These historically grounded essays by Adolph Reed, Jr. and Kenneth W. Warren incorporate essential historical, contemporary, and literary perspectives on Black cultural criticism to explore the full portrait of racial injustice and inequality in America.

Taking up such topics as the evolving politics of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina and novels by Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead, this book engages with the Black Radical Tradition, Afropessimism, antiblackness, race reductionism, and other key theories and concepts in contemporary Black studies. Challenging the prevailing assertion that longstanding white animus against nonwhite peoples sufficiently and adequately explains deepening injustice, past injustice or present inequality, the essays argue that such thinking fails to fully explain America’s past and leaves us ill-equipped to handle the continuing challenges in the present.

Tracing black cultural criticism across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, this book will appeal to students, scholars and researchers of Black studies, race and ethnic studies, and contemporary and black American literature.

Adolph Reed, Jr. is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts. A veteran activist and prolific analyst of the politics of race and class, his books include Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era, Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene, and The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives.

Kenneth W. Warren is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. His books include What Was African American Literature?, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism, and Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literature.