“This book will interest students and scholars of history as well as literature. . . . Recommended.” — CHOICE
“Capturing and unveiling the complexity of race requires a vast knowledge of both history and literature, a knowledge that cannot be acquired easily or quickly. There are few critics . . . who can match Ernest’s grasp of the period.” — American Quarterly
“[A] thoughtful study. . . . Importantly affirms the continuing need, in courses and in scholarship, for work focused specifically on the African American tradition.” — Journal of American History
“One of the most eloquent, thought-provoking, learned, theoretically innovative (Ernest not only draws from chaos theory but also from choreography!) and consequently, at least potentially, interesting attempts to counter the idea that we need to move beyond race.” — Ethnic and Racial Studies
“Illuminates a world of unseen material. . . .Ernest reads a wide array of African American literary texts through his vision of racial chaos, finding new ways to account for some of the familiar problems and irregularities in nineteenth-century African American literary history and criticism.” — Journal of Southern History
“A much needed work in African American literary studies and one that should be read by anyone who considers working in the field.” — Louisiana History
“An invitation to participate in this conversation, whether as historian or literary critic, theorist or writer, and to recognize that the contingent reality of race is in fact constituted by these very conversations even, or perhaps especially, when race is itself the subject of discussion.” — American Nineteenth Century History
“A much needed work in African American literary studies and one that should be read by anyone who considers working in the filed.” — Louisiana History
“Ernest offers invigorating new readings of familiar writers and familiar as well as unfamiliar texts. This book is genuinely magisterial, a landmark for this generation of African American and American literary and cultural studies.” — Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University
“This is the kind of book I've been waiting for! Only a person with superior command of a broad range of disciplines, a comprehensive knowledge of African American literature, and the courage and missionary zeal to tell it like it is could so deftly demonstrate the relevance of chaos theory to early African American literature. John Ernest gives us a work of outstanding scholarship.” — Frances Smith Foster, Emory University
