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Erica Edwards

Institutional Affiliation: 
Associate Professor of English, UC Riverside
Professional Bio: 

Erica R. Edwards is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside and the author of Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership. She is currently at work on a book about African American literature and the War on Terror.

Area of Expertise: 

My expertise is in African American literature, popular culture, and politics. As a Black feminist theorist, I focus on how cultural texts--from novels to films to songs--reflect and disrupt dominant notions of politics, gender, and nationhood. My first book, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, offers a feminist critique of Black politics that argues that throughout the long twentieth century, African American expressive culture has been shaped by its simultaneous engagement and disengagement with the fiction that social and political change is impossible in the absence of gifted male charismatic leadership. My current project studies racial formation and the War on Terror, viewing literature as a gauge of changing relationships between race, violence, and inequality.

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