"timely, inventive, and pathbreaking": Edited Collection honored at MLA Prize

On 7 December 2022, the Modern Language Association of America announced the winners of the first Modern Language Association Prize for an Edited Collection. An honorable mention went to Bertram Ashe from the University of Richmond and Ilka Saal from the University of Erfurt for their edited collection Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination (U of Washington P, 2020). The committee praised the book:

"Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination is a timely, inventive, and pathbreaking collection of ten essays that explore how late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century African American writers and artists have reimagined transatlantic slavery and its legacies for the contemporary moment. After Toni Morrison’s Beloved, these neo–slave narratives reveal a different politics and poetics in their approach to the past, a break evinced through content and form: they have become transnational and global and have developed new idioms and self-aware, often playful strategies in a variety of genres. Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal’s collection has been edited to show both range and depth, offering fresh insights and theoretically informed ways of understanding a new body of Black cultural production and situating that body with dexterity and impressive scholarly expertise in fraught questions of the moment."