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This introductory chapter demonstrates how nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature and print culture used Victorian literature to conduct acts of “African Americanization.” Here, close engagement with Victorian literature represented no mere capitulation to existing constraints, but instead constituted a deliberate political strategy and means of artistic expression. The chapter shows that this practice did not impede or undercut the development of a distinctive African American literary culture and tradition, but on the contrary contributed directly to its development. It did so through the very repetition of African Americanizing engagements, repetition that grew increasingly self-conscious and self-referential, as writers and editors built on, responded to, and positioned themselves in relation to prior instances. Victorian literature's role as an important archive for the production of African American literature and print culture, the chapter also argues, makes African American literature and print culture an important archive for the study of Victorian literature.

This chapter gives an introduction to the complex interrelation of agency and first-person narration in the works of Octavia Butler by way of her short story “The Evening and the Morning and the Night.” It is argued that the short story uses first-person narration to juxtapose the creation of self through language – for example, via changing we-versus-they constructions – with the self’s physical self-destruction. Not only does Butler’s text address the agential potential of the multidimensional category of voice, but its narrative perspective also bespeaks the deconstruction of the mind/body binary at the heart of the Enlightenment’s liberal humanist conception of the subject. Moreover, in choosing to construct the narrative as a creative utilization of African American literary tradition, the story creates a narrative intersectionality which serves as a locus of agency.

The book’s conclusion makes an implicit call for a more nuanced genealogy connecting representations of black folklore in the post-Reconstruction era to what are typically considered the more “sophisticated” treatments of folklore in later African American literary and ethnographic works, suggesting a shared set of interests and concerns in writers from Paul Laurence Dunbar, to Zora Neale Hurston, to Ralph Ellison, to Colson Whitehead, and beyond. This approach beckons us to recover another layer in the sophisticated and nuanced ways folklore and African American literature have intersected, not just in the post-Reconstruction period, or even in the Harlem Renaissance period and beyond, but indeed from the very foundations of the African American literary tradition.