This groundbreaking exploration of twenty-first century African American literature and culture addresses crucial topics from Hurricane Katrina and Black Lives Matter to hip hop, Black comics, and film and introduces a vast range of important literary and cultural works. Focused on portrayals of exceptional Black prominence and everyday Black precarity, this volume powerfully completes the examination of Black America's rich and profound cultural heritage in the African American Literature in Transition series. Each chapter emphasizes how twenty-first century literary and cultural works build upon, reconsider, and transition from the work of previous generations and delineates the characteristics and contours of twenty-first century African American literature and culture. Engaging and accessible to scholars and students alike, each chapter relates twenty-first century Black cultural production to contemporary Black experience and to inherited cultural and traumatic legacies, including slavery, segregation, and the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts movements.
