While every writer grapples with form, for African American novelists, considerations of form are complicated by considerations of race. Whether a writer elects to create a text specifically addressing race or not, its specter is often present, if not in the content of the novel then in its evaluation. Frequently external focus on racial dimensions within works obscures the fact that black novelists work within and create new traditions. Part II of this study focuses on the predominant genres of African American novels: the neo-slave narrative, detective, speculative, black pulp, graphic, and two categories that are groups rather than actual genres, novels adapted for the screen and novels of the diaspora.

The neo-slave narrative is unique to African American fiction in its effort to portray enslavement as more than an African American history. Novels in this genre show how inextricable slavery was and is from conceptions of American national identity. They give voice to those silenced by history's ostensibly objective record. Using conventions and content of the nineteenth-century narrative of the enslaved, they counter oversimplification, erasure, and misinformation. As much about the present as the past, they are cautionary tales urging an examination of history to achieve better understanding of continued systems of oppressions.

Seeing and detecting are themes used to construct new articulations of race, racism, and the dynamics of social domination in black detective fiction. This genre probes structures of authority, exposes unjust class systems, dissects all manner of prejudice from race, to class, to sexuality. In some of these works, the detective is a transgressive figure evoking the trickster tradition in African American culture; in others, he or she is an escapist figure enjoying a heightened degree of mobility. The detective character challenges readers to locate the sources of their own attitudes toward both social and literary traditions.