Lena Hill, Visusalizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition

In her ambitious rereading of important segments of the African American literary canon of works published between the eighteenth century and the beginning of the Black Arts movement in the 1960s, Lena Hill proposes to apply a methodology announced very clearly in the “Acknowledgments” to her work: “This book ponders visual images inspired by texts […]”(xiii). In a critical gesture that signifies on the well-known “trope of the Talking Book” she proposes the notion of the trope of the Picture...