U-M Professors Aida Levy-Hussen (English) and Victor Mendoza (English, women’s studies) discuss Levy-Hussen’s new book How to Read African-American Literature. The book offers a series of provocations to unsettle the predominant assumptions readers make when encountering post-Civil Rights black fiction. Foregrounding the large body of literature and criticism that grapples with legacies of the slave past, Levy-Hussen’s argument develops on two levels: as a textual analysis of black historical fiction, and as a critical examination of the reading practices that characterize the scholarship of our time.