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This chapter examines recent celebrated fictions from the new African diaspora that remake American conceptions of race by placing them in relation to the history of the postcolonial state and its own itineraries of hope and despair, migration and return. Writers like Chris Abani, NoViolet Bulawayo, Chimamanda Adichie, Teju Cole, and Dinaw Mengestu appropriate various genres—the great American novel, the reverse imperial romance, the black Atlantic travel narrative, the ethnic bildungsroman—to delineate new conceptions of diaspora, beyond the assimilation mandated by the conventional immigrant plot or the melancholy sounded by critics nostalgic for simpler moments of opposition between Africa and the West. Often termed Afropolitan, these writers resist received notions of what constitutes African literature, even as they open up numerous critical possibilities for the study of diaspora, expanding previous geographies and weaving together race and class with location.

A brief Coda wrestles with the scope of the claims made for a strategic cynicism. It begins with the uncomfortable play between sceptical cynicism and much more impoverished cynicisms in Dinaw Mengestu’s novel How to Read the Air (2010). It then turns to Bernard Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness, a book that sought to clarify the virtues of truthfulness as our main resource against cynicism. It takes Williams’s reworking of the Nietzschean genealogy as a prompt to think critically about the strengths and limitations of cynicism’s corrective or recalibrating role for today.

As an acknowledgment of Penn Szittya's affection and support for the Lannan Center, its founder and former director (2006-2009) Mark McMorris has written a verbal portrait of Penn. The inclusion of a contribution by a distinguished poet and scholar of contemporary poetry and poetics honors Penn's belief in promoting the social value of all poetic culture, whether medieval or modern. Building on Penn's examination of the Omne bonum manuscript, as described in Cruz's essay, McMorris draws inspiration from Penn's thesis about the text as “conceptual palimpsest” to find a structure for describing both Penn's life and the relationship between poetics and social practice. McMorris's own consideration of this manuscript and its scribe also allows him to develop the interactions between writing and drawing, reading and seeing, text and universe.