About the Author John Cullen Gruesser is the author of Race, Gender, and Empire in American Detective Fiction; The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home: African American Literature and the Era of Overseas Expansion; Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic; and Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa. Hanna Wallinger is associate professor of American studies at Salzburg University in Austria and the author of Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography.