Aida Levy-Hussen is an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan and the author of How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation (NYU, 2016). She is currently at work on a second book project, concerning the role and status of “bad” objects in African American literature—texts and tropes that bristle at prevailing ideas about Black literature’s purview, coherence, warrant, or will.