Eve Dunbar is the Jean Webster Professor of English at Vassar College. She is author of Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World and coeditor of African American Literature in Transition: 1930–1940.

Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Radical Satisfaction of Black Women’s Monstrous Work

1. Ugly Work: Alterity and the “Ugly Work” of Black Life

2. Home Work: Black Domestic Liberation

3. Domestic Work: Dangerous Workers and Black Sociality

4. Line Work: Human–Nonhuman Crossings and New Routes to Black Satisfaction

Coda: The Revenant

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

"Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction offers new and insightful readings of African American women's writings in the 1930s-1950s, illustrating these writers' radical resistance to the false and incomplete promise of liberal racial integration. Eve Dunbar demonstrates how they offer new blueprints for Black life by creating narrative models for radical satisfaction: Black women's completeness, joy, and happiness outside the bounds of normative racial inclusion"--