Introduction: how black are whites in the age of Obama: problematizing normative spaces in the African American "neo-urban" novel -- Alternative "detection" of whiteness in Walter Mosley's L.A.: the politics of masquerade in Devil in a blue dress (1990) -- Transgressing the authority of whiteness in strategic spaces of blackness: resisting urban project of alterity in Walter Mosley's Little scarlet (2004) -- Deconstructing the black body as biopolitical paradigm of the city: "zones of indistinction" in John Edgar Wideman's Two cities (1998) -- Re-scripted performances of blackness as "parodies of whiteness": discursive frames of recognition in Percival Everett's I am not Sidney Poitier (2009) -- Contested terrain of blackness in "color-blind" spaces of (racialized) intersubjectivity: unmasking discursive manifestations of whiteness in Martha Southgate's The fall of Rome (2002) -- Navigations of embedded dynamics of whiteness in the city as discursive space: revisionary urban scripts of "penalized" blackness in Asha Bandele's Daughter (2003) -- The (im)possibilities of writing the Black interiority into discursiveterrain: the discourse of failure as success in unavailable/unavoidable spaces of whiteness in Michael Thomas' Man gone down (2007) -- Afterword: undoing whiteness or performing whiteness differently : African American neo-urban novel as the critique of everyday life.