Librarian for Media Studies, Gender Studies, & Philosophy
nicholae cline
they/them
Land Acknowledgment & Resource Guide
Indiana University and the city of Bloomington occupy lands of enduring historical and cultural significance, and that for some was, is, and will always be home, to a number of Indigenous groups, including the Myaamiaki (Miami), Lënape (Delaware), saawanwa (Shawnee), kiikaapoa (Kickapoo), and Neshnabé/Bodwéwadmik (Potawatomi) peoples. We honor and acknowledge the ancestral and contemporary caretakers of this place, as well as our nonhuman spirits, elders, and guides, offer gratitude for being held and nourished by the land, and recognize the inherent sovereignty and resilience of all Native communities who have survived and still thrive to this day on Turtle Island in spite of the systemic subjugation, dispossession, and genocide that constitute the ongoing reality of settler-colonialism.
We encourage all, settlers and guests alike, to look beyond acknowledgement and engage with local Indigenous communities while also cultivating thoughtful relations of reciprocity with the sacred land you live on, as well as the many vibrant beings with whom you share it.
Further Resources & Reading
- Land Reparations & Indigenous Solidarity Toolkit
- Resource Guide to Reparations and Land Rematriation on Turtle Island
- Native Land Interactive Map
- First Nations Educational & Cultural Center @ IU (FNECC)
- FNECC Land Acknowledgment & Resources
If you'd like to learn more about the practice and history of Indigenous land acknowledgments and the tribes, nations, and communities with ties to this land colonially known as the state of Indiana, consult our full resource guide.
About
Welcome to the Media Studies subject guide for Indiana University Bloomington
We're glad you're here. This guide contains information pertaining to the field of media studies. Here you'll find featured content, helpful resources and services for scholars, instructional support information, research & writing tips, new titles, and recommended resources. You will also find a list of campus & community resources relevant to film and media. For a description of what you'll find in each section of this guide, just hover over each item in the navigation menu on the left-hand side of this page; if you're using a mobile device, you'll also find a summary on each page.
The subject specialist and collection manager for this area is nicholae cline. If you would like to contact them, please use the profile box located on the left-hand side of this page. If you would like to request a purchase for our collections, you can use this form.
To learn more about who we are and the services we offer, including links to key general library services, take a look at the About Us page of this guide.
About Media Studies
Media Studies refers to the broad range of interdisciplinary subjects focusing on media culture and production. This may include media theory; game studies & design; communication & culture; telecommunications & communication science; media production, design, & aesthetics; mass media & popular culture; film & cinema studies, including the history & culture thereof; identity & representation; policy, copyright, and other legal frameworks; media ecology; journalism and the news, public relations and advertising, among many others. This subject area may also maintain commitments to sociocultural concerns relevant to information technology, such as the surveillance economy, social media, and other forms of technologically mediated interactions.
Media studies may and often does intersect with other fields, including philosophy, literary & social theory, art history & criticism, and cultural studies, et al.
This guide comprises resources and information relevant to students within the IU Media School, as well as those engaging with media, generally, in their research. Scholars of media often find themselves working with and across a variety frameworks, both regional and global; formats, both analog (film, videocassettes/DVDs) and digital; and styles, from radio programming to movies, from television to video games, and beyond.
To learn more about the IU Media School, please visit their website.
Featured | Black Histories & Futures Month
In recognition and celebration of Black History Month this February, we have curated a selection of books, films, podcasts, and music that celebrate the voices, writing, lives, and history of Black people in America. This collection loosely centers around Blackness in media—aiming to highlight Black music, pop culture, television, and performance. In these selections you will find Black creators discussing the impact of media misrepresentation on Black masculinity, connections between Black music and culinary traditions, rest as a form of resistance, the history of Black performance in America, Black feminist sound, and ekphrastic Black & queer futures alongside a variety of other topics. We hope that you can utilize this collection alongside additional IU Library resources to recognize and celebrate the work of Black intellectuals, writers, poets, chefs, directors, and creators this February.
Our collection is only a small sampling of texts. See below for additional reading lists:
- Black History Month Reading List (Monroe County Public Library)
- Reading Recommendations From Black Cultural Figures (T Magazine)
- Black Caucus, American Library Association Resources (BCALA)
- Black History Reading List (Innocence Project)
- Black History Month Reading List (The Century Foundation)
- Black Lives Matter Reading Lists (Powell's Books)
About the Playlist
In addition to the resources we've gathered in this feature, we've also curated a sampling of music by black artists, across time and genre. To learn more about the deep and varied contributions of black musicians to the development of this medium, take a look at some of the resources we used to make this and other related playlists in the Sounds of Black History Month feature.
Note: To enjoy the playlist in full, click on the white Spotify icon in the upper-right corner of the playlist, and press the "like" (♡) button in the application to save.
Next Steps
National recognition months are a great opportunity to celebrate and participate in events and learning that honor the history of marginalized communities. We recognize, however, that these months, and the creation of resource guides, is only one small step in celebrating and recognizing the contributions of marginalized communities across America. We also recognize that reading books, engaging with films, and listening to music by Black creators is only one aspect of supporting Black communities. To engage more fully, consider supporting local Black-owned businesses, learning about the history and experiences of Black people in Bloomington and at IU, and supporting institutions at IU the are dedicated to Black students. Please see our feature on Local Black History for resources specific to Bloomington, Indiana.
In particular, we would like to highlight the Celebrating Black Cinema series hosted by the Black Film Center & Archive, the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center, and the City of Bloomington. See the full list of events on the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center Calendar.
To explore more programming at IU, see below:
- Archives of African American Music and Culture (AAAMC at IU)
- A repository of materials covering a range of African American musical idioms and cultural expressions from the post-World War II era.
- Pride of IU Stories: Black History Month Features
While Black History Month, as a formulation, often emphasizes history and the present (and thus maintains a retrospective focus), we acknowledge that there are many Black futures that we can dream, cultivate, and grow together. While we have highlighted a number of resources that imagine a different world, in the (or "a") future we hope to shift our focus to looking forward, with new features and resources that highlight what is possible.
If you'd like to engage more deeply with Black History Month through library resources, the IU Libraries Arts & Humanities department has created a number of resources and features to provide more holistic coverage of Black history:
- The Sounds of Black History Month (Media Studies)
- Black LGBTQ+ Poetry (Gender Studies)
- Black Philosophy & Thought (Philosophy)
- In Memoriam: bell hooks (Philosophy)
- Local Black History (Race, Migration, & Indigeneity)
- Black American Poets and Poetry, 1770-Present (Literature)
- Black Freedom Movements in American History (History)
- African American Voices and History in University Collections (History)
- Contemporary Black Playwrights You Should Know (Theatre & Drama)
- Performance and Protest: Theatre, Politics, and Activism in America (Theatre & Drama)
- Black Artists & Designers (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- Pan-Africanism in Art and Literature (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- Afrocentric Architecture (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- Juneteenth and Folklore (Folklore)
- Black History Month Streaming and DVD Resources (Media Services)
- Youth Materials on Africa & African Identity (Education Library)
- Youth Materials on African American Identity (Education Library)
- Youth Materials on Afro-Latine Identity (Education Library)
How Beautiful We Were by ISBN: 9780593132425Publication Date: 2021-03-09We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue's powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made--and ignored. The country's government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price. Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community's determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman's willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people's freedom.
Freshwater by ISBN: 9780802127358Publication Date: 2018-02-13The astonishing debut novel from the acclaimed bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Oji, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, and Pet, Freshwater tells the story of Ada, an unusual child who is a source of deep concern to her southern Nigerian family. Young Ada is troubled, prone to violent fits. Born "with one foot on the other side," she begins to develop separate selves within her as she grows into adulthood. And when she travels to America for college, a traumatic event on campus crystallizes the selves into something powerful and potentially dangerous, making Ada fade into the background of her own mind as these alters--now protective, now hedonistic--move into control. Written with stylistic brilliance and based in the author's realities, Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace.
The Most Secret Memory of Men by ISBN: 9781635423273Publication Date: 2023-09-26In 2018, Diégane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer in Paris, discovers a legendary book from the 1930s, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity. No one knows what became of its author, once hailed as the "Black Rimbaud," after the book caused a scandal. Enthralled by this mystery, Diégane decides to search for T.C. Elimane, going down a path that will force him to confront the great tragedies of history, from colonialism to the Holocaust. Alongside his investigation, Diégane becomes part of a group of young African writers in Paris. Together they talk, drink, make love, philosophize about the role of exile in artistic creation. Diégane grows particularly close to two women: the seductive Siga, who holds so many secrets, and the photojournalist Aïda, impossible to pin down. The Most Secret Memory of Men is an astonishing novel about the choice between living and writing, and the desire to transcend the divide between Africa and the West. Above all, it is an ode to literature and its timelessness.
The New Naturals by ISBN: 9781616208806Publication Date: 2023-11-14An abandoned restaurant on a hill off the highway in Western Massachusetts doesn't look like much. But to Rio, a young Black woman bereft after the loss of her newborn child, this hill becomes more than a safe haven--it becomes a place to start over. She convinces her husband to help her construct a society underground, somewhere safe, somewhere everyone can feel loved, wanted, and accepted, where the children learn actual history, where everyone has an equal shot. She locates a Benefactor and soon their utopia begins to take shape.
Luster by ISBN: 9780374194321Publication Date: 2020-08-04No one wants what no one wants. And how do we even know what we want? How do we know we're ready to take it? Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties—sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage—with rules. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren't hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and invited into Eric's home—though not by Eric. She becomes a hesitant ally to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie may be the only Black woman young Akila knows. Irresistibly unruly and strikingly beautiful, razor-sharp and slyly comic, sexually charged and utterly absorbing, Raven Leilani's Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her life—her hunger, her anger—in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent, and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by ISBN: 9780593422946Publication Date: 2023-08-08In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe's theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe. As these characters' stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town's white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community--heaven and earth--that sustain us.
Open Water by ISBN: 9780802157942Publication Date: 2021-04-13A stunning first novel about two young Black artists in London falling in and out of love by a new literary virtuoso and finalist for the BBC Short Story Award, twenty-six-year-old writer and photographer Caleb Azumah Nelson. In a crowded London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists—he a photographer, she a dancer—and both are trying to make their mark in a world that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence, and over the course of a year they find their relationship tested by forces beyond their control. Narrated with deep intimacy, Open Water is at once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity that asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body; to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength; to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, and blistering emotional intelligence, Caleb Azumah Nelson gives a profoundly sensitive portrait of romantic love in all its feverish waves and comforting beauty. This is one of the most essential debut novels of recent years, heralding the arrival of a stellar and prodigious young talent.
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by ISBN: 9781628973877Publication Date: 2022-07-19"Folks. This here is the story of the Loop Garoo Kid. A cowboy so bad he made a working posse of spells phone in sick. A bullwhacker so unfeeling he left the print of winged mice on hides of crawling women. A desperado so onery he made the Pope cry and the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head to the Executioner's swine." And so begins the HooDoo Western by Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo and one of America's most innovative and celebrated writers. Reed demolishes white American history and folklore as well as Christian myth in this masterful satire of contemporary American life. In addition to the black, satanic Loop Garoo Kid, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down features Drag Gibson (a rich, slovenly cattleman), Mustache Sal (his nymphomaniac mail-order bride), Thomas Jefferson and many others in a hilarious parody of the old Western.
The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories by ISBN: 9781594487330Publication Date: 2020-11-10The award-winning author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self brings her signature voice and insight to the subjects of race, grief, apology, and American history. Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and X-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters' lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multiracial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief—all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history—about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight. In "Boys Go to Jupiter," a white college student tries to reinvent herself after a photo of her in a Confederate-flag bikini goes viral. In "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain," a photojournalist is forced to confront her own losses while attending an old friend's unexpectedly dramatic wedding. And in the eye-opening title novella, a black scholar from Washington, DC, is drawn into a complex historical mystery that spans generations and puts her job, her love life, and her oldest friendship at risk.
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ISBN: 9781573223782Publication Date: 2004-02-03The acclaimed debut short story collection that introduced the world to an arresting and unforgettable new voice in fiction, from multi-award winning author ZZ Packer. Her impressive range and talent are abundantly evident: Packer dazzles with her command of language, surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong. We meet a Brownie troop of black girls who are confronted with a troop of white girls; a young man who goes with his father to the Million Man March and must decide where his allegiance lies; an international group of drifters in Japan, who are starving, unable to find work; a girl in a Baltimore ghetto who has dreams of the larger world she has seen only on the screens in the television store nearby, where the Lithuanian shopkeeper holds out hope for attaining his own American Dream. With penetrating insight, ZZ Packer helps us see the world with a clearer vision. Fresh, versatile, and captivating, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a striking and unforgettable collection, sure to stand out among the contemporary canon of fiction.
Song of Solomon by ISBN: 0679445048Publication Date: 1995-11-14In this celebrated novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison created a new way of rendering the contradictory nuances of Black life in America. Its earthy poetic language and striking use of folklore and myth established Morrison as a major voice in contemporary fiction. Song of Solomon begins with one of the most arresting scenes in our century's literature: a dreamlike tableau depicting a man poised on a roof, about to fly into the air, while cloth rose petals swirl above the snow-covered ground and, in the astonished crowd below, one woman sings as another enters premature labor. The child born of that labor, Macon (Milkman) Dead, will eventually come to discover, through his complicated progress to maturity, the meaning of the drama that marked his birth. Toni Morrison's novel is at once a romance of self-discovery, a retelling of the Black experience in America that uncovers the inalienable poetry of that experience, and a family saga luminous in its depth, imaginative generosity, and universality. It is also a tribute to the ways in which, in the hands of a master, the ancient art of storytelling can be used to make the mysterious and invisible aspects of human life apparent, real, and firm to the touch.
Goliath by ISBN: 9781250782953Publication Date: 2022-01-25In his adult novel debut, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Award finalist and ALA Alex and New England Book Award winner Tochi Onyebuchi delivers a sweeping science fiction epic in the vein of Samuel R. Delany and Station Eleven. In the 2050s, Earth has begun to empty. Those with the means and the privilege have departed the great cities of the United States for the more comfortable confines of space colonies. Those left behind salvage what they can from the collapsing infrastructure. As they eke out an existence, their neighborhoods are being cannibalized. Brick by brick, their houses are sent to the colonies, what was once a home now a quaint reminder for the colonists of the world that they wrecked. A primal biblical epic flung into the future, Goliath weaves together disparate narratives—a space-dweller looking at New Haven, Connecticut as a chance to reconnect with his spiraling lover; a group of laborers attempting to renew the promises of Earth's crumbling cities; a journalist attempting to capture the violence of the streets; a marshal trying to solve a kidnapping—into a richly urgent mosaic about race, class, gentrification, and who is allowed to be the hero of any history.
The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer by ISBN: 9780063070875Publication Date: 2022-04-19In The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, singer-songwriter, actor, fashion icon, futurist, and worldwide superstar Janelle Monáe brings to the written page the Afrofuturistic world of one of her critically acclaimed albums, exploring how different threads of liberation—queerness, race, gender plurality, and love—become tangled with future possibilities of memory and time in such a totalitarian landscape...and what the costs might be when trying to unravel and weave them into freedoms. Whoever controls our memories controls the future. Janelle Monáe and an incredible array of talented collaborators have crafted a collection of tales comprising the bold vision and powerful themes that have made Monáe such a compelling and celebrated storyteller. Dirty Computer introduced a world in which thoughts—as a means of self-conception—could be controlled or erased by a select few. And whether you were human, AI, or other, your life and sentience were dictated by those who'd convinced themselves they had the right to decide your fate. That was until Jane 57821 decided to remember and break free. Expanding from that mythos, these stories fully explore what it's like to live in such a totalitarian society, and what it takes to get out of it. Building off the tradition of speculative fiction writers such as Octavia E. Butler, Ted Chiang, Becky Chambers, and Nnedi Okorafor—and filled with powerful themes and Monáe's emblematic artistic vision—The Memory Librarian serves to readers tales that dissect the human trials of identity expression, technology, and love, reaching through to the worlds of memory and time, and the stakes and power that pulse there.
Memorial by ISBN: 9780593087275Publication Date: 2020-10-27A funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the limits of love. Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day care teacher, and they've been together for a few years—good years—but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other. But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike's immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it. Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they've ever known. And just maybe they'll all be okay in the end.
When I'm Gone, Look for Me in the East by ISBN: 9780525565444Publication Date: 2023-01-17From the acclaimed author of We Ride Upon Sticks comes a luminous novel that moves across a windswept Mongolia, as estranged twin brothers make a journey of duty, conflict, and renewed understanding. Tasked with finding the reincarnation of a great lama—a spiritual teacher who may have been born anywhere in the vast Mongolian landscape—the young monk Chuluun sets out with his identical twin, Mun, who has rejected the monastic life they once shared. Their relationship will be tested on this journey through their homeland as each possesses the ability to hear the other's thoughts. Proving once again that she is a writer of immense range and imagination, Quan Barry carries us across a terrain as unforgiving as it is beautiful and culturally varied, from the western Altai mountains to the eerie starkness of the Gobi Desert to the ancient capital of Chinggis Khaan. As their country stretches before them, questions of faith—along with more earthly matters of love and brotherhood—haunt the twins. Are our lives our own, or do we belong to something larger? When I'm Gone, Look for Me in the East is a stunningly far-flung examination of our individual struggle to retain our convictions and discover meaning in a fast-changing world, as well as a meditation on accepting what simply is.
For more poetry, explore the following curated lists:
- Poems for Black History Month (poets.org)
- Celebrating Black History Month (Poetry Foundation)
- Celebrate Black Authors: Poetry (Powell's Books)
Alive at the End of the World by ISBN: 9781566896511Publication Date: 2022-09-13Pierced by grief and charged with history, this new poetry collection from the award-winning author of Prelude to Bruise and How We Fight for Our Lives confronts our everyday apocalypses. In haunted poems glinting with laughter, Saeed Jones explores the public and private betrayals of life as we know it. With verve, wit, and elegant craft, Jones strips away American artifice in order to reveal the intimate grief of a mourning son and the collective grief bearing down on all of us. Drawing from memoir, fiction, and persona, Jones confronts the everyday perils of white supremacy with a finely tuned poetic ear, identifying moments that seem routine even as they open chasms of hurt. Viewing himself as an unreliable narrator, Jones looks outward to understand what's within, bringing forth cultural icons like Little Richard, Paul Mooney, Aretha Franklin and Diahann Carroll to illuminate how long and how perilously we've been living on top of fault lines. As these poems seek ways to love and survive through America's existential threats, Jones ushers his readers toward the realization that the end of the world is already here--and the apocalypse is a state of being.
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce by ISBN: 9781941040539Publication Date: 2017-02-14The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly-laughing in the therapist's office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive. Morgan Parker stands at the intersections of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, ruthless, and sequined, these poems are an altar to the complexities of black American womanhood in an age of non-indictments and deja vu, and a time of wars over bodies and power. These poems celebrate and mourn. They are a chorus chanting: You're gonna give us the love we need.
M Archive: After the End of the World by ISBN: 9780822371878Publication Date: 2018-03-08Engaging with the work of M. Jacqui Alexander and Black feminist thought more generally, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive is a series of prose poems that speculatively documents the survival of Black people following a worldwide cataclysm while examining the possibilities of being that exceed the human.
Olio by ISBN: 9781940696225Publication Date: 2016-04-05Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them. So, while I lead this choir, I still find that I'm being led...I'm a missionary mending my faith in the midst of this flock... I toil in their fields of praise. When folks see these freedmen stand and sing, they hear their God speak in tongues. These nine dark mouths sing shelter; they echo a hymn's haven from slavery's weather. Detroit native Tyehimba Jess' first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.
Worldly Things by ISBN: 9781571315168Publication Date: 2021-06-08Sometimes," Michael Kleber-Diggs writes in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, "everything reduces to circles and lines." In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love—teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics—couple with moments of wrenching grief—a father's life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother's waist; Freddie Gray's death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor. But Worldly Things refuses to "offer allegiance" to this centuries-old status quo. With uncompromising candor, Kleber-Diggs documents the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better. "Let's create folklore side-by-side," he urges, asking us to aspire to a form of nurturing defined by tenderness, to a kind of community devoted to mutual prosperity. "All of us want," after all, "our share of light, and just enough rainfall." Sonorous and measured, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.
I Need Music by ISBN: 0900575115Publication Date: 2021-10-01Poetry. In his fourth book, AnaÏs Duplan reinvents ekphrasis as an act of devotion to art as both the sense-archive and future tense of Black embodiment. In this vibrant think space (where thinking is singing), Duplan hosts a vivid community of Black musicians, performers, painters, photographers, poets, critics, filmmakers and video artists, even a chorus of lovelorn chatroom denizens. I Need Music hosts the lyric re-arrivals of unquiet pasts, enacts a haptic intimacy with the present, and vibrates with the immanence of Black, queer futures.
The Essential June Jordan by ISBN: 9781556596209Publication Date: 2021-05-04The Essential June Jordan honors the enduring legacy of a poet fiercely dedicated to building a better world. In this definitive volume, introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown, June Jordan's generous body of poetry is distilled and curated to represent the very best of her works. Written over the span of several decades—from Some Changes in 1971 to Last Poems in 2001—Jordan's poems are at once of their era and tragically current, with subject matter including racist police brutality, violence against women, and the opportunity for global solidarity amongst people who are marginalized or outside of the norm. In these poems of great immediacy and radical kindness, humor and embodied candor, readers will (re)discover a voice that has inspired generations of contemporary poets to write their truths. June Jordan is a powerful voice of the time-honored movement for justice, a poet for the ages. Introduced by Jericho Brown, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer prize in poetry.
Black Girl, Call Home by ISBN: 9780593197141Publication Date: 2021-03-09A literary coming-of-age poetry collection, an ode to the places we call home, and a piercingly intimate deconstruction of daughterhood, Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing. From spoken word poet Jasmine Mans comes an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity. With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, Mans writes to call herself, and us, home.
Just Us: An American Conversation by ISBN: 9781644450215Publication Date: 2020-09-08Claudia Rankine's Citizen changed the conversation—Just Us urges all of us into it. As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine's questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture's liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect. This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend's explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine's own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word. Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.
Sho by ISBN: 9781950268153Publication Date: 2021-04-06Eschewing series and performative typography, Douglas Kearney's Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, these poems are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular traditions, while examining histories, pop culture, myth, and folklore. Both dazzling and devastating, Sho is a genius work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony. In his "stove-like imagination," Kearney has concocted poems that destabilize the spectacle, leaving looky-loos with an important uncertainty about the intersection between violence and entertainment.
Voyage of the Sable Venus by ISBN: 9781101875438Publication Date: 2015-09-29Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present-titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, "Voyage" is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin-five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story? Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire—how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race—a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.
MissSettl by ISBN: 1643621408Publication Date: 2022-06-14Sonically vibrant, polyphonic, typographic experimentation gleefully strategizes resistance and life under white supremacist capitalism in Kamden Hilliard's debut collection of poems, MissSettl. MissSettl, is a funny, joyful, and spiteful debut collection of seriously playful poems; they carry on with impish provocation, engagement, and mourning for what has been done to our living practices. These poems lampoon rigged games of common sense, syntax, and citizenship to expose the mechanics of what Americans have become and what they might be freed into after the end of capitalism and gender, and race, and money, and property. MissSettl confronts what's in the way of love; it disrupts what limits our potential.
Yabo by ISBN: 9780989940504Publication Date: 2014-04-11"See YABO... like a Mingus composition: Pentecostal, blues-inflected, full of wit and that deep literacy of the black diaspora. The present, the past, the uncertain future collapse upon themselves in this narrative of place/s. Our dead move with us: behind us, above us, confronting us in Manhattan; Asheville (N.C.); Buffalo, NY; Jamaica; the hold of a funky slave ship; crossing and bending lines between genders, sexualities, longing and geographies. Time is a river endlessly coursing, shallow in many places, deep for long miles, and, finally, deadly as the hurricane that engulfs and destroys the slave vessel, 'Henrietta Marie.' YABO calls our ghosts back and holds us accountable for memory" (Cheryl Clarke, author, Living as a Lesbian and The Days of Good Looks). "Alexis De Veaux laces together the past and the present with poetic elegance in an intricate and delicate pattern of call and response: Echoing the work of Jean Toomer and Toni Morrison, YABO speaks in a powerful and insistent cadence about things we may have forgotten: death, desire, magic and the drum beat of resilience" (Jewelle Gomez, author, The Gilda Stories).
Poems of Cabin and Field by Publication Date: 1899Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872, to two formerly enslaved people from Kentucky. He became one of the first influential Black poets in American literature and was internationally acclaimed for his dialect verse in collections such as Majors and Minors (Hadley & Hadley, 1895) and Lyrics of Lowly Life (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1896). The dialect poems constitute only a small portion of Dunbar’s canon, which is replete with novels, short stories, essays, and many poems. In its entirety, Dunbar’s literary body is regarded as an impressive representation of Black life in the turn-of-the-century United States.
Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop by ISBN: 9780593132715Publication Date: 2022-04-19American pop music is arguably this country's greatest cultural contribution to the world, and its singular voice and virtuosity were created by a shining thread of Black women geniuses stretching back to the country's founding. This is their surprising, heartbreaking, soaring story—from "one of the generation's greatest, most insightful, most nuanced writers in pop culture" (Shea Serrano). A weave of biography, criticism, and memoir, Shine Bright is Danyel Smith's intimate history of Black women's music as the foundational story of American pop. Smith has been writing this history for more than five years. But as a music fan, and then as an essayist, editor (Vibe, Billboard), and podcast host (Black Girl Songbook), she has been living this history since she was a latchkey kid listening to "Midnight Train to Georgia" on the family stereo. Smith's detailed narrative begins with Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman who sang her poems, and continues through the stories of Mahalia Jackson, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, and Mariah Carey, as well as the under-considered careers of Marilyn McCoo, Deniece Williams, and Jody Watley. Shine Bright is an overdue paean to musical masters whose true stories and genius have been hidden in plain sight—and the book Danyel Smith was born to write.
Borealis by ISBN: 9781566896191Publication Date: 2021-11-02Art about glaciers, queer relationships, political anxiety, and the meaning of Blackness in open space—Borealis is a shapeshifting logbook of Aisha Sabatini Sloan's experiences moving through the Alaskan outdoors. In Borealis, Aisha Sabatini Sloan observes shorelines, mountains, bald eagles, and Black fellow travelers while feeling menaced by the specter of nature writing. She considers the meaning of open spaces versus enclosed ones and maps out the web of queer relationships that connect her to this quaint Alaskan town. Triangulating the landscapes she moves through with glacial backdrops in the work of Black conceptual artists and writers, Sabatini Sloan complicates tropes of Alaska to suggest that the excitement, exploration, and possibility of myth-making can also be twinned by isolation, anxiety, and boredom.
The Book of Delights by ISBN: 9781616207922Publication Date: 2019-02-12In The Book of Delights, one of today's most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay's funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend's unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything else, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world-his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis. The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.
Ordinary Notes by ISBN: 9780374604486Publication Date: 2023-04-25A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages—sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature—always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life. At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author's mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. "I learned to see in my mother's house," writes Sharpe. "I learned how not to see in my mother's house...My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words." Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to the page.
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by ISBN: 9781984801210Publication Date: 2021-03-30A sweeping, genre-bending "masterpiece" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) exploring Black art, music, and culture in all their glory and complexity—from Soul Train, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Whitney Houston, and Beyoncé. "I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too." Inspired by these few words, spoken by Josephine Baker at the 1963 March on Washington, MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellow and bestselling author Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines—whether it's the twenty-seven seconds in "Gimme Shelter" in which Merry Clayton wails the words "rape, murder," a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt—has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib's own personal history of love, grief, and performance. Touching on Michael Jackson, Patti LaBelle, Billy Dee Williams, the Wu-Tan Clan, Dave Chappelle, and more, Abdurraqib writes prose brimming with jubilation and pain. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space—from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio.
808s and Otherworlds: Memories, Remixes, & Mythologies by ISBN: 9781953387066Publication Date: 2021-09-14808s & Otherworlds announces a bold and incendiary new voice in Sean Avery Medlin. Against the backdrop of the Phoenix suburbs where they were raised, Medlin interrogates the effects of media misrepresentation on the performance of Black masculinity. Through storytelling rhymes and vulnerable narratives in conversation with both contemporary Hip-Hop culture and systemic anti-Blackness, 808s & Otherworlds pieces together a speculative reality where Black folk are simultaneously superhuman and dehumanized. From the gut-wrenchingly real stories of young lovers unmythed by segregation or former classmates appropriating Black culture, to the fantastic settings of Hip-Hop songs and comic characters, Medlin weaves a tapestry of worlds and otherworlds while composing a love letter to family and self, told to an undeniably energetic beat.
Thick: And other Essays by ISBN: 9781620974360Publication Date: 2019-01-08In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom—award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed—is unapologetically "thick": deemed "thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less," McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the personal with the political, from bringing her full self and voice to the fore of her analytical work. Thick "transforms narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women" (Los Angeles Review of Books) with "writing that is as deft as it is amusing" (Darnell L. Moore). This "transgressive, provocative, and brilliant" (Roxane Gay) collection cements McMillan Cottom's position as a public thinker capable of shedding new light on what the "personal essay" can do. She turns her chosen form into a showcase for her critical dexterity, investigating everything from Saturday Night Live, LinkedIn, and BBQ Becky to sexual violence, infant mortality, and Trump rallies.Collected in an indispensable volume that speaks to the everywoman and the erudite alike, these unforgettable essays never fail to be "painfully honest and gloriously affirming" and hold "a mirror to your soul and to that of America" (Dorothy Roberts).
Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now by ISBN: 9781937512835Publication Date: 2019-11-12With luminous insight and fervent prose, Andre Perry's debut collection of personal essays, Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now, travels from Washington, DC, to Iowa City to Hong Kong in search of both individual and national identity. While displaying tenderness and a disarming honesty, Perry catalogs racial degradations committed on the campuses of elite universities and liberal bastions like San Francisco while coming of age in America. The essays in Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now take the form of personal reflection, multiple choice questions, screenplays, and imagined talk-show conversations, while traversing the daily minefields of childhood schoolyards and Midwestern dive-bars. The impression of Perry's personal journey is arresting and beguiling, while announcing the author's arrival as a formidable American voice.
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays by ISBN: 9781937512651Publication Date: 2017-11-07In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly. In the wake of the nightclub attacks in Paris, he recalls how he sought refuge as a teenager in music, at shows, and wonders whether the next generation of young Muslims will not be afforded that opportunity now. While discussing the everyday threat to the lives of Black Americans, Abdurraqib recounts the first time he was ordered to the ground by police officers: for attempting to enter his own car. In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—along with original, previously unreleased essays—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world, so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life: Essays by ISBN: 9781101912195Publication Date: 2017-05-30This essay collection from the "bitches gotta eat" blogger, writer on Hulu's Shrill, and "one of our country's most fierce and foulmouthed authors" (Amber Tamblyn, Vulture) is sure to make you alternately cackle with glee and cry real tears. Whether Samantha Irby is talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making "adult" budgets; explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette (she's "35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something"); detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father's ashes; sharing awkward sexual encounters; or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms (hang in there for the Costco loot!); she's as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.
all about love: New Visions by ISBN: 9780060959470Publication Date: 2018-01-30All About Love is the acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' "Love Song to the Nation" trilogy. All About Love reveals what causes a polarized society, and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces. "The word 'love' is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb," writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness—not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society's failure to provide a model for learning to love. As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question "What is love" her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation.
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by ISBN: 9780062362599Publication Date: 2017-06-13From Roxane Gay, the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist, a memoir in weight about eating healthier, finding a tolerable form of exercise, and exploring what it means to learn, in the middle of your life, how to take care of yourself and how to feed your hunger. New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as "wildly undisciplined," Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she casts an insightful and critical eye on her childhood, teens, and twenties—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life. With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and tells a story that hasn't yet been told but needs to be.
The Yellow House by ISBN: 9780802125088Publication Date: 2019-08-13A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East. In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant—the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser-known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.
How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by ISBN: 9781982132330Publication Date: 2023-10-03Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair's father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman's highest virtue was her obedience. In an effort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. In place of pants, the women in her family were made to wear long skirts and dresses to cover their arms and legs, head wraps to cover their hair, no make-up, no jewelry, no opinions, no friends. Safiya's mother, while loyal to her father, nonetheless gave Safiya and her siblings the gift of books, including poetry, to which Safiya latched on for dear life. And as Safiya watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under housework and the rigidity of her father's beliefs, she increasingly used her education as a sharp tool with which to find her voice and break free. Inevitably, with her rebellion comes clashes with her father, whose rage and paranoia explodes in increasing violence. As Safiya's voice grows, lyrically and poetically, a collision course is set between them.
The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song by ISBN: 9781984880338Publication Date: 2021-02-16From bestselling author of Stony the Road and one of our most important voices on the African American experience comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity—an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today's political landscape. At road's end, and after Gates's distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community's most critical personal and social issues. In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. As Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. As a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society's darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.
Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz and Black Internationalism by ISBN: 9781479871032Publication Date: 2021-04-27Explores how jazz helped propel the rise of African American Islam during the era of global Black liberation. Amid the social change and liberation of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp recorded a tribute to Malcolm X's emancipatory political consciousness. Shepp saw similarities between his revolutionary hero and John Coltrane, one of the most influential jazz musicians of the era. Later, the esteemed trumpeter Miles Davis echoed Shepp's sentiment, recognizing that Coltrane's music represented the very passion, rage, rebellion, and love that Malcolm X preached. Soundtrack to a Movement examines the link between the revolutionary Black Islam of the post-WWII generation and jazz music. It argues that from the late 1940s and '50s though the 1970s, Islam rose in prominence among African Americans in part because of the embrace of the religion among jazz musicians. The book demonstrates that the values that Islam and jazz shared—Black affirmation, freedom, and self-determination—were key to the growth of African American Islamic communities, and that it was jazz musicians who led the way in shaping encounters with Islam as they developed a Black Atlantic "cool" that shaped both Black religion and jazz styles. Soundtrack to a Movement demonstrates how by expressing their values through the rejection of systemic racism, the construction of Black notions of masculinity and femininity, and the development of an African American religious internationalism, both jazz musicians and Black Muslims engaged with a global Black consciousness and interconnected resistance movements in the African diaspora and Africa.
South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by ISBN: 9780062977403Publication Date: 2022-01-25An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South—and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America. We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole. This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life. Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America offers an assertion that if we want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Four Hundred Souls by ISBN: 9780593134054Publication Date: 2021-02-02A chorus of extraordinary voices tells the epic story of the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present—edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire. The story begins in 1619—a year before the Mayflower—when the White Lion disgorges "some 20-and-odd Negroes" onto the shores of Virginia, inaugurating the African presence in what would become the United States. It takes us to the present, when African Americans, descendants of those on the White Lion and a thousand other routes to this country, continue a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles, stunning achievements, and millions of ordinary lives passing through extraordinary history. Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume "community" history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness. This is a history that illuminates our past and gives us new ways of thinking about our future, written by the most vital and essential voices of our present.
Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way by ISBN: 9781492688815Publication Date: 2021-05-21The triumphant story of how an all-Black Broadway cast and crew changed musical theatre—and the world—forever. If Hamilton, Rent, or West Side Story captured your heart, you'll love this in-depth look into the rise of the 1921 Broadway hit, Shuffle Along, the first all-Black musical to succeed on Broadway. No one was sure if America was ready for a show featuring nuanced, thoughtful portrayals of Black characters—and the potential fallout was terrifying. But from the first jazzy, syncopated beats of composers Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, New York audiences fell head over heels. Footnotes is the story of how Sissle and Blake, along with comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, overcame poverty, racism, and violence to harness the energy of the Harlem Renaissance and produce a runaway Broadway hit that launched the careers of many of the twentieth century's most beloved Black performers. Born in the shadow of slavery and establishing their careers at a time of increasing demands for racial justice and representation for people of color, they broke down innumerable barriers between Black and white communities at a crucial point in our history. Author and pop culture expert Caseen Gaines leads readers through the glitz and glamour of New York City during the Roaring Twenties to reveal the revolutionary impact one show had on generations of Americans, and how its legacy continues to resonate today.
Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World by ISBN: 9780525656876Publication Date: 2021-10-19This unprecedented history of Black cinema examines 100 years of Black movies—from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther—using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America. Beginning in 1915 with D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation—which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Hollywood's first blockbuster—Wil Haygood gives us an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes. He makes clear the effects of changing social realities and events on the business of making movies and on what was represented on the screen: from Jim Crow and segregation to white flight and interracial relationships, from the assassination of Malcolm X, to the O. J. Simpson trial, to the Black Lives Matter movement. He considers the films themselves—including Imitation of Life, Gone with the Wind, Porgy and Bess, the Blaxploitation films of the seventies, Do The Right Thing, 12 Years a Slave, and Black Panther. And he brings to new light the careers and significance of a wide range of historic and contemporary figures: Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Berry Gordy, Alex Haley, Spike Lee, Billy Dee Willliams, Richard Pryor, Halle Berry, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele, among many others. An important, timely book, Colorization gives us both an unprecedented history of Black cinema and a groundbreaking perspective on racism in modern America.
It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him by ISBN: 9781647001049Publication Date: 2022-05-10From a talented young journalist on the rise, a deeply reported, timely new biography of the Notorious B.I.G., publishing for what would have been his 50th birthday. The Notorious B.I.G. was one of the most charismatic and talented artists of the 1990s. Born Christopher Wallace and raised in Clinton Hill/Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, Biggie lived an almost archetypal rap life: young trouble, drug dealing, guns, prison, a giant hit record, the wealth and international superstardom that came with it, then an early violent death. Biggie released his first record, Ready to Die, in 1994, when he was only 22. Less than three years later, he was killed just days before the planned release of his second record Life After Death. Journalist Justin Tinsley's It Was All a Dream is a fresh, insightful telling of the life beyond the legend. It is based on extensive interviews with those who knew and loved Biggie, including neighbors, friends, DJs, party promoters, and journalists. And it places Biggie's life in context, both within the history of rap but also the wider cultural and political forces that shaped him, including Caribbean immigration, the Reagan era disinvestment in public education, street life, the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and the booming, creative, and influential 1990s music industry. This is the story of where Biggie came from, the forces that shaped him, and the legacy he has left behind.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by ISBN: 9780679763888Publication Date: 2011-10-04In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize-winnner and bestselling author of Caste chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an "unrecognized immigration" within our own land.
What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture by ISBN: 0415920728Publication Date: 1998-12-01First Published in 1999. In What the Music Said, Mark Anthony Neal provides a timely study of from be-bop to Hip Hop. This book looks at the last fifty years of black popular music and provides an intriguing portrait of the existential and social forces that drove black communities to make music in protest, reaction and to fulfill their material and spiritual needs.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by ISBN: 9780679745426Publication Date: 1993-07-27An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature— from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree—and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
See "A Century of Greatness: The Best African American Literary Anthologies" by Kenton Rambsy for more.
Black Women's Liberatory Pedagogies: Resistance, Transformation, and Healing Within and Beyond the Academy by ISBN: 9783319657899Publication Date: 11-27-2017This interdisciplinary anthology sheds light on the frameworks and lived experiences of Black women educators. Contributors for this anthology submitted works from an array of academic disciplines and learning environments, inviting readers to bear witness to black women faculty’s classroom experiences, as well as their pedagogical approaches both inside and outside of the higher education classroom that have fostered transformative teaching-learning environments. Through this multidimensional lens, the editors and contributors view instruction and learning as a political endeavor aimed at changing the way we think about teaching, learning. and praxis.
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song by ISBN: 9781598536669Publication Date: 2020-10-20Taking the measure of the tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song sets a new standard for a genuinely deep engagement with Black poetry and its essential expression of American genius.
The Norton Anthology of African American Literature by ISBN: 9780393923698Publication Date: 2014-03-28The much-anticipated Third Edition brings together the work of 140 writers from 1746 to the present writing in all genres, as well as performers of vernacular forms—from spirituals and sermons to jazz and hip hop. Fresh scholarship, new visuals and media, and new selections—with an emphasis on contemporary writers—combine to make The Norton Anthology of African American Literature an even better teaching tool for instructors and an unmatched value for students.
Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds by ISBN: 9781478021230Publication Date: 2021-01-11In Black Utopias Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as a way of exploring alternative states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture. Musical, literary, and mystic practices become utopian enclaves in which Black people engage in modes of creative worldmaking. Brown explores the lives and work of Black women mystics Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson, musicians Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, and the work of speculative fiction writers Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler as they decenter and destabilize the human, radically refusing liberal humanist ideas of subjectivity and species. Brown demonstrates that engaging in utopian practices Black subjects imagine and manifest new genres of existence and forms of collectivity. For Brown, utopia consists of those moments in the here and now when those excluded from the category human jump into other onto-epistemological realms. Black people—untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress—celebrate themselves as elements in a cosmic effluvium.
No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies by ISBN: 9780822362227Publication Date: 2016-10-28The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together nineteen essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. Building on the foundations laid by the earlier volume, this collection's contributors speak new truths about the black queer experience while exemplifying the codification of black queer studies as a rigorous and important field of study. Topics include "raw" sex, pornography, the carceral state, gentrification, gender nonconformity, social media, the relationship between black feminist studies and black trans studies, the black queer experience throughout the black diaspora, and queer music, film, dance, and theater. The contributors both disprove naysayers who believed black queer studies to be a passing trend and respond to critiques of the field's early U.S. bias. Deferring to the past while pointing to the future, No Tea, No Shade pushes black queer studies in new and exciting directions.
Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing by ISBN: 9781888553857Publication Date: 2018-08-17A collection of poems, essays, elder conversations, and visual works, Letter to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing, celebrates temporal, spatial, formal, and linguistically innovative literature. The anthology collects late-modern and contemporary work by Black women from the United States, England, Canada, and the Caribbean—work that challenges readers to participate in meaning making. Because one contextual framework for the collection is "art as a form of epistemology," the writing in the anthology is the kind of work driven by the writer's desire to radically present, uncovering what she knows and does not know, as well as critically addressing the future. Erica Hunt, in her introduction to the collection, says, "The future is a slippery project. What can it hold? We asked writers to write about it, imagining the future as the present conjugated—conjoining the past, the present with some other time...One dimension that drew our curiosity was to know how this particular group of Black women writers would respond to the question of tomorrow."
Well-Read Black Girl by ISBN: 9780525619772Publication Date: 2018-10-30An inspiring collection of essays by black women writers, curated by the founder of the popular book club Well-Read Black Girl, on the importance of recognizing ourselves in literature. Remember that moment when you first encountered a character who seemed to be written just for you? That feeling of belonging remains with readers the rest of their lives—but not everyone regularly sees themselves in the pages of a book. In this timely anthology, Glory Edim brings together original essays by some of our best black women writers to shine a light on how important it is that we all—regardless of gender, race, religion, or ability—have the opportunity to find ourselves in literature. Contributors include Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing), Lynn Nottage (Sweat), Jacqueline Woodson (Another Brooklyn), Gabourey Sidibe (This Is Just My Face), Morgan Jerkins (This Will Be My Undoing), Tayari Jones (An American Marriage), Rebecca Walker (Black, White and Jewish), and Barbara Smith (Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology). Whether it's learning about the complexities of femalehood from Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, finding a new type of love in The Color Purple, or using mythology to craft an alternative black future, the subjects of each essay remind us why we turn to books in times of both struggle and relaxation. As she has done with her book club-turned-online community Well-Read Black Girl, in this anthology, Glory Edim has created a space in which black women's writing and knowledge and life experiences are lifted up, to be shared with all readers who value the power of a story to help us understand the world and ourselves.
The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Black Futurity, Art+Design by ISBN: 9781498510530Publication Date: 2019-11-13The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Black Futurity, Art+Design is a 21st century statement on the intersection of the future of African people with art, culture, technology, and politics. This collection enters the global debate on the emerging field of Afrofuturism studies with an international array of scholars and artists contributing to the discussion of Black futurity in the 21st century. The contributors analyze and respond to the invisibility or mischaracterization of Black people in the popular imagination, in science fiction, and in philosophies of history.
Black Women Writers at Work by ISBN: 9781642598407Publication Date: 2023-01-10Through candid interviews with Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexis De Veaux, Nikki Giovanni, Kristin Hunter, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, and Sherley Anne Williams, the book highlights the practices and critical linkages between the work and lived experiences of Black women writers whose work laid the foundation for many who have come after. Responding to questions about why and for whom they write, and how they perceive their responsibility to their work, to others, and to society, the featured playwrights, poets, novelists, and essayists provide a window into the connections between their lives and their art. Finally available for a new generation, this classic work has an urgent message for readers and writers today.
Black Fire: an anthology for Afro-American writing by ISBN: 9781574780390Publication Date: 2007-04-05The defining work of the Black Arts Movement,Black Fire is at once a rich anthology and an extraordinary source document. Nearly 200 selections, including poetry, essays, short stories, and plays, from over 75 cultural critics, writers, and political leaders, capture the social and cultural turmoil of the 1960s. In his new introduction, Amiri Baraka reflects -- nearly four decades later -- on both the movement and the book.
Meals, Music, and Muses by ISBN: 9781250098092Publication Date: 2020-02-25Iconic chef and world-renowned opera singer Alexander Smalls marries two of his greatest passions—food and music—in Meals, Music, and Muses. More than just a cookbook, Smalls takes readers on a delicious journey through the South to examine the food that has shaped the region. Each chapter is named for a type of music to help readers understand the spirit that animates these recipes. Filled with classic Southern recipes and twists on old favorites, this cookbook includes starters such as Hoppin' John Cakes with Sweet Pepper Remoulade and Carolina Bourbon Barbecue Shrimp and Okra Skewers, and main dishes like Roast Quail in Bourbon Cream Sauce and Prime Rib Roast with Crawfish Onion Gravy. Complete with anecdotes of Smalls's childhood in the Low Country and examinations of Southern musical tradition, Meals, Music, and Muses is a heritage cookbook in the tradition of Edna Lewis's A Taste of Country Cooking.
Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's practical guide to liberation on the land by ISBN: 9781603587624Publication Date: 2018-10-30In 1920, 14 percent of all land-owning US farmers were black. Today less than 2 percent of farms are controlled by black people—a loss of over 14 million acres and the result of discrimination and dispossession. While farm management is among the whitest of professions, farm labor is predominantly brown and exploited, and people of color disproportionately live in "food apartheid" neighborhoods and suffer from diet-related illness. The system is built on stolen land and stolen labor and needs a redesign. Farming While Black is the first comprehensive "how to" guide for aspiring African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity as agriculturists and for all farmers to understand the distinct, technical contributions of African-heritage people to sustainable agriculture.
Sweet Home Café Cookbook: A Celebration of African American Cooking by ISBN: 9781588346407Publication Date: 2018-10-23A celebration of African American cooking with 109 recipes from the National Museum of African American History and Culture's Sweet Home Café. Since the 2016 opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, its Sweet Home Café has become a destination in its own right. Showcasing African American contributions to American cuisine, the café offers favorite dishes made with locally sourced ingredients, adding modern flavors and contemporary twists on classics. Now both readers and home cooks can partake of the café's bounty: drawing upon traditions of family and fellowship strengthened by shared meals, Sweet Home Café Cookbook celebrates African American cooking through recipes served by the café itself and dishes inspired by foods from African American culture. With 109 recipes, the sumptuous Sweet Home Café Cookbook takes readers on a deliciously unique journey. More than a collection of inviting recipes, this book illustrates the pivotal—and often overlooked—role that African Americans have played in creating and re-creating American foodways. Offering a deliciously new perspective on African American food and culinary culture, Sweet Home Café Cookbook is an absolute must-have.
Jubilee by ISBN: 9781524761738Publication Date: 2019-11-05Adapted from historical texts and rare African-American cookbooks, the 125 recipes of Jubilee paint a rich, varied picture of the true history of African-American cooking—a cuisine far beyond soul food. Throughout her career, Toni Tipton-Martin has shed new light on the history, breadth, and depth of African American cuisine. She's introduced us to black cooks, some long forgotten, who established much of what's considered to be our national cuisine. After all, if Thomas Jefferson introduced French haute cuisine to this country, who do you think actually cooked it? In Jubilee, Tipton-Martin brings these masters into our kitchens. Through recipes and stories, we cook along with these pioneering figures, from enslaved chefs to middle- and upper-class writers and entrepreneurs. With more than 100 recipes, from classics such as Sweet Potato Biscuits, Seafood Gumbo, Buttermilk Fried Chicken, and Pecan Pie with Bourbon to lesser-known but even more decadent dishes like Bourbon & Apple Hot Toddies, Spoon Bread, and Baked Ham Glazed with Champagne, Jubilee presents techniques, ingredients, and dishes that show the roots of African American cooking-deeply beautiful, culturally diverse, fit for celebration.
At the Table of Power by ISBN: 9780822989035Publication Date: 2022-10-18At the Table of Power is both a cookbook and a culinary history that intertwines social issues, personal stories, and political commentary. Renowned culinary historian Diane M. Spivey offers a unique insight into the historical experience and cultural values of African America and America in general by way of the kitchen. From the rural country kitchen and steamboat floating palaces to marketplace street vendors and restaurants in urban hubs of business and finance, Africans in America cooked their way to positions of distinct superiority, and thereby indispensability. Despite their many culinary accomplishments, most Black culinary artists have been made invisible—until now. Within these pages, Spivey tells a powerful story beckoning and daring the reader to witness this culinary, cultural, and political journey taken hand in hand with the fight of Africans in America during the foundation years, from colonial slavery through the Reconstruction era. These narratives, together with the recipes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, expose the politics of the day and offer insight on the politics of today. African American culinary artists, Spivey concludes, have more than earned a rightful place at the table of culinary contribution and power.
Son of a Southern Chef by ISBN: 9780525534174Publication Date: 2019-06-11Thousands of fans know Lazarus Lynch for his bold artistic sensibility, exciting take on soul food, and knockout fashion sense. Laz has always had Southern and Caribbean food on his mind and running through his veins; his mother is Guyanese, while his father was from Alabama and ran a popular soul food restaurant in Queens known for its Southern comfort favourites. He created 'Son of a Southern Chef' on Instagram as a love letter to the family recipes and love of cooking he inherited. In his debut cookbook, Laz offers up more than 100 recipe hits with new takes on classic dishes like Brown Butter Candy Yam Mash with Goat Cheese Brulee, Shrimp and Crazy Creamy Cheddar Grits, and Dulce de Leche Banana Pudding. Packed with splashy colour photography that pops off the page, this cookbook blends fashion, food, and storytelling to get readers into the kitchen.
Hallelujah! The Welcome Table by ISBN: 9780812974850Publication Date: 2007-10-09Throughout Maya Angelou's life, from her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas, to her world travels as a bestselling writer, good food has played a central role. Preparing and enjoying homemade meals provides a sense of purpose and calm, accomplishment and connection. Now in Hallelujah! The Welcome Table, Angelou shares memories pithy and poignant—and the recipes that helped to make them both indelible and irreplaceable. Angelou tells us about the time she was expelled from school for being afraid to speak—and her mother baked a delicious maple cake to brighten her spirits. She gives us her recipe for short ribs along with a story about a job she had as a cook at a Creole restaurant (never mind that she didn't know how to cook and had no idea what Creole food might entail). There was the time in London when she attended a wretched dinner party full of wretched people; but all wasn't lost—she did experience her initial taste of a savory onion tart. She recounts her very first night in her new home in Sonoma, California, when she invited M. F. K. Fisher over for cassoulet, and the evening Deca Mitford roasted a chicken when she was beyond tipsy—and created Chicken Drunkard Style. And then there was the hearty brunch Angelou made for a homesick Southerner, a meal that earned her both a job offer and a prophetic compliment: "If you can write half as good as you can cook, you are going to be famous." Maya Angelou is renowned in her wide and generous circle of friends as a marvelous chef. Her kitchen is a social center. The Welcome Table is a stunning collaboration between the two things Angelou loves best: writing and cooking.
Watermelon and Red Birds by ISBN: 9781982176211Publication Date: 2022-05-31The very first cookbook to celebrate Juneteenth, from food writer and cookbook author Nicole A. Taylor—who draws on her decade of experiences observing the holiday. On June 19, 1865, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and issued General Order Number 3, informing the people of Texas that all enslaved people were now free. A year later, in 1866, Black Texans congregated with music, dance, and BBQs--Juneteenth celebrations. All-day cook-outs with artful salads, bounteous dessert spreads, and raised glasses of "red drink" are essential to Juneteenth gatherings. In Watermelon and Red Birds, Nicole puts jubilation on the main stage. As a master storyteller and cook, she bridges the traditional African-American table and 21st-century flavors in stories and recipes. Nicole synthesizes all the places we've been, all the people we have come from, all the people we have become, and all the culinary ideas we have embraced. Watermelon and Red Birds contains over 75 recipes, including drinks like Afro Egg Cream and Marigold Gin Sour, dishes like Beef Ribs with Fermented Harissa Sauce, Peach Jam and Molasses Glazed Chicken Thighs, Southern-ish Potato Salad and Cantaloupe and Feta Salad, and desserts like Roasted Nectarine Sundae, and Radish and Ginger Pound Cake. Taylor also provides a resource to guide readers to BIPOC-owned hot sauces, jams, spice, and waffle mixes companies and lists fun gadgets to make your Juneteenth special. These recipes and essays will inspire parties to salute one of the most important American holidays, and moments to savor joy all year round.
Black Food by ISBN: 9781984859723Publication Date: 2021-10-19A beautiful, rich, and groundbreaking book exploring Black foodways within America and around the world, curated by food activist and author of Vegetable Kingdom Bryant Terry. In this stunning and deeply heartfelt tribute to Black culinary ingenuity, Bryant Terry captures the broad and divergent voices of the African Diaspora through the prism of food. With contributions from more than 100 Black cultural luminaires from around the globe, the book moves through chapters exploring parts of the Black experience, from Homeland to Migration, Spirituality to Black Future, offering delicious recipes, moving essays, and arresting artwork. As much a joyful celebration of Black culture as a cookbook, Black Food explores the interweaving of food, experience, and community through original poetry and essays, including "Jollofing with Toni Morrison" by Sarah Ladipo Manyika, "Queer Intelligence" by Zoe Adjonyoh, "The Spiritual Ecology of Black Food" by Leah Penniman, and "Foodsteps in Motion" by Michael W. Twitty. The recipes are similarly expansive and generous, including sentimental favorites and fresh takes such as Crispy Cassava Skillet Cakes from Yewande Komolafe, Okra & Shrimp Purloo from BJ Dennis, Jerk Chicken Ramen from Suzanne Barr, Avocado and Mango Salad with Spicy Pickled Carrot and Rof Dressing from Pierre Thiam, and Sweet Potato Pie from Jenne Claiborne. Visually stunning artwork from such notables as Black Panther Party creative director Emory Douglas and artist Sarina Mantle are woven throughout, and the book includes a signature musical playlist curated by Bryant. With arresting artwork and innovative design, Black Food is a visual and spiritual feast that will satisfy any soul.
Between Harlem and Heaven by ISBN: 9781250108715Publication Date: 2018-02-06In two of the most renowned and historic venues in Harlem, Alexander Smalls and JJ Johnson created a unique take on the Afro-Asian-American flavor profile. Their foundation was a collective three decades of traveling the African diaspora, meeting and eating with chefs of color, and researching the wide reach of a truly global cuisine; their inspiration was how African, Asian, and African-American influences criss-crossed cuisines all around the world. They present here for the first time over 100 recipes that go beyond just one place, taking you, as noted by The New Yorker, "somewhere between Harlem and heaven." This book branches far beyond "soul food" to explore the melding of Asian, African, and American flavors. The Afro Asian flavor profile is a window into the intersection of the Asian diaspora and the African diaspora. An homage to this cultural culinary path and the grievances and triumphs along the way, Between Harlem and Heaven isn't fusion, but a glimpse into a cuisine that made its way into the thick of Harlem's cultural renaissance. Complete with essays on the history of Minton's Jazz Club, the melting pot that is Harlem, and the Afro-Asian flavor profile by bestselling coauthor Veronica Chambers, who just published the wildly successful Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelsson, this cookbook brings the rich history of the Harlem food scene back to the home cook.
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by ISBN: 9780807019412Publication Date: 2018-08-28A manifesto from one of America's most influential activists which disrupts political, economic, and social norms by reimagining the Black Radical Tradition. Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. And Unapologetic provides a clear framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders.
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by ISBN: 9781849353267Publication Date: 2019-03-19How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Author and editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "pleasure activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, she challenges us to rethink the ground rules of activism. Her mindset-altering essays are interwoven with conversations and insights from other feminist thinkers, including Audre Lorde, Joan Morgan, Cara Page, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Together they cover a wide array of subjects—from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs—building new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own. Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!
The Body Is Not an Apology, by ISBN: 9781523090990Publication Date: 2021-02-09Humans are a varied and divergent bunch with all manner of beliefs, morals, and bodies. Systems of oppression thrive off our inability to make peace with difference and injure the relationship we have with our own bodies. The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world—for us all.
How We Fight White Supremacy by ISBN: 9781568588490Publication Date: 2019-03-26This celebration of Black resistance, from protests to art to sermons to joy, offers a blueprint for the fight for freedom and justice—and ideas for how each of us can contribute. Many of us are facing unprecedented attacks on our democracy, our privacy, and our hard-won civil rights. If you're Black in the US, this is not new. As Colorlines editors Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin show, Black Americans subvert and resist life-threatening forces as a matter of course. In these pages, leading organizers, artists, journalists, comedians, and filmmakers offer wisdom on how they fight White supremacy. It's a must-read for anyone new to resistance work, and for the next generation of leaders building a better future. Featuring contributions from: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tarana Burke, Harry Belafonte, Adrienne Maree brown, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Reverend Dr. Valerie, and more.
Rest Is Resistance by ISBN: 9780316365215Publication Date: 2022-10-11Disrupt and push back against capitalism and white supremacy. In this book, Tricia Hersey, aka The Nap Bishop, encourages us to connect to the liberating power of rest, daydreaming, and naps as a foundation for healing and justice. What would it be like to live in a well-rested world? Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by capitalism, we subject our bodies and minds to work at an unrealistic, damaging, and machine level pace—feeding into the same engine that enslaved millions into brutal labor for its own relentless benefit. In Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey, aka the Nap Bishop, casts an illuminating light on our troubled relationship with rest and how to imagine and dream our way to a future where rest is exalted. Our worth does not reside in how much we produce, especially not for a system that exploits and dehumanizes us. Rest, in its simplest form, becomes an act of resistance and a reclaiming of power because it asserts our most basic humanity. We are enough. The systems cannot have us. Rest Is Resistance is rooted in spiritual energy and centered in Black liberation, womanism, somatics, and Afrofuturism. With captivating storytelling and practical advice, all delivered in Hersey's lyrical voice and informed by her deep experience in theology, activism, and performance art, Rest Is Resistance is a call to action, a battle cry, a field guide, and a manifesto for all of us who are sleep deprived, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of Grind Culture.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by ISBN: 9781849352604Publication Date: 2017-04-18Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. In the framework of emergence, the whole is a mirror of the parts. Existence is fractal - the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet. Change is constant. This book is about how we can shape the changes we experience to match our intentions using strategic methods that are as adaptive, resilient decentralised, and interdependent as the patterns of flocking birds or differentiating cells. A secular spirituality based equally on science and science fiction.
This Here Flesh by ISBN: 9780593239773Publication Date: 2022-02-22In her stunning debut, the creator of Black Liturgies weaves stories from three generations of her family alongside contemplative reflections to discover the "necessary rituals" that connect us with our belonging, dignity, and liberation. "From the womb, we must repeat with regularity that to love ourselves is to survive. I believe that is what my father wanted for me and knew I would so desperately need: a tool for survival, the truth of my dignity named like a mercy new each morning." So writes Cole Arthur Riley in her unforgettable book of stories and reflections on discovering the sacred in her skin. In these deeply transporting pages, Arthur Riley reflects on the stories of her grandmother and father, and how they revealed to her an embodied, dignity-affirming spirituality, not only in what they believed but in the act of living itself. Writing memorably of her own childhood and coming to self, Arthur Riley boldly explores some of the most urgent questions of life and faith: How can spirituality not silence the body, but instead allow it to come alive? How do we honor, lament, and heal from the stories we inherit? How can we find peace in a world overtaken with dislocation, noise, and unrest? In this indelible work of contemplative storytelling, Arthur Riley invites us to descend into our own stories, examine our capacity to rest, wonder, joy, rage, and repair, and find that our humanity is not an enemy to faith but evidence of it. At once a compelling spiritual meditation, a powerful intergenerational account, and a tender coming-of-age narrative, This Here Flesh speaks potently to anyone who suspects that our stories might have something to say to us.
Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic by ISBN: 9781940596471Publication Date: 2022-11-15Bigger Than Bravery explores comfort and compromise, challenge and resilience, throughout the Great Pause that became the Great Call. Award-winning author and scholar of the Black archive Valerie Boyd curates this anthology of original essays and poems, alongside some of the most influential nonfiction published on the subject, inviting readers into a conversation of restorative joy and enduring wisdom. Bigger Than Bravery captures what Boyd calls the "first draft of history," with poems serving as deep breaths between narrative essays to form a loose chronology of this unprecedented time. Karen Good Marable cranks "Whip My Hair" from the car windows during quarantine joyrides with her daughter. Deesha Philyaw ponders loneliness as she sorts Zoom meetings into those that require a bra and those that don't. Writing in the moment though not of it, Pearl Cleage reflects on what has and hasn't changed since the AIDS epidemic. Jason Reynolds harnesses heat and flavor to carry on his father's legacy. Sorrow and outrage have their say, but the stories in these pages are bright with family, music, food, and home, teaching us how to nourish ourselves and our communities. Looking ahead as much as it looks back, Bigger Than Bravery offers a window into a hopeful, complex present, establishing an essential record of how Black people in America insist on joy as an act of resistance.
Black Joy by ISBN: 9781982176570Publication Date: 2022-02-01When Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts wrote an essay on Black joy for The Washington Post, she had no idea just how deeply it would resonate. But the outpouring of positive responses affirmed her own lived experience: that Black joy is not just a weapon of resistance, it is a tool for resilience. With this book, Tracey aims to gift her community with a collection of lyrical essays about the way joy has evolved, even in the midst of trauma, in her own life. Detailing these instances of joy in the context of Black culture allows us to recognize the power of Black joy as a resource to draw upon, and to challenge the one-note narratives of Black life as solely comprised of trauma and hardship. "Lewis-Giggetts etches a stunning personal map that follows in her ancestors' footsteps and highlights their ability to take control of situational heartbreak and tragedy and make something better out of it....A simultaneously gorgeous and heartbreaking read" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
How We Heal by ISBN: 9781797216263Publication Date: 2022-11-08Beloved wellness author and teacher Alexandra Elle shares this practical and empowering guide to self-healing. In How We Heal, bestselling author Alexandra Elle offers a life-changing invitation to heal yourself and reclaim your peace. In these pages, readers will discover essential techniques for self-healing, including journaling rituals to cultivate innate strength, accessible tools for processing difficult emotions, and restorative meditations to ease the mind. Alex Elle elegantly weaves together themes like self-healing, mindfulness, inner child work, and boundary setting and presents the reader with easy-to-follow practices that have changed her life and the lives of the thousands of people she has taught. Her 4-part framework for healing will appeal to anyone who wants a clear process, while the compelling personal stories leave the reader feeling connected and ready to begin again. Complementing the practices are powerful insights from Alex Elle's own journey of self-discovery using writing to heal, plus remarkable stories of healing from a range of luminary voices, including Nedra Tawwab, Morgan Harper Nichols, Dr. Thema Bryant, Barb Schmidt, and many more. Brimming with encouragement and delivered with Alex Elle's signature warmth and candor, How We Heal is a must-have companion for anyone that wants to unlock their inner wisdom and confidence to heal on their own.
Set Boundaries, Find Peace by ISBN: 9780593192092Publication Date: 2021-03-16The instant New York Times bestseller. End the struggle, speak up for what you need, and experience the freedom of being truly yourself. Healthy boundaries—we all know we should have them in order to achieve work/life balance, cope with toxic people, and enjoy rewarding relationships with partners, friends, and family. But what do "healthy boundaries" really mean—and how can we successfully express our needs, say "no," and be assertive without offending others? Licensed counselor, sought-after relationship expert, and one of the most influential therapists on Instagram, Nedra Glover Tawwab demystifies this complex topic for today's world. In a relatable and inclusive tone, Set Boundaries, Find Peace presents simple-yet-powerful ways to establish healthy boundaries in all aspects of life. Rooted in the latest research and best practices used in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), these techniques help us identify and express our needs clearly and without apology—and unravel a root problem behind codependency, power struggles, anxiety, depression, burnout, and more.
Pause, Rest, Be: Stillness Practices for Courage in Times of Change by ISBN: 9781611809855Publication Date: 2022-02-01Restoring your body, mind, and spirit amid change is an act of courage, empowerment, and hope. This warm, powerful guide will help you honor the changes and spaces in your life with purposeful rest and reflection. If you're trying to push your way through endings, beginnings, and places of uncertainty, only to find yourself more confused, disconnected, tired, and uncertain, this book will hold and fortify you. Yoga teacher and activist Octavia Raheem offers us the motivation and guidance we need to restore ourselves in the midst of all sorts of change. Change in our lives—whether it be welcome, joyful, challenging, or more subtle-presents us with the opportunity to pause and gather our energy to work with whatever lies ahead. Drawing wisdom from yoga philosophy and her many years of teaching experience, Raheem offers us the motivation and guidance we need to restore ourselves in the midst of all types of change. She gives us three simple restorative yoga poses (savasana, side lying pose, and child's pose), and offers short teachings, reflections, and practices to see us through times of ending, beginning, and liminal/transitional space. She shows us how slowing down, stillness, and deeper connection to our own transitions empower us to move through collective shifts with more grace—and what it means to navigate shifts and change with presence and courage.
Your Black Friend and Other Strangers by ISBN: 9781945509209Publication Date: 2018-04-15Your Black Friend and Other Strangers is a collection of culturally charged comics by cartoonist Ben Passmore. Passmore masterfully tackles comics about race, gentrification, the prison system, online dating, gross punks, bad street art, kung fu movie references, beating up God, and lots of other grown-up stuff with refreshing doses of humor and lived relatability. These comics are essential, humorous, and accessible, told through Passmore's surreal lens in the vibrant full-color hues of New Orleans.
Queenie: Godmother of Harlem by ISBN: 9781419757747Publication Date: 2023-01-17A historical graphic novel inspired by the life of Harlem's legendary mobster, Stephanie Saint-Clair Queenie follows the life of Stephanie Saint-Clair—the infamous criminal who made herself a legend in Harlem in the 1930s. Born on a plantation in the French colony of Martinique, Saint-Clair left the island in 1912 and headed for the United States, eager to make a new life for herself. In New York she found success, rising up through poverty and battling extreme racism to become the ruthless queen of Harlem's mafia and a fierce defender of the Black community. A racketeer and a bootlegger, Saint-Clair dedicated her wealth and compassion to the struggling masses of Harlem, giving loans and paying debts to those around her. But with Prohibition ending, and under threat by Italian mobsters seeking to take control of her operation, she launched a merciless war to save her territory and her skin. In an America still swollen by depression and segregation, Saint-Clair understood that her image was a tool she could use to establish her power and wield as a weapon against her opponents. The story tackles the themes of colonization, corruption, police violence, and racial identity, but above all, Queenie celebrates the genius of a woman forgotten by history.
Last on His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century by ISBN: 9781631495588Publication Date: 2023-02-21On the morning of July 4, 1910, thousands of boxing fans stormed a newly built stadium in Reno, Nevada, to witness an epic showdown. Jack Johnson, the world's first Black heavyweight champion—and most infamous athlete in the world because of his race—was paired against Jim Jeffries, a former heavyweight champion then heralded as the "great white hope." It was the height of the Jim Crow era, and spectators were eager for Jeffries to restore the racial hierarchy that Johnson had pummeled with his quick fists. Transporting readers directly into the ring, artist Youssef Daoudi and poet Adrian Matejka intersperse dramatic boxing action with vivid flashbacks to reveal how Johnson, the self-educated son of formerly enslaved parents, reached the pinnacle of sport-all while facing down a racist justice system. Through a combination of breathtaking illustrations and striking verse, Last on His Feet honors a contentious civil rights figure who has for more than a century been denied his proper due.
Bingo Love by ISBN: 9781534307506Publication Date: 2018-02-20When Hazel Johnson and Mari McCray met at church bingo in 1963, it was love at first sight. Forced apart by their families and society, Hazel and Mari both married young men and had families. Decades later, now in their mid-'60s, Hazel and Mari reunite again at a church bingo hall. Realizing their love for each other is still alive, what these grandmothers do next takes absolute strength and courage. Bingo Love is a touching story of love, family, and resiliency that spans over 60 years.
Hot Comb by ISBN: 9781770463486Publication Date: 2019-06-18Hot Comb offers a poignant glimpse into black women's lives and coming-of-age stories as seen across a crowded, ammonia-scented hair salon while ladies gossip and bond over the burn. The titular "Hot Comb" is about a young girl's first perm—a doomed ploy to look cool and stop seeming "too white" in the all-black neighborhood her family has just moved into. In "Virgin Hair," taunts of "tender-headed" sting as much as the perm itself. "My Lil Sister Lena" shows the stress of being the only black player on a white softball team. Lena's hair is the team curio, an object to be touched, a subject to be discussed and debated at the will of her teammates, leading Lena to develop an anxiety disorder of pulling her own hair out. Throughout Hot Comb, Ebony Flowers re-creates classic magazine ads idealizing women's need for hair relaxers and products. Realizations about race, class, and the imperfections of identity swirl through these stories and ads, which are by turns sweet, insightful, and heartbreaking.
Now Let Me Fly by ISBN: 9781626728523Publication Date: 2023-01-03From author Ronald Wimberly, creator of the viral comic Lighten Up, comes a soaring graphic biography that casts new light on the first African-American fighter pilot. On the eve of World War I, Eugene Bullard was a refugee of the Jim Crow South who was determined to find a place where a Black man would be treated as a fellow human being. His search took him from rural Georgia to the streets of Paris, from the vaudeville stage to the boxing ring, and finally, from the muddy trenches to the open skies. In 1914, Bullard joined the fight to defend France—and made history as the world's first African American fighter pilot. In this candid but sensitive portrait of Bullard, author Ronald Wimberly balances the personal and the historical to interrogate concepts of cynicism, idealism, fear, glory, and the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism.
Abbott by ISBN: 9781684152452Publication Date: 2018-10-30While investigating police brutality and corruption in 1970s Detroit, journalist Elena Abbott uncovers supernatural forces being controlled by a secret society of the city's elite. In the uncertain social and political climate of 1972 Detroit, hard-nosed, chain-smoking tabloid reporter Elena Abbott investigates a series of grisly crimes that the police have ignored. Crimes she knows to be the work of dark occult forces. Forces that took her husband from her. Forces she has sworn to destroy. Hugo Award-nominated novelist Saladin Ahmed and artist Sami Kivelä present one woman's search for the truth that destroyed her family amidst an exploration of the systemic societal constructs that haunt our country to this day.
I Am Alfonso Jones by ISBN: 1620142635Publication Date: 2017-10-10The Hate U Give meets The Lovely Bones in this unflinching graphic novel about the afterlife of a young man killed by an off-duty police officer, co-illustrated by New York Times bestselling artist John Jennings. Alfonso Jones can't wait to play the role of Hamlet in his school's hip-hop rendition of the classic Shakespearean play. He also wants to let his best friend, Danetta, know how he really feels about her. But as he is buying his first suit, an off-duty police officer mistakes a clothes hanger for a gun, and he shoots Alfonso. When Alfonso wakes up in the afterlife, he's on a ghost train guided by well-known victims of police shootings, who teach him what he needs to know about this subterranean spiritual world. Meanwhile, Alfonso's family and friends struggle with their grief and seek justice for Alfonso in the streets. As they confront their new realities, both Alfonso and those he loves realize the work that lies ahead in the fight for justice. In the first graphic novel for young readers to focus on police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, as in Hamlet, the dead shall speak-and the living yield even more surprises.
BTTM FDRS by ISBN: 9781683962069Publication Date: 2019-06-25Once a thriving working class neighborhood on Chicago's south side, the "Bottomyards" is now the definition of urban blight. When an aspiring fashion designer named Darla and her image-obsessed friend, Cynthia, descend upon the neighborhood in search of cheap rent, they soon discover something far more seductive and sinister lurking behind the walls of their new home. Like a cross between Jordan Peele's Get Out and John Carpenter's The Thing, Daniels and Passmore's BTTM FDRS (pronounced "bottomfeeders") offers a vision of horror that is gross and gory in all the right ways. At turns funny, scary, and thought provoking, it unflinchingly confronts the monsters--both metaphoric and real--that are displacing cultures in urban neighborhoods today.
New Kid by ISBN: 9780062691200Publication Date: 2019-02-05New Kid is a timely, honest graphic novel about starting over at a new school where diversity is low and the struggle to fit in is real, from award-winning author-illustrator Jerry Craft. Seventh grader Jordan Banks loves nothing more than drawing cartoons about his life. But instead of sending him to the art school of his dreams, his parents enroll him in a prestigious private school known for its academics, where Jordan is one of the few kids of color in his entire grade. As he makes the daily trip from his Washington Heights apartment to the upscale Riverdale Academy Day School, Jordan soon finds himself torn between two worlds—and not really fitting into either one. Can Jordan learn to navigate his new school culture while keeping his neighborhood friends and staying true to himself?
Nubia: Real One by ISBN: 9781401296407Publication Date: 2021-02-23Can you be a hero if society doesn't see you as a person? Nubia has always been a little bit different. As a baby she showcased Amazonian-like strength by pushing over a tree to rescue her neighbor's cat. But despite her having similar abilities, the world has no problem telling her that she's no Wonder Woman. And even if she were, they wouldn't want her. Every time she comes to the rescue, she's reminded of how people see her: as a threat. Her moms do their best to keep her safe, but Nubia can't deny the fire within her, even if she's a little awkward about it sometimes. Even if it means people assume the worst. When Nubia's best friend, Quisha, is threatened by a boy who thinks he owns the town, Nubia will risk it all—her safety, her home, and her crush on that cute kid in English class—to become the hero society tells her she isn't. From the witty and powerful voice behind A Blade So Black, and with endearing and expressive art by Robyn Smith, comes a vital story for today about equality, identity, and kicking it with your squad.
Let Me Hear a Rhyme by ISBN: 9780062840325Publication Date: 2019-05-21In this striking new novel by the critically acclaimed author of Allegedly and Monday's Not Coming, Tiffany D. Jackson tells the story of three Brooklyn teens who plot to turn their murdered friend into a major rap star by pretending he's still alive. Brooklyn, 1998. Biggie Smalls was right: Things done changed. But that doesn't mean that Quadir and Jarrell are cool letting their best friend Steph's music lie forgotten under his bed after he's murdered—not when his rhymes could turn any Bed Stuy corner into a party. With the help of Steph's younger sister Jasmine, they come up with a plan to promote Steph's music under a new rap name: the Architect. Soon, everyone wants a piece of him. When his demo catches the attention of a hotheaded music label rep, the trio must prove Steph's talent from beyond the grave. As the pressure of keeping their secret grows, Quadir, Jarrell, and Jasmine are forced to confront the truth about what happened to Steph. Only, each has something to hide. And with everything riding on Steph's fame, they need to decide what they stand for or lose all that they've worked so hard to hold on to—including each other.
Every Body Looking by ISBN: 9780525556206Publication Date: 2020-09-22Every Body Looking is a debut novel in verse in the style of Elizabeth Acevedo and Jason Reynolds. Candice Iloh's book tells the story of Ada-daughter of an immigrant father and an African American mother-and her struggle to find a place for herself in America and in her own family. When Ada leaves home for her freshman year at a Historically Black College, it's the first time she's ever been so far from her family—and the first time that she's been able to make her own choices and to seek her place in this new world. As she stumbles deeper into the world of dance and explores her sexuality, she also begins to wrestle with her past-her mother's struggle with addiction, her Nigerian father's attempts to make a home for her. Ultimately, Ada discovers she needs to brush off the destiny others have chosen for her and claim full ownership of her body and her future.
Love Radio by ISBN: 9781665908153Publication Date: 2022-05-31Hitch meets The Sun Is Also a Star in this "mega swoon-worthy, effortlessly cool" novel about a self-professed teen love doctor with a popular radio segment who believes he can get a girl who hates all things romance to fall in love with him in only three dates. Prince Jones is the guy with all the answers—or so it seems. After all, at seventeen, he has his own segment on Detroit's popular hip-hop show, Love Radio, where he dishes out advice to the brokenhearted. Prince has always dreamed of becoming a DJ and falling in love. But being the main caretaker for his mother, who has multiple sclerosis, and his little brother means his dreams will stay just that and the only romances in his life are the ones he hears about from his listeners. Until he meets Dani Ford. Dani isn't checking for anybody. She's focused on her plan: ace senior year, score a scholarship, and move to New York City to become a famous author. But her college essay keeps tripping her up and acknowledging what's blocking her means dealing with what happened at that party a few months ago. And that's one thing Dani can't do. When the romantic DJ meets the ambitious writer, sparks fly. Prince is smitten, but Dani's not looking to get derailed. She gives Prince just three dates to convince her that he's worth falling for. Three dates for the love expert to take his own advice, and just maybe change two lives forever.
Felix Ever After by ISBN: 9780062820259Publication Date: 2020-05-05From Stonewall and Lambda Award-winning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity and self-discovery while falling in love for the first time. Felix Love has never been in love—and, yes, he's painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it's like and why it seems so easy for everyone but him to find someone. What's worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, Felix also secretly fears that he's one marginalization too many—Black, queer, and transgender—to ever get his own happily-ever-after. When an anonymous student begins sending him transphobic messages—after publicly posting Felix's deadname alongside images of him before he transitioned—Felix comes up with a plan for revenge. What he didn't count on: his catfish scenario landing him in a quasi-love triangle...But as he navigates his complicated feelings, Felix begins a journey of questioning and self-discovery that helps redefine his most important relationship: how he feels about himself. Felix Ever After is an honest and layered story about identity, falling in love, and recognizing the love you deserve.
Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America by ISBN: 9780062698728Publication Date: 2019-01-08Edited by National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi, and featuring some of the most acclaimed bestselling Black authors writing for teens today—Black Enough is an essential collection of captivating stories about what it's like to be young and Black in America. Black is...sisters navigating their relationship at summer camp in Portland, Oregon, as written by Renée Watson. Black is...three friends walking back from the community pool talking about nothing and everything, in a story by Jason Reynolds. Black is...Nic Stone's high-class beauty dating a boy her momma would never approve of. Black is...two girls kissing in Justina Ireland's story set in Maryland. Black is urban and rural, wealthy and poor, mixed race, immigrants, and more—because there are countless ways to be Black enough.
I'm So (Not) over You by ISBN: 9780593334447Publication Date: 2022-02-22It's been months since aspiring journalist Kian Andrews has heard from his ex-boyfriend, Hudson Rivers, but an urgent text has them meeting at a cafe. Hudson has a favour to ask—he wants Kian to pretend to be his boyfriend while his parents are in town, and Kian reluctantly agrees. The dinner doesn't go exactly as planned, and suddenly Kian is Hudson's plus one to Georgia's wedding of the season. Soon their fake relationship is starting to feel like it might be more than a means to an end, and it's time for both men to fact-check their feelings.
Children of Blood and Bone by ISBN: 9781250170972Publication Date: 2018-03-06With five starred reviews, Tomi Adeyemi's West African-inspired fantasy debut, and instant #1 New York Times Bestseller, conjures a world of magic and danger, perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo and Sabaa Tahir. They killed my mother. They took our magic. They tried to bury us. Now we rise. Zélie Adebola remembers when the soil of Orïsha hummed with magic. Burners ignited flames, Tiders beckoned waves, and Zélie's Reaper mother summoned forth souls. But everything changed the night magic disappeared. Under the orders of a ruthless king, maji were killed, leaving Zélie without a mother and her people without hope. Now Zélie has one chance to bring back magic and strike against the monarchy. With the help of a rogue princess, Zélie must outwit and outrun the crown prince, who is hell-bent on eradicating magic for good. Danger lurks in Orïsha, where snow leoponaires prowl and vengeful spirits wait in the waters. Yet the greatest danger may be Zélie herself as she struggles to control her powers and her growing feelings for an enemy.
All the Days Past, All the Days to Come by ISBN: 9780399257308Publication Date: 2020-01-07The saga of the Logan family—made famous in the Newbery Medal-winning Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry—concludes in a long-awaited and deeply fulfilling story. In her tenth book, Mildred Taylor completes her sweeping saga about the Logan family of Mississippi, which is also the story of the civil rights movement in America of the 20th century. Cassie Logan, first met in Song of the Trees and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, is a young woman now, searching for her place in the world, a journey that takes her from Toledo to California, to law school in Boston, and, ultimately, in the 60s, home to Mississippi to participate in voter registration. She is witness to the now-historic events of the century—the Great Migration north, the rise of the civil rights movement, preceded and precipitated by the racist society of America, and the often violent confrontations that brought about change. Rich, compelling storytelling is Ms. Taylor's hallmark, and she fulfills expectations as she brings to a close the stirring family story that has absorbed her for over forty years. It is a story she was born to tell.
Pet by ISBN: 9780525647072Publication Date: 2019-09-10A singular book that explores themes of identity and justice. Pet is here to hunt a monster. Are you brave enough to look? There are no monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. Jam and her best friend, Redemption, have grown up with this lesson all their life. But when Jam meets Pet, a creature made of horns and colors and claws, who emerges from one of her mother's paintings and a drop of Jam's blood, she must reconsider what she's been told. Pet has come to hunt a monster, and the shadow of something grim lurks in Redemption's house. Jam must fight not only to protect her best friend, but also to uncover the truth, and the answer to the question—How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist? A riveting and timely young adult debut novel that asks difficult questions about what choices you can make when the society around you is in denial.
Pride by ISBN: 9780062564047Publication Date: 2018-09-18In a timely update of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi skillfully balances cultural identity, class, and gentrification against the heady magic of first love in her vibrant reimagining of this beloved classic. A smart, funny, gorgeous retelling starring all characters of color. Zuri Benitez has pride. Brooklyn pride, family pride, and pride in her Afro-Latino roots. But pride might not be enough to save her rapidly gentrifying neighborhood from becoming unrecognizable. When the wealthy Darcy family moves in across the street, Zuri wants nothing to do with their two teenage sons, even as her older sister, Janae, starts to fall for the charming Ainsley. She especially can't stand the judgmental and arrogant Darius. Yet as Zuri and Darius are forced to find common ground, their initial dislike shifts into an unexpected understanding. But with four wild sisters pulling her in different directions, cute boy Warren vying for her attention, and college applications hovering on the horizon, Zuri fights to find her place in Bushwick's changing landscape, or lose it all.
Calling My Name by ISBN: 9780062656865Publication Date: 2017-10-24Calling My Name is a striking, luminous, and literary exploration of family, spirituality, and self—ideal for readers of Jacqueline Woodson, Jandy Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Sandra Cisneros. This unforgettable novel tells a universal coming-of-age story about Taja Brown, a young African American girl growing up in Houston, Texas, and deftly and beautifully explores the universal struggles of growing up, battling family expectations, discovering a sense of self, and finding a unique voice and purpose. Told in fifty-three short, episodic, moving, and iridescent chapters, Calling My Name follows Taja on her journey from middle school to high school. Literary and noteworthy, this is a beauty of a novel that captures the multifaceted struggle of finding where you belong and why you matter.
When You Were Everything by ISBN: 9781524715915Publication Date: 2020-03-10For fans of Nina LaCour's We Are Okay and Adam Silvera's History Is All You Left Me, this heartfelt and ultimately uplifting novel follows one sixteen-year-old girl's friend breakup through two concurrent timelines—ultimately proving that even endings can lead to new beginnings. You can't rewrite the past, but you can always choose to start again. It's been twenty-seven days since Cleo and Layla's friendship imploded. Nearly a month since Cleo realized they'll never be besties again. Now Cleo wants to erase every memory, good or bad, that tethers her to her ex-best friend. But pretending Layla doesn't exist isn't as easy as Cleo hoped, especially after she's assigned to be Layla's tutor. Despite budding friendships with other classmates—and a raging crush on a gorgeous boy named Dom—Cleo's turbulent past with Layla comes back to haunt them both. Alternating between time lines of Then and Now, When You Were Everything blends past and present into an emotional story about the beauty of self-forgiveness, the promise of new beginnings, and the courage it takes to remain open to love.
Feature Films
The 40-Year-Old Version by
Publication Date: 2020-01-25A down-on-her-luck playwright thinks the only way she can salvage her voice as an artist is to become a rapper at 40. Available on Netflix.
Queen & Slim by Publication Date: 2019-11-27While on a forgettable first date together in Ohio, a black man and a black woman, are pulled over for a minor traffic infraction. The situation escalates, with sudden and tragic results, when the man kills the police officer in self-defense. Terrified and in fear for their lives, the man, a retail employee, and the woman, a criminal defense lawyer, are forced to go on the run. But the incident is captured on video and goes viral, and the couple unwittingly becomes a symbol of trauma.Hair Wolf by
Publication Date: 2018-01-20The staff at a black hair salon fends off strange monsters: white women intent on sucking the lifeblood from black culture.Nanny by
Publication Date: 2022-01-22An African woman hopes her new job as a nanny will help bring her young son to the United States. However, when a violent presence begins to invade both her dreams and reality, it threatens to destroy everything she's fought for. Available on Prime Video.BlacKkKlansman by
Call Number: 2018-08-10Ron Stallworth is the first African-American detective to serve in the Colorado Springs Police Department. Determined to make a name for himself, Stallworth bravely sets out on a dangerous mission: infiltrate and expose the Ku Klux Klan. The detective soon recruits a more seasoned colleague, Flip Zimmerman, into the undercover investigation of a lifetime. Together, they team up to take down the extremist hate group as the organization aims to sanitize its rhetoric to appeal to the mainstream.
Nope by Publication Date: 2022-07-22As the horses on their ranch mysteriously go missing, two siblings struggling to run their father's ranch and business outside of L.A. need to discover what's happening or forfeit their legacy. As they observe phenomena that defy explanation, they involve an esoteric filmmaker and their sometimes-business-partner, the child-star turned owner of the theme park down the road. NOPE is a 2022 American neo-Western science fiction horror film written, directed, and co-produced by Jordan Peele. It stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer with Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott, Brandon Perea, and Keith David in supporting roles.
Black Panther by Publication Date: 2018-02-16King T'Challa returns home to the isolated, technologically advanced African nation of Wakanda to serve as new leader. However, T'Challa soon finds that he is challenged for the throne from divisions within his own country. When two enemies conspire to destroy Wakanda, the hero known as Black Panther must join forces with C.I.A. agent Everett K. Ross and members of the Wakandan Special Forces, to prevent Wakanda from being drawn into a world war.
Sorry to Bother You by Publication Date: 2018-01-20In an alternate reality of present-day Oakland, Calif., telemarketer Cassius Green finds himself in a macabre universe after he discovers a magical key that leads to material glory. As Green's career begins to take off, his friends and co-workers organize a protest against corporate oppression. Cassius soon falls under the spell of Steve Lift, a cocaine-snorting CEO who offers him a salary beyond his wildest dreams.
Love & Basketball by Publication Date: 2000-04-16Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy (Omar Epps) are two childhood friends who both aspire to be professional basketball players. Quincy, whose father, Zeke (Dennis Haysbert), plays for the Los Angeles Clippers, is a natural talent and a born leader. Monica is ferociously competitive but sometimes becomes overly emotional on the court. Over the years, the two begin to fall for each other, but their separate paths to basketball stardom threaten to pull them apart.
Zola by Publication Date: 2021-06-30Zola, a Detroit waitress, is seduced into a weekend of stripping in Florida for some quick cash—but the trip becomes a sleepless 48-hour odyssey involving a nefarious friend, her pimp and her idiot boyfriend. Available on Tubi, Redbox, and Vudu.
Moonlight by Publication Date: 2016-09-02A young African-American man grapples with his identity and sexuality while experiencing the everyday struggles of childhood, adolescence, and burgeoning adulthood.Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse by
Publication Date: 2018-12-14Bitten by a radioactive spider in the subway, Brooklyn teenager Miles Morales suddenly develops mysterious powers that transform him into the one and only Spider-Man. When he meets Peter Parker, he soon realizes that there are many others who share his special, high-flying talents. Miles must now use his newfound skills to battle the evil Kingpin, a hulking madman who can open portals to other universes and pull different versions of Spider-Man into our world.
The Hate U Give by Publication Date: 2018-10-07Starr Carter is constantly switching between two worlds: the poor, mostly black, neighborhood where she lives and the rich, mostly white, prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Now, facing pressures from all sides of the community, Starr must find her voice and stand up for what's right.
Belle by Publication Date: 2014-05-02Although Dido Elizabeth Belle, an eighteenth-century English woman of mixed race, is raised in privilege by her aristocratic great-uncle and his wife, she is denied a proper social standing because of her skin color. But when Dido falls in love with a young idealist lawyer who aspires to create positive change, she finds herself caught between two worlds.
Documentary Films
Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) by Publication Date: 2021-01-28Over the course of six weeks during the summer of 1969, thousands of people attend the Harlem Cultural Festival to celebrate Black history, culture, music, and fashion.
Across, Beyond, and Over by Publication Date: 2019-01-03A hybrid documentary about two estranged trans men who used to date in middle school reconnecting over a long weekend to develop a film about their past.Free Angela and All Political Prisoners by
Publication Date: 2013-04-05A docudrama that takes a gripping look at the historical incidents that created an international movement to free activist Angela Davis, and tells the story of social justice activism that lands her on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list
A Galaxy Sits in the Cracks by Publication Date: 2020Afrofuturism has grown rapidly in popular culture, but the term has a rich history that extends beyond even the word’s coining in 1993. Its ideas have inspired philosophers and revolutionaries, mobilizing entire communities. At its core, Afrofuturism is an act on the part of Black artists, leaders, and communities to reclaim histories and create futures for themselves outside of current systems of oppression. “A Galaxy Sits in the Cracks” is a short experimental documentary engaging with the ways Black communities in Chicago, Detroit, and Durham use Afrofuturism as a tool to inspire young people, organize politically and economically, and reimagine the spaces around them. In a set of short movements ranging from interviews to verité-driven scenes, we spend time in an Afrofuturist youth center in Durham, NC, reimagine a historic university on Chicago's south side, deconstruct race as a technology at a Wakanda-inspired Afrofuturism convention, and think about Afrofuturism’s political and technological implications for the future of Detroit.Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror by
Publication Date: 2019-02-01Starting with The Birth of a Nation, this film traces the history of African Americans in horror, from roles as passive victims, to terrifying monsters, to full-fledged protagonists. Filled with clips, sometimes juxtaposed with powerful images from civil rights marches to Rodney King, to Black Lives Matter protests, the film shows how popular horror films of each era reflect changing social norms.The Watermelon Woman by
Publication Date: 1997-03-05An aspiring black lesbian filmmaker researches an obscure 1940s black actress billed as the Watermelon Woman.
I Am Not Your Negro by Publication Date: 2017-02-03An Oscar-nominated documentary narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO explores the continued peril America faces from institutionalized racism. In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, Remember This House. The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and successive assassinations of three of his close friends—Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin's death in 1987, he left behind only thirty completed pages of his manuscript. Now, in his incendiary new documentary, master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin's original words and flood of rich archival material. I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film that questions black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately, by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of these three leaders, Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the very definition of what America stands for.Strong Island by
Publication Date: 2017-01-23When filmmaker Yance Ford investigates the 1992 murder of a young black man, it becomes an achingly personal journey since the victim, 24-year-old William Ford Jr., was the filmmaker's brother. Available on Netflix.
On Black Media Philosophy by ISBN: 9780520976016Publication Date: 2022-03-01Who is the human in media philosophy? Although media philosophers have argued since the twentieth century that media are fundamental to being human, this question has not been explicitly asked and answered in the field. Armond R. Towns demonstrates that humanity in media philosophy has implicitly referred to a social Darwinian understanding of the human as a Western, white, male, capitalist figure. Building on concepts from Black studies and cultural studies, Towns develops an insightful critique of this dominant conception of the human in media philosophy and introduces a foundation for Black media philosophy. Delving into the narratives of the Underground Railroad, the politics of the Black Panther Party, and the digitization of Michael Brown's killing, On Black Media Philosophy deftly illustrates that media are not only important for Western Humanity but central to alternative Black epistemologies and other ways of being human.
Fear of Black Consciousness by ISBN: 9780374159023Publication Date: 2022-01-11Lewis R. Gordon's Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking account of Black consciousness by a leading philosopher. In this original and penetrating work, Lewis R. Gordon, one of the leading scholars of Black existentialism and anti-Blackness, takes the reader on a journey through the historical development of racialized Blackness, the problems this kind of consciousness produces, and the many creative responses from Black and non-Black communities in contemporary struggles for dignity and freedom. Skillfully navigating a difficult and traumatic terrain, Gordon cuts through the mist of white narcissism and the versions of consciousness it perpetuates. He exposes the bad faith at the heart of many discussions about race and racism not only in America but across the globe, including those who think of themselves as "color blind." As Gordon reveals, these lies offer many white people an inherited sense of being extraordinary, a license to do as they please. But for many if not most Blacks, to live an ordinary life in a white-dominated society is an extraordinary achievement. Informed by Gordon's life growing up in Jamaica and the Bronx, and taking as a touchstone the pandemic and the uprisings against police violence, Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking work that positions Black consciousness as a political commitment and creative practice, richly layered through art, love, and revolutionary action.
The Black Aesthetic: Season II by ISBN: 9780998346144Publication Date: 2018-02-23Responding to the films and interviewing the filmmakers of season two, films made by independent Black filmmakers, The Black Aesthetic: Season II contains works that contribute to a larger conversation that attempts to define and demarcate boundaries around "Black" aesthetics while also positioning the diasporic diversity of Black cultural production and aesthetics as a self-contained and self-referential global body of work. Where the first book was responding specifically to cinematic portrayals of Black womanhood/femininity and to projects by Black women as a part of an artistic canon, this book speaks more explicitly to that canon's larger composition and the array of themes, politics, senses and affective politics—both complementary and contradictory—contained within. Are there qualifiers to the degree of blackness of artistic work? Can non-blackness exist within a Black space? Does a quintessentially Black aesthetic exist within white institutions? Does blackness exist outside of whiteness' negation? Through engaging these questions and other questions posed and answered by contributors, The Black Aesthetic: Season II continues to seek out and define the potentially undefinable Black aesthetic.
Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound by ISBN: 9780674052819Publication Date: 2021-02-23An award-winning Black feminist music critic takes us on an epic journey through radical sound from Bessie Smith to Beyoncé. Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures—a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers. Zora Neale Hurston appears as a sound archivist and a performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer Black feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America's first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism. She makes lyrical forays into the blues pioneers Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, as well as fans who became critics, like the record-label entrepreneur and writer Rosetta Reitz. With an innovative perspective on the story of Black women in popular music—and who should rightly tell it—Liner Notes for the Revolution pioneers a long overdue recognition and celebration of Black women musicians as radical intellectuals.
The Complexity and Progression of Black Representation in Film and Television by ISBN: 9780739188378Publication Date: 2016-06-02The Complexity and Progression of Black Representation in Film and Television examines the intricacies of race, representation, Black masculinity, sexuality, class, and color in American cinema and television. Black images on the silver screen date back to the silent film era, yet these films and television programs presented disturbing images of African American culture, and regrettably, many early films and small screen programs portrayed Black characters in demeaning and stereotypical roles. In order to fully analyze the roles of Black actors and actresses in film and television, Moody addresses the following issues: the historical significance of the term "race films"; female Black identities and constructs; queerness and Black masculinity; Black male identities; and Black buffoonery in film and television.
Black Panther by ISBN: 9780847829415Publication Date: 2007-02-06This is an important book devoted to Emory Douglas's work, one of the most important graphic artists of the 1960s. It showcases the provocative posters of the revolutionary Black Panther Party, which was founded in the wake of the murder of Malcolm X.
African American Cinema Through Black Lives Consciousness by ISBN: 9780814345498Publication Date: 2018-10-30Employs an interdisciplinary critical approach to discuss a selected group of black-oriented films. African American Cinema through Black Lives Consciousness uses critical race theory to discuss American films that embrace contemporary issues of race, sexuality, class, and gender. Its linear history chronicles black-oriented narrative film from post-World War II through the presidential administration of Barack Obama. Editor Mark A. Reid has assembled a stellar list of contributors who approach their film analyses as an intersectional practice that combines queer theory, feminism/womanism, and class analytical strategies alongside conventional film history and theory. Taken together, the essays invigorate a ""Black Lives Consciousness,"" which speaks to the value of black bodies that might be traumatized and those bodies that are coming into being-ness through intersectional theoretical analysis and everyday activism. African American Cinema through Black Lives Consciousness embraces varied social experiences within a cinematic Black Lives Consciousness intersectionality. The interdisciplinary quality of the anthology makes it approachable to students and scholars of fields ranging from film to culture to African American studies alike.
More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction by ISBN: 0704380250Publication Date: 1999-09-01More Brilliant than the Sun is a machine for travelling at the speed of thought, a probe for drilling into new levels of possibility space. Its mission is to undermine the concepts this present has of "Health" and "Culture" and to excite mockery and hatred against these hybrid monsters of concepts.
Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film by ISBN: 9780822362050Publication Date: 2016-09-09In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. Gillespie discusses the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), and how place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Considering how each film represents a distinct conception of the relationship between race and cinema, Gillespie recasts the idea of black film and poses new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality.
Invisibility Blues: from pop to theory by ISBN: 9781786631954Publication Date: 2016-11-08First published in 1990, Michele Wallace's Invisibility Blues is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of black feminism. Wallace's considerations of the black experience in America include recollections of her early life in Harlem; a look at the continued underrepresentation of black voices in politics, media, and culture; and the legacy of such figures as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Wallace addresses the tensions between race, gender, and society, bringing them into the open with a singular mix of literary virtuosity and scholarly rigor.
The Routledge Companion to Media and Race by ISBN: 9781315778228Publication Date: 2016-11-03The Routledge Companion to Media and Race serves as a comprehensive guide for scholars, students, and media professionals who seek to understand the key debates about the impact of media messages on racial attitudes and understanding. Broad in scope and richly presented from a diversity of perspectives, the book is divided into three sections: first, it summarizes the theoretical approaches that scholars have adopted to analyze the complexities of media messages about race and ethnicity, from the notion of "representation" to more recent concepts like Critical Race Theory. Second, the book reviews studies related to a variety of media, including film, television, print media, social media, music, and video games. Finally, contributors present a broad summary of media issues related to specific races and ethnicities and describe the relationship of the study of race to the study of gender and sexuality.
Object Of Sound by
Object Of Sound brings you in tune with the music shaping our culture today. Hosted by poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib, each episode blends the eclectic curation of freeform radio with artist interviews and textural storytelling, guiding you to a new way of listening.Into It: A Vulture Podcast by
So much pop culture. So many movies, TV shows, music, and memes. In Vulture’s flagship podcast Into It, host Sam Sanders will help you obsess…better. Every week, we’ll break down the pop culture we can’t stop thinking about, with friends from Vulture and the occasional celebrity. From the tiny, dumb scene on loop in our brains to the big, deep questions we have about what it all means…we’ll get into all of it—amazing, terrible, or just insanely memorable. New episodes drop every Thursday.
The Roxane Gay Agenda by The Roxane Gay Agenda is the *bad feminist* podcast of your dreams. It’s writer Roxane Gay in conversation with guests who have something necessary to say about the issues that matter most to her–and hopefully to you as well. On the Agenda: feminism, race, writing, art, pop culture, food, and, of course, politics. If you enjoy hearing from people–women, mostly; Black women, usually–who bring unique perspectives to a world in complete and utter chaos, put this show on your own agenda.
Still Processing by Wesley Morris and J Wortham are working it out in this show about culture. That means television, film, books, music — but also the culture of work, dating, the internet and how those fit together.
Black Men Can’t Jump [In Hollywood] by Black Men Can't Jump [In Hollywood] is a comedic podcast that reviews films with leading actors of color and analyzes them in the context of race and Hollywood's diversity issues.Black Girl Songbook by
Join Danyel Smith as she celebrates and uplifts the talents of Black Women in the music industry - songwriters, producers, executives and more. This is the space where the musical creativity and genius of Black women comes first. On Black Girl Songbook, you will hear the music of Black woman and stories from Danyel citing her decades of life experience, music, love and beyond. More importantly, you will hear and feel, Black women getting the credit they deserve.
The Sum of Us by On the heels of her bestselling book, Heather McGhee embarks on a road trip across Covid-era America, unearthing stories of American solidarity and hope in a time of great division and peril for our democracy. Join Heather as she travels from rural Maine to the California coast and everywhere in between, meeting extraordinary Americans who are crossing demographic, cultural, and political lines to build a better future for all of us.
Notes from America with Kai Wright by Notes from America with Kai Wright is a show about the unfinished business of our history, and its grip on our future.
Black History Bootcamp by GirlTrek’s Black History Bootcamp Podcast is a 21-day walking meditation series to remember where we came from and to gather strength for the road ahead. We celebrate Black stories and the lessons of our ancestors to help guide us through these uncertain times. Sign up to receive updates and specially curated emails with survival tips, speeches + dedicated songs to listen to for each episode.
1619 by Four hundred years ago, in August 1619, a ship carrying more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed. “1619,” a New York Times audio series hosted by Nikole Hannah-Jones, examines the long shadow of that fateful moment.
Episodes Highlighting Black Voices
When Opera Rejected Alexander Smalls, He Opened A Restaurant by After 15 years as an opera singer and winning a Grammy and a Tony, Alexander Smalls got turned down for a lead role at the Metropolitan Opera. He’d hit the same glass ceiling that held back many Black opera singers before him. He went home, drank a bottle of wine, and came to a realization: "I couldn't own an opera house, but I could own a restaurant." In the decades since, Alexander has served upscale Southern food in New York, researched the food of the African diaspora in the Americas, Asia, and beyond, and fused cuisines in award-winning cookbooks. His biggest project to date is an African food hall in Dubai, and he plans to open similar food halls around the world. Alexander shares his story with Dan, and also his food, when he cooks up his own spin on shrimp and grits.
Dionne Brand: Nomenclature—New and Collected Poems by Today’s guest Dionne Brand, to borrow the words of John Keene, “is without question one of the major living poets in the English language.” Kamau Brathwaite called Brand “our first major exile female poet.” Adrienne Rich described her as “a cultural critic of uncompromising courage, an artist in language and ideas, and an intellectual conscience for her country.” Dionne Brand is, as well, a celebrated and beloved novelist, essayist, filmmaker, editor, activist, and thinker. But today, with the release of the landmark work Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems, which gathers eight volumes of her poetry between 1982 and 2010, and includes a new book-length poem never before published, today we center her poetry, and look at why she considers herself a poet first and foremost. What does stepping back together, and looking at her body of work across the decades, tell us about her poetry over time? How is time itself related to her deep engagement with Black life and liberation in her writing? How does Brand employ language as a means to gesture toward an otherwise, an elsewhere, in order to both write toward a future and from a future time?
Laryngology (VOICE BOXES) with Dr. Ronda Alexander by Voices! Singing! Anxiety busters! Breathing! The absolutely magnetic, charismatic Laryngologist and surgeon Dr. Ronda Alexander makes her long-awaited Ologies debut to chat about why we sound the way we do, hormones and voices, Elvis accents, opera singing, kid voices, turning back time vocally, coughing, sleep apnea, acid reflux, vocal fry, Mariah and more in this stellar two-parter.
N8ture_Al On Seeing And Being Seen with Alex Troutman by Alex Troutman, a Black wildlife biologist and nature advocate, discusses the importance of seeing people who look like you in the development and growth of careers like his in the biological sciences.
Your Success Probably Didn’t Come From Merit Alone with Tressie McMillan Cottam by McMillan Cottom is a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, a 2020 MacArthur fellow, co-host of the podcast “Hear to Slay,” and the author of the essay collection “Thick,” which was a National Book Award finalist. And she’s one of those people who can seemingly write on anything: The way for-profit colleges generate inequality, the cultural meaning of Dolly Parton, the way the U.S. medical profession treats Black women, how beauty operates in contemporary America, the role of hustle in the economy—the list just keeps going.
Featured | The Sounds of Black History Month
In recognition and celebration of Black History Month in February, we have created a series of curated playlists designed to celebrate the voices, innovations, and influence of black artists and musicians across music history.
The first in our series of playlists, titled “Masterpiece,” explores a variety of genres and musical movements traditionally recognized as being driven by black artistry and innovation, genres that provide a space for the voices of black artists to be heard and celebrated. This playlist focuses on key figures in pop, jazz, soul, funk, r&b, and hip hop, spanning from the mid-20th century to the present day.
In addition to this more general playlist, we also created three other playlists that offer deep dives into genres where black voices and influence are often obscured or overlooked: including rock music, celebrating black pioneers in punk, metal, and other rock music movements; folk and country, where black contributions to the evolution of folk and country music into popular culture is centered; and electronic, where we highlight key black contributors to the evolution of electronic music in all its many sub-genres.
Provided in tandem with these playlists are library and freely available resources to aid in the further exploration and celebration of black contributions to contemporary popular music and culture.
Resources for Further Exploration
- Archives of African American Music and Culture (AAAMC at IU) Repository of materials covering a range of African American musical idioms and cultural expressions from the post-World War II era
- Black Grooves Music review site hosted by the Archives of African American Music & Culture (AAAMC) at Indiana University
- The Black Music History Library A living collection of books, articles, documentaries, series, podcasts and more about the Black origins of traditional and popular music dating from the 18th century to present day.
- " History of Black Music in America" A series of livestreamed discussions on Black Music in the United States, from Serato
Beyond the Playlist
As with many of these national commemorations, one month is never enough time to fully honor and celebrate the history and culture of marginalized communities, let alone heal the legacies (and ongoing reality) of harm they've experienced. We recognize that there is much more to be done, that racism and anti-blackness can't be eliminated simply through the creation of resource guides, and that the work of realizing justice won't soon be over. But nevertheless, we keep trying, contributing how we can and building upon the efforts of those who came before us, and we continue to learn from and with one another.
If you'd like to engage more deeply with Black History Month, the IU Libraries Arts & Humanities department has created a number of interrelated resources and features to provide more holistic coverage of this remembering. You'll find those, below:
- Black Histories & Futures Month (Media Studies)
- Black LGBTQ+ Poetry (Gender Studies)
- Black Philosophy & Thought (Philosophy)
- In Memoriam: bell hooks (Philosophy)
- Local Black History (Race, Migration, & Indigeneity)
- Black American Poets and Poetry, 1770-Present (Literature)
- Black Freedom Movements in American History (History)
- Contemporary Black Playwrights You Should Know (Theatre & Drama)
- Performance and Protest: Theatre, Politics, and Activism in America (Theatre & Drama)
- Black Artists & Designers (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- Pan-Africanism in Art and Literature (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- Afrocentric Architecture (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- Juneteenth and Folklore (Folklore)
- Black History Month Streaming and DVD Resources (Media Services)
- Youth Materials on Africa & African Identity (Education Library)
- Youth Materials on African American Identity (Education Library)
- Youth Materials on Afro-Latine Identity (Education Library)
And for all things Black culture, you can never go wrong with the resources, services, and collections of the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center Library.
For the other three playlists in our Black History Month feature we will focus on the voices and innovations of black artists in genres where they are often overlooked, or excluded. To start, we present here a curated list of Rock musicians and bands from the genre’s inception to the present day. Here, we illustrate and outline a handful of the black artists who drove the genre forward, keeping it fresh into the new decade, from rock, to punk, to metal, and back again.
Playlist Resources & Further Reading
- "Who Belongs Here? The Complicated Position of Rock Fans of Color and The #BLM Movement" (Paste)
- "Let There Be (Black) Rock" (Abundant Living newsletter)
- "Queer, Black & Blue: Sister Rosetta Tharpe is Muva of Them All" (Afropunk)
- "‘We Don’t Need Another Black Woman in Rock ‘n’ Roll’: How Betty Davis Challenged the Music Industry" (Hazlitt)
- "From Chuck Berry to Tom Morello: A Conversation About Black Guitarists" (Los Angeleno)
- "Why Can't Black Kids Play Heavy Metal?" (The Root)
- "Heavy Metal Feminism" (Hazlitt)
- "The Unbearable Whiteness of Indie" (Pitchfork)
- "'I Definitely Rage Against Being Classified as R&B': The Strange, Beautiful Music of Moses Sumney" (The Guardian)
- "16 Black Artists You Should Listen to This Black History Month (And Every Month)" (Ones to Watch)
Continuing in our celebration of contributions and innovations by black artists to genres wherein their voices are often forgotten or overlooked, we present a curated playlist of black songs that have influenced and driven the sounds of folk and country music for over a hundred years.
Playlist Resources & Further Reading
- "The Black Vanguard in White Utopias" (The Undefeated)
- “The Roots of Cowboy Music: The Search For A Black Self In The American West” (MTV)
- “Country Music Is Nothing Without Black Artists” (Zora)
- “Rewriting Country Music’s Racist History” (Rolling Stone)
- “The Long Ride To 'Old Town Road': Black Artists And Their Contributions To Country Music” (NPR, podcast)
- "How Brittney Spencer, Joy Oladokun, and Other Black Women Musicians are Reframing Country Music" (Vanity Fair)
- Reimagining Country with Jamal Khadar (NTS) - Monthly streaming radio show exploring country music's "hidden roots and surprising global connections."
- Gandy Dancers (1994, Folkstreams) - Short documentary on the musical traditions and recollections of eight retired African-American railroad track laborers whose occupational folk songs were once heard on railroads that crisscross the South.
- "My Take: Jake Blount on Black Folk Music" (PBS)
- "11 Important Black Folk Music Artists" (liveabout)
Classical music in particular has long been dominated by the contributions of white men, despite the breadth and artistry of black composers from as early as the 19th century. In this playlist, we highlight compositions from across musical time to showcase the many ways black artists have explored and challenged the conventions of classical music.
Playlist Resources & Further Reading
- "Black Artists on How to Change Classical Music" (The New York Times)
- "Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music" (The New Yorker)
- "Timeline: A History of Black Classical Musicians" (WQXR)
- "Why Is American Classical Music So White?" (NPR)
- "Was Beethoven Black? Probably Not, but These Unsung Composers Were" (Smithsonian Magazine)
- "19 Black Musicians Who Have Shaped the Classical Music World" (Classic FM)
- "10 Black Composers Who Changed the Course of Classical Music History" (Classic FM)
- "Ear To Ear: Celebrating Today’s Black Classical Composers" (capradio)
- "Black Classical Music The Forgotten History" (BBC)
- "CP Time: The History of Black Classical Music" (The Daily Show)
- "Black Classical Composers - You Oughta Know" (WHYY)
Our final playlist in our Black History Month series explores the contributions and innovations made by black musicians in the rapidly evolving electronic music genre. While much debate exists over the true beginnings of music made entirely with electronic instruments, one thing that is certain is black artists have been at the forefront of exploring the capabilities of electronic compositions, pushing the types of music that can be created entirely with synthetic instruments to new heights with each decade.
Playlist Resources & Further Reading
- Dweller Electronics Library List of articles, interviews and documentaries about techno and its history, from a black perspective
- Black to Techno (2019) Short documentary tracing the lineage of techno via its birthplace in Detroit and later innovation in Berlin
- "In the Mix: Hearing the Souls of Black Folk" (American Studies)
- "Is This the Future? Black Music and Technology Discourse" (Science Fiction Studies)
- "Confessions of a DJ" (n+1)
- "The Divine Creation of Chicago House" (cuepoint)
- "Black Women Helped Build House Music. Their Credit Is Often Left off Records." (Zoya)
- “Detroit is Techno City, and techno is Black” (Metro Times)
- "2010-19: Reflections Of A Black Woman In Dance Music" (Resident Advisor)
- "The Sound of a Movement: 18 Creatives on the Black Queer Future of Dance Music" (them)
- "Black Techno History Month" 2021 Twitter thread with daily posts about contributions to techno music from Black artists
- "Electronic music for Black History Month" 2022 Twitter thread with daily posts about contributions to electronic music from Black artists
- "With Black Techno Matters, Bernard Farley Uses Music to Fuel Revolution" (The Washington Post)
African American Music by ISBN: 9780415881814Publication Date: 2014-09-25American Music: An Introduction, Second Edition is a collection of seventeen essays surveying major African American musical genres, both sacred and secular, from slavery to the present. With contributions by leading scholars in the field, the work brings together analyses of African American music based on ethnographic fieldwork, which privileges the voices of the music-makers themselves, woven into a richly textured mosaic of history and culture. At the same time, it incorporates musical treatments that bring clarity to the structural, melodic, and rhythmic characteristics that both distinguish and unify African American music. The second edition has been substantially revised and updated, and includes new essays on African and African American musical continuities, African-derived instrument construction and performance practice, techno, and quartet traditions. Musical transcriptions, photographs, illustrations, and a new audio CD bring the music to life.
Representing Black Music Culture: then, now, and when again? by ISBN: 9780810877863Publication Date: 2011-10-07In this collection of essays, interviews, and profiles, William C. Banfield reflects on his life as a musician and educator, weaving together pieces of cultural criticism and artistry and paying homage to Black music of the last forty years and beyond. The essays and interviews in Representing Black Music Culture: Then, Now, and When Again? are enhanced by seven years of daily diary entries that reflect on some of the country's most respected Black composers, recording artists, authors, and cultural icons, including Ornette Coleman, Bobby McFerrin, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Gordon Parks, the Marsalis brothers, Maya Angelou, Patrice Rushen, Billy Taylor, Herbie Hancock, and Quincy Jones. Although many of the individuals Banfield lauds are well known to most readers, he also turns his attention to musicians and artists whose work, while perhaps unheralded by the world at large, is no less deserving of praise and respect for their contributions. In addition, this volume is filled with candid photographs of many artists participating in expressive culture, whether on stage, on tour, in clubs, in rehearsal, or teaching class. This unique book will be of interest to scholars and students, as well as general readers interested in absorbing and appreciating Black culture. Book jacket.
Black Diamond Queens: African American women and rock and roll by ISBN: 9781478010197Publication Date: 2020-10-30African American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll--from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite this, black women's importance to the music's history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers. By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.
Right to Rock: the Black Rock Coalition and the cultural politics of race by ISBN: 0822333058Publication Date: 2004-06-23The original architects of rock 'n' roll were black musicians including Little Richard, Etta James, and Chuck Berry. Jimi Hendrix electrified rock with his explosive guitar in the late 1960s. Yet by the 1980s, rock music produced by African Americans no longer seemed to be "authentically black." Particularly within the music industry, the prevailing view was that no one--not black audiences, not white audiences, and not black musicians--had an interest in black rock. In 1985 New York-based black musicians and writers formed the Black Rock Coalition (brc) to challenge that notion and create outlets for black rock music. A second branch of the coalition started in Los Angeles in 1989. Under the auspices of the brc, musicians organized performances and produced recordings and radio and television shows featuring black rock. The first book to focus on the brc, Right to Rock is, like the coalition itself, about the connections between race and music, identity and authenticity, art and politics, and power and change. Maureen Mahon observed and participated in brc activities in New York and Los Angeles, and she conducted interviews with more than two dozen brc members. In Right to Rock she offers an in-depth account of how, for nearly twenty years, members of the brc have broadened understandings of black identity and black culture through rock music.
What Are You Doing Here?: a black woman's life and liberation in heavy metal Author by ISBN: 9781935950059Publication Date: 2013-01-08Laina Dawes is not always the only black woman at metal shows and she's not always the only headbanger among her black female friends. In her first book, the Canadian critic and music fan questions herself, her hardcore heroes and dozens of black punk, metal and hard-rock fans to answer a knee-jerk question she's heard a hundred times in the small clubs where her favourite bands play: What are you doing here?' She investigates how black female musicians and fans navigate the metal, hardcore and punk music genres that are regularly thought of as inclusive spaces.'
Country Soul: making music and making race in the American South by ISBN: 9781469622439Publication Date: 2015-03-23In the sound of the 1960s and 1970s, nothing symbolized the rift between black and white America better than the seemingly divided genres of country and soul. Yet the music emerged from the same songwriters, musicians, and producers in the recording studios of Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama--what Charles L. Hughes calls the "country-soul triangle." In legendary studios like Stax and FAME, integrated groups of musicians like Booker T. and the MGs and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section produced music that both challenged and reconfirmed racial divisions in the United States. Working with artists from Aretha Franklin to Willie Nelson, these musicians became crucial contributors to the era's popular music and internationally recognized symbols of American racial politics in the turbulent years of civil rights protests, Black Power, and white backlash. Hughes offers a provocative reinterpretation of this key moment in American popular music and challenges the conventional wisdom about the racial politics of southern studios and the music that emerged from them. Drawing on interviews and rarely used archives, Hughes brings to life the daily world of session musicians, producers, and songwriters at the heart of the country and soul scenes. In doing so, he shows how the country-soul triangle gave birth to new ways of thinking about music, race, labor, and the South in this pivotal period.
Hidden in the Mix: the African American presence in country music by ISBN: 9780822351498Publication Date: 2013-07-10Country music's debt to African American music has long been recognized. Black musicians have helped to shape the styles of many of the most important performers in the country canon. The partnership between Lesley Riddle and A. P. Carter produced much of the Carter Family's repertoire; the street musician Tee Tot Payne taught a young Hank Williams Sr.; the guitar playing of Arnold Schultz influenced western Kentuckians, including Bill Monroe and Ike Everly. Yet attention to how these and other African Americans enriched the music played by whites has obscured the achievements of black country-music performers and the enjoyment of black listeners. The contributors to Hidden in the Mix examine how country music became "white," how that fictive racialization has been maintained, and how African American artists and fans have used country music to elaborate their own identities. They investigate topics as diverse as the role of race in shaping old-time record catalogues, the transracial West of the hick-hopper Cowboy Troy, and the place of U.S. country music in postcolonial debates about race and resistance. Revealing how music mediates both the ideology and the lived experience of race, Hidden in the Mix challenges the status of country music as "the white man's blues." Contributors. Michael Awkward, Erika Brady, Barbara Ching, Adam Gussow, Patrick Huber, Charles Hughes, Jeffrey A. Keith, Kip Lornell, Diane Pecknold, David Sanjek, Tony Thomas, Jerry Wever
Uproot: travels in twenty-first-century music and digital culture by ISBN: 9780374533427Publication Date: 2016-08-16In 2001 Jace Clayton was an unknown DJ who recorded a three-turntable, sixty-minute mix and put it online to share with friends. Within weeks, Gold Teeth Thief became an international calling card, whisking Clayton away to play a nightclub in Zagreb, a gallery in Osaka, a former brothel in Sao Paolo, and the American Museum of Natural History. Just as the music world made its fitful, uncertain transition from analog to digital, Clayton found himself on the front lines of creative upheavals ofart production in the twenty-first century globalized world. Uproot is a guided tour of this newly-opened cultural space. With humor, insight, and expertise, Clayton illuminates the connections between a Congolese hotel band and the indie-rock scene, Mexican rodeo teens and Israeli techno, and Whitney Houston and the robotic voices is rural Moroccan song, and offers an unparalleled understanding of music in the digital age.
More Brilliant Than the Sun: adventures in sonic fiction by ISBN: 0704380250Publication Date: 1999The classic work on the music of Afrofuturism, from jazz to jungle
More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction is one of the most extraordinary books on music ever written. Part manifesto for a militant posthumanism, part journey through the unacknowledged traditions of diasporic science fiction, this book finds the future shock in Afrofuturist sounds from jazz, dub and techno to funk, hip hop and jungle. By exploring the music of such musical luminaries as Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Lee Perry, Dr Octagon, Parliament and Underground Resistance, theorist and artist Kodwo Eshun mobilises their concepts in order to open the possibilities of sonic fiction: the hitherto unexplored intersections between science fiction and organised sound. Situated between electronic music history, media theory, science fiction and Afrodiasporic studies, More Brilliant than the Sun is one of the key works to stake a claim for the generative possibilities of Afrofuturism.
African Theatre: Opera & Music Theatre by ISBN: 1847012574Publication Date: 2020-11-20Compelling inside views of what characterises opera and music theatre in African and African diasporic contexts. Music is often cited as a central artistic mode in African theatre and performance practices. However, little attention has been paid to music theatre on the continent in general, and to opera in particular, with the exceptions ofa few noted genres, such as Concert Party or the Yorùbá "folk opera" of the 1960s, and the emerging research on opera culture in South Africa. This volume of African Theatre highlights the diversity across the continent from a variety of perspectives - including those of genre, media, and historiography. Above all, it raises questions and encourages debate: What does "opera" mean in African and African diasporic contexts? What are its practices and legacies - colonial, postcolonial and decolonial; what is its relation to the intersectionalities of race and class? How do opera and music theatre reflect, change or obscure social, political and economic realities? How are they connected to educational and cultural institutions, and non-profit organisations? And why is opera contradictorily, at various times, perceived as both "grand" and "elitist, "folk" and "quotidian", "Eurocentric" and "indigenous"? Contributors also address aesthetic transformation processes, the porousness of genre boundaries and the role of space and place, with examples ranging from Egypt to South Africa, from Uganda to West Africa and the USA. The playscript in this volume is We Take Care of Our Own by Zainabu Jallo.
Dvořák's Prophecy: and the vexed fate of Black classical music by ISBN: 9780393881240Publication Date: 2021-11-23In 1893 the composer Antonin Dvořák prophesied a "great and noble" school of American classical music based on the searing "negro melodies" he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would found popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, he looks back to literary figures Emerson, Melville, and Twain to ponder how American music can connect with a "usable past." The result is a new paradigm that makes room for Black composers including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Dawson, and Florence Price to redefine the classical canon.
John Henry and His People by ISBN: 9781476686110Publication Date: 2021-12-28The song "John Henry," perhaps America's greatest folk ballad, is about an African-American steel driver who raced and beat a steam drill, dying "with his hammer in his hand" from the effort. Most singers and historians believe John Henry was a real person, not a fictitious one, and that his story took place in West Virginia--though other places have been proposed. John Garst argues convincingly that it took place near Dunnavant, Alabama, in 1887. The author's reconstruction, based on contemporaneous evidence and subsequent research, uncovers a fascinating story that supports the Dunnavant location and provides new insights. Beyond John Henry, readers will discover the lives and work of his people: Black and white singers; his "captain," contractor Frederick Dabney; C. C. Spencer, the most credible eyewitness; John Henry's wife; the blind singer W. T. Blankenship, who printed the first broadside of the ballad; and later scholars who studied John Henry. The book includes analyses of the song's numerous iterations, several previously unpublished illustrations and a foreword by folklorist Art Rosenbaum.
Odetta: a life in music and protest by ISBN: 9780807035320Publication Date: 2020-04-14The first in-depth biography of Odetta, the legendary singer and "Voice of the Civil Rights Movement" who combatted racism and prejudice through her music. Leader of the 1960s folk revival, Odetta is one of the most important singers of the last 100 years. Her music has influenced a huge number of artists over many decades, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Judy Collins, Janis Joplin, the Kinks, Carly Simon, Jewel and, more recently, Rhiannon Giddens and Miley Cyrus. But Odetta's importance extends far beyond music. Journalist Ian Zack follows Odetta from her beginnings in a deeply segregated Birmingham, Alabama to stardom in Los Angeles, where she helped the nation heal after 9/11 through her music. It's hard to imagine the Civil Rights Movement without her opera-trained voice echoing at the March on Washington, the Selma to Montgomery march, and countless other rallies and protests, large and small. Odetta channeled her anger and shame into some the most powerful folk music the nation has ever heard. Through her lyrics and iconic persona, Odetta influenced lasting political, social, and cultural change. Through interviews with Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Judy Collins, Carly Simon, and many more, Ian Zack brings Odetta back into the spotlight, reminding the world of the folk music that powered the Civil Rights Movement and continues to influence generations of musicians today.
Banjo Roots and Branches by ISBN: 9780252041945Publication Date: 2018-08-15The story of the banjo's journey from Africa to the western hemisphere blends music, history, and a union of cultures. In Banjo Roots and Branches, Robert B. Winans presents cutting-edge scholarship that covers the instrument's West African origins and its adaptations and circulation in the Caribbean and United States. The contributors provide detailed ethnographic and technical research on gourd lutes and ekonting in Africa and the banza in Haiti while also investigating tuning practices and regional playing styles. Other essays place the instrument within the context of slavery, tell the stories of black banjoists, and shed light on the banjo's introduction into the African- and Anglo-American folk milieus. Wide-ranging and illustrated with twenty color images, Banjo Roots and Branches offers a wealth of new information to scholars of African American and folk musics as well as the worldwide community of banjo aficionados. Contributors: Greg C. Adams, Nick Bamber, Jim Dalton, George R. Gibson, Chuck Levy, Shlomo Pestcoe, Pete Ross, Tony Thomas, Saskia Willaert, and Robert B. Winans.
Blue Muse: Timothy Duffy's Southern Photographs by ISBN: 9781469648262Publication Date: 2019-03-28The tintype is rooted in more than 150 years of photographic method. In this collection of extraordinary portraits, Timothy Duffy brings new vitality to this old form, capturing powerful images of musicians who represent the roots of American music. These American blues, jazz, and folk artists are living expressions of a cultural legacy, made and remade by everyday people and passed down through generations. In the hands of the people in Duffy's portraits, centuries-old traditions find new expression in this digital millennium. Likewise, Duffy's photographic techniques fuse old forms and the original collodion wet plates with modern lighting. In this collaboration between photographer and artist, music and image meet around a history of struggle, adaptability, and creativity. It is this ethos that Duffy captures in his tintypes. Some of the musicians in Duffy's photographs have found fame, but most have not. While the world finds inspiration in the grassroots creativity of these musicians, barriers of class, race, and place often keep them underacknowledged and obscured. But in these photographs, Duffy demands they be seen.
Frankie and Johnny: Race, Gender, and the work of African American folklore in 1930s America by ISBN: 9781477312070Publication Date: 2017-04-18Winner, Wayland D. Hand Prize, American Folklore Society, 2018. Originating in a homicide in St. Louis in 1899, the ballad of "Frankie and Johnny" became one of America's most familiar songs during the first half of the twentieth century. It crossed lines of race, class, and artistic genres, taking form in such varied expressions as a folk song performed by Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly); a ballet choreographed by Ruth Page and Bentley Stone under New Deal sponsorship; a mural in the Missouri State Capitol by Thomas Hart Benton; a play by John Huston; a motion picture, She Done Him Wrong, that made Mae West a national celebrity; and an anti-lynching poem by Sterling Brown. In this innovative book, Stacy I. Morgan explores why African American folklore--and "Frankie and Johnny" in particular--became prized source material for artists of diverse political and aesthetic sensibilities. He looks at a confluence of factors, including the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and resurgent nationalism, that led those creators to engage with this ubiquitous song. Morgan's research uncovers the wide range of work that artists called upon African American folklore to perform in the 1930s, as it alternately reinforced and challenged norms of race, gender, and appropriate subjects for artistic expression. He demonstrates that the folklorists and creative artists of that generation forged a new national culture in which African American folk songs featured centrally not only in folk and popular culture but in the fine arts as well.
The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy by ISBN: 9781469646480Publication Date: 2018-11-26Over the course of his long career, legendary bluesman William "Big Bill" Broonzy (1893-1958) helped shape the trajectory of the genre, from its roots in the rural Mississippi River Delta, through its rise as a popular genre in the North, to its eventual international acclaim. Along the way, Broonzy adopted an evolving personal and professional identity, tailoring his self-presentation to the demands of the place and time. His remarkable professional fluidity mirrored the range of expectations from his audiences, whose ideas about race, national belonging, identity, and the blues were refracted through Broonzy as if through a prism. Kevin D. Greene argues that Broonzy's popular success testifies to his ability to navigate the cultural expectations of his different audiences. However, this constant reinvention came at a personal and professional cost. Using Broonzy's multifaceted career, Greene situates blues performance at the center of understanding African American self-presentation and racial identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Through Broonzy's life and times, Greene assesses major themes and events in African American history, including the Great Migration, urbanization, and black expatriate encounters with European culture consumers. Drawing on a range of historical source materials as well as oral histories and personal archives held by Broonzy's son, Greene perceptively interrogates how notions of race, gender, and audience reception continue to shape concepts of folk culture and musical authenticity.
Josh White: Society Blues by ISBN: 1558492690Publication Date: 2000-11-13A gifted and charismatic entertainer, Josh White (1914-1969) was a blues star of the 1930s, a cabaret star of the 1940s, and a folk star of the 1950s and the 1960s. In 1963, a Billboard magazine poll ranked him America's third most popular male folksinger, surpassed only by Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte, and ahead of Bob Dylan. White brought American folk and blues to audiences around the world and released several dozen albums, all featuring his distinctive guitar style, supple voice, and unique showmanship. In this compelling biography, Elijah Wald traces White's journey from a childhood leading blind singers on the streets of Greenville, South Carolina, to the heights of Manhattan cafe society. He explores the complexities of White's music, his struggles with discrimination and stereotypes, his political involvements, and his sometimes raucous personal life. White was always drawn to music and made his first recordings at age fourteen. By the 1930s he had become a recording star, with equally strong careers in blues and gospel. In the 1940s he was discovered by white audiences and regularly appeared in New York cabarets alongside such artists as Billie Holiday. He also became an outspoken proponent of civil rights and frequently appeared at rallies and benefits, as well as at the Roosevelt White House, becoming known as "the Presidential Minstrel." He was one of the few black figures to star on Broadway and appear in Hollywood films, the only black solo performer to have his own national tour, and a daring sex symbol with adoring fans on both sides of the color line. In the 1950s, White won acclaim in Europe, then saw his achievements collapse in the polarized political ferment of the McCarthy era. Attempting to strike a balance that would keep his career afloat, he instead ended up alienating both political camps. Although still a star in England, he became the forgotten man at home until his resurrection during the folk revival.
Libba by ISBN: 9781452148571Publication Date: 2018-01-16This lyrical, loving picture book from popular singer-songwriter Laura Veirs and debut illustrator Tatyana Fazlalizadeh tells the story of the determined, gifted, daring Elizabeth Cotten--one of the most celebrated American folk musicians of all time. Elizabeth Cotten was only a little girl when she picked up a guitar for the first time. It wasn't hers (it was her big brother's), and it wasn't strung right for her (she was left-handed). But she flipped that guitar upside down and backwards and taught herself how to play it anyway. By age eleven, she'd written "Freight Train," one of the most famous folk songs of the twentieth century. And by the end of her life, people everywhere--from the sunny beaches of California to the rolling hills of England--knew her music.
House Music the Real Story by ISBN: 9781604740011Publication Date: 2007-11-01Jesse Saunders story is one of the most important in the history of popular culture. From his hometown of Chicago, Jesse created the first original House music record and launched the House music movement across the land. Eventually, his style of music would come to sell millions of records and CDs, take over the popular consciousness of millions of kids across the earth and cement the electronic revolution in music. Written with author James Cummins, this autobiography tells the story of how it all happened. From the streets of Chicago to the biggest music labels in Los Angeles, California, it follows Jesse Saunders as he recreates the musical landscape of America. Touching on the celebrity culture of the 1980s and 90s and into the twenty-first century, you will read many shocking things about some of your favorite artists. Jesse Saunders is an artist whose influence on modern music will never be forgotten.
America's Blues by
Publication Date: 2015This program explores the impact the blues has had American society, culture, and the entertainment industry. Despite influencing nearly every form of American music, literature, television, film, and other art forms, its contributions often go unrecognized. Historians, performers, and artists discuss the origin of the blues and how it has evolved. Blues today only accounts for a small part of the music market, but it developed its own tourism industry and remains strong in pockets of the U.S. and Europe.
Bad Brains, Live at CBGB 1982 by Publication Date: 2006Live at CBGB 1982 is a live album and DVD capturing hardcore punk/reggae group Bad Brains in concert at the historic New York City club CBGB in December 1982. The show features several tracks from the first three Bad Brains albums - Black Dots, Bad Brains, and the soon-to-be-released Rock for Light. The album also contains previously unreleased material, such as the reggae tunes "King of Glory" and "I And I Rasta."
A Band Called Death by Publication Date: 2012A Band Called Death is the story of three musician brothers, born to a Baptist preacher and his wife in 1950s Detroit. In their teenage years, the three brothers (to five other siblings) emerge as, first, a budding rock/funk band, heavily influenced by Motown & Parliament, ultimately evolving into pioneers of punk music, Death. Influenced by music by Alice Cooper and The Who, the group was heavily steered by the guidance and decisions of visionary eldest brother and guitarist, David Hackney. The film follows the re-discovery of the group through record collectors leading to an eventual release of Death's album ...For the Whole World to See by the Drag City record label and the group's eventual reunion and touring with a new guitarist.
The believers: the world’s first transgender gospel choir by Publication Date: 2006Built around the lives of 15 founding members of the world's first transgender gospel choir, the film portrays the choir's dilemma-- how to reconcile their gender identity with the widespread belief that changing one's gender goes against the word of God. Filmed over three years, the film takes us from the Transcendence Gospel Choir's shaky beginnings, when the heartwarmingly chaotic, cacophonous group is unable to agree on much of anything, arguing over appropriate wardrobe and learning to sing with transitioning voices, through their transformation into a polished, award-winning choir and close-knit family.Betty: They Say I'm Different by
Publication Date: 2017Funk Queen Betty Davis changed the landscape for female artists in America. Betty Mabry Davis is a global icon whose mysterious life story has until now, never been told. Creatively blending documentary, animation and nonfiction techniques, this movie traces the path of Betty's life, how she grew from humble upbringings to become a fully self-realized black female pioneer the world failed to understand or appreciate, revealing the mystery of her 35-year disappearance and her battle with mental illness and poverty. After years of trying, the elusive Betty, forever the free-spirited Black Power Goddess, finally allowed the filmmakers to creatively tell her story based on their conversations.
The Black power mixtape: 1967-1975 by Call Number: E185.615 .B5468 2011Publication Date: 2011The Black power mixtape: 1967-1975 mobilizes a treasure trove of 16mm material shot by Swedish journalists who came to the US drawn by stories of urban unrest and revolution. Gaining access to many of the leaders of the Black Power Movement -- Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver among them -- the filmmakers captured them in intimate moments and remarkably unguarded interviews. Thirty years later, this lush collection was found languishing in the basement of Swedish Television
Charley Pride, I’m Just Me by Publication Date: 2019American Masters – Charley Pride: I’m Just Me traces the improbable journey of Charley Pride, from his humble beginnings as a sharecropper’s son on a cotton farm in segregated Sledge, Mississippi to his career as a Negro American League baseball player and his meteoric rise as a trailblazing country music superstar. The new documentary reveals how Pride’s love for music led him from the Delta to a larger, grander world. In the 1940s, radio transcended racial barriers, making it possible for Pride to grow up listening to and imitating Grand Ole Opry stars like Ernest Tubb and Roy Acuff.
Purple Rain by Call Number: PN1997 .P9789 1997Publication Date: 1997Prince stars as "The Kid," a Minneapolis club musician, who struggles with both a tumultuous home life and his own smoldering anger while taking refuge in his music and his steamy love for sultry Apollonia Kotero. Semi-autobiographical.
What happened, Miss Simone? by Call Number: ML420.S5635 W53 2016Publication Date: 2016The documentary chronicles the life of American singer Nina Simone, who became a civil rights activist and moved to Liberia following the turbulence of the 1960s. The documentary combines previously unreleased archival footage and interviews with Simone's daughter and friends.
Summer of Soul (... or, when the revolution could not be televised)ISBN: 9786318691598Publication Date: 2022In his acclaimed debut as a filmmaker, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson presents a powerful and transporting documentary, part music film, part historical record, created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture, and fashion. Over the course of six weeks in the summer of 1969, just one hundred miles south of Woodstock, The Harlem Cultural Festival was filmed in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). The footage was largely forgotten, until now. This documentary shines a light on the importance of history to our spiritual well-being and stands as a testament to the healing power of music during times of unrest, both past, and present. The feature includes concert performances by Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly & the Family Stone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, The 5th Dimension, and more.
Black OrpheusPublication Date: 1959Winner of both the **Academy Award** for best foreign-language film and the **Cannes Film Festival's** Palme d'Or, Marcel Camus' Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. With its eye-popping photography and ravishing, epochal soundtrack, Black Orpheus was an international cultural event, and it kicked off the bossa nova craze that set hi-fis across America spinning.
Noble Sissle's Syncopated RagtimePublication Date: 2020Combining unseen footage with original scores from the era, this film tells the story of Noble Sissle's incredible life journey that spans "The Harlem Hell Fighters" of World War I, Broadway Theater, the Civil Rights Movement, and decades of black cultural production.
Recent Additions
Critical Race Media Literacy
This volume offers deeper exploration and advancement of critical race media literacy, a concept which fuses the genres of media literacy and critical media literacy with critical race theory to bring a new and salient frame to the discussion of media literacy across all levels of education in today’s globalized, race-based, and media-saturated climate. Bridging the gap in research that has not addressed the ways in which media is a conduit of racial dialogue and ideology, the book brings together a diverse group of scholars that explore their perspectives on critical race media literacy as it is experienced from the interface and consumption of a variety of media texts and social phenomena. Topics addressed include news literacy, children’s literature, Black political movements, media protests, and ethnic rock—Critical Race Media Literacy addresses these topics within existing media literacy contexts to enhance media literacy scholarship and educational pedagogy. This book will provide a timely and important resource not only for scholars and students of media literacy and media education but also for educators working in diverse learning settings.
American Mass Incarceration and Post-Network Quality Television
Far more than a building of brick and mortar, the prison relies upon gruesome stories circulated as commercial media to legitimize its institutional reproduction. Perhaps no medium has done more in recent years to both produce and intervene in such stories than television. This unapologetically interdisciplinary work presents a series of investigations into some of the most influential and innovative treatments of American mass incarceration to hit our screens in recent decades. Looking beyond celebratory accolades, Lee A. Flamand argues that we cannot understand the eagerness of influential programs such as OZ, The Wire, Orange Is the New Black, 13th,and Queen Sugarto integrate the sensibilities of prison ethnography, urban sociology, identity politics activism, and even Black feminist theory into their narrative structures without understanding how such critical postures relate to the cultural aspirations and commercial goals of a quickly evolving TV industry and the most deeply ingrained continuities of American storytelling practices.
Chokepoint Capitalism
A call to action for the creative class and labor movement to rally against the power of Big Tech and Big Media Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers)--or both. In Chokepoint Capitalism, scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we're in a new era of "chokepoint capitalism," with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well-illustrated by the plight of creative workers. Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that's being heisted away--before it's too late.
Analysing Media Discourse
This study of media discourse combines a theoretical framework with empirical engagement and brings together analysis from a range of disciplines. As such, this volume will enable readers to more comprehensively embrace the nature of media communication, on the one hand, and, on the other, it will provide media discourse producers with more effective instruments to understand the role of media in social life.
The Cinema House and the World
The writings of one of the greatest film critics of his generation on the auteur approach of the French New Wave to a more structural examination of film. One of the greatest film critics of his generation, Serge Daney wrote for Cahiers du Cinema before becoming a journalist for the daily newspaper Liberation. The writings collected in this volume reflect Daney's evolving interests, from the auteur approach of the French New Wave to a more structural examination of film, psychoanalysis, and popular culture. Openly gay throughout his lifetime, Daney rarely wrote explicitly about homosexuality but his writings reflect a queer sensibility that would influence future generations. In regular intellectual exchanges with Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Roland Barthes, Daney wrote about cinema autobiographically, while lyrically analyzing the transition from modern cinema to postmodern media. A noted polymath, Daney also published books about tennis and Haiti's notorious Duvalier regime. His criticism is open and challenging, polyvocal and compulsively readable.
Gender, Sexuality and Queerness in American Horror Story
The horror anthology TV show American Horror Story first aired on FX Horror in 2011 and has thus far spanned eight seasons. Addressing many areas of cultural concern, the show has tapped in to conversations about celebrity culture, family dynamics, and more. This volume with nine new essays and one reprinted one considers how this series engages with representations of gender, sexuality, queer identities and other LGBTQ issues. The contributors address myriad elements of American Horror Story, from the relationship between gender and nature to contemporary masculinities, offering a sustained analysis of a show that has proven to be central to contemporary genre television.
Grief in Contemporary Horror Cinema
Over the course of the past two decades, horror cinema around the globe has become increasingly preoccupied with the concept of loss. Grief in Contemporary Horror Cinema: Screening Loss examines the theme of grief as it is represented in both indie and mainstream films, including works such as Jennifer Kent's watershed film The Babadook, Juan Antonio Bayona's award-sweeping El orfanato, Ari Aster's genre-straddling Midsommar, and Lars von Trier's visually stunning Melancholia. Analyzing depictions of grief ranging from the intimate grief of a small family to the collective grief of an entire nation, the essays illustrate how these works serve to provide unity, catharsis, and--sometimes--healing.
Handbook of Japanese Media and Popular Culture in Transition
The Handbook of Japanese Media and Popular Culture in Transitionbrings together new research and perspectives on popular media phenomena, as well as shining a spotlight on texts that are less well known or studied. Organized into five thematic sections, the chapters span a diverse range of cultural genres, including contemporary film and television, postwar cinema, advertising, popular fiction, men's magazines, manga and anime, karaoke and digital media. They address issues critical to contemporary Japanese society: the politicization of history, authenticity and representation, constructions of identity, trauma and social disaffection, intersectionality and trans/nationalism. Drawing on methods and approaches from a range of disciplines, the chapters make explicit the interconnections between these areas of research and map out possible trajectories for future inquiry. As such, the handbook will be of value to both novice scholars and seasoned researchers, working within and/or beyond the Japanese media studies remit.
Insights on Fashion Journalism
This collection surveys the key debates and issues that currently face fashion journalism, going beyond traditional print media to consider its multiple contexts and iterations in an ever-evolving post-digital media environment. Bringing together a diverse range of contributors, Insights on Fashion Journalism explores the characteristics, complexities, shifts and specificities of the field. Part One focuses on the complex relationships between those who practice fashion journalism, the fashion industry, and the media context in which they operate; Part Two considers the ways in which fashion journalism responds to the socio-political and cultural contexts in which it is created, as well as the impact these contexts have on tone, content, and style; and Part Three investigates how language is employed in different media. Approaching fashion journalism through a critically diverse lens, this collection is an asset for academics and students in the fields of fashion studies, journalism, communication, cultural studies and digital media.
K-Pop Dance
This book is about K-pop dance and the evolution and presence of its dance fandom on social media. Based on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, choreography, and participation-observation with 40 amateur and professional K-pop dancers in New York, California, and Seoul, the book traces the evolution of K-pop dance from the 1980s to the 2020s and explains its distinctive feature called 'gestural point choreography' - front-driven, two-dimensional, decorative and charming movements of the upper body and face - as an example of what the author theorizes as 'social media dance.' It also explores K-pop cover dance as a form of intercultural performance, suggesting that, by imitating and idolizing K-pop dance, fans are eventually 'fandoming' themselves and their bodies. Presenting an ethnographic study of K-pop dance and its fandom, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Media Studies, Korean Studies, Performance Studies, and Dance.
Performing Fear in Television Production
What goes into the ideological sustenance of an illiberal capitalist democracy? While much of the critical discussion of the media in authoritarian contexts focus on state power, the emphasis on strong states tend to perpetuate misnomers about the media as mere tools of the state and sustain myths about their absolute power. Turning to the lived everyday of media producers in Singapore, I pose a series of questions that explore what it takes to perpetuate authoritarian resilience in the mass media. How, in what terms and through what means, does a politically stable illiberal Asian state like Singapore formulate its dominant imaginary of social order? What are the television production practices that perform and instantiate the social imaginary, and who are the audiences that are conjured and performed in the process? What are the roles played by imagined audiences in sustaining authoritarian resilience in the media? If, as I will argue in the book, audiences function as the central problematic that engenders anxieties and self-policing amongst producers, can the audience become a surrogate for the authoritarian state?
Screening the Gothic in Australia and New Zealand
The persistent popularity of the detective narrative, new obsessions with psychological and supernatural disturbances, as well as the resurgence of older narratives of mystery or the Gothic all constitute a vast proportion of contemporary film and television productions. New ways of watching film and television have also seen a reinvigoration of this 'most domestic of media'. But what does this 'domesticity' of genre and media look like 'Down Under' in the twenty.first century? This collection traces representations of the Gothic on both the small and large screens in Australia and New Zealand in the twenty.first century. It attends to the development and mutation of the Gothic in these post. or neo.colonial contexts, concentrating on the generic innovations of this temporal and geographical focus.
Voices of the Race
Voices of the Race offers English translations of more than one hundred articles published in Black newspapers in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay from 1870 to 1960. Those publications were as important in Black community and intellectual life in Latin America as African American newspapers were in the United States, yet they are almost completely unknown to English-language readers. Expertly curated, the articles are organized into chapters centered on themes that emerged in the Black press: politics and citizenship, racism and anti-racism, family and education, community life, women, Africa and African culture, diaspora and Black internationalism, and arts and literature. Each chapter includes an introduction explaining how discussions on those topics evolved over time, and a list of questions to provoke further reflection. Each article is carefully edited and annotated; footnotes and a glossary explain names, events, and other references that will be unfamiliar to English-language readers. A unique, fascinating insight into the rich body of Black cultural and intellectual production across Latin America.
Popular Music Heritage
This book critically discusses the significance of popular music heritage as a means of remembering and re-presenting rock and pop artists, their music and their place in the culture of contemporary society. Since the mid-1990s, the contribution of popular music to the shaping of contemporary history and heritage has increasingly been acknowledged. In the same period, exhibitions of popular music related artefacts have become more commonplace in museums, and facilities dedicated to the celebration of popular music history and heritage, such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, have opened their doors. Popular music heritage has found other mediums of expression too. There is now a significant popular music heritage media, including books, magazines, films and television series. Fans collect and display their own mementos, while the live performances of tribute bands and classic albums fulfill an increasing desire for the live spectacle of popular music heritage. This book will be crucial reading for established scholars as well as postgraduate and undergraduate students studying popular music heritage.
The Reel World
This fully updated and complete guide takes you inside the world of creating music for film, television, and-unique to this third edition-video games. Industry expert Jeff Rona addresses a wide range of topics including musical aesthetics, cutting-edge technology and techniques, and current business aspects. It is packed with interviews with the most influential film, television, and video game composers, along with music editors, music supervisors, agents, contractors and studio executives. Packed with insider's tips, the book also advises on how to nurture positive relationships within your creative team and business contacts. For the aspiring film, TV or video game composer, this book is a veritable cornucopia of useful information for pursuing scoring to picture as a career.
Understanding Personalisation
Understanding Personalization: New Aspects of Design and Consumption addresses the global phenomenon of personalization that affects many aspects of everyday life. The book identifies the dimensions of personalization and its typologies. Issues of privacy, the ethics of design, and the designer/maker's control versus the consumer's freedom are covered, along with sections on digital personalization, advances in new media technologies and software development, the way we communicate, our personal devices, and the way personal data is stored and used. Other sections cover the principles of personalization and changing patterns of consumption and development in marketing that facilitate individualized products and services. The book also assesses the convergence of both producers and consumers towards the co-creation of goods and services and the challenges surrounding personalization, customization, and bespoke marketing in the context of ownership and consumption.