Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing
A trailblazer, Freedom Time offers a distinctive take on the political implications of experimental writing by neglected African American writers. Reed has developed a strikingly original and wonderfully useful redefinition of the ‘radical’ politics of black literature as a reimagining of what can be thought less through ‘expression’ than through the dynamics of nontraditional formal practices.
The book participates in the very politics it describes, effectively pushing the boundaries of ‘allowable thought.’ Insightful and elegant, Freedom Time provides astute, compelling, even breathtaking readings of the structural and theoretical implications of black experimental writing.
It also does justice to those works’ rootedness in ethnic traditions and engagement with putatively Eurocentric concerns with language, form, and aesthetic transformation. Brilliantly appropriate, this important book has started a conversation that we must have, and it will anchor that conversation for some time.
