Emotion, Race, and Space in African American Literature

The book publication examines interlinkages between emotion, race, and space in twenty- first-century African American literature. It investigates how African American writers narrate different emotions fear, hope, shame, guilt, anger, and grief in relation to racial and geographic forms of discrimination. The selected primary texts engage a wide variety of genres and modes of storytelling: the neo-slave narrative, the neo-segregation narrative, the neo-passing narrative, African American satire, and eco-Afrofuturism. On the one hand, the novels bear witness to the Black emotional pain that is produced in and through white geographies. On the other hand, they articluate Black lives, emotions, and geographies as far more than the adverse effects of oppression. The texts demonstrate that emotional healing and positive affective experiences are bound up with communal and intersectional spaces. While not all twenty-first-century African American novels fulfill a protest function, African American fiction in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement plays an important role in making legible the complexity of Blackness, fostering empathy with Black people, and prompting critical examination of structural inequality. January 2025 Marijana Mikic