Black Cultural Mythology

Offers a new conceptual framework rooted in mythological analysis to ground the field of Africana cultural memory studies.

Winner of the 2021 CLA Book Award presented by the College Language Association

Black Cultural Mythology retrieves the concept of "mythology" from its Black Arts Movement origins and broadens its scope to illuminate the relationship between legacies of heroic survival, cultural memory, and creative production in the African diaspora. Christel N. Temple comprehensively surveys more than two hundred years of figures, moments, ideas, and canonical works by such visionaries as Maria Stewart, Richard Wright, Colson Whitehead, and Edwidge Danticat to map an expansive yet broadly overlooked intellectual tradition of Black cultural mythology and to provide a new conceptual framework for analyzing this tradition. In so doing, she at once reorients and stabilizes the emergent field of Africana cultural memory studies, while also staging a much broader intervention by challenging scholars across disciplines-from literary and cultural studies, history, sociology, and beyond-to embrace a more organic vocabulary to articulate the vitality of the inheritance of survival.

Christel N. Temple is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her books include Transcendence and the Africana Literary Enterprise; Literary Spaces: Introduction to Comparative Black Literature; and Literary Pan-Africanism: History, Contexts, and Criticism.