African American Literature in Transition, 1980¿1990 tracks Black expressive culture in the 1980s as novelists, poets, dramatists, filmmakers, and performers grappled with the contradictory legacies of the civil rights era, and the start of culture wars and policy machinations that would come to characterize the 1990s. The volume is necessarily interdisciplinary and critically promiscuous in its methodologies and objects of study as it reconsiders conventional temporal, spatial, and moral understandings of how African American letters emerged immediately after the movement James Baldwin describes as the 'latest slave rebellion.' As such, the question of the state of America's democratic project as refracted through the literature of the shaping presence of African Americans is one of the guiding concerns of this volume preoccupied with a moment in American literary history still burdened by the legacies of the 1960s, while imagining the contours of an African Americanist future in the new millennium.

Introduction D. Quentin Miller; Part I. The Expanding Canon Rich Blint: 1. Those dazzling African American women writers of the 1980s Trudier Harris; 2. Innovations and institutions in African American poetry of the 1980s Laura Vrana; 3. Wideman's family stories and the carceral archipelago D. Quentin Miller; 4. A queer reckoning for Black masculinity Kevin Quashie; 5. August Wilson's time and history's Black bottom Alan Nadel; Part II. New Directions / New Literary Forms D. Quentin Miller: 6. The Trey Ellis eighties and the launching of an artistic 'school' Bertram Ashe; 7. Hip-hop in transition Joseph G. Schloss; 8. Reframing and reappropriating Blackness in 1980s satire Danielle Morgan; Part III. Global Connections Rich Blint: 9.Decolonial poetics and queer resistance in Anglophone Afro-Caribbean women's literature Angelique Nixon; 10. Transnational visions of Black women writing Shaundra Myers; 11. Ruination and a dramaturgical reading of Jamaican women's transnational literature in 1980s North America Danielle Bainbridge.