The distinguishing characteristic of the book is its mix of essays focusing on teaching cultural diversity in the classroom and illustrating diversity through fiction to the general readers."--BOOK JACKET.

Evidence of Things Not Seen is an interdisciplinary study of blackness in genre literature of the Americas. When mystery, romance, fantasy, mixed-genre, and science fiction writers center fantastical blackness, they make this expressive quality available to a broad audience that uses pop fictions' imaginable vocabularies to reshape extra-literary realities. Ultimately, popular genres' imaginable possibilities help us strategize ways that the made up can be made real.

Table of contents

The diverse essays collected here constitute an exploration of the emerging interdisciplinary field of visual culture, and examine why modern and postmodern culture place such a premium on rendering experience in visual form.

Recovering the Black Female Body recognizes the pressing need to highlight through scholarship the vibrant energy of African American women's attempts to wrest control of the physical and symbolic construction of their bodies away from the distortions of others.

This text explores the ways in which crime fiction manipulates cultural constructions such as race and gender to inscribe dominant cultural discourses. It notes that even those writers who set out to revise conventions repeatedly produce some of the genre's most conservative elements.

100 American Crime Writers features discussion and analysis of the lives of crime writers and their key works, examining the developments in American crime writing from the Golden Age to hardboiled detective fiction. This study is essential to scholars and an ideal introduction to crime fiction for anyone who enjoys this fascinating genre.