This chapter explores how Black writers link the subjects of racial inequality and what it means to be human. This linking prompts a perennial question for critics and students alike: when it comes to examining African American literature’s long memory, do we examine the history of racial inequality to find out more about what it means to be human, or do we look to rich humanistic social relations in fiction to reimagine and/or resolve any remaining concepts of racial inequality? For this chapter, I examine the terms of the debates over how to represent Black humanity, and I claim that the debate has produced only ongoing and unanswered questions. Hence, I posit that it is in fact the irresolvable human conflict that asks and re-asks questions about Black humanity, and I claim that it is this ongoing instability or tension that defines race’s seminal role in African American literature.

This chapter considers the significance of the psychoanalytic concept of melancholia to queer theory and literature, using James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a case study. The chapter traces the ways in which queerness – particularly queer love – is haunted by melancholia by highlighting the manner in which melancholia is inextricable from the passionate relationship between David and Giovanni, the lovers at the novel’s core. Yet Baldwin arguably also universalizes melancholia by demonstrating that all of the novel’s characters, including David’s girlfriend Hella, are deeply melancholic. Melancholia, then, is not merely a queer predicament but rather – as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan also claimed – a part of the human condition. The chapter consequently draws a distinction between constitutive (existential) and context-specific (socially imposed) forms of melancholia, illustrating that queer melancholia tends to fall into the latter genre of melancholia due to the discrimination, persecution, and shame that often characterize queer lives and loves.

Formalism freeness and logical entanglement are precisely defined. Anticipations of these concepts are cited in the work of Post and Brouwer, as well as in early work of Gödel. Varieties of entanglement and formalism freeness are given, with specific examples taken from set theory: extended constructibility and games; and model theory. Semantic characterisations of metamathematical concepts are discussed at length.

This chapter tracks the fascination with mid-twentieth century New York black American culture through a reading of influential works by white writers. The second half of the chapter explores the role that New York–based African American writers Ted Joans and LeRoi Jones played in the development of the Beat Generation, a movement which began in New York City. While the Beats have long been associated with the triumvirate of white American writers who met at Columbia University in the late 1940s–Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs–African American writers played an important role in the development of what became known as the Beat Generation. As this chapter explores, while Mailer and Kerouac in particular viewed jazz as the quintessential sound-track for post-war New York culture, Baldwin, Jones and Joans developed a new jazz aesthetic in their writing which further explodes the myth of the Beat Generation as a quintessentially white phenomenon. And while Baldwin in particular was dismissive of the Beats’ interest in jazz, this chapter traces a less rigid trajectory between white and black culture, suggesting that bebop, arguably more than literature, became a vital text where issues of race, class, gender and authenticity were played out.