In the whalebone leg worn by Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Melville invents one of the most famous prostheses in the history of the novel. What imaginative labour, that novel asks, is required to force inanimate matter to take on the attributes of life? How do we convert the heavy stuff of which we are made – of which a hostile and inhuman world is made – into the living expression of mind?

This essay explores Melville’s response to this question, particularly as it unfolds in his novella Benito Cereno. The prosthetic logic that is at work in Moby Dick reaches a certain intensity in this short work – where it becomes entangled with the question of racial difference, the question that is at the heart too of the discussion, in Moby Dick, of the ‘whiteness of the whale’. In Benito Cereno, the relation between the white master Cereno and the black manservant Babo is conceived as a prosthetic one. Babo is described as acting as ‘a sort of crutch’ to Cereno, a black extension of white power. The narrator’s capacity to read the power dynamic between Cereno and Babo, between master and servant, depends on the terms in which he conceives of this crutch. If Melville’s novella might be read as a critique and a performance of the process by which a form of black power expresses itself, outside of the terms of what Toni Morrison calls the ‘ideology of whiteness’, then that reading requires us to understand how the capacity for revolutionary self-expression is woven, in Melville’s fiction, into the prosthetic extensions in which it materialises itself.

Looking at Stephen Crane’s Maggie and William Faulkner’s Light in August, this chapter suggests that racial in-betweenness may be one of the driving forces of American literature. At the turn of the twentieth century, the distinction between whiteness and blackness plagued not only literary authors, but also legal institutions. In a series of court cases, judges had to decide which immigrant groups counted as white and could hence be naturalized. This chapter proposes that at this juncture, law and literature are closely interconnected. At a time when the judiciary struggled to make sense of petitioners who were racially in-between, literary texts zoom in on figures who are either mixed race or racially indeterminate. Crane’s novella presents the idea that in the late nineteenth century, the Irish were seen as “whites on probation.” Faulkner’s novel focuses on a protagonist who is rumored to be a “mulatto”, but turns out to be half Mexican. Focusing on the “off-whiteness” of Irish and Mexican characters in American literature, this chapter argues that whiteness is ultimately a fiction, and that it is in the pages of literature that the construction of whiteness can best be observed.

In the 1980s, a theoretical turn in African American literary criticism helped institutionalize the study of African American literature by insisting on its formal complexity and distinctiveness. The racial text could no longer be read as reducible to its social context. In that same decade, a materialist line of inquiry sought to reconcile formal and contextual analysis by examining the ways black-authored books were published by major companies and received by the critical establishment. Drawing on methods from book history and print culture studies, a sociology of African American literature developed as the academic field of study took shape around canon-building projects. Two approaches to African American literary sociology emerged out of the 1990s: skepticism about the book’s capacity to represent racial experience, and optimism about the commercial success of diverse authors. Over time, these approaches merged into general studies of the racial text’s shifting status in the literary marketplace. With that expanded focus, the sociology of African American literature today sheds light on the way culture and commerce intersect in the making, selling, and reading of black-authored books.

Among the challenges to Black feminist tradition today is a gap between the visibility of intersectional disparities faced by Black women and nonbinary people, and the mobilization of this knowledge to meet problems such as economic precarity and sexual and gender discrimination. Ironically, as the rhetoric of intersectionality has become central to diversity and equity initiatives in academia and publishing, in its institutional iterations, intersectionality has moved away from earlier Black feminist commitments to dismantling systems of inequity, discrimination, and oppression. Contemporary African American literature reflects anxiety about intersectionality’s conflicted service to the individualistic values of neoliberal capitalism while recognizing it remains powerful for critiquing and refining Black feminist priorities and politics surrounding solidarity. This ambivalence is seen in the narratives discussed in this chapter, in particular, in the way they turn to intersectional logics to think through problems of transnational coalition building, gender and sexual discrimination, and economic precarity. This chapter argues that contemporary African American literature reflects anxiety about Black feminist ideas without commensurate gains in equality, safety, and freedom for Black women, providing stark representations of Black female personhood that articulate the urgency of moving beyond this impasse to face the challenges of our time.

This chapter explores how the African American novel imagined a better world, experimented with form, and reflected the artistic and cultural sophistication of Black people in the twentieth century. It argues that understanding the twentieth-century African American novel in the context of various overlapping liberation movements helps us organize our thinking about the ways in which writers used long fiction to explore the social, political, ideological, and historical realities that informed the time period in which they were writing. Focusing on African American fiction produced within and around several Black liberation movements and historical interregnums – i.e., Post-Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement (BAM), and the post-BAM Toni Morrison era – the chapter examines the nuances and complexities of novelists who used the novel as form to reflect and inspire shared visions of a liberated future.

The history of literature has long been viewed in its relationship to politics. For much of the twentieth century, we were schooled to find the politics of literature not in its acknowledged commitments but as lying deep within its unconsciously ideological structures and forms. The Introduction to the volume, as well as offering succinct summaries of the eighteen essays that make it up, calls for attending to literature’s political surfaces: to recognise that twentieth-century authors wrote in direct response to political movements, ideas, and events, that many were activists for or against them, and that literature and politics over the twentieth century coincided, overlapped, and clashed. Taking its cue from Toni Morrison’s unapologetic mixing of commitment and literature in her 1973 Foreword to Sula, the Introduction argues that several works by twentieth-century individuals were political in specific, open, and direct ways. This is of course not to say that these writers did not question literature’s relationship to politics, nor that they didn’t quiz literature’s ability to effect politics.

In “Wilderness,” Debbie Lee traces the conceptual origins of wilderness writing to the “wildēors” (self-willed land) of ancient and medieval texts like Beowulf and to Indigenous place-based language and storytelling such as that of the Nimiipuu. In addition to tracing a history of the “wilderness movement” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through the writings of authors like Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Muir, Lee also suggests an alternative history of wilderness rooted in social and environmental justice and expressed in Black and Indigenous literatures. Using examples from the works of Barry Lopez, Evelyn White, Gary Snyder, Toni Morrison, and Cecil Giscombe, among many others, Lee demonstrates the diversity and range of wilderness literature, arguing that we should think of “wilderness movements” in the plural.

The essay focuses on the uses and significance of the trope of passing, as both theme and literary strategy, in African American fiction from the 19th to the 21st century. Passing as a theme pushed the boundaries of arbitrary, but operative, racial dichotomies, while passing as a literary strategy enabled radical experimentation with novelistic conventions. African American writers revised the tragic mulatta and mulatto characters by articulating a black-centered racial imaginary that infused the trope of passing with profound political and literary relevance. Deploying the high visibility of all-but-white characters as a screen to introduce new figures in American literature, they advanced a far from monolithic understanding of blackness that foregrounded its intraracial diversification and intersection with gender and class. African American writers adopted the trope of passing in order to expose the sociopolitical construction of “race,” unsettle prevailing racial epistemologies of blackness, popularize a more complex racial imaginary, and teach self-consciously critical modes of reading literature and, by extension, reality. Through a diachronic approach, the essay shows how the trope of passing was repurposed in different literary-historical periods and how it retains its relevance as a malleable literary strategy of cultural and political intervention.

Reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America alongside Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy reveals striking similarities and differences in how the two authors treat the entanglement of indigenous, black, and white histories from seventeenth-century America to the present. Both texts use vivid literary imagery to make concrete some of the intersectional dilemmas of race and gender. In Tocqueville’s case, the purpose is to instruct; in Morrison’s, however, it is to reinhabit the lives of those previously overlooked. Notwithstanding the similarity of their subject matter, the two texts are strikingly different insofar as Tocqueville’s presentation gives no room for the voices and perspectives of the victims of injustice. Nor does his fatalistic narrative suggest the possibility of concrete alternatives to these histories. Taken together, these two works raise broader questions about the sufficiency of fiction as a way of identifying and resolving dilemmas of race and exclusion in American society. In contrast to the inadequacy of Tocqueville’s “new science of politics,” Morrison seeks to project through her fiction a new world that points her readers toward novel ways of conceiving of freedom.

This chapter surveys Ellison’s complex relationship with other key Modernist writers, as expressed both explicitly in his letters and chapters, and implicitly in his short stories, in Invisible Man, and in Three Days Before the Shooting … . Examining key moments in his intellectual formation, such as his encounters with Eliot and Joyce during his undergraduate studies at Tuskegee, it also maps out the paradox of his attested admiration for but rare intertextual dialogue with Hemingway, and his ambivalent and shifting positions on Faulkner. Lastly, it suggests that despite Ellison’s and Morrison’s mutual and clearly voiced antipathy, these two writers have far more in common, particularly in terms of their conceptions of Modernism, than either would like to admit. Throughout my overview, I will take account of the best pre-existing scholarship on this subject.

The history of waste records a relationship that has altered over time, resulting in various literal and symbolic manifestations. Waste Studies crosses conventional disciplines to offer ethical frameworks which pay attention to, understand, and act on bodily, cultural, and societal waste. With examples from novelists Toni Morrison and Wolfgang Hilbig, this chapter illustrates a number of aspects of waste in literature: waste as material agent; waste as metaphor; and narratives structured as waste, with little hope for clarity. The strategy of slow practice through narrative construction can prove a means to inculcate an ecological sensitivity and awareness we carry with us beyond the act of reading. While waste categories often are used to dismiss, deny, and reject certain humans, other-than-human agents, and material items, waste has also been used as a means to provoke compassion and ethical engagement by which we can develop a compassionate commonality with wasted beings to act for them, for us, and for the world. Waste Studies argues that the humanities can vibrantly and dynamically work to improve all of our lives in a concrete and material way.

Scholars of both American and U.S. southern history have turned attention to the Indigenous traces often overlooked at the dark heart of place-making. Such revisionism has proved no easy feat in the South, a place where “real” Indians are presumed to be largely extinct after the sweeping Removal land-clearing policies of the 1830s. Nonetheless, Indigenous traces linger – preserved indelibly in the region’s place names, cultural memories, and compensatory fictions. Especially in southern literature, Native hauntings appear to speak for themselves; but they are also uncannily, frighteningly reticent: “vanish’d,” “incomprehensible,” and “inexplicable.” As vital precursors to a traumatic regional history – their expulsion directly facilitating the rise of the South’s plantation economy – this chapter suggests that their centrality can be neither fully recovered nor reckoned with. Indeed, for southerners from a surprising range of backgrounds and moments, the Indian endures as a consistent, formative presence central to the region’s fictions of identity.

This chapter interrogates the conservative conceptualization of great literature during the culture wars, arguing that it was an over-determined symptom revealing how two different discourses of literary prestige clashed in a futile attempt to reconcile the radical tension between capitalism and traditionalism. This debate turned the category of “highbrow fiction” into a condensation point of perplexing opposites, combining disparate conservative explanations for social decline. For Reagan era conservatives, highbrow fiction was somehow both an elitist liberal discourse that betrayed traditional American values and a great civilizational barricade against the untutored, racialized masses. Ultimately, conservatives mourned the deterioration of meaningful connection and community produced by capitalism, but they reconfigured this neoliberal nihilism into a left-wing specter that haunted contemporary American fiction and the institutions of higher education that produced and legitimized it. The conservative movement’s simultaneous suspicion of contemporary literary prestige and their embrace of popular realist fiction were rooted in a commitment to market-based individualism, nominal colorblindness, and the aestheticization of populist white grievance. This chapter probes these ostensible contradictions to illuminate how Toni Morrison and Tom Wolfe emerged as major, diametrically opposed figures in the cultural politics of American fiction toward the end of the twentieth century.

In the Introduction I set out the argument of the book by drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics as well as on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, to establish the central concepts by which I define the subject of postcolonial tragedy. Key operative concepts that I will incrementally expand upon in the course of the book are introduced in this chapter. These include: tragedy itself, postcolonialism, colonial interpellation, suffering, systematic delirium, postcolonial edginess and precarity, giving an account of oneself, the Akan concept of musuo, causal plausibility, suffering, unruly affective economies, and ethical choice. I also lay out very briefly what I will be doing subsequently in the individual chapters. Thus, I provide minimal synopses of chapters on Shakespeare’s Othello, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and The Road, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy.

Chapter 10 lays out the primary methodological motivations behind the book. Because both postcolonialism and tragedy are highly complex, constellation concepts, I argue that they instigate the necessity for thinking closely about the dynamics of comparison, critical theory, interdisciplinarity, and the ethics of reading. I then track the complex relations between historical context and literary texts in postcolonial studies and go on to show some of the ways in which the contrast and comparison of Western notions of tragedy with postcolonial examples forces us to rethink both sides of the coin. I conclude with remarks on the characterological types we have seen in the course of the book – namely the bold (Othello, Okonkwo, Sethe) and the quiet (the Magistrate and Murphy) – and show how they correlate to two different ideas of freedom. There are implications to be derived from postcolonial tragedy for how we think of freedom in today’s world.

Chapter 6 focuses on how, for Toni Morrison’s Sethe in Beloved, a sense of precarity comes from the brutal conditions of slavery from which she has recently escaped as well as from her own traumatic attempt at murdering her children so as to take them out of the circuitry of enslavement. I isolate the terms of the ethical topos that Morrison so suggestively lays out behind Sethe’s terrible choice and connect this to other aspects of the novel. These historical and personal details about the violence of slavery form a potent background to our reading of the novel and allow us to attend closely to the problem of moral residue that is seen most tellingly in Baby Suggs’s response to Sethe’s choice. I return to Aristotle’s anagnorisis (but this time split between two characters) as a way of reviewing one of the central concepts of tragedy.

“The Universal Wilderness” argues that environmentalist appeals to self-dissolution constitute a uniquely universal form of identity politics. It does so by situating these appeals in the context of identity-based movements that flourished in the 1970s through a reading of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977). The novel pointedly juxtaposes two characters: one who caricatures the era’s Black nationalism and another who identifies with the ecological intricacy of his environment. This arrangement effects a comparison between two accounts of authenticity: the racial and the ecological, the particular and the universal. Such a reading enables a reevaluation of certain facets of postwar environmentalism. Appeals to self-dissolution join the rhetoric of authenticity that characterized Black Power with the sort of political universalism that such movements called into question. However, though Morrison represents ecology as a universal condition, she also critiques the notion that it might constitute an identity position. That position might serve only to enshrine as universal the colonial attitudes of white men, erasing the perspectives of women and people of color.

This chapter uses the work of Toni Morrison, especially Song of Solomon, to explore the racialised history of finance in America. The first section suggests that the two intertextual reference points for this novel, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, provide a telling history of those key moments in America – the 1870s, the 1930s and the 1960s – in which credit has been associated with false promise and dispossession for the African Americans. Its second section uses this context to trace the narrative of the protagonist of Song of Solomon, Milkman Dead, as he uncovers the loss that has constructed his own family history. Morrison traces this racialised history of finance, especially the self-ownership promised by insurance, to explore the particular and paradoxical crisis in the credit cultures of the 1970s. The novel reads the politics of the contemporary by returning to the old failures of both the New South and the New Deal and reckons with the persistent and still-present legacies of a credit system that was rooted in the trade in humans.