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This book profiles Eric Walrond (1898–1966), the writer, journalist, and critic, whose short story collection, Tropic Death, was one of the first efforts by a black author to depict Caribbean lives and voices in American fiction. It restores Walrond to his proper place as a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, situates Tropic Death within the author's broader corpus, and positions the work as a catalyst and driving force behind the New Negro literary movement in America. The book follows Walrond from the West Indies to Panama, New York, France, and finally England. It recounts his relationships with New Negro authors such as Countée Cullen, Charles S. Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, and Gwendolyn Bennett, as well as the white novelist Carl Van Vechten. It also highlights Walrond's involvement with Marcus Garvey's journal Negro World and the National Urban League journal, Opportunity, and examines the writer's work for mainstream titles, including Vanity Fair. The book also shows how, in 1929, Walrond severed ties with Harlem, but did not disappear. It explains that he went on to contribute to the burgeoning anti-colonial movement and print culture centered in England and fueled by C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and other Caribbean expatriates.

An America in which the color of one’s skin no longer matters would be unprecedented. With the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, that future suddenly seemed possible. Obama’s rise reflects a nation of fluid populations and fortunes, a society in which a biracial individual could be embraced as a leader by all. Yet complicating this vision are shifting demographics, rapid redefinitions of race, and the instant invention of brands, trends, and identities that determine how we think about ourselves and the place of others. This book confronts the premise, advanced by black intellectuals, that the Obama administration marked the start of a “post-racial” era in the United States. While the “transcendent” and post-racial black elite declare victory over America’s longstanding codes of racial exclusion and racist violence, their evidence relies largely on their own salaries and celebrity. The chapters here strike at the certainty of those who insist life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are now independent of skin color and race in America. They argue, signify, and testify that “post-blackness” is a problematic mythology masquerading as fact—a dangerous new “race science” motivated by black transcendentalist individualism.

This book approaches Negritude as an experimental, text-based poetic movement developed by diasporic authors of African descent through the means of modernist print culture. Engaging primarily the works of Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas, this book shows how the demands of print culture alter the personal voice of each author, transforming an empirical subjectivity into a hybrid, textual entity that it names, after Theodor Adorno, an “aesthetic subjectivity.” This aesthetic subjectivity, transmitted by the words on the page, must be actualized—performed, reiterated, and created anew—by each reader, at each occasion of reading. Lyric writing and lyric reading therefore attenuate the link between author and phenomenalized voice. Yet the Negritude poem insists upon its connection to lived experience even as it emphasizes its printed form. Ironically, a purely formalist reading would have to ignore the ways formal—and not merely thematic—elements point toward the poem's own conditions of emergence. Blending archival research on the historical context of Negritude with theories of the lyric “voice,” this text argues that Negritude poems present a challenge to both form-based (deconstructive) theories and identity-based theories of poetic representation. Through close readings, it reveals that the racialization of the author places pressure on a lyric regime of interpretation, obliging us to reconceptualize the relation of author to text in poetries of the first person.