African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910: Volume 7 African American Literature in Transition Series

African American Literature in Transition, 1900?1910 offers a wide ranging, multi-disciplinary approach to early twentieth century African American literature and culture. It showcases the literary and cultural productions that took shape in the critical years after Reconstruction, but before the Harlem Renaissance, the period known as the nadir of African American history. It undercovers the dynamic work being done by Black authors, painters, photographers, poets, editors, boxers, and entertainers to shape 'New Negro' identities and to chart a new path for a new century. The book is structured into four key areas: Black publishing and print culture; innovations in genre and form; the race, class and gender politics of literary and cultural production; and new geographies of Black literary history. These overarching themes, along with the introduction of established figures and movement, alongside lesser known texts and original research, offer a radical re-conceptualization of this critical, but understudied period in African American literary history.

Acknowledgements; List of images; Introduction Shirley Moody-Turner; Part I. Transition in African American Authorship, Publishing and the Visual Arts: 1. Black bibliographers and the category of negro authorship Laura E. Helton; 2. Transitions in African American book publishing and print culture Alisha Knight; 3. Re-evaluating African American art before the Harlem renaissance Rhonda Reymond; Part II. New Negro Aesthetic and Transitions in Genre and Form: 4. African American novels and new slavery in the new south M. Giulia Fabi; 5. Anti-lynching poetry and the poetics of protest Laura Vrana; 6. The politics of performance, character, and literary genre in transition April Logan; Part III. Modernist Masculinities and Transitions in Black Leadership: 7. Charting the tensions between optimism and despair at mid-decade Hanna Wallinger; 8. W. E. B. Du Bois and transitions in black intellectual thought Keith Byerman; 9. Celebrity and black masculinity at the turn into the twentieth century Jeffrey Leak; Part IV. Remapping the Turn of the Twentieth Century: 10. Can the subaltern speak through Alain Locke and Paul Laurence Dunbar? Jeffrey Stewart; 11. Race and manhood in African American representations of the frontier James Leiker; 12. Narratives of black and Chinese citizenship after Plessy v. Ferguson Edlie Wong; 13. Black transpacific culture and the migratory imagination Vince Schleitwiler.

Shirley Moody-Turner is the author of Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation (2013) and Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon (2103). She is an award-winning teacher in the departments of English and African American Studies at Penn State University and co-director of the Center for Black Digital Research. She is a former fellow of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, Massachusetts.