This chapter explores how the African American novel imagined a better world, experimented with form, and reflected the artistic and cultural sophistication of Black people in the twentieth century. It argues that understanding the twentieth-century African American novel in the context of various overlapping liberation movements helps us organize our thinking about the ways in which writers used long fiction to explore the social, political, ideological, and historical realities that informed the time period in which they were writing. Focusing on African American fiction produced within and around several Black liberation movements and historical interregnums – i.e., Post-Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement (BAM), and the post-BAM Toni Morrison era – the chapter examines the nuances and complexities of novelists who used the novel as form to reflect and inspire shared visions of a liberated future.

The concluding two chapters take up cultural responses to the ongoing violence perpetuated by mass incarceration and the global cycles of warfare and terror. Dennis R. Childs examines narratives of immobility based on police and state violence, imprisonment, and detention and deportation at national borders. He argues that “anti-carceral hip-hop” is the “aesthetic practice [that] represents the quintessential storytelling method for those most commonly targeted for police killing and imprisonment.” Reading hip-hop narratives within a “long twenty-first century” of radical literary, political, and musical practices since the 1970s, he links recent works by Dead Prez, Reyna Grande, Ann Jaramillo, Kendrick Lamar, Monifa Love, Main Source, Invincible, and Askari X to those of James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Public Enemy, Chester Himes, George Jackson, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Assata Shakur, and Malcolm X.

As the global Movement for Black Life continues its demands to end state violence in the USA and abroad, black feminists have cast motherhood as a radical site of political resistance. This chapter historicises popular and scholarly rhetorics of black mothering by returning to earlier black feminist voices from the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, this chapter points to the theoretical contours and elisions undergirding canonical and contemporary black feminist treatments of motherhood and family. Through close reading of personal reflections by black mothers and writers Martha Southgate and Alice Walker, the author argues for theorists to reassess motherhood’s celebrated status in black feminist discursive landscapes and begin rethinking motherhood as a burdensome site of gendered labour and psychic antagonism in the intimate spheres of black women’s lives.