THE AFRICAN AMERICAN MALE, WRITING, AND DIFFERENCE -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction: Approaching African American Life, History, Literature, and Criticism Polycentrically -- 2. History, the White/Black Binary, and the Construction of the African American as Other -- 3. The White/Black Binary and the African American Sociopolitical Mission of Racial Uplift -- 4. Finding Freedom in Sameness: James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man -- 5. Disrupting the White/Black Binary: William Melvin Kelley' s A Different Drummer -- 6. Exposing Limiting, Racialized Heterological Critical Sites: An Existential Reading of Charles Wright's The Messenger -- 7. The Blues Idiom Lifestyle, Counter-Hegemony, and Clarence Major's Dirty Bird Blues -- 8. Naming the Subaltern: The Swinging Life and Nathan Heard's Howard Street -- 9. Identity Politics, Sexual Fluidity, and James Earl Hardy's B-Boy Blues -- 10. Voodoo, A Different African American Experience, and Don Belton's Almost Midnight -- 11. Conclusion -- NOTES -- 2. History, the White/Black Binary, and the Construction of the African American as Other -- 3. The White/Black Binary and the African American Sociopolitical Mission of Racial Uplift -- 4. Finding Freedom iN Sameness: James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man -- 9. Identity Politics, Sexual Fluidity, and James Earl Hardy's B-Boy Blues -- 10. Voodoo, A Different African American Experience, and Don Belton' s Almost Midnight -- WORKS CITED -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z.