Perhaps the brevity of short fiction accounts for the relatively scant
attention devoted to it by scholars, who have historically concentrated
on longer prose narratives. The Geographies of African American Short
Fiction seeks to fill this gap by analyzing the ways African American
short story writers plotted a diverse range of characters across
multiple locations--small towns, a famous metropolis, city sidewalks, a
rural wooded area, apartment buildings, a pond, a general store, a
prison, and more. In the process, these writers highlighted the extents
to which places and spaces shaped or situated racial representations.
Presenting African American short story writers as cultural
cartographers, author Kenton Rambsy documents the variety of
geographical references within their short stories to show how these
authors make cultural spaces integral to their artwork and inscribe
their stories with layered and resonant social histories.
The history of these short stories also documents the circulation of
compositions across dozens of literary collections for nearly a century.
Anthology editors solidified the significance of a core group of short
story authors including James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Charles
Chesnutt, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright. Using
quantitative information and an extensive literary dataset, The
Geographies of African American Short Fiction explores how editorial
practices shaped the canon of African American short fiction.
