Contributors to this volume suggest that we read not for event but for multiple conditions productive of and for Black literature. Such a protocol of reading yields understandings closer to the complexity of an African American mid-century. Those conditions include how Black literature was being produced and circulated; how and why it marked its relation to other literary and expressive traditions; what geopolitical imaginaries it facilitated through representation, how, and why it did so; and what technologies, including but not limited to print, enabled African Americans to both represent and pursue such a complex and ongoing aesthetic and political project.