Following in the tradition of landmark projects, including Robert Stepto's From behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (1979) and Bernard Bell's The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987) and The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches (2004), Valerie Babb's historicizing project affirms the enduring existence of a distinct literary tradition, while also expanding the scope of what constitutes “African American” and “the novel.” Through two coexisting chronologies – a history of authorship from pre-national to post-black writings and a set of generic literary histories – Babb interrogates the racial relationship between text and author. Do black writers necessarily produce African American fiction? Does the novel represent a coherent black community? In probing these questions, Babb subverts the book's titular terminology. In admitting that the “title of this study was selected by the publisher,” she removes the veil between critic and publisher (3). In such moments, when – to paraphrase Brent Hayes Edwards in The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches (2003) – the argumentative framing fails and splits its own binding, Babb denaturalizes African American literature, revealing it to be a political and cultural formation.

Part I reassesses ideas about the evolution of the African American novel, taking into account queer, gendered, ethnically diverse, diasporic, and transnational practices. The first chapter charts the beginnings of a novelistic tradition to the mid-nineteenth century. Contemplating the importance of “firsts,” a concept that “creates origins and argues against inferiority while offering proof” (20), Babb locates the African American novel's origins at the intersection of William Wells Brown's Clotel; Or, the President's Daughter (1853), Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative (2002), and Emma Dunham Kelley's Megda (1891) and Four Girls at Cottage City (1898). They each feature interrelated thematic interests that characterize African American literature: political critique, ambiguity, authenticity, artistry, freedom, and formal experimentation (20).

Chapter 2 traces black canon formation to the early 1900s, as white patrons, independent black publishers, and black periodicals published works to varying degrees of acclaim. Babb highlights the racial politics in marketing authors like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt. The former felt forced to market himself as a racial novelty, while the latter's publications cemented his blackness. Chapter 3 depicts New Negro Renaissance writing through a network of authors negotiating a collective cultural identity formulated around orality, folklore, and vernacular. While Jean Toomer and Claude McKay reveal the longevity of diasporic black novelists, Harlem writers are shown to either embrace, deny, satirize, or trouble associations with black culture. Chapter 4 connects New Negro ideologies to novels produced between the 1940s and 1960s, an era that emphasized the “desire for credible representation, the importance of place to imagination, [and] the experimentation with literary form” (123). For instance, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin defy narrative categorization by writing “between art and protest, between blackness and raceless ‘universality’” (118). In Chapter 5, the black arts movement is characterized by writers who critiqued traditional, Western artistic forms and framed black agency through intra- and interethnic diversity. However, this period is largely characterized by commentaries on African American sexuality by male authors. Chapter 6 amends this imbalance by foregrounding Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Terri McMillan, Gloria Naylor, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange. Academia is crucial to the emergence of black women writers, who were accused of producing artistically inferior novels about identity politics and were rarely praised for their experimental and intersectional practices. Part I concludes by examining how “Bohemian Cult Nats” – including Trey Ellis, Nathaniel Mackey, and Danzy Senna, among others – have responded to “postrace” discourses by producing a nuanced vernacular voice that expresses blackness “less as a fixed entity and more as a continually self-evaluating process” (189). In this first part, Babb uses form and content to resist easy categorizations.

In Part II, Babb argues that an analysis of genres engenders an investigation of the “specter” of racial presence (215). This section outlines neo-slave narratives, detective fiction, speculative fiction, pulp fiction, graphic novels, film adaptations, and black-diasporic fiction. In chapter 8, the neo-slave narrative is shown to move beyond “binaries of slaves and masters, victims and victimizers” to redress historical erasures while reframing present oppressions (218). The remaining chapters treat genres that, while not originating with African American authorship, have been influenced by black writing. For instance, passing and Afrofuturism are now embedded in detective and speculative literary traditions respectively. Pulp fiction, often characterized as “street lit,” is presented as a site of cross-cultural, gendered influences. In chapter 12, the black graphic novel's use of illustration further reveals the fluidity of racial identification, undermining a simple black–white paradigm. Conversely, Babb argues that the history of film adaptation presented in chapter 13 – from Native Son to The Color Purple – is marred by a lack of complexity and a desire for universalization. The final chapter on black-diasporic novels gestures to the international scale of black writing.

While already dense, this study would benefit from a deeper interrogation of Babb's opening question: “What makes a novel African American or black?” (4). Left unconsidered is the literary production of authors from various ethnic backgrounds who clearly draw on African American practices – Bill Cheng's Southern Cross the Dog (2013) and Laila Lalami's The Moor's Account (2014) come to mind. Moreover, Babb tends to dismiss the impact of white authorship on black readership. For instance, black superheroes in comics are overlooked because “they are still the products of white creators, and still exist apart from the black community” (304). Yet, as Babb notes elsewhere, black reader consumption impacts black authors and expectations of black literature. A History of the African American Novel nevertheless offers a resounding testament to the vitality of today's black literary tradition.