Black Regions of the Imagination

Eve Dunbar is Associate Professor of English at Vassar College.

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1 Becoming American through Ethnographic Writing: Zora Neale Hurston and the Performance of Ethnography2 Escape through Ethnography: Literary Regionalism and the Image of Nonracial Alignment in Richard Wright’s Travel Writing3 Deconstructing the Romance of Ethnography: Queering Knowledge in James Baldwin’s Another Country4 Ethnography of the Absurd: Chester Himes’s Detective Fiction and Counterimages of Black LifeConclusion: Look Down! The Black Arts Affirmation of Place and the Refusal to TranslateNotesBibliographyIndex

"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." Publishers Weekly "Eve Dunbar's Black Regions of the Imagination renegotiates the relationship between regionalism in African American literature and ethnography as a practice and form of knowledge production around race in the United States... Dunbar scrutinizes this intellectual and cultural tension in the critically undertheorized period between major African American literary movements of the twentieth century: the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement... Dunbar's necessary reevaluation of regionalism produces nuanced, against-the-grain readings of the canonical authors studied in each chapter."--MELUS, Summer 2013 "Compact, readable, and incisive, Eve E. Dunbar's Black Regions of the Imagination examines the ethnographic strategies and ironies of African American writers between 1930 and 1970 that probed the specter of national belonging and demonstrated the contrapuntal nationalist and internationalist conceptions of race... Dunbar astutely repurposes black internationalism to account for the national experience of race."--Journal of American History