Pt.I Genealogies : Family matters (The New Yorker)
My Yiddishe mama (The Wall Street Journal)
Native sons of liberty (The New York Times Week in Review)
In the kitchen (Colored People)
Walk the last mile (Colored People)
The last mill picnic (Colored People)
In our lifetime (The Root)
Pt.II Excavation : Introduction, Our nig; or, sketches from the life of a free black by Harriet E. Wilson
Introduction, The bondswoman's narrative : a novel by Hannah Crafts
In her own write, series introduction, The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers
Introduction, African American lives, with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
Introduction to the first edition, Africana : the encyclopedia of the African and African American experience, second edition, with Kwame Anthony Appiah
Prefatory notes on the African slave trade, In search of our roots
Pt.III Canons : The master's pieces : on canon formation and the African-American tradition, Loose canons
Introduction, "Tell me, sir,...What is 'black' literature?," Loose canons
Preface to the second edition, The Norton anthology of African American literature, with Nellie Y. McKay
Canon confidential : a Sam Slade caper (The New York Times Book Review)
Pt.IV "Race," writing, and reading : Being, the will, and the semantics of death : Wole Soyinka's Death and the king's horseman
Introduction, Writing "race" and the difference it makes (Critical Inquiry)
Preface, The image of the black in Western art, with David Bindman
The signifying monkey and the language of signifyin(g): rhetorical difference and the orders of meaning (The signifying monkey)
Reading "Race," writing, and difference (PMLA)
Jean Toomer's conflicted racial identity, with Rudolph P. Byrd (The Chronicle of Higher Eduation)
Pt.V Reading people : Both sides now : W.E.B. Du Bois (The New York Times)
The prince who refused the kingdom : John Hope Franklin (Du Bois Review)
King of cats : Albert Murray (The New Yorker)
White like me : Anatole Broyard (The New Yorker)
Bliss Broyard (In search of our roots)
Elizabeth Alexander (Faces of America)
Oprah Winfrey (In search of our roots)
Pt.VI Reading places : Africa, to me (Wonders of the African world)
Black London (The New Yorker)
Harlem on our minds (Critical Inquiry)
Introduction (Black in Latin America)
Brazil : "May Exú give me the power of speech" (Black in Latin America)
Pt.VII Culture and politics : 2 Live Crew, decoded (The New York Times)
"Authenticity," or the lesson of Little Tree (The New York Times Book Review)
The chitlin circuit (The New Yorker)
Changing places (The New York Times)
Forty acres and a gap in wealth (The New York Times)
Ending the slavery blame-game (The New York Times)
Is he a racist? : James Watson's errant, perilous theories (The Washington Post)
Pt.VIII Interviews : An interview with Josephine Baker and James Baldwin (The Southern Review)
The future of Africa : an interview with Wole Soyinka (The Root)
A conversation with Condoleezza Rice : on leadership (Du Bois Review)
A conversation with William Julius Wilson on the election of Barack Obama (Du Bois Review)
A conversation with Isabel Wilkeson : on America's great migration (Du Bois Review).
