New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers spans the contemporary era into the AfroFuture. It begins with Ann Petry, who has been forcibly mashed into masculinized critical paradigms, and ends by introducing audiences to Black speculative and Science Fiction writers.

New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers is a collection of critical and pedagogical essays that shed new light on the creative depths of Black women writers. On the one hand, some Black women writers have been heavily anthologized, they have more often than not been restricted by critical metanarratives. Some of their works have been lionized while others remain neglected. On the other hand, some Black women writers have been ignored and understudied. This collection corrects the gaps in our critical thinking about Black women writers by introducing them to a new generation of undergraduate and graduate students, and by presenting pedagogical essays to our colleagues currently working in the field.

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction: Eschewing Social Science and Defying Categorization: An Introduction to Contemporary Black Women Writers

LaToya Jefferson-James

Chapter 1: “You Can’t Run from the Street”: Failed Escapes in Ann Petry’s The Street (1947) and Shay Youngblood’s Black Girl in Paris (2000)

Shahara’Tova V. Dente

Chapter 2: You Can’t Shut Me Up: Using Gwendolyn Brooks to Help Me Be Seen and Heard

Carissa McCray

Chapter 3: Kathleen Collins: BAM Filmmaker and Fiction Writer

Cynthia Davis

Chapter 4: Closed in Silence and Clothed in Heteronormativity and the (Anti)Lesbian Embrace: The Woman’s Plight in Gayl Jones’ Eva’s Man and “The Women”

Georgene Bess Montgomery

Chapter 5: Grange’s Grapple and Brownfield’s Battle: Redefining Manhood in Alice Walker’s Third Life of Grange Copeland

Lana N. Lockhart

Chapter 6: Reconnections to Gendered Black Identities in Alice Walker’s The World Will Follow Joy

Linda Mustafa

Chapter 7: Womanist Freedom Dreams: ‘Stay on the Battlefield’ by Sonia Sanchez and Sweet Honey in the Rock

Michael C. Montesano

Chapter 8: Mothers Incognito in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

Linda Mustafa

Chapter 9: Love in a Time of Pretentiousness: The Social and Personal Consequences of Romance in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Anna E. Schmidt

Chapter 10: Endless Love: The Evolution of Healers in Octavia Butler’s Patternist Series

Ebony Gibson

Chapter 11: “I Would Restore What Could Be Restored”: Reclaiming Identity in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling

Rashell Smith-Spears

Chapter 12: Audre Lorde’s Zami as a Speculative Womanist Guide to Self- Actualization in Octavia Butler’s Dawn

Roslyn Nicole Smith

Chapter 13: Arc of Memory in Natasha Trethewey’s Works

Nagueyalti Warren

Chapter 14: Seen and Unseen: The Role of the Venus in N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season

Jasmine H. Wade

Chapter 15: Eco-Justice as Womanist Practice in Contemporary Black Women’s Poetry

Marta Werbanowska

Chapter 16: Who Fears Death: Necropolitics, Gender, and Radical Ontology in Africanfuturist Literature

Venise N. Adjibodou

Conclusion

About the Contributors