"In this book, Michel Feith positions John Edgar Wideman as a major critic of western modernity within African American literature. Feith presents Wideman's case against ghettoization, prisons, and the diasporic sense of history that emerges in his novels in unique and complex ways. Feith interprets these traits as at times a wholesale rejection of western modernity and at others a reorientation toward the minority viewpoint. Feith examines Wideman's novels consistently in light of The Cattle Killing, widely regarded as his magnum opus"--