Black Configurations

Black Configurations is the first volume of a three-volume study of African-American literary history, with special attention to the internal dialogues regarding concepts of “tradition,” haunting, trauma, and re-vision. Texts studied extend from slave narratives to contemporary works, including both canonical and lesser-known instances of African-American expression.

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Black Configurations is the first volume of a three-volume study that offers a fresh reading of African-American literary history by locating within the literature itself the terms for a revisionary account of black writing, terms pursued along three distinct but interlocking pathways: by charting figurations of tradition among six of the most innovative practitioners of black literary expression from Sterling Brown to Toni Morrison (Volume 1); by following the haunting pathways of spectral dialogues between slavery and African-American modernism (Volume 2); and by interrogating interlocking topoi of critique and assertion (naming; facing; voicing) across the history of African-American literary expression. The critical trilogy thereby presents a narrative of African-American literature as a continual, dialectical process, blending confrontation with traumatic origins and the quest for expressive transformation. This project arises from the question: how does one construe and narrate the story of a tradition for which the conventional structure of literary history is itself politically and thematically charged issue? Across the landscapes cultivated by each of its three volumes, the study confronts this question by developing a mode of critical history adequate to a literature that exerts transformative pressure on the very experience that engenders it, attending both to the material circumstances of its linguistic achievement and the expressive activity by which the black subject emerges.