Chabot Davis analyzes contemporary texts that bond together two seemingly antithetical sensibilities: the sentimental and the postmodern. Ranging across multiple media and offering a methodological union of textual analysis and reception study, Chabot Davis presents case studies of audience responses. Chabot Davis argues that sentimental postmodernism deepened leftist political engagement by moving audiences to identify emotionally with people across the divisions of gender, sexual identity, race, and ethnicity. This study questions the critical equation of postmodernism with apocalyptic...

Critics often characterize white consumption of African American culture as a form of theft that echoes the fantasies of 1950s-era bohemians, or "White Negroes," who romanticized black culture as anarchic and sexually potent. In "Beyond the White Negro," Kimberly Chabot Davis claims such a view fails to describe the varied politics of racial crossover in the past fifteen years.
Davis analyzes how white engagement with African American novels, film narratives, and hip-hop can help form anti-racist attitudes that may catalyze social change and racial justice. Though acknowledging past...

Critics often characterize white consumption of African American culture as a form of theft that echoes the fantasies of 1950s-era bohemians, or "White Negroes," who romanticized black culture as anarchic and sexually potent. In "Beyond the White Negro," Kimberly Chabot Davis claims such a view fails to describe the varied politics of racial crossover in the past fifteen years.
Davis analyzes how white engagement with African American novels, film narratives, and hip-hop can help form anti-racist attitudes that may catalyze social change and racial justice. Though acknowledging past...