Glenda R. Carpio is Professor of African and African American Studies and English at Harvard University. She is the author of Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (2008) and a coeditor of African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (2011). She is currently editing the Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright and working on a study of contemporary US-based immigrant fiction provisionally entitled “Migrant Aesthetics.”