Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World

Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes have all enlightened mainstream (white) audiences about their race and culture. Focusing on fiction and non-fiction produced between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, Eve Dunbar's important book, Black Regions of the Imagination examines how these African American writers-who lived and travelled outside the United States-both document and re-imagine their "homegrown" racial experiences within a worldly framework. From Hurston's participant-observational accounts and Wrights' travel writing to Baldwin's Another Country and Himes' detective fiction, these writers helped develop the concept of a "region" of blackness that resists boundaries of genre. Each writer represents-and signifies-blackness in new ways and within the larger context of the world. As they negotiated issues of "belonging," these writers disallowed the privileging of the national or the international, and were more critical of social segregation in America as well as their roles as cultural "translators." A volume in the American Literatures Initiative