TY - BOOK AU - Mikić,Marijana ED - SpringerLink (Online service) TI - Emotion, Race, and Space in Contemporary African American Literature T2 - American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, SN - 9783031857959 AV - PN695-779 U1 - 809.05 23 PY - 2025/// CY - Cham PB - Springer Nature Switzerland, Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan KW - Literature, Modern KW - 20th century KW - 21st century KW - America KW - Literatures KW - Human geography KW - Cultural geography KW - Prose literature KW - Contemporary Literature KW - Twentieth-Century Literature KW - North American Literature KW - Social and Cultural Geography KW - Narrative Text and Prose N1 - Chapter 1:Introduction.-Chapter 2:Fear, Hope, and Geographies of Slavery in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World -- Chapter 3:Shame, Guilt, and Separatist Geographies in Toni Morrison’s Home and Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half -- Chapter 4:Anger, Outrage, Race, and Space in Percival Everett’s Erasure and Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow -- Chapter 5: Grief, Grievability, and Environmental Disaster in Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy -- Chapter 6: Conclusion; Open Access N2 - “A dazzling theoretical tour de force, Mikić masterfully illuminates the intricate intersections of emotion, race, and geography in Black fiction. In lockstep with race-narrative luminaries like Kenneth Warren, Madhu Dubey, Christopher González, and Sue J. Kim, Mikić deftly reveals how literary giants such as Morrison, Everett, Whitehead, and Jemisin expose the harrowing nexus of racialized spaces and negatively valanced emotions like fear, shame, and grief. Her innovative socio-political and cognitive narratological lens reveals the deep structural roots of emotional anguish while exalting Black fiction's kaleidoscopic complexity and transformative brilliance. Mikić’s visionary framework redefines how we interpret Black fiction—along with Latinx, Native, and Asian American. Bold. Brilliant. Boundless!” —Frederick Luis Aldama, Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin, USA This open access book examines how selected African American authors—Colson Whitehead, Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison, Brit Bennett, Percival Everett, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Sherri L. Smith, and N.K. Jemisin—narrate relationships between emotion, race, and space. On the one hand, they bear witness to the structural production of Black emotional pain at the confluence of racial and spatial discrimination. On the other hand, they reveal meaningful and subversive interlinkages between Black emotional experiences and Black spatial practices. Weaving together insights from psychology, narrative theory, African American studies, affect theory, and Black Geographies, Marijana Mikić interrogates fear, hope, shame, guilt, anger, and grief in relation to the racial-geographic projects of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and their continued legacies. Mikić draws attention to the narrative strategies contemporary African American authors employ to prompt their readers’ engagement with both the pain and the possibility that continues to shape Black lives in the twenty-first century. Marijana Mikić completed her PhD at the Department of English at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. She is coeditor of Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology. Her essays have appeared in JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, Orbis Litterarum, and Anglia. UR - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-85795-9 ER -