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Beginning with a discussion of Colson Whitehead’s more recent novel The Intuitionist (1999), chapter four covers a range of works, from the most influential African-American novels of mid-century, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), to less frequently discussed works such as Wright’s own second novel, The Outsider (1953), and John A. Williams’ The Man Who Cried I Am! (1967). The chapter demonstrates how African Americans writers dramatized a sense of being caught between the competing systems of control represented by Communism on the one hand, and the promise of American democratic freedom on the other. Tracing an arc from Native Son to The Man Who Cried I Am!, the chapter demonstrates the ever-changing relationship between the individual and political rhetoric by showing how the denial of chance was first attributed to Communists, who in Invisible Man simply want to control African Americans for their own purposes, and then moves finally The Man Who Cried I Am!, which shows that, from a black perspective, American democracy masks a fantasy of complete control.

This chapter looks at the fictional folklorists who appear in the work of Gloria Naylor, Lee Smith, Randall Kenan, and Colson Whitehead. An interesting pattern emerges when you consider the works of these four writers side-by-side: each of the stories are structured through a metafictive, self-conscious framework, each ask the reader to think critically about notions of authenticity, and each are haunted by ghosts, both figurative and literal. The ghostly is not an arbitrary signifier here. It figures an absence that has something to do with knowledge and text, with literary tourism, and with the inability to ever know, really, the shape of a community’s past, present, or future. This chapter thus argues that the character of the folklorist serves as a metonymic signifier of the absence always present in the representation of cultures.

The third chapter moves away from the more experimental aesthetics of Castillo’s and Ondaatje’s narratives to incorporate an analysis of a formally non-experimental and realist text in order to show that Deleuzian sensations likewise underpin and constitute explicitly representational and verisimilar narration. Tracing the novel’s African American protagonist’s progressive immersion in becoming the chapter draws out how she engages in what Isabelle Stengers has termed speculative constructivism—the facilitation of events—in order to create the future to come. Since the protagonist’s speculative trajectory is created by poetic means it is tantamount to the figuration of the narrative’s very own speculative-creative activity and thus emblematic of narration’s own construction work.

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.

The Introduction elucidates the central theoretical, literary-historical, and methodological arguments in the book. It explains how the coming chapters navigate the representation of consolation by examining both the formal and the thematic elements of contemporary narrative. The Introduction also situates the contribution Discrepant Solace makes to recent conversations in affect studies, the history of emotions, literary aesthetics, and ethical criticism. It explains the book’s rationale for selection and comparison, while summarizing each of the core chapter’s arguments and focal texts. As a way of offering preliminary examples of the book’s larger metacritical and literary-historical claims, the Introduction integrates close readings of Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave (2013); Christina Crosby’s A Body, Undone (2016); and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016).

The afterword argues that so-called neo-passing narratives distinctively highlight the performative dimension to racial formation and are, moreover, particularly attentive to the social and political consequences of race. This essay argues that the desire for passing to be a phenomenon of the past can be problematic in that it wills away the social insights afforded by cultural and literary narratives of passing in the post–Civil Rights era.