Getting to know Black American literature
Over the past five years, I’ve been making a concerted effort to read more Black literature. And I’ve noticed that the work I was encouraged to read in college, from writers like Zora Neale Hurston or Toni Morrison, or even the work that I read in my MFA program, from Zadie Smith and Edwidge Danticat, bears little resemblance to the work I’m reading today (Victor LaValle’s The Changeling or Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy).
To help me shed some light on the breadth of Black American literature, I turned to Monica L. Miller, a professor of English and Africana Studies at Barnard College. Miller is a scholar of African American culture, art, and literature, and her book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism (Duke University Press, 2009), inspects the intersection of fashion and culture in Black identity.
