"Eve Dunbars exploration of radical satisfaction provides a new way to conceptualize Black female subjectivity outside the limits of racial inclusion. In a series of bold, incisive readings, she analyzes examples of agency and joy that defy conventional narratives of progress. This book provides a necessary reorientation to the power of monstrous work and satisfaction." -Stephanie Li, author of Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America
"Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction brilliantly reveals how midcentury Black women writers undertook the monstrous work of refusing an assumed good, integration, in favor of the kind of fugitive and ephemeral pleasures that center and affirm Black life and Black womens daily joy: radical satisfaction. Eve Dunbars incisive, eloquent analysis shows how these authors endeavored to uncover alternative paths to existence, autonomy, and fulfillment than those offered by liberal democratic humanism. Dunbars critical labor in this volume reminds us that Black women artists and thinkers have always cast a skeptical eye at the facile promises of inclusion and insisted that we consider and imagine our own satisfaction otherwise." -Candice M. Jenkins, author of Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh
"Edifying and incisive, this impresses."-Publishers Weekly
"A compelling new interpretation of Black feminist literature from the 1930s through the 1950s."-Ms. Magazine