This special issue of American Literature transcends the old debates surrounding black expressive culture and reexamines major African American texts through the lenses of modernism, progressivism, architecture, avant-gardism, hybridity, and Continental theory. With this arsenal of critical and theoretical tools, the scholars here declare that the concept of "blackness" is agile and dynamic, both unsettled and unsettling. Articles in this issue address topics as rich and varied as the friendship between Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison; hybridity, montage, and the avant-garde in the works of...