African American Novel in the Early Twenty-First Century

Anna Pochmara is Associate Professor at the University of Warsaw. She authored The Making of the New Negro (UAP, 2011) and The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel (UGAP, 2021).Raphaël Lambert is a Professor of African American studies at Kansai University in Osaka, Japan. He is the author of Narrating the Slave Trade, Theorizing Community (Brill, 2019) and Black Hopes/Black Woes: Early African American Optimism and Twenty-first Century Afro-pessimism (Routledge, forthcoming).

• 1 At the Crossroads of Continuity and Disruption: Exploring the Contemporary African American NovelRaphaël Lambert and Anna Pochmara2 Creative Practices of Resistance in Contemporary Narratives of Slavery of the Twenty-First CenturyLuana de Souza Sutter3 Agency and Property in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground RailroadRaphaël Lambert4 Remembering Generations in Homegoing: Rewriting Roots for the Twenty-First CenturyMiguel Sanz Jiménez5 Ifemelu’s Online Linguistic and Identity Performances in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s AmericanahDorottya Mozes6 The New African Diaspora and Afropolitanism in the Work of Taiye SelasiElisa Bordin7 Exposure in Teju Cole’s Photography and FictionNicholas Gamso8 “How Does it Feel to Be Free of One’s Illusions?”: Erasure and the Anti-Essentialist Ethos of Percival EverettKamil Chrzczonowicz9 From Freedom to Struggle: Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt as a Denouncement of Surface FetishismMirosław Aleksander Miernik10 Voluntary Slavery and Omnipresent Black Fathers: The Thirdspace of Blackness in Paul Beatty’s The SelloutAnna Pochmara11 Modes of Change in the Africanfuturism of Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears DeathBrian Willems12 Afrofuturist Alternate History in the Post-Race Era: Justina Ireland’s Dread NationJulia Lindsay13 Same As It Ever Was: Dehumanizing the American Cityscape in Colson Whitehead’s Zone OneJamie Brummer14 “This Is a Place for the Dead”: Reading the Child Ghost in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, SingLucy Arnold15 “Hey, Celestial”: Loving Girls and Aging in Toni Morrison’s LoveMar GallegoIndex