Designs of Blackness : Mappings in the Literature & Culture of Afro-America

This text explores the ways in which black writers have fashioned a unique literary culture through autobiography and fiction.

Beginning with the language of slave narratives, it focuses on the Harlem Renaissance and late 20th century writers and polemicists such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Chester Himes. It then looks at the surge of writing by black women, including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Gay Jones, and examines the modernists - from Ishmael Reed to Leon Forrest - and black story-tellers, with special emphasis on James Alan MacPherson and Toni Cade Bambara.

The book also looks at black drama in the 1960s and the black Beat Writers.