thinkable in an institutional context, it is not difficult to surmise, in generous faith, why the turn to affect has been inhospitable to lines of inquiry that presume a racial subject. Meanwhile, questions regarding the transmission of affect have remained central to the project of African American literature since before its advent as literature. This chapter considers how the work of the critic in the field necessarily presumes the relevance of affect, arguing that consciously reading for affect wards off duller accounts of what African American literary texts signify in favor of vivacious dialogue on what they do and how.

This chapter discusses Afrofuturism with reference to a wide range of literary works, influential critical and theoretical accounts, and artistic manifestos, identifying its overlaps and distinctions from the broader speculative turn apparent in African American literature from the 1980s onward. The chapter focuses on two rubrics that lend cohesion to the array of genres, styles, and aesthetic principles associated with the label of Afrofuturism: the politics of time and the idea of race as technology. Through various devices of temporal dislocation, Afrofuturist works invent revisionist histories, shatter consensus narratives about the present, and challenge prevailing discourses of futurity. In addition, the chapter argues that Afrofuturist literature at its best defamiliarizes established ways of reading race through its innovative engagement with race-making techniques and technologies ranging from genre conventions to genetic engineering.

This chapter examines the different aspects of enslaved Africans’ humanity that writers of neo-slave narratives felt was limiting, dehumanizing, or incomplete. To do this, this chapter also investigates the changing trends in the study of the sociology and history of enslaved Africans, speeches by Ossie Davis, and the writings of Octavia Butler, Angela Davis, and Toni Morrison – all of which contributed to ideas about black humanity. This chapter turns the kaleidoscope of neo-slave narrative by looking at a narrower, yet significant, angle of political life, form, and style of being Black and human, in the context of trends in mass consumption that gave shape to the landscape of this fiction about slavery.

Touching down in a few of the many geographies of Black sound, this chapter pauses to listen in between the lines and forms of Black literary creation. Inclusive of readings of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paul Beatty, Jesmyn Ward, and others, this chapter examines the penetrating collusions of the sonic and/as the literary in order to briefly mark their interreliance and to consider the conditions and futures of blackness as improvisational practice.

Arlisha Norwood examines a special category of women, those who temporarily or permanently could be classified as “single” in Virginia. This chapter argues that this population which includes unmarried, divorced, widowed, abandoned and separated women were the most economically vulnerable group during and after the war. Despite the unique obstacles they faced, single Black women asserted their needs, worked together to prevent destitution, and challenged the agendas of governmental agencies and private organizations whose well-meaning intentions often clashed with their own expectations. Their petitions for support and compensation altered the roles and responsibilities of federal and local agencies and made these women prominent characters in defining freedom, welfare, citizenship, and womanhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

At its inception, the Tea Party embraced a platform emphasizing fiscal restraint, lower taxes, exclusive patriotism, and criticism of the Obama administration. This framing occupied a nearly empty discursive space within conservative grassroots activism. It combined the efforts of an anti-tax, anti-spending message that had been cultivated by elite conservative groups with genuine grassroots activism aimed at undermining the Obama presidency. The resonance of such claims was in part responsible for the Tea Party’s early success. This chapter traces the evolution of Tea Party discourse between 2009 and 2018 using a unique sample of 91,874 blog posts written by leaders and activists. Over time, the Tea Party’s tightly coherent messaging began to erode as Obama was reelected and the economy slowly began to recover from the Great Recession. Soon, Tea Party activists began to follow along with the flow of the broader conservative dialogue, thereby blurring the clarity of the original Tea Party message. We refer to this process as discursive demobilization, which helped further hasten the Tea Party’s decline.

This chapter explores enchantment and speculation as features of contemporary black literature, connecting earlier forms of Pan-Africanist gathering to twenty-first-century preoccupations with genre fiction and popular culture. As political critiques of racialized capitalism intensify to include queries about the fundamental assumptions of materialism, black authors in a variety of settings and genres have drawn on forms of the immaterial – religion, spirituality, magic, ghostly haunts – to ground and illuminate possibilities for black art and life. The chapter first contextualizes the historical background of contemporary black literature and then explores contemporary models of gathering or cohesion based on such radiant effects as the sound wave, the empathic transfer, and the spirit. Two novels by radically searching black writers, Erna Brodber and Octavia Butler, help ground the chapter, as both authors demonstrate the thematic and formal possibilities of nonmaterialist thinking in global black literature and culture. Brodber’s experimentation with ideas from a variety of Afro-descended religious traditions in tandem with Butler’s genre-inflected vision of apocalypse and survival present a vision of black collaboration across difference, timescape, and distance – and demonstrate a prevailing investment in the potential for black (re)gathering on the other side of, in the wake of, catastrophe.

This chapter assesses the interplay among social class and the growing centralization of African American literature in the marketplace. Since the 1980s the production of black literature has been increasingly shaped by the economic and aesthetic priorities of commercial bookselling. Contemporary African American writers have expressed their awareness of the ways that the commodification of black literary expression has both imposed limits and created new possibilities for literary art. These authors have been particularly attentive to new patterns of consumption and reception that emphasize class distinctions among consumers and genres of writing. These changes have prompted writers to rethink traditional assumptions about the social and aesthetic obligations of black middle-class writers in forging alliances with the working class. The chapter considers these shifting social relations with reference to literary works by Paul Beatty, Trey Ellis, Percival Everett, Mat Johnson, Claudia Rankine, and Colson Whitehead.