Unbought and Unbossed

Trimiko Melancon is Assistant Professor of English, African American Studies, and Women's Studies at Loyola University New Orleans.

"Trimiko Melancon offers beautiful and complex readings of novels by Toni Morrison, Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Gloria Naylor while effortlessly synthesizing a generation of scholarship on black sexuality. Unbought and Unbossed is a refreshingly innovative new work destined to become a classic." -Robert F. Reid-Pharr, author of Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual "Unbought and Unbossed is an interesting exploration of black female sexual politics and literary representations of black womanhood at the intersection of three political and aesthetic movements: black nationalism, (black) feminism, and postmodernism. I was especially impressed with Melancon’s close readings of the primary texts and her analysis of the symbolic sexual play and coming of age of the characters. This book is a welcome addition to the very few literary studies that deal explicitly with black womanhood and transgressive sexuality." -Eve Dunbar, Associate Professor of English at Vassar College and author of  Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World "[A] critical analysis of five 'post-1960s black women’s texts.' ... Perhaps most provocatively, Melancon concentrates on the transgressive sexuality present in all of these books... and asserts its importance to the authors’ larger project.... [S]erious readers of African-American literature will value the innovative observations offered on the intersection of 'race, gender, and sexuality' in American life and letters." -Publishers Weekly "Unbought and Unbossed is an eloquently written and well-organized book about an important era in black women's literary tradition."-LaMonda Horton Stallings, Indiana University Bloomington, author of Mutha’ Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture

• Contents  Acknowledgments  Introduction: Disrupting Dissemblance  1 "New World Black and New World Woman": Or, Beyond the Classical Black Female Script2 Toward an Aesthetic of Transgression: Ann Allen Shockley's Loving Her and the Politics of Same-Gender Loving3 Negotiating Cultural Politics4 "That Way Lies Madness": Sexuality, Violent Excess, and Perverse Desire 5 "Between a Rock and a Hard Place": Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place  Conclusion: "Without Fear of Reprisals": Representation in the Age of Michelle Obama   Notes   Bibliography   Index