African American Review

Abstract:

This essay examines the challenge of mapping critical terms to understand the complex meanings of blackness and freedom in the post-Obama/Trump era and argues that black people must reaffirm a commitment to a reconstructed global African world view to develop an alternate (nonwhite/mainstream) epistemology to establish any self-definition of these terms. While it acknowledges the useful of traditional theory, it cautions against the dismissal of (and promotes instead) the vernacular and folk wisdom that undergird African American critical reading practices prior to the professionalization of the field of African American literary studies.