DESIGNS OF BLACKNESS, MAPPINGS IN THE LITERATURE AND CULTURE OF AFRICAN AMERICANS by A. Robert Lee, which initially published in London in 1998, was one of the first comprehensive studies of African American literature and culture. This highly anticipated 20th anniversary expanded edition is an update of literary trends into the twenty-first century. DESIGNS OF BLACKNESS brings together the work of 150 writers from 1746 to the present in all genres, as well as performers of vernacular forms - from spirituals and sermons to jazz and hip hop. Lee examines both high and popular styles from slave writing through the diaspora and the Middle Passage as memory, to postmodernism and cultural styles like rap. As Lee traverses through four centuries of African American works, he examines the work of writers as diverse as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglas and Harriet Wilson in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Amiri Baraka, Octavia Butler and Robert Hayden in the twentieth century, and the addition of writers representing the twenty-first century, such as Jesmyn Ward, Paul Beatty, Darryl Pinckney, Colson Whitehead and Natasha Tretheway. Lee meets this abundant play of imagination head on against the backdrop of a larger corpus of black artists such as Bessie Smith's blues, Romare Bearsden's canvases, Gordon Park's photography, Martin Luther King's oratory, Muhammad Ali's pop culture influence, and Spike Lee's filmmaking, presenting an intertextual series of mappings of figures and forms in the making of African American literature. Yet despite so spacious a coverage, Lee keeps his focus sharp, and in doing so provides a diligent and informed assessment of the cultural history of African Americans.