Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World in Bloomington, MN

Black Regions of the Imagination focuses on the fiction and non-fiction that Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes produced between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Eve Dunbar examines how these African American writers-who lived and traveled outside the United States-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."