The African American Novel in the Early Twenty-First Century comprises fourteen essays, each focussing on recent, widely known fiction by acclaimed African American authors. This volume showcases the originality, diversity, and vitality of contemporary African American literature, which has reached a bewildering yet exhilarating stage of disruption and continuity between today and yesterday, homegrown and diasporic identities, and local and global interrelatedness. Additionally, it delves into the complexity of the Black literary imagination and its interaction with broader cultural contexts. Lastly, it reflects on the evolution of the African American community, its tribulations, triumphs, challenges, and prospects.
The African American Novel in the Early Twenty-First Century comprises fourteen essays, each focussing on recent, widely known fiction by acclaimed African American authors. This volume showcases the originality, diversity, and vitality of contemporary African American literature, which has reached a bewildering yet exhilarating stage of disruption and continuity between today and yesterday, homegrown and diasporic identities, and local and global interrelatedness. Additionally, it delves into the complexity of the Black literary imagination and its interaction with broader cultural contexts. Lastly, it reflects on the evolution of the African American community, its tribulations, triumphs, challenges, and prospects.
In Antropofagia, Aarnoud Rommens shows how this Brazilian avant-garde movement (1920-30s) deconstructed early tendencies in the European vanguard. Through imaginative re-readings, the author reinterprets Antropofagia’s central texts and images as elements within an ever-changing, neo-baroque memory palace. Not only does the movement subvert established conceptions of the pre- and postcolonial; it is also a counter-colonial critique of verbal and visual literacy. To do justice to the dynamic between visibility and legibility, Rommens develops the inventive methodology of ‘emblematics’. The book’s implications are wide-ranging, prompting a revaluation of the avant-garde as a transmedial tactic for disrupting our reading and viewing habits.