Jarrett - A Companion to African American Literature

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field.

Published Recently

This paperback edition first published 2013

2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization 2013 Gene Andrew Jarrett

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2010)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to African American literature / edited by Gene Andrew Jarrett.

p. cm. (Blackwell companions to literature and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-8862-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-118-43878-7 (pbk.)

1. American literatureAfrican American authors. 2. African AmericansIntellectual life. 3. African Americans in literature. I. Jarrett, Gene Andrew, 1975

PS153.N5C57 2010

810.9896073dc22

2009050302

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Lois Mailou Jones, Jeanne, Martiniquaise, 1938, oil on canvas. Photograph 2010 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of the Lois Mailou Jones Pierre-Noel Trust, 2006.1440.

Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates

Notes on Contributors

Joanna Brooks is the author of American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (2003), winner of the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Award, as well as editor of The Collected Writings of Samson Occom: Literature and Leadership in Eighteenth-Century Native America (2006). She is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University.

Glenda R. Carpio is Professor of African and African American Studies and English at Harvard University, and the author of Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (2008). She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Ambivalent Alliances: Black and Latina/o Fiction in the Americas , which includes a chapter on Junot Diazs novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao . Professor Carpio started her teaching career in Compton, California, where she taught 8th-grade English and 4th grade through the Teach for America program. She recently received Harvard Universitys Abramson Award for Excellence and Sensitivity in Undergraduate Teaching.

Vincent Carretta , Professor of English at the University of Maryland, specializes in eighteenth-century transatlantic historical and literary studies. He has recently held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the John Carter Brown Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the University of London, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, and the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton. Author of more than 100 articles and reviews, Carretta has also written and edited 11 books, most recently Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005) and (with Ty M. Reese) Philip Quaque, Correspondence (2010). His current project is a biography of Phillis Wheatley.

Theresa Delgadillo is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. Her research centers on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, visual culture, and music. Her research and teaching interests are interdisciplinary and include mestizaje, diaspora, cross-cultural and multiethnic contexts, intersectionality, performance, memory, nationalisms, gender, spirituality, and religion. Her monograph Spiritual Mestizaje in Contemporary Chicana Narrative: Race, Religion, Gender, and (Trans)Nation is forthcoming.