Coleman, James, Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman, University Press of Mississippi, 1989.

This study takes on the complicated issues that arise when the Eurocentric models of modernism are applied to African-American writing.

Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk, 1903.

This essay is one of the classics in the study of African-American literature. In it Du Bois explains his theories of second sight.

Hurston, Zora Neale, Mules and Men, Perennial Library, 1990.

This pioneering work by the anthropologist and writer remains the landmark study of African-American culture in the post-reconstruction South.