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Alain L. Locke (1886–1954), in his famous 1925 anthology The New Negro, declared that “the pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.” Often called the father of the Harlem Renaissance, he had his finger directly on that pulse, promoting, influencing, and sparring with such figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey. This biography of an extraordinarily gifted philosopher and writer narrates the story of Locke's impact on twentieth-century America's cultural and intellectual life. It traces this story through Locke's Philadelphia upbringing, his undergraduate years at Harvard University—where William James helped spark his influential engagement with pragmatism—and his tenure as the first African American Rhodes Scholar. The heart of the narrative illuminates Locke's heady years in 1920s New York City and his forty-year career at Howard University, where he helped spearhead the adult education movement of the 1930s and wrote on topics ranging from the philosophy of value to the theory of democracy. The book shows that throughout this illustrious career—despite a formal manner that many observers interpreted as elitist or distant—Locke remained a warm and effective teacher and mentor, as well as a fierce champion of literature and art as means of breaking down barriers between communities. The multifaceted portrait that emerges from this account effectively reclaims Locke's place in the pantheon of America's most important minds.

Why do race relations appear to be getting worse instead of better since the election and reelection of the country’s first black president? David Ikard speaks directly to us, in the first person, as a professor and father and also as self-described working-class country boy from a small town in North Carolina. His lively account teems with anecdotes—from gritty to elegant, sometimes scary, sometimes funny, sometimes endearing—that show how parasitically white identity is bound up with black identity in America. Ikard thinks critically about the emotional tenacity, political utility, and bankability of willful white blindness in the 21st century. A key to his analytic reflections on race highlights the three tropes of white supremacy which help to perpetuate willful white blindness, tropes that remain alive and well today as cultural buffers which afford whites the luxury of ignoring their racial privilege and the cost that blacks incur as a result of them. The tropes are: lovable racists, magical negroes, and white messiahs. Ikard is definitely reformist: teachers, parents, students, professors can use such tropes to resist the social and psychological dangers presented by seemingly neutral terms and values which in fact wield white normative power.

This book considers what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African–American literature. The author argues that for African–American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy. She shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African–American strain of postmodernism. The author argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression.

Black pulp fiction flourished as a popular literary genre in the final quarter of the twentieth century. The genre's market success belied the fact that it was published by a single company for over forty years. That company, Los Angeles-based Holloway House, started out as the mass-market paperback arm of two pinup magazines. Like those periodicals, the press assumed a white male readership. This book recounts the curious history of how this white-owned, white-oriented enterprise came to embrace genre fiction by black authors for black readers. It begins by outlining the midcentury men’s magazine market into which Holloway House entered. Within this market, blackness came to be an object of fascination for white readers fearful of the feminization of society. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, black readers took up Holloway House’s paperbacks in ever-increasing numbers. The book explains how this shift compelled the company to rethink its audience and operations. From the early 1970s on, Holloway House fostered a reading public for pulp fiction and pornography that catered to African American men. While these men undoubtedly became the focus of the company's operations, the book suggests that the racist assumptions and practices of cultural appropriation that characterized Holloway House’s early years continued to inform its turn toward a black literary underground Ultimately, then, the book’s study of the particular phenomenon of black pulp fiction sheds light on the broader dilemmas of race, audience, and exploitation in a market that capitalizes on the perception of cultural difference.