►PAOLA BOI is Professor of American Literature at the University of Cagliari, Italy. She has been Associate Research Fellow at Harvard and Visiting Scholar at Columbia University working on the field of African, Jewish and Anglo American modernist theory and practice. She has published several essays on the subject. She is the author of Talking Books: Zora Neale Hurston and the Power/Knowledge Philosophy in the American Modernist Novel (1999), The Charm of the Nameless. Charles Brockden Brown and the Problem of Representation ( 2000). She has recently edited, together with Radhouan Ben Anara, Letterature della Diaspora e Migranti (2002) and with Sabine Broeck Crossroutes: the Meanings of "Race" for the 21^st Century (2003).

►FRANCOISE CLARY is a Professor of American literature and civilization at Rouen University, France. A contributor to American Literary Scholarship, a publication of Duke University, she is the author of L'espoir de vivre, a critical study of the African American novel from Chester Himes to Hal Bennett, of Jean Toomer, a close study of Cane, of various articles on African American novelists and poets, racial Christianity in America, African American islam and Affirmative Action. She has edited Black American Stories, and coedited Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as a new translation of A Case of Rape by Chester Himes.

►GENEVIEVE FABRE is Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris 7-Denis Diderot where she has directed a research group on the diaspora. She is editor and co-editor of several books among which Configurations of Ethnicity, Feasts and Celebrations among Ethnic Communities (1993), Parcours identitaires (1994), History and Memory in African-American Culture (1994, with Robert O'Meally), Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation (2001), Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance (2001), Temples for Tomorrow (2002), and one of two volumes on African Diasporas of the Old and the New World (forthcoming 2003).

►UGO RUBEO is an Associate Professor of American literature at the University of Rome "La Sapienza". He is the author of Visible Men. XXth Century African-American Poetry (1990), and has lectured and published widely on authors such as L. Hughes, S. Brown, G. Brooks, A. Baraka, E. Knight, and M. Harper. His most recent publications include Fearful Symmetries. Textual Strategies in E. A. Poe's The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (2000), and the first Italian translation of Henry James 's The American Scene (2001).