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Kiese Laymon

African American Fiction and the Post-Civil Rights Era

For the next few weeks, I shall attempt to construct an intellectual history of African Americans in the post-civil rights era. This “post-civil rights era” is one I define as encompassing the cultural and intellectual debates sparked by the fallout of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the federal government’s attempt to enforce both, and also grapple with the fallout of the “long, hot summers” of the mid-1960s. By no means is this “the” intellectual history of the time period. Instead, it’s a way of looking backward—from the present, current Ferguson/post-“Age of Obama” moment Read more