Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers Between the Nation and the World

In this scholarly volume, Dunbar, associate professor of English at Vassar College, explores the strategies used by four African-American authors to imagine black identity both within and against a mostly white literary world. Analyzing Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic writings, Richard Wright’s travel narratives, James Baldwin’s novel Another Country, and Chester Himes’s detective fiction, Dunbar offers a reading of African-American literature that creates a bridge from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s to the Black Arts Movement (1930–1970). Dunbar builds off of W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of black double consciousness to recognize a tendency in these authors to use ethnographic tropes in order to comment upon both black culture and American race relations from the stances of participant and observer. Forced into the role of “cultural translators,” these authors distanced themselves (physically and imaginatively) from America, and used ethnographic language to reimagine narratives of African-American identity. Dunbar argues that the four authors constructed a “region” for alternative blackness, navigating between nationalist, antinationalist, and internationalist perspectives on racial segregation. Each chapter offers original readings of the authors’ works—the chapter on Himes being particularly insightful—that go against the grain of the academic conversation. Buoyed by extensive research, the volume will be of primary interest to scholars of American literature. (Nov.)