The African American Literature and Culture Now Symposium brings together a group of leading scholars in African American humanistic fields to identify and discuss the central questions that animate 21st-century Black Studies.

Panel #3: Representing the Racial Imagination

Emily Lordi
“‘You Are the Second Person’: Uses of Direct Address in Contemporary African American Literature”

This talk builds on and departs from my own recent work on African American epistolary nonfiction. I have recently analyzed Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), Kiese Laymon’s How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (2013), and Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie’s Dear Continuum (2015), among other texts, as James Baldwin-inspired in-group gestures toward black love that are especially urgent in the context of anti-black violence and hyper-(cyber)surveillance. This talk will shift the analysis and diagnosis of black writers’ use of the second person by examining Coates’s Between the World alongside two other, yet more recent memoirs: Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir (2018), which is addressed to his mother, and Imani Perry’s Breathe, which is subtitled A Letter to My Sons (2019). I want to put more pressure than I did previously on the relationship between the second-person mode of address and writers’ visions of political organizing and sense of historical change. There is something fatalistic as well as aspirational, I will suggest, in all three writers’ decision to channel Baldwin, in particular, now, and to frame their stories and secrets as being of specific use to, if not exclusively designed for, their family members. What do we make of this move toward the domestic and the personal, and how do things change when Laymon frames his text not as a letter but as a book, and addresses his mother, where Perry and Coates write to their sons? In short, thinking critically about these three major writers’ second-person memoirs can illuminate the relationship between African American literature and the political imaginary now.

Madhu Dubey
“Racecraft in Contemporary African American Fiction”

This paper will look at the unique representational strategies through which contemporary African American novelists, including Paul Beatty, Percival Everett, Jesmyn Ward, Colson Whitehead, and John Edgar Wideman, are taking on the epistemic confusion surrounding public debates about race in the post-Civil Rights decades. Taking my cue from the term racecraft, coined by Karen Fields and Barbara Fields to model a new kind of race critique suited to the exigencies of this moment, I will argue that contemporary African American fiction yokes together questions of race and of craft in a manner distinct from earlier literary projects of demystification and corrective mimesis. Instead, these novelists employ formal devices such as anachronism and parataxis, literal-metaphorical conflation, and inflation of the fictive realm, in an effort to parse the contradictory truth claims constituting race as a false yet salient, obsolete yet undead category in the post–Civil Rights decades.


Emily Lordi is a writer, professor, and cultural critic whose focus is African American literature and black popular music. She is an associate professor of English at Vanderbilt University and the author of three books: Black Resonance (2013), Donny Hathaway Live (2016), and, forthcoming in 2020, The Meaning of Soul. In addition to publishing scholarly articles on topics ranging from literary modernism to Beyoncé, she contributes freelance essays to such venues as New Yorker.com, The Atlantic, Billboard, NPR, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Madhu Dubey is professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She is the author of Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic (1994) and Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (2003) and has published essays on African American literary and cultural studies, postmodernism, and race and speculative fiction in journals such as African American Review, American Literary History, American Literature, The Black Scholar, differences, Signs, and Social Text. She is currently working on a study examining the shifts in American literary ‘racecraft’ since the 1970s.