Among the challenges to Black feminist tradition today is a gap between the visibility of intersectional disparities faced by Black women and nonbinary people, and the mobilization of this knowledge to meet problems such as economic precarity and sexual and gender discrimination. Ironically, as the rhetoric of intersectionality has become central to diversity and equity initiatives in academia and publishing, in its institutional iterations, intersectionality has moved away from earlier Black feminist commitments to dismantling systems of inequity, discrimination, and oppression. Contemporary African American literature reflects anxiety about intersectionality’s conflicted service to the individualistic values of neoliberal capitalism while recognizing it remains powerful for critiquing and refining Black feminist priorities and politics surrounding solidarity. This ambivalence is seen in the narratives discussed in this chapter, in particular, in the way they turn to intersectional logics to think through problems of transnational coalition building, gender and sexual discrimination, and economic precarity. This chapter argues that contemporary African American literature reflects anxiety about Black feminist ideas without commensurate gains in equality, safety, and freedom for Black women, providing stark representations of Black female personhood that articulate the urgency of moving beyond this impasse to face the challenges of our time.

Chapter 15 explores Ratzinger’s thoughts on eschatology as a key to understand Christian revelation and to enter into dialogue with modernity.

This chapter wrestles with the contradictory power that popular romance wields in American culture. These novels both uphold heteropatriarchal norms through their fidelity to the marriage plot, but also unsettle romance tropes as a mode of resisting pernicious stereotypes about Black love and dysfunctional families and counter ubiquitous representations of Black pain. Through a close reading of work by writers such as Sister Souljah, Terry McMillan, and Beverly Jenkins, this chapter upends the claim that Black popular romance is unimaginative and does not merit serious critical analysis as well as defies the common belief that Black popular fiction is a political wasteland. As it reimagines Black popular romance as a space of political possibility with immense cultural impact, this chapter deromanticizes the book publishing industry as a site of antiracism by uncovering the numerous hurdles that Black popular romance writers must clear before they publish novels with Black love at the center.

Social media engagement means losing and finding oneself on a sea of disparate and divergent rhythms, which in this chapter is taken as both material condition and metaphor for the mixture of playful surprise and persistent dread that characterizes the digital dimension of contemporary Black life in the United States. This chapter reads together a collection of technologies, digital and nondigital texts, and memory to explore how contemporary Black social media protest draws on and extends legacies of Black textual play.

Chapter 19 sets forth the substantial understanding of ecumenism promoted by Ratzinger with his writings and ecclesial actions.

Much contemporary antiracist and African Americanist scholarship – especially since the 2008 election of President Barack Obama – has assumed a decidedly cynical orientation toward ideas of “post-racialism.” Scholars, journalists, and activists have rightly detected, in numerous deployments of the term, a kind of bad faith utopianism espoused as a cover for political retreat from progressive, race-conscious policies. This chapter recognizes the merits of such anti-post-racial critiques, but also argues against the summary dismissal of the term. More pointedly, the chapter argues for a rethinking of post-racialism that acknowledges and grapples with a long, ideologically heterogeneous history of African American investments in and ambivalence toward the race concept. The upshot of this rethinking is not a defense of post-racialism as such, but a richer and more dynamic portrait of post-racialism’s historical force, social currency, and inner workings. The chapter takes inspiration from, and proceeds through close readings and intertextual analyses of, Danzy Senna’s 2017 novel, New People.

Chapter 16 surveys Ratzinger’s understanding of modernity in relation to Christian revelation and his proposals for an intelligent engagement of the Gospel with today’s society.

Chapter 20 explores the theological foundation and importance of Christian dialogue with religions, in particular Judaism, in Ratzinger’s thought.

This chapter grows out of the strain of queer theory that revolves around questions of time. Many thinkers make sense of queer subjects by exploring their complex relationships to the past, present, and future as well as what time signifies in this context. Taking seriously the critical linkage between queerness and temporality, I consider how queer bodies make us aware of time – whether through temporal refusal, embrace, or displacement. I argue that contemporary novelists Mia McKenzie and Robert Jones, Jr., use queer characters to reorient narrative understandings of time and present new possible relationships to time. McKenzie’s The Summer We Got Free (2013) and Jones’s The Prophets (2021) both attend to the past to write Black queer life, and, in doing so, these authors provide meditations on time and the writing of history. Beginning with a consideration of the larger historical context of Black queer writing from the end of the twentieth century, the chapter highlights the narrative questioning of the temporal placement and meaning of the Black queer body and draws a connection between the narrative construction and conceptions of temporality that disrupt prevalent ways of thinking about time. In these texts, time emerges as a queer formation.

Understanding contemporary African American literature, this chapter argues, requires accounting for the rich, multifaceted dialogue between Black literary production and the visual arts. This chapter traces what Toni Morrison called the “alliances and alignments” between literature and the other arts by analyzing the aesthetics and themes of contemporary African American writing and examining the cross-arts influences that shaped it. The dialogue between African American literature and visual culture is part of a much longer tradition, and contemporary writers have built on many earlier precedents. But this chapter also unpacks how important historical changes, including developments in media technology and the rise of Black art institutions, have generated new and more numerous intersections between Black literary and artistic cultures since the 1970s. Focusing on three key spaces that provided material support and thematic inspiration for Black writers’ experiments with visual art – the home, museum, and university – this chapter examines how authors working in a range of literary genres, including novels, poetry, plays, screenplays, memoirs, and essays, engaged with a variety of visual arts, including painting, film, sculpture, and photography. The influences and aesthetics of visual culture, the chapter shows, powerfully infuse the work of many writers today.

Chapter 1 considers the academic teachers who were instrumental in Ratzinger’s formation and the historical theologians he engaged with in the shaping of his own theology.