Establishing an imaginative space for blackness, four mid-century American writers resist literary segregation

Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1 Becoming American through Ethnographic Writing: Zora Neale Hurston and the Performance of Ethnography
2 Escape through Ethnography: Literary Regionalism and the Image of Nonracial Alignment in Richard Wright’s Travel Writing
3 Deconstructing the Romance of Ethnography: Queering Knowledge in James Baldwin’s Another Country
4 Ethnography of the Absurd: Chester Himes’s Detective Fiction and Counterimages of Black Life
Conclusion: Look Down! The Black Arts Affirmation of Place and the Refusal to Translate

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Eve Dunbar is Associate Professor of English at Vassar College.