Reading Africa into American literature: epics, fables, and gothic tales

pt. I. Epic impulses/narratives of ancestry

Imperial mother wit, gumbo erotics: from Sunjata to The souls of Black folk

Of root figures and buggy jiving: Toomer, Hurston, and Ellison

Myth-making, mother-child-ness, and epic renamings: Malcolm X, Kunta Kinte, and Milkman Dead

pt. II. Bound cultures/the creolization of Dixie

"Two heads fighting": African roots, geechee/gombo tales

Creole self-fashioning: Joel Chandler Harris's "other fellow"

Searching for spiritual soil: milk bonds and the "maumer tongue"

pt. III. Shadows of Africans/gothic representations

The spears of the party of the merciful: Senegambian Muslims, scriptural mercy, and plantation slavery

Babo and bras coupé: malign machinations, gothic plots

"Never once but like ripples": on boomeranging trumps, rememory, and the novel as medium.