Contemporary Black Campus Novels: Between Nostalgia and Counter-Nostalgia

In its vast range of variants, the genre of the campus novel continues to thrive and be reinvented by contemporary writers. This essay focuses on a specific subgenre, the contemporary Black campus novel, and I intend to analyze compelling examples of the dualism of nostalgia and counter-nostalgia. While some of these campus-set stories are centered on, for example, murder mysteries and social satire, generally the Black campus novel has a more specific focus: the fictional and satirical representation of Black students and academics at university, constituting a window into the social-political events.

With the support of literary and sociological works such as Derek C. Maus’s Post-Soul Satire and Elaine Showalter’s Faculty Towers, I scrutinize Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996), Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), and Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (2020). While Beatty’s novel creates a post-soul satire (Maus) of the contradictory aspects of US colleges and their effect on African American students, Smith’s On Beauty and Taylor’s Real Life are more centered on nostalgic elements of the coming-of-age process of students coming to terms with their sexuality, family, and their professional future. My article intends to navigate what Janice Rossen calls “a complicated web [that] can be discerned in the texture of university fiction.”