The Strangers Book

"[An] important and fresh contribution to the study of African American literature, rereading the works of the canonical Douglass and turning our attention to lesser-known African American francophone poetry . . . Pratt offers [a] compelling and forceful theory and method that no doubt will shape the work of literary scholars and have the power to influence theorizations of African American history."—American Literature

"Pratt's scholarship is timely. As #BlackLivesMatter informs us, the struggle for racial justice in America continues . . . The Strangers Book is about African Americans writing about their experiences of an America that does not permit them to be seen as human. Revealing a complex network of relationships and texts, it offers an innovative framework to understand and read early African American literature. That these writers are communicating through varied kinds of storytelling points to one similarity across difference and time; that the figure of the 'strange negro' persists in the stories of Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, or Freddie Gray, points to another."—MELUS

"A lot of academic monographs are credited with offering a critique, but The Strangers Book is the rare book that really and profoundly assesses the limits of what is thinkable. Like black lives, black texts matter. But it rings hollow to claim that both things matters without also disaffirming the existing structures of power-and the categories of person and text that power has established-that create the need to say such things in the first place. Like the Black Lives Matter movement, The Strangers Book offers a utopian affirmation of difference couched in a language of refusal, where the particular matters more than the universal toward which it supposedly should add."—Public Books