Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing Under Segregation (2024)
University of Minnesota Press

Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction offers new and insightful readings of African American women’s writings in the 1930s–1950s, illustrating how these writers centered Black women’s satisfaction as radical resistance to the false and incomplete promise of liberal racial integration. Eve Dunbar examines the writings of Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks to show how these women explored self-fulfillment over normative and sanctioned models of national belonging. 

Paying close attention to literary moments of disruption, miscommunication, or confusion rather than ease, assimilation, or mutual understanding around race and gender, Dunbar tracks these writers’ dissatisfaction with American race relations. She shows how Petry, West, Childress, and Brooks redeploy the idea of monstrous work to offer potential modalities for registering Black women’s capacity to locate satisfaction within the domestic and interpersonal.

While racial integration may satisfy the national idea of equality and inclusion, it has not met the long-term needs of Black people’s quest for equity. Dunbar responds, demonstrating how these mid-century women offer new blueprints for Black life by creating narrative models for radical satisfaction: Black women’s completeness, joy, and happiness outside the bounds of normative racial inclusion.

Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers Between the Nation and the World (2012)
Temple University Press

Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes were all pressured by critics and publishers to enlighten mainstream (white) audiences about race and African American culture. Focusing on fiction and non-fiction they produced between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, Eve Dunbar's important book, Black Regions of the Imagination, examines how these African American writers—who lived and traveled outside the United States—both document and re-imagine their "homegrown" racial experiences within a worldly framework.

From Hurston's participant-observational accounts and Wright's travel writing to Baldwin's Another Country and Himes' detective fiction, these writers helped develop the concept of a "region" of blackness that resists boundaries of genre and geography. Each writer represents—and signifies—blackness in new ways and within the larger context of the world. As they negotiated issues of "belonging," these writers were more critical of social segregation in America as well as increasingly resistant to their expected roles as cultural "translators."

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African American Literature In Transition, 1930-1940 (2022)
Edited By Eve Dunbar and Ayesha K. Hardison
Cambridge University Press

The volume explores 1930s African American writing to examine Black life, culture, and politics to document the ways Black artists and everyday people managed the Great Depression's economic impact on the creative and the social. Essays engage iconic figures such as Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Richard Wright as well as understudied writers such as Arna Bontemps and Marita Bonner, Henry Lee Moon, and Roi Ottley. This book demonstrates the significance of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and Black literary circles in the absence of white patronage. By featuring novels, poetry, short fiction, and drama alongside guidebooks, photographs, and print culture, African American Literature in Transition 1930-1940 provides evidence of the literary culture created by Black writers and readers during a period of economic precarity, expanded activism for social justice, and urgent internationalism.

Articles and Chapters (selected)

“Genres of Enslavement: Ruptured Temporalities of Black Unfreedom and The Resurfacing Plantation.” Special Issue: Black Temporality in Times of Crisis. South Atlantic Quarterly 121.1 (January 2022): 53-73.

“Loving Gorillas: Animality, Segregation Literature, and Liberation.” American Literature 92.1 (March 2020): 123-149. Winner of the 2020 Lois D. Rubin, Jr. Prize by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature for best article on Southern literature published in a peer-reviewed journal

Woman on the Verge of a Cultural Breakdown: Zora Neale Hurston in Haiti and the Racial Privilege of Boasian Relativism.” Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas. Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner, eds. Yale University Press, 2018. 213-257.

“Hip Hop (feat. Women Writers): Reimagining Black Women and Hip Hop Through Street Fiction.” The Living Canon: Theory and Pedagogy in Contemporary African American Literature. eds. Lovalerie King and Shirley Moody. Indiana University Press, 2013. 91-112.

“Black is a Region: Segregation and Literary Regionalism in Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain.”  African American Review 42.1 (Spring 2009): 109-119.

Public Writing (selected)

"What I Learned From Rereading 'Their Eyes Were Watching God'" Pbs.org. June 8, 2017. 

"On Gwendolyn Brooks and Disappearing Black Girls" Lithub.com. April 4, 2017. 

"Who Can Change the American University?" TheNation.com. March 29, 2016.

Dispatch From Academia: Equity In the Archives. Colorlines.com. June 24, 2013. 

Media Appearances/Interviews

Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming A Space. Tracy Heather Strain, director, American Experience, January 2023. (documentary film)

You can listen to an interview with Thomas Hill, host of The Library Cafe, regrading Black Regions of the Imagination here: 
http://library-cafe.blogspot.com/2013/10/eve-dunbar.html