Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History

Contents

C o n t e n t s Acknowledgments ix introduCtion Loosed Canons The Race for Literary History 1 Chapter one Representing Chaos and Reading Race 35 Chapter two Truth Stranger than Fiction African American Identity and (Auto)Biography 75 Chapter three The Shortest Point between Two Lines Writing African Americans into American Literary History 112 Chapter Four Choreographing Chaos African American Literature in Time and Space 147 Chapter Five The Story at the End of the Story African American Literature and the Civil War 193 ConClusion Covenants and Communities The Demands of African American Literature 242 Notes 255 Bibliography 275 Index 309 ...