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Draws on twenty years of firsthand teaching experience, student stories, and campus data to show how culturally grounded reading and discussion can support intellectual growth and improve college success for African American men.
The Convergence tells the inside story of a first-semester literature course for Black men at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, taught every fall since 2004. Drawing on twenty years of classroom practice, student voices, and campus data linking the course to higher persistence and graduation rates, the book shows how early, culturally grounded engagement with poetry, speeches, rap, fiction, and visual culture fosters deep reading and intellectual confidence. Across four chapters—on slavery and creativity, "verbal dazzle," fiction reading, and learning to love what we criticize—the book bridges humanities scholarship with insights from reading science and aesthetics (saliency, the aesthetic mindset) to explain how and why this model works. Written for scholars, teachers, advisors, and higher-ed leaders, it offers an adaptable playbook, readings, practices, and program design to support Black men from day one and revitalize student-centered pedagogy in African American literary studies.
"The Convergence is full of examples of what works—and not only when teaching Black students or African American literature, though Rambsy is right that far too little attention is given to Black college-aged men in discussions of higher education today. I kept taking notes about what I could do in my classes or what text I wanted to incorporate. But the book is not just a how-to guide. It is part educational narrative, part sociological text, part literary text—which makes it both very rich and a joy to read. All humanities instructors invested in supporting all of our students as their reading skills shift will benefit from this book." — Amy E. Earhart, author of Digital Literary Redlining: African American Anthologies, Digital Humanities, and the Canon
Howard Rambsy II is Distinguished Research Professor of Literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He is the author Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers and Writing Black Panther: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Representation Struggles.
Introduction
1. The Slavery-Creativity Paradox
2. Verbal Dazzle & Verse Decoders
3. Collegiate Black Men as Fiction Readers
4. Loving What We Criticize
Conclusion
Appendix: Checklists for Intellectual Endeavors
Notes
Works Cited
Index