This volume is a selection of significant and previously unpublished essays and short stories by the influential critic of German and American literature and popular culture, James A. Snead. The volume contains innovative essays and notes about African American popular culture, literary criticism and five pieces of short fiction. Published posthumously, the volume attests to Snead's unique intellectual commitment to a critical engagement with the interconnections between European and African American cultural formations.

'This long awaited book is a gem - yet still a small part of the huge corpus of the life of James Snead. He stands among the most important American intellectuals in the late 20th Century.' - Cornel West, Professor of Afro-American Studies, Princeton, USA

Autorentext
JAMES SNEAD was Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of Figures of Division: William Faulkner's Major Novels and White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side . He died in 1989.

KARA KEELING is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

COLIN MacCABE is a Distinguished Service Professor of English and Film at the University of Pittsburgh where he has taught since 1985. Since 1998 he has also taught as Professor of English at Exeter University and produced for Minerva Pictures.

CORNEL WEST is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Inhalt
Preface by Colin MacCabe Acknowledgements Permissions Editor's Note Introduction PART I: ESSAYS On Repetition in Black Culture Litotes and Chiasmus: Cloaking Tropes in Absalom Absalom! Misreading Race in Benito Cereno : The Silence of Babo The Vision of Desire in Death in Venice The Black Image in American Film MTV and Its Audiences: Global Utopias? On Basketball European Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Nationality, Narrative and Communality in Tutuola, Achebe and Reed Racist Traces in Postmodernist Theory and Literature PART II: FICTION Colossus The White Cafe Fundamentals Egyptian Trains Always Come The Disappearance of Queen Nofret Index