John Cullen Gruesser’s scholarship has long been concerned with the relationship between African American writers and imperialism. In an earlier monograph, Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic (2005), for example, he lays out an ambitious plan for scholarship that accounts for the intersection of all three titular topics. In The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home, Gruesser’s Confluences proposal finds its fullest articulation in a study of African American writers and their relationship to U.S. imperialism.