Table of Contents:
  • Criteria of Negro art / W.E.B. DuBois
  • The Negro-art Hokum / G.S. Schuyler
  • The Negro artist and the racial mountain / L. Hughes
  • Characteristics of Negro expression / Z.N. Hurston
  • Blueprint for Negro writing / R. Wright
  • What White publishers won't print / Z.N. Hurston
  • Self-criticism / A. Locke
  • Expressive language / LeRoi Jones
  • Brave words for a startling occasion / R. Ellison
  • And Shine swam on / L. Neal
  • The Black writer and his role / C.F. Gerald
  • Some reflections on the Black aesthetic / L. Neal
  • Cultural strangulation / A. Gayle, Jr.
  • Inside the funk shop / S.E. Henderson
  • Saturation: progress report on a theory of Black poetry / S.E. Henderson
  • On the criticism of Black American literature / H.A. Baker, Jr.
  • Toward a Black feminist criticism / B. Smith
  • Preface to blackness / H.L. Gates, Jr.
  • New directions for black feminist criticism / D.E. McDowell
  • Generational shifts and the recent criticism of Afro-American literature / H.A. Baker, Jr.
  • Some implications of womanist theory / S.A. Williams
  • Belief, theory and Blues / H.A. Baker, Jr.
  • Woman's era: rethinking Black feminist theory / H.V. Carby
  • Mama's baby, papa's maybe / H.J. Spillers
  • The race for theory / B. Christian
  • The Black canon / J.A. Joyce
  • "What's love got to do with it?": critical theory, integrity and the Black idiom / H.L. Gates, Jr.
  • In dubious battle / H.A. Baker, Jr.
  • "Who the cap fit": unconsciousness and unconscionableness in the criticism of Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. / J.A. Joyce
  • Appropriative gesture: theory and Afro-American literary criticism / Michael Awkward
  • Introduction to The signifying monkey / H.L. Gates, Jr.
  • Speaking in tongues / M.G. Henderson
  • Black feminist theory and the representation of the "other" / V. Smith
  • Revision and (re)membrance: a theory of literary structures in literature by African-American women writers / K.F.C. Holloway
  • Toward a Black gay aesthetic / C.I. Nero
  • Theoretical returns / H.A. Baker, Jr.
  • Phallus(ies) of interpretation / A. duCille
  • Nationalism and Social Division in Black Arts Poetry of the 1960s / P.B. Harper
  • The problems with silence and exclusiveness in the African American literary community / J.A. Joyce
  • Black (w)holes and the geometry of Black female sexuality / E. Hammonds
  • Some glances at the Black fag / M.B. Ross
  • The crisis in Black American literary criticism and the postmodern cures of Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. / S. Adell
  • A Black man's place in Black feminist criticism / M. Awkward
  • Black feminist thinking / D.E. McDowell
  • "All the things you could be by now, if sigmund freud's wife was your mother": psychoanalysis and race / H.J. Spillers
  • Tearing the goat's flesh: homosexuality, abjection and the production of a late twentieth-century Black masculinity / R.F. Reid-Pharr
  • African signs and spirit writing / H. Mullen
  • Mapping the interstices between Afro-American cultural discourse and cultural studies / W. Lubiano
  • Cultural narratives passed on: African American mourning stories / K.F.C. Holloway
  • Introduction to Race men: the W.E.B. DuBois lectures / H.V. Carby
  • Malcolm's conk and Danto's colors; or, four logical petitions concerning race, beauty and aesthetics / P.C. Taylor.