Confluences looks at the prospects for breaking down theoretical and disciplinary barriers that have tended to separate African American and postcolonial studies. John Cullen Gruesser emphasizes the confluences among three major theories of the past twenty-five years: postcolonialism, Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Signifyin(g), and Paul Gilroy's black Atlantic. Gruesser then devotes a chapter to each theory, examining one literary text that illustrates the value of the theoretical model, a second text that extends the model in a significant way, and a third text that complicates the theory. His examples are drawn from the writings of Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, Walter Mosley, Pauline Hopkins, Toni Morrison, Harry Dean, Harriet Jacobs, and Alice Walker.