Publications
"Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic: An IntroductionAcademic journal article," African American Review , Vol. 41, No. 4 (Winter 2007)
"'Under the Umbrella of Black Civilization': A Conversation with Reginal McKnight," African American Review, Vol. 35, No. 3, 427-437 (Autumn 2001)
"'Why Don't He like My Hair?': Constructing African-American Standards of Beauty in Toni Morrison's 'Song of Solomon' and Zora Neale Hurston's 'Their Eyes Were Watching God,'" African American Review, v.29 (1995)
From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Studies (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)
ISBN-13: 978-0415861021 ISBN-10: 0415861020
​
The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale"-an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener-with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late 20th century.