This research proposes a re-examination of the concept of death and the way it is utilized within selected contemporary African-American works of fictional literature. These texts present death and its use as a tool of empowerment as a paradigm beyond its traditional treatments in literature-particularly Africana-centered literature. Through the harnessing and manipulation of death, the characters featured in this work are recognized as those who encapsulate and re-invent circumstances that are otherwise disempowering and dysfunctional. Through death, these women re-propose their negative realities by using death as a manipulative for vengeance and to gain the ultimate freedom from oppression. In both Beloved and Kindred death is an escape mechanism through which the protagonists return to life as they would have it lived, and are re-born to re-engage life anew.

The objective of this dissertation is to converge and apply Elijah P. Anderson’s concept of “Nigger Moment,” as delineated in his 2011 work, The Cosmopolitan Canopy, as a particular category of trauma, experienced exclusively by Africana men, women, and children, with William E. Cross’ theory of racial socialization called “Nigrescence,” to Comparative Black Literature (CBL). While experiences with racism in both individual and structural forms have played a fundamental role in analyses of Africana literature, a focus on the incidence of these “Moments,” as they contribute to the subject’s “Nigrescence” (the series of racial encounters both within and without the group that precipitate the subject’s exploration of their racial identity) through an intersectional lens applied to CBL, allows the analyst or critic to observe how the means by which the “Moment” is experienced, in what context it is experienced, and how the identity of the literary subject(s) manifest patterns of Africana identity formation within fiction and non-fiction narrative, and, ultimately, Africana individuals. Ultimately, I will explore the pedagogical implications of applying the “N-Moment” to Comparative Black Literature within a multi-cultural and multi-racial classroom in the interest of social cohesion and positive identity formation. This will be done by outlining the various dimensions of the N-Moment within classed, gendered, and migrant contexts, as they apply to Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom, Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There is Confusion, Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye, James Baldwin’s Another Country, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Americanah, and Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory. / African American Studies