front cover of Black Regions of the Imagination
Black Regions of the Imagination
African American Writers between the Nation and the World
Eve Dunbar
Temple University Press, 2012

Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes were all pressured by critics and publishers to enlighten mainstream (white) audiences about race and African American culture. Focusing on fiction and non-fiction they produced between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, Eve Dunbar’s important book, Black Regions of the Imagination, examines how these African American writers—who lived and traveled outside the United States—both document and re-imagine their “homegrown” racial experiences within a worldly framework.

From Hurston’s participant-observational accounts and Wright’s travel writing to Baldwin’s Another Country and Himes’ detective fiction, these writers helped develop the concept of a “region” of blackness that resists boundaries of genre and geography. Each writer represents—and signifies—blackness in new ways and within the larger context of the world. As they negotiated issues of “belonging,” these writers were more critical of social segregation in America as well as increasingly resistant to their expected roles as cultural “translators.” 


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front cover of Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction
Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction
Black Women Writing under Segregation
Eve Dunbar
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Radical Black feminist refusal through the works of mid-twentieth-century African American women writers
 

Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction offers new and insightful readings of African American women’s writings in the 1930s–1950s, illustrating how these writers centered Black women’s satisfaction as radical resistance to the false and incomplete promise of liberal racial integration. Eve Dunbar examines the writings of Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks to show how these women explored self-fulfillment over normative and sanctioned models of national belonging. 

 

Paying close attention to literary moments of disruption, miscommunication, or confusion rather than ease, assimilation, or mutual understanding around race and gender, Dunbar tracks these writers’ dissatisfaction with American race relations. She shows how Petry, West, Childress, and Brooks redeploy the idea of monstrous work to offer potential modalities for registering Black women’s capacity to locate satisfaction within the domestic and interpersonal.

 

While racial integration may satisfy the national idea of equality and inclusion, it has not met the long-term needs of Black people’s quest for equity. Dunbar responds, demonstrating how these mid-century women offer new blueprints for Black life by creating narrative models for radical satisfaction: Black women’s completeness, joy, and happiness outside the bounds of normative racial inclusion.

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