Topics include: 'Complexity and Continuity'; 'Transition, Exclusion and Illusion'; 'The Use of an Eye'; 'Fragmentation and Reconstruction'; 'Shifting Foundations'; 'Living History'; and more.

Analysis of four Harlem Renaissance texts that challenges our assumptions about the stability of racial identity and investigates the ways those assumptions shape how we have read literature by Black writers.

Excavates the contemporary revival of 19th-century cultural pluralism, revealing how American novelists since the 1990s have appropriated the historical novel in the pursuit of selfhood rather than truth, fundamentally repositioning the genre in American culture.

This book explores lesbians in film from early representations to contemporary ones, spanning sixty years and over twenty films. Concentrating on lesbian desire and subtext, Kabir draws on films such as Queen Christina, The Killing of Sister George, Rebecca, Desperately Seeking Susan and The Color Purple. She details their narratives in conjunction with an examination of different spectating positions and new syntheses of filmic languages. Deploying lesbian history, black subjectivity, feminist film criticism and material from psychoanalysis, Daughters of Desire explores narrative, desire and identifications. From castration and agency to the fetishization of beauty, from mothering, narcissism, and Oedipus to rage and trauma, Kabir crosses frontiers in film studies and feminist theory.

In spite of the existence of statistics and numerical data on various aspects of African American life, including housing, earnings, assets, unemployment, household violence, teen pregnancy and encounters with the criminal justice system, social science literature on how racism affects the everyday interactions of African American families is limited. How does racism come home to and affect African American families? If a father in an African American family is denied employment on the basis of his race or a wife is demeaned at work by racist slurs, how is their family life affected? Given the lack of social science literature responding to these questions, this volume turns to an alternative source in order to address them: literature. Engaging with novels written by African American authors, it explores their rich depictions of African American family life, showing how these can contribute to our sociological knowledge and making the case for the novel as an object and source of social research. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students of the sociology of the family, race and ethnicity, cultural studies and literature.

Nostalgia or Perversion? Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century until the Present Day presents an interdisciplinary approach to an important aspect of Gothic texts, films, and music: that of rewriting. From the eighteenth-century Gothic novel to present-day vampire films and Goth music, the genre is characterised by its nostalgic reflection on past worlds, narratives, and identities. Gothic nostalgia is often accompanied by a transgressive drive, resulting in perversions of the rewritten past—the modern vampire is no longer embodied evil but an attractive dandy, while Goth subcultures reflect on Victorian aesthetics but pervert them by adding fetishist elements. Gothic nostalgia transforms the past, turning it upside down, foregrounding its background, and corrupting its order. In this volume an international group of philosophy, literature, film, and music scholars investigates the instrumental role of nostalgia and perversion in the Gothic’s rewriting of the past. If elements of both nostalgia and perversion are operative in Gothic rewriting, how are they connected? How do they play out in differing media? How do they change audiences’ views on the relationships between binaries such as past and present, other and self, and norm and deviation? Nostalgia or Perversion brings together the early Gothic novel, present-day female and black Gothic literature, Goth subculture and music, and the imagery of horror films and comic books, thus broadening the definition of ‘Gothic’ from a literary genre to a gesture of pervasive cultural criticism. The interdisciplinary analysis of nostalgia and perversion in Gothic rewriting uncovers wholly new insights into the artistic and social functions of the Gothic, making the volume useful to both scholars and students. As the essays reflect on academic as well as popular texts and media, it is also accessible to general readers. "Nostalgia or Perversion provides a sophisticated analysis of how the Gothic radically rewrites the past, not as nostalgia but as a calculated act of transgression. The past and how its reconstructions break down the boundaries between real and unreal, and normal and abnormal, is examined across a range of different media, including novels, films, comic books, television and music. The essays in this collection also address how this issue shapes Gothic formulations of race, sexuality, and gender. Both ambitious in scope and focused and rigorous in its analysis, this book provides a critically important re-evaluation of the Gothic tradition." —Andrew Smith, University of Glamorgan (UK).

As a young journalist covering black life at large, author Ytasha L. Womack was caught unaware when she found herself straddling black culture's rarely acknowledged generation gaps and cultural divides. Traditional images show blacks unified culturally, politically, and socially, united by race at venues such as churches and community meetings. But in the “post black” era, even though individuals define themselves first as black, they do not necessarily define themselves by tradition as much as by personal interests, points of view, and lifestyle. In Post Black: How a New Generation Is Redefining African American Identity, Womack takes a fresh look at dynamics shaping the lives of contemporary African Americans. Although grateful to generations that have paved the way, many cannot relate to the rhetoric of pundits who speak as ambassadors of black life any more than they see themselves in exaggerated hip-hop images. Combining interviews, opinions of experts, and extensive research, Post Black will open the eyes of some, validate the lives of others, and provide a realistic picture of the expanding community.