Preface: Contrary to Appearances / Jennifer DeVere Brody xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Unruly Knowledges / Janet Neary 1
I. In the Classroom, In the Academy: Situating African American Literature, Theory, and Culture
Introduction / Linh U. Hua 25
1. Institutions, Classrooms, Failures: African American Literature and Critical Theory in the Same Small Spaces 31
2. The Experiences of Slave Narratives: Reading against Authenticity 48
3. Redoubling American Studies: John Carlos Rowe and Cultural Criticism 61
II. Gestures of Inscription: African American Slave Narratives
Introduction / Daphne A. Brooks 87
4. African-American Slave Narratives: Literacy, the Body, Authority 92
5. Hand-Writing: Legibility and the White Body in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom 119
6. Self-Knowledge, Law, and African American Autobiography: Lucy A. Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light 139
III. Imagining Collectively: Identity, Individuality, and Other Social Phantasms
Introduction / Marlon B. Ross 165
7. Identities and Identity Studies: Reading Toni Cade Bambra's "The Hammer Man" 171
8. The Gaze of Langston Hughes: Subjectivity, Homoeroticism, and the Feminine in The Big Sea 193
9. Black Men in the Mix: Badboys, Heroes, Sequins, and Dennis Rodman 212
10. Dead Men Printed: Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, and Hip-Hop Eulogy 237
IV. Calculations of Race and Reason: Theorizing the Psychic and the Social
Introduction / Robyn Wiegman 273
11. Presence of Mind: Detection and Racialization in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" 278
12. Family Values/Critical Values: "The Chaos of Our Strongest Feelings" and African American Women's Writings of the 1890s 299
13. Mercantilism, U.S. Federalism, and the Market within Reason: The "People" and the Conceptual Impossibility of Racial Blackness 320
Afterword: Remembering Lindon Barrett / Elizabeth Alexander 353
Contributors 357
Index 361
Credits 375
