The Introduction provides an overview of the history, practice, and future directions of the field. It considers the coherence and stability of the category of contemporary African American literature, examines multiple genealogies and questions of periodization, and describes varied aesthetic practices of grief and grievance, experimentation and play. Embedding African American cultural production within the fraught history of the last five decades, this chapter examines various forces shaping the creation of innovative genres, the turn to the afterlife of slavery, the pull toward protest, and the impact of new and expanded geographies and methods.