Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel.

The Great Migration is a defining matrix for the African American community in the twentieth century. The exodus from the South to the urban centers of modern America changed a rural folk to an urban populace; simultaneously, it transformed American cities. For nearly one hundred years now, black writers have borne witness to this social and spiritual upheaval and have produced a primary interior record of the evolution of African American urban life. Charles Scruggs's Sweet Home maps the literary and cultural history of that evolution, deftly using as his compass the visionary city that figures the "Beloved Community."

The effect is of a familiar terrain seen anew. Interweaving various strands of black American discourse on the city, together with filaments from such white American social thinkers as Josiah Royce, Robert Park, and Louis Wirth, Scruggs traces as the core of his …