Jarrett's examination of how critics, scholars and authors have answered the question “what is African American Literature?” raises a plethora of issues relevant to all area studies, be it ethnic, regional or gender-based. In fact, at a moment in US history when the headline “Is Barak Obama Black Enough?” can be a part of the public discourse concerning the most viable African American presidential candidate ever to run, explorations regarding the constructions of race and racial authenticity in any discipline are timely and vital. Jarrett examines the dialogue and tensions between “deans,” those who advocated specific criteria, such as racial realism, for literature written by African Americans, and “truants,” those writers who defied such restrictions. Jarrett has chosen many icons of African American literature, such as Paul Dunbar (truant), Richard Wright (dean), Toni Morrison (truant) and Amiri Baraka (dean). He also discusses less-known writers such as George S. Schuyler, whose essay “Negro Art-Hokum” of 1926 fueled a public debate on black essentialism with Langston Hughes and other advocates of new Negro modernism. His chapter on the virtual erasure of Frank Yerby from literary history – even though he was “the most prolific and commercially successful writer in African American history” (22) – shows how rigid expectations of black authors, could affect a writer's literary legacy.

Selecting a wide range of writing, poetry, novels, short stories, satire, and criticism, Jarrett shows how the reception of certain authors and their texts has defined what is and is not considered African American literature to this day. This book cites the review and the anthology as two of the most powerful tools for canon formation as scholars and critics, black and white, have determined how “black literature” is emphatically not “white literature.” In the chapter on the cultural theorist and philosopher Alain Locke as a “dean” Jarrett seems a bit out of his realm and some important secondary sources by Rudolf Alexander Kofi Cain, Leonard Harris, and Chielozona Eze are not in his footnotes. Overall, however, this book is well written and as nicely nuanced as the topic it addresses regarding the history of defining black textuality.