Includes bibliographical references (p. 243-276) and index.

The postmodern moment in Black literary and cultural studies -- Books of life: postmodern uses of print literacy -- Urban writing as voyeurism: literature in the age of spectacle -- Reading as listening: the Southern folk aesthetic -- Reading as mediation: urbanity in the age of information.

Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy. Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor.