In the 1980s, a theoretical turn in African American literary criticism helped institutionalize the study of African American literature by insisting on its formal complexity and distinctiveness. The racial text could no longer be read as reducible to its social context. In that same decade, a materialist line of inquiry sought to reconcile formal and contextual analysis by examining the ways black-authored books were published by major companies and received by the critical establishment. Drawing on methods from book history and print culture studies, a sociology of African American literature developed as the academic field of study took shape around canon-building projects. Two approaches to African American literary sociology emerged out of the 1990s: skepticism about the book’s capacity to represent racial experience, and optimism about the commercial success of diverse authors. Over time, these approaches merged into general studies of the racial text’s shifting status in the literary marketplace. With that expanded focus, the sociology of African American literature today sheds light on the way culture and commerce intersect in the making, selling, and reading of black-authored books.

The chapter continues the emphasis on color and considers its relationship to temporal settings. As James F. English has shown, popular and prestigious fiction have diverged over the last half century, with the latter effecting a historical turn. Section 3.1 establishes a similar development for graphic novels, yet in contrast to contemporary novels, this historical turn remains limited to the subgenres of the graphic memoir and graphic journalism. Section 3.2 turns to Giorgio Agamben’s conception of the contemporary as a historicizing account of the present and looks at graphic novels that span past, present, and future settings. Where a focus on historical settings highlights a shift towards graphic nonfiction, the discussion of combined temporal settings argues for the continued vitality of popular subgenres within the graphic novel. Section 3.3 examines the evolving relationship between color printing and temporal settings.