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Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics
by Louis M. MarajBlack or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics explores notions of Blackness in white institutional—particularly educational—spaces. In it, Louis M. Maraj theorizes how Black identity operates with/against ideas of difference in the age of #BlackLivesMatter. Centering Blackness in frameworks for antiracist agency through interdisciplinary Black feminist lenses, Black or Right asks how those racially signifying “diversity” in US higher education (and beyond) make meaning in the everyday. Offering four Black rhetorics as antiracist means for rhetorical reclamation—autoethnography, hashtagging, inter(con)textual reading, and reconceptualized disruption—the book uses Black feminist relationality via an African indigenous approach. Maraj examines fluid, quotidian ways Black folk engage anti/racism at historically white institutions in the United States in response to violent campus spaces, educational structures, protest movements, and policy practice. Black or Right’s experimental, creative style strives to undiscipline knowledge from academic confinement. Exercising different vantage points in each chapter—autoethnographer, digital media scholar/pedagogue, cultural rhetorician, and critical discourse analyst—Maraj challenges readers to ecologically understand shifting, multiple meanings of Blackness in knowledge-making. Black or Right’s expressive form, organization, narratives, and poetics intimately interweave with its argument that Black folk must continuously invent “otherwise” in reiterative escape from oppressive white spaces. In centering Black experiences, Black theory, and diasporic Blackness, Black or Right mobilizes generative approaches to destabilizing institutional whiteness, as opposed to reparative attempts to “fix racism,” which often paradoxically center whiteness. It will be of interest to both academic and general readers and significant for specialists in cultural rhetorics, Black studies, and critical theory.
Black Orpheus, Transition, and Modern Cultural Awakening in Africa
by Peter BensonThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.
The Black Panther
by David Hilliard"We knew from the beginning how critical it was to have our own publication, to set forth our agenda for freedom...to urge change, to use the pen alongside the sword," writes David Hilliard in the preface to this stunning collection of pages from the original groundbreaking editions of the Black Panther Party's official news organ and original essays by Hilliard, Elaine Brown, Dr. Stan Oden, Craig Laurence Rice, Kumasi, and Joshua Bloom. First called The Black Panther Community News Service and then The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service (BPINS), the weekly periodical was nationally and internationally distributed. It was "sold in small stores in black communities, through subscriptions, and, mostly, on the streets by dedicated Party members," writes Brown, a party leader and author of A Taste of Power, in this edition. In its heyday, the Party sold several hundred thousand copies of the newspaper per week and was highly regarded for the quality of its content by media professionals and its legion of readers alike. It ultimately became the most influential independent black newspaper in the United States, known not only for its fearless reportage and analysis but its stunning photographs and illustrations, including provocative and humorous political cartoons. Published in time to mark the 40th anniversary of the BPINS, this book is, at once, an invaluable document of a little-known aspect of American history and a celebration of one of the most stunning accomplishments of a cultural and political movement that changed the nation. The original DVD, included in the back of the book, makes this a multimedia package that readers across generations can appreciate, documenting events and leaders of the past who still resonate and influence culture and politics today.
Black Panther: Interrogating a Cultural Phenomenon (Reframing Hollywood)
by Terence McSweeneyNamed a Nonfiction Book Awards Gold Winner by the Nonfiction Authors AssociationGold Winner of the 2022 eLit Book Award for Popular CultureWinner of a National Indie Excellence Award in the category of “Movies & TV”Book of the Year 2021 in African Studies awarded by CESTAFWinner of the 2022 Best Book Award in the category of “Performing Arts”Black Panther is one of the most financially successful and culturally impactful films to emerge from the American film industry in recent years. When it was released in 2018 it broke numerous records and resonated with audiences all around the world in ways that transcended the dimensions of the superhero film. In Black Panther: Interrogating a Cultural Phenomenon, author Terence McSweeney explores the film from a diverse range of perspectives, seeing it as not only a comic book adaptation and a superhero film, but also a dynamic contribution to the discourse of both African and African American studies. McSweeney argues that Black Panther is one of the defining American films of the last decade and the most remarkable title in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2008–). The MCU has become the largest film franchise in the history of the medium and has even shaped the contours of the contemporary blockbuster, but the narratives within it have almost exclusively perpetuated largely unambiguous fantasies of American heroism and exceptionalism. In contrast, Black Panther complicates this by engaging in an entirely different mythos in its portrayal of an African nation—never colonized by Europe—as the most powerful and technologically advanced in the world. McSweeney charts how and why Black Panther became a cultural phenomenon and also a battleground on which a war of meaning was waged at a very particular time in American history.
"Black People Are My Business": Toni Cade Bambara's Practices of Liberation (African American Life Series)
by Thabiti Lewis"Black People Are My Business": Toni Cade Bambara’s Practices of Liberation studies the works of Bambara (1939–1995), an author, documentary filmmaker, social activist, and professor. Thabiti Lewis’s analysis serves as a cultural biography, examining the liberation impulses in Bambara’s writing, which is concerned with practices that advance the material value of the African American experience and exploring the introspection between artist production and social justice. This is the first monograph that focuses on Bambara’s unique approach and important literary contribution to 1970s and 1980s African American literature. It explores her unique nationalist, feminist, Marxist, and spiritualist ethos, which cleared space for many innovations found in black women’s fiction. Divided into five chapters, Lewis’s study relies on Bambara’s voice (from interviews and essays) to craft a "spiritual wholeness aesthetic"—a set of principles that comes out of her practices of liberation and entail family, faith, feeling, and freedom—that reveals her ability to interweave ethnic identity, politics, and community engagement and responsibility with the impetus of balancing black male and female identity influences and interactions within and outside the community. One key feature of Bambara’s work is the concentration on women as cultural workers whereby her notion of spiritual wholeness upends what has become a scholarly distinction between feminism and black nationalism. Bambara’s fiction situates her as a pivotal voice within the Black Arts Movement and contemporary African American literature. Bambara is an understudied and important artistic voice whose aversion to playing it safe both personified and challenged the boundaries of black nationalism and feminism. "Black People Are My Business" is a wonderful addition to any reader’s list, especially those interested in African American literary and cultural studies.
Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible (Sexual Cultures #49)
by Malik GainesArticulates the role black theatricality played in the radical energy of the sixties Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left illustrates the black political ideas that radicalized the artistic endeavors of musicians, playwrights, and actors beginning in the 1960s. These ideas paved the way for imaginative models for social transformation through performance. Using the notion of excess—its transgression, multiplicity, and ambivalence—Malik Gaines considers how performances of that era circulated a black political discourse capable of unsettling commonplace understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Following the transnational route forged by W.E.B. Du Bois, Josephine Baker, and other modern political actors, from the United States to West Africa, Europe and back, this book considers how artists negotiated at once the local, national, and diasporic frames through which race has been represented. Looking broadly at performances found in music, theater, film, and everyday life—from American singer and pianist Nina Simone, Ghanaian playwrights Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann, to California-based performer Sylvester—Gaines explores how shared signs of racial legacy and resistance politics are articulated with regional distinction. Bringing the lens forward through contemporary art performance at the 2015 Venice Biennial, Gaines connects the idea of sixties radicality to today’s interest in that history, explores the aspects of those politics that are lost in translation, and highlights the black expressive strategies that have maintained potent energy. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left articulates the role black theatricality played in the radical energy of the sixties, following the evolution of black identity politics to reveal blackness’s ability to transform contemporary social conditions.
Black Pioneers in Communication Research
by Ronald L. Jackson Sonja M. Brown Givens"Black Pioneers in Communication Research is a pathbreaking book that displays a refreshingly joyful and critical spirit. Here, communication theory is shown to be the work of real persons living real lives, asking real questions of real problems. By celebrating and evaluating the lives of Black scholars as they have sought to advance communication studies, readers are introduced to perhaps the first truly foundational text our field has to offer! By tracing pioneers′ life histories up to their current contributions to the field of communication, students will not simply be exposed to a concept and its definition, but rather invited to explore the evolution of both the concept and its progenitor. This illuminates and enlivens the study of communication while helping readers to be conscious of the conditions that have helped to shape our current state of knowledge. Black Pioneers in Communication Research is fully edifying: It lifts all communication scholars higher by being courageous enough to teach us as intellectuals that when we lay bare some of the intricacies of our lives, our students are better able to understand the complex canvases upon which our paradigms are built." --Eric King Watts, Wake Forest UniversityBlack Pioneers in Communication Research is the only book in the field of communication that—through personal interviews—systematically explores the lives, careers, and profound conceptual contributions of the men and women who have helped shape the contours of humanistic and social scientific inquiry within communication studies and beyond. The personal lives and careers of eleven leading scholars are profiled: Molefi Kete Asante, Donald E. Bogle, Hallie Quinn Brown, Melbourne S. Cummings, Jack L. Daniel, Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Stuart Hall, Marsha Houston, Joni L. Jones/Iya Omi Osun Olomo, Dorthy L. Pennington, and Orlando L. Taylor. These pioneers have had an indelible impact on Black Studies, sociology, communication, political science, film studies, rhetoric, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies. Black Pioneers in Communication Research presents a penetrating look into the circumstances that shifted the paradigms of interdisciplinary thought. Some of the concepts covered in this book are afrocentricity, articulation theory, aphasia, oral performance and interpretation, womanism, Black English, Black oral traditions, the TrEE communication development model, chronemics, as well as the mammy, buck, mulatto, coon, and Uncle Tom images in film and television. Intended Audience:This is an excellent textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses dealing with African American communication and/or communication research (such as intercultural communication, African American communication, African American studies, African American rhetoric, communication research, and communication theory~
Black Playwrights and Heightened Text: When Shakespeare Ain’t Enuf
by null Jacqueline SpringfieldBlack Playwrights and Heightened Text: When Shakespeare Ain’t Enuf breaks down the misconception that heightened text sits only within a white tradition and brings the work of Black playwrights from across history to the forefront by highlighting the use of heightened dramatic text in their work.Interrogating the use of linguistic techniques often seen in heightened text, such as: enjambment, assonance, and consonance, author Jacqueline Springfield looks at the ways in which these techniques allow the text itself to have a kind of permanence in audiences’ minds and works to reinforce a character’s objective within the play. The book presents examples of works from a plethora of Black playwrights, including Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, August Wilson, Katori Hall, Marcus Gardley, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and many more, as well as providing the context in which they’re writing. Theatre artists who read, teach, direct and perform the work of Black playwrights answer key questions in their own words in interviews with the author. Interviewees include Dominique Morisseau, Ron OJ Parson, Mfoniso Udofia, Zora Howard and many other theatre practitioners. Taking a chronological approach, the book examines the history of heightened text in the works of Black playwrights and re-defines the ways in which theatre students and scholars can understand the techniques of heightened texts outside of a purely Eurocentric and white perspective.Ideal for students of theatre history, acting, playwriting, and text analysis, as well as researchers of African American theatre.
The Black Poets
by Dudley RandallThe claim of The Black Poets to being. . . an anthology is that it presents the full range of Black-American poetry, from the slave songs to the present day. It is important that folk poetry be included because it is the root and inspiration of later, literary poetry. Not only does this book present the full range of Black poetry, but it presents most poets in depths, and in some cases presents aspects of a poet neglected or overlooked before. Gwendolyn Brooks is represented not only by poems on racial and domestic themes, but is revealed as a writer of superb love lyrics. Turning away from White models and returning to their roots has freed Black poets to create a new poetry. This book records their progress. --from the Introduction by Dudley Randall
Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics
by Margo Natalie CrawfordA 2008 cover of The New Yorker featured a much-discussed Black Power parody of Michelle and Barack Obama. The image put a spotlight on how easy it is to flatten the Black Power movement as we imagine new types of blackness. Margo Natalie Crawford argues that we have misread the Black Arts Movement's call for blackness. We have failed to see the movement's anticipation of the "new black" and "post-black." Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics. Crawford zooms in on the 1970s second wave of the Black Arts Movement and shows the connections between this final wave of the Black Arts movement and the early years of twenty-first century black aesthetics. She uncovers the circle of black post-blackness that pivots on the power of anticipation, abstraction, mixed media, the global South, satire, public interiority, and the fantastic.
Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s, Revised Edition (Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History)
by Marc DollingerHighlights Jewish participation in the civil rights movementBlack Power, Jewish Politics charts the transformation of American Jewish political culture from the Cold War liberal consensus of the early postwar years to the rise and influence of Black Power-inspired ethnic nationalism. It shows how, in a period best known for the rise of antisemitism in some parts of the Black community and the breakdown of the alliance between white Jews and Black Americans, Black Power activists enabled Jewish activists to devise a new Judeo-centered political agenda—including the emancipation of Soviet Jews, the rise of Jewish Day Schools, the revitalization of worship services with gender-inclusive liturgy, and the birth of a new form of American Zionism.Undermining widely held beliefs about the civil rights movement, Black Power, racism, Soviet Jewry, American Zionism, and the religious revival of the 1970s, Black Power, Jewish Politics describes a new political consensus based on identity politics that drew Black and Jewish Americans together and altered the course of American liberalism.In the midst of national reckoning on race, this revised edition extends the book’s thesis to the contemporary period, investigating the limits of white Jewish liberalism, the ways in which scholars have and have not addressed racial privilege in their work, and the dynamics around these themes in a much more diverse American Jewish community.
The Black Prince (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series)
by SparkNotesThe Black Prince (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Iris Murdoch Making the reading experience fun! Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster.Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides:chapter-by-chapter analysis explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols a review quiz and essay topics Lively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers.
Black Prison Intellectuals: Writings from the Long Nineteenth Century
by Andrea StoneHow early Black prison writing shaped Black intellectual movements In this book, Andrea Stone recovers critical, understudied writings from early archives to call into question the idea that the Black prison intellectual movement began in the twentieth century. In fact, nearly two centuries before Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver, Black prisoners were serving as thought leaders and contributing to political movements. By illuminating their pathbreaking voices, Stone shows that prison writing from this era was a foundational part of Black American intellectualism. Grounding her work in a history of the disproportionately high incarceration of Black Americans, Stone traces the arc of Black prison writing from 1795 to 1901. She analyzes gallows literature, court records, newspaper coverage, and parole request letters, arguing that parole requests represent an undervalued, vital literary genre. Most of the writers featured in this book were effectively treated as enemies of the state, leading Stone to a question that continues to resonate in America today: what is the distinction between criminal and enemy, and how are those categories intertwined with Blackness in the United States? Black Prison Intellectuals sheds light on the roots of issues like structural racism and mass incarceration. Looking at an important literary tradition that contributed to the Black American intellectual movement, this book helps readers better understand the present as a moment in the long journey toward a racially just society. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow
by Brooks E. HefnerA deep dive into mid-century African American newspapers, exploring how Black pulp fiction reassembled genre formulas in the service of racial justice In recent years, Jordan Peele&’s Get Out, Marvel&’s Black Panther, and HBO&’s Watchmen have been lauded for the innovative ways they repurpose genre conventions to criticize white supremacy, celebrate Black resistance, and imagine a more racially just world—important progressive messages widely spread precisely because they are packaged in popular genres. But it turns out, such generic retooling for antiracist purposes is nothing new. As Brooks E. Hefner&’s Black Pulp shows, this tradition of antiracist genre revision begins even earlier than recent studies of Black superhero comics of the 1960s have revealed. Hefner traces it back to a phenomenon that began in the 1920s, to serialized (and sometimes syndicated) genre stories written by Black authors in Black newspapers with large circulations among middle- and working-class Black readers. From the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American, Hefner recovers a rich archive of African American genre fiction from the 1920s through the mid-1950s—spanning everything from romance, hero-adventure, and crime stories to westerns and science fiction. Reading these stories, Hefner explores how their authors deployed, critiqued, and reassembled genre formulas—and the pleasures they offer to readers—in the service of racial justice: to criticize Jim Crow segregation, racial capitalism, and the sexual exploitation of Black women; to imagine successful interracial romance and collective sociopolitical progress; and to cheer Black agency, even retributive violence in the face of white supremacy. These popular stories differ significantly from contemporaneous, now-canonized African American protest novels that tend to represent Jim Crow America as a deterministic machine and its Black inhabitants as doomed victims. Widely consumed but since forgotten, these genre stories—and Hefner&’s incisive analysis of them—offer a more vibrant understanding of African American literary history.
Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel
by Alvin J. HenryA groundbreaking examination of how twentieth-century African American writers use queer characters to challenge and ultimately reject subjectivity Black Queer Flesh reinterprets key African American novels from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Modernism to contemporary literature, showing how authors have imagined a new model of black queer selfhood. African American authors blame liberal humanism&’s model of subjectivity for double consciousness and find that liberal humanism&’s celebration of individual autonomy and agency is a way of disciplining Black queer lives. These authors thus reject subjectivity in search of a new mode of the self that Alvin J. Henry names &“black queer flesh&”—a model of selfhood that is collective, plural, fluctuating, and deeply connected to the black queer past. Henry begins with early twentieth-century authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and James Weldon Johnson. These authors adapted the Bildungsroman, the novel of self-formation, to show African Americans gaining freedom and agency by becoming a liberal, autonomous subjects. These authors, however, discovered that the promise of liberal autonomy held out by the Bildungsroman was yet another tool of antiblack racism. As a result, they tentatively experimented with repurposing the Bildungsroman to throw off subjectivity and its attendant double consciousness. In contrast, Nella Larsen, Henry shows, was the first author to fully reject subjectivity. In Quicksand and Passing, Larsen invented a new genre showing her queer characters—characters whose queerness already positioned them on the margins of subjectivity—escaping subjectivity altogether. Using Ralph Ellison&’s archival drafts, Henry then powerfully rereads Invisible Man, revealing that the protagonist as a queer, disabled character taught by the novel&’s many other queer, disabled characters to likewise seek a selfhood beyond subjectivity. Although Larsen and Ellison sketch glimpses of this selfhood beyond subjectivity, only Saidiya Hartman&’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments shows a protagonist fully inhabiting black queer flesh—a new mode of selfhood that is collective, plural, always evolving, and no longer alienated from the black past.Black Queer Flesh is an original and necessary contribution to black literary studies, offering new ways to understand and appreciate the canonical texts and far more.
Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire (New Black Studies)
by GerShun AvilezWhether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomical injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists’ work throughout the black diaspora. GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces—specifically prisons and hospitals—and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.
The Black Queer Work of Ratchet: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the (Anti)Politics of Respectability
by Nikki LaneThis book enters as a corrective to the tendency to trivialize and (mis)appropriate African American language practices. The word ratchet has entered into a wider (whiter) American discourse the same way that many words in African American English have—through hip-hop and social media. Generally, ratchet refers to behaviors and cultural expressions of Black people that sit outside of normative, middle-class respectable codes of conduct. Ratchet can function both as a tool for critiquing bad Black behavior, and as a tool for resisting the notion that there are such things as “good” and “bad” behavior in the first place. This book takes seriously the way ratchet operates in the everyday lives of middle-class and upwardly mobile Black Queer women in Washington, DC who, because of their sexuality, are situated outside of the norms of (Black) respectability. The book introduces the concept of “ratchet/boojie cultural politics” which draws from a rich body of Black intellectual traditions which interrogate the debates concerning what is and is not “acceptable” Black (middle-class) behavior. Placing issues of non-normative sexuality at the center of the conversation about notions of propriety within normative modes of Black middle-class behavior, this book discusses what it means for Black Queer women’s bodies to be present within ratchet/boojie cultural projects, asking what Black Queer women’s increasing visibility does for the everyday experiences of Black queer people more broadly.
The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution (America and the Long 19th Century #2)
by Jeremy Matthew Glick2017 Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award presented by the Caribbean Philosophical AssociationAs the first successful revolution emanating from a slave rebellion, the Haitian Revolution remains an inspired site of investigation for a remarkable range of artists and activist-intellectuals in the African Diaspora.In The Black Radical Tragic, Jeremy Matthew Glick examines twentieth-century performances engaging the revolution as laboratories for political thinking. Asking readers to consider the revolution less a fixed event than an ongoing and open-ended history resonating across the work of Atlantic world intellectuals, Glick argues that these writers use the Haitian Revolution as a watershed to chart their own radical political paths, animating, enriching, and framing their artistic and scholarly projects. Spanning the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and political thought, The Black Radical Tragic explores work from Lorraine Hansberry, Sergei Eisenstein, Edouard Glissant, Malcolm X, and others, ultimately enacting a speculative encounter between Bertolt Brecht and C.L.R. James to reconsider the relationship between tragedy and revolution. In its grand refusal to forget, The Black Radical Tragic demonstrates how the Haitian Revolution has influenced the ideas of freedom and self-determination that have propelled Black radical struggles throughout the modern era.
Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me, My Journey Through Depression
by Rachel KellyIn 1997, Oxford graduate, working mother and Times journalist Rachel Kelly went from feeling mildly anxious to being completely unable to function within the space of just three days. Prescribed antidepressants by her doctor, and supported by her husband and her family, Rachel slowly began to get better, but her anxiety levels remained high, and six years later, as a stay-at-home mother, she suffered a second collapse even worse than the first. Throughout both of Rachel's periods of severe depression, the healing power of poetry became an integral part of her recovery. As someone who had always loved poetry, it became something for Rachel to cling on to in times of need - from repeating short mantras to learning and reciting entire poems - these words and verses became a powerful force for change in her life. In Black Rainbow Rachel analyses why poetry can be one answer to depression, and the book contains a selected 40 of the poems that provided Rachel with solace and comfort during her breakdown and recovery. At a time when mental health problems and depression are becoming more common, and the stigma around such issues is finally being lifted, this book offers a lifeline for anyone seeking to understand depression and seek new ways to treat it. Poetry is free, has no side-effects and, as Rachel can attest, 'prescribing words instead of pills' can be an incredibly powerful remedy.
Black Reason, White Feeling: The Jeffersonian Enlightenment in the African American Tradition (Jeffersonian America)
by Hannah SpahnThe vital influence of Black American intellectuals on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson&’s ideas The lofty Enlightenment principles articulated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, so central to conceptions of the American founding, did not emerge fully formed as a coherent set of ideas in the eighteenth century. As Hannah Spahn argues in this important book, no group had a more profound influence on their development and reception than Black intellectuals. The rationalism and universalism most associated with Jefferson today, she shows, actually sprang from critical engagements with his thought by writers such as David Walker, Lemuel Haynes, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. Du Bois.Black Reason, White Feeling illuminates the philosophical innovations that these and other Black intellectuals made to build on Jefferson&’s thought, shaping both Jefferson&’s historical image and the exalted legacy of his ideas in American culture. It is not just the first book-length history of Jefferson&’s philosophy in Black thought; it is also the first history of the American Enlightenment that centers the originality and decisive impact of the Black tradition.
Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World
by Eve DunbarZora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes were all pressured by critics and publishers to enlighten mainstream (white) audiences about race and African American culture. Focusing on fiction and non-fiction they produced between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, Eve Dunbar’s important book, Black Regions of the Imagination, examines how these African American writers—who lived and traveled outside the United States—both document and re-imagine their “homegrown” racial experiences within a worldly framework. From Hurston’s participant-observational accounts and Wright’s travel writing to Baldwin’s Another Country and Himes’ detective fiction, these writers helped develop the concept of a “region” of blackness that resists boundaries of genre and geography. Each writer represents—and signifies—blackness in new ways and within the larger context of the world. As they negotiated issues of “belonging,” these writers were more critical of social segregation in America as well as increasingly resistant to their expected roles as cultural “translators.”
The Black Register (Critical South)
by Tendayi SitholeHow can thinkers grapple with the question of the human when they have been dehumanized? How can black thinkers confront and make sense of a world structured by antiblackness, a world that militates against the very existence of blacks? These are the questions that guide Tendayi Sithole’s brilliant analyses of the work of Sylvia Wynter, Aimé Césaire, Steve Biko, Assata Shakur, George Jackson, Mabogo P. More, and a critique of Giorgio Agamben. Through his careful interrogation of their writings Sithole shows how the black register represents a uniquely critical perspective from which to confront worlds that are systematically structured to dehumanize. The black register is the ways of thinking, knowing and doing that emerge from existential struggles against antiblackness and that dwell in the lived experience of being black in an antiblack world. The black register is the force of critique that comes from thinkers who are dehumanized, and who in turn question, define, and analyze the reality that they are in, in order to reframe it and unmask the forces that inform subjection. This book redefines the arc of critical black thought over the last seventy-five years and it will be an indispensable text for anyone concerned with the deep and enduring ways in which race structures our world and our thought.
The Black Reproductive: Unfree Labor and Insurgent Motherhood
by Sara Clarke KaplanHow Black women&’s reproduction became integral to white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy—and remains key to their dismantling In the United States, slavery relied on the reproduction and other labors of unfree Black women. Nearly four centuries later, Black reproductivity remains a vital technology for the creation, negotiation, and transformation of sexualized and gendered racial categories. Yet even as Black reproduction has been deployed to resolve the conflicting demands of white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, Sara Clarke Kaplan argues that it also holds the potential to destabilize the oppressive systems it is supposed to maintain.The Black Reproductive convenes Black literary and cultural studies with feminist and queer theory to read twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts and images alongside their pre-emancipation counterparts. These provocative, unexpected couplings include how Toni Morrison&’s depiction of infanticide regenders Orlando Patterson&’s theory of social death, and how Mary Prince&’s eighteenth-century fugitive slave narrative is resignified through the representational paradoxes of Gayl Jones&’s blues novel Corregidora. Throughout, Kaplan offers new perspectives on Black motherhood and gendered labor, from debates over the relationship between President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, to the demise of racist icon Aunt Jemima, to discussions of Black reproductive freedom and abortion. The Black Reproductive gives vital insight into the historic and ongoing conditions of Black unfreedom, and points to the possibilities for a Black feminist practice of individual and collective freedom.
Black Resistance in the Americas
by D. A. Dunkley Stephanie ShonekanAll across the US in the last few years, there has been a resurgence of Black protest against structural racism and other forms of racial injustice. Black Resistance in the Americas draws attention to this renewed energy and how this theme of resistance intersects with other communities of Black people around the world. This edited collection examines in depth stories of resistance against slavery, narratives of resistance in African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latin American Literature, resistance in politics, education, religion, music, dance, and film, exploring a range of new perspectives from established and emerging researchers on Black communities. The essays in this pivotal book discuss some of the mechanisms that Black communities have used to resist bondage, domination, disempowerment, inequality, and injustices resulting from their encounters with the West, from colonization to forced migration.
The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery
by Matt SandlerThe prophetic poetry of slavery and its abolitionDuring the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers—enslaved and free—allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility. These Black writers borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism—lyric poetry, prophetic visions--to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. At the same time, they voiced anxieties about the expansion of global capital and US imperial power in the aftermath of slavery. They also focused on the ramifications of slavery's sexual violence. Authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Moses Horton, Albery Allson Whitman, and Joshua McCarter Simpson conceived the Civil War as a revolutionary upheaval on par with Europe's stormy Age of Revolutions. The Black Romantic Revolution proposes that the Black Romantics' cultural innovations have shaped Black radical culture to this day, from the blues and hip hop to Black nationalism and Black feminism. Their expressions of love and rage, grief and determination, dreams and nightmares, still echo into our present.