From Alice Walker’s Meridian to Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Black writers reshape the campus novel into something new: a subgenre exploring spaces of racial conflicts and solidarity, in-betweenness, and resistance at the heart of academic life. In Reinventing the Ivory Tower, Francesco Bacci traces six decades of Black campus fiction – from the 1960s to the 2010s – showing how this subgenre diverges from the wider genre and rewrites its conventions, linking questions of race to gender, class, and sexuality. This book invites you to see how Black authors transform the literary representation of higher education, depict student activism, and redefine what belonging in academia really means.