Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation
Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity
Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels

These three first books by talented rising scholars in the rich, diverse, and rapidly developing field of African American studies engage fiction by twentieth-century black women writers and ponder such terms key to reading their works’ historical, cultural, and social contexts as representation, transgression, nationalism, transnationalism, labor, and appropriation. All three root their methodologies in black feminist thought, reading texts from popular culture as well as fiction, such as Beyoncé’s and Shakira’s musical performances or Michelle Obama’s visual representations in the press and in the White House. Their considerable contribution to the fields of literary, pop cultural, and visual studies filters through and refracts the rich, interdisciplinary critical lens first crafted by Euro-American-Caribbean black studies scholars following World War II and during the strained decades of the Cold War. Dominating the last sixty years, this scholarly optic has productively brought together earlier materialist, cross-cultural,...