This chapter brings an emotion-race-space framework to the study of contemporary African American literature. It argues that the framework can, on the one hand, be applied to interrogate the structural production of emotional pain at the confluence of racial and spatial discrimination. On the other hand, it can be used to articulate subversive intersections between Black emotions and Black geographies. The chapter situates the proposed framework within the different research fields that it draws on. First, it considers scholarship at the intersection of narrative theory and race and ethnic studies, paying particular attention to cognitive narratological research that explores emotion and empathy in relation to politically oriented questions. Second, it turns to a discussion of African American literature in the twenty-first century, the sociopolitical and affective contexts that it reflects and responds to, its readerships, and the uses of empathy for Black and non-Black readers in the present era. Third, it surveys geographic scholarship, the relationships between race and space, and the Black geographic imagination. In doing so, it explicates how crossing disciplinary boundaries opens up new ways of understanding African American literature, while simultaneously foregrounding the potential that the Black literary imagination offers for various areas of inquiry.