Brandy E. Underwood

"The Black Crowd: Leadership, Affect, and Racial Uplift in African American Literature" engages with literary texts that address prominent outbreaks of black crowd violence in the twentieth century: The Harlem riots of the 1930s and 1940s, the tumult of the 1960s, and the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising. Each historical moment is paired with an affect. This book project argues that following WWII, African American writers ranging from Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man (1952) to Walter Mosley in Little Scarlet (2005) rendered the negative affective responses of middle-class black protagonists who witness black violent crowds in order to challenge the validity of contradictory racial uplift ideologies.