The Diasporan Self offers a robust, accessible theory of contemporary African American literature that scholars and students alike will find essential both in complementary critical studies and in the classroom. In fact, Greene may very well have written the definitive analyses of the novels he studies, presenting a long-overdue synthesis of a quarter century of scholarship in African American literary ... Read morestudies. Readers who desire entree into the more challenging works of these African American writers will obtain it here and emerge excited by new interpretive possibilities. - Darryl Dickson-Carr, Southern Methodist University, author of The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction and African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel ""The Diasporan Self: Unbreaking the Circle in Western Black Novels is a worthy successor to the author's landmark previous volume, Blacks in Eden. It clearly will be required reading for anybody with either an academic or even just a reading interest in contemporary African American letters, American literature, cultural studies, or literary theory. Greene enters a discussion in progress and shifts its direction significantly. What he teases out in his astute readings is a foundational myth that carries within it 'a theory of western black Being,' and that is what he pursues through the many texts he analyses. In the process of his explications, Greene defines and explores modes of 'literary diaspority' that have seldom been so ably anatomized."" - Aldon Nielsen, Kelly Professor of American Literature, Penn State University Show Less