Preface Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Approaching African American Life, History, Literature, and Criticism Polycentrically 2. History, the White/Black Binary, and the Construction of the African American as Other 3. The White/Black Binary and the African American Sociopolitical Mission of Racial Uplift 4. Finding Freedom in Sameness: James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man 5. Disrupting the White/Black Binary: William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer 6. Exposing Limiting, Racialized Heterological Critical Sites: An Existential Reading of Charles Wright's The Messenger 7. The Blue Idiom Lifestyle, Counter-Hegemony, and Clarence Major's Dirty Bird Blues 8.

Naming the Subaltern: The Swinging Life and Nathan Heard's Howard Stree t 9. Identity Politics, Sexual Fluidity, and James Earl Hardy's B-Boy Blues 10. Voodoo, A Different African American Experience, and Don Belton's Almost Midnight 11. Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index.