Emotion, Race, and Space in Contemporary African American Literature

This is an open access book.

The book examines how selected African American authors—Colson Whitehead, Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison, Brit Bennett, Percival Everett, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Sherri L. Smith, and N.K. Jemisin—narrate relationships between emotion, race, and space. On the one hand, they bear witness to the structural production of Black emotional pain at the confluence of racial and spatial discrimination. On the other hand, they reveal meaningful and subversive interlinkages between Black emotional experiences and Black spatial practices. Weaving together insights from psychology, narrative theory, African American studies, affect theory, and Black Geographies, Marijana Mikic interrogates fear, hope, shame, guilt, anger, and grief in relation to the racial-geographic projects of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and their continued legacies. Mikic draws attention to the narrative strategies contemporary African American authors employ to prompt their readers’ engagement with both the pain and the possibility that continues to shape Black lives in the twenty-first century.