Emotion, Race, and Space in Contemporary African American Literature

“A dazzling theoretical tour de force, Mikić masterfully illuminates the intricate intersections of emotion, race, and geography in Black fiction. In lockstep with race-narrative luminaries like Kenneth Warren, Madhu Dubey, Christopher González, and Sue J. Kim, Mikić deftly reveals how literary giants such as Morrison, Everett, Whitehead, and Jemisin expose the harrowing nexus of racialized spaces and negatively valanced emotions like fear, shame, and grief. Her innovative socio-political and cognitive narratological lens reveals the deep structural roots of emotional anguish while exalting Black fiction's kaleidoscopic complexity and transformative brilliance. Mikić’s visionary framework redefines how we interpret Black fiction—along with Latinx, Native, and Asian American. Bold. Brilliant. Boundless!”

—Frederick Luis Aldama, Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin, USA

This open access book examines how selected African American authors—Colson Whitehead, Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison, Brit Bennett, Percival Everett, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Sherri L. Smith, and N.K. Jemisin—narrate relationships between emotion, race, and space. On the one hand, they bear witness to the structural production of Black emotional pain at the confluence of racial and spatial discrimination. On the other hand, they reveal meaningful and subversive interlinkages between Black emotional experiences and Black spatial practices. Weaving together insights from psychology, narrative theory, African American studies, affect theory, and Black Geographies, Marijana Mikić interrogates fear, hope, shame, guilt, anger, and grief in relation to the racial-geographic projects of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and their continued legacies. Mikić draws attention to the narrative strategies contemporary African American authors employ to prompt their readers’ engagement with both the pain and the possibility that continues to shape Black lives in the twenty-first century.

Marijana Mikić completed her PhD at the Department of English at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. She is coeditor of Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology. Her essays have appeared in JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, Orbis Litterarum, and Anglia.