front cover of Being Somebody and Black Besides
Being Somebody and Black Besides
An Untold Memoir of Midcentury Black Life
George B. Nesbitt
University of Chicago Press, 2021
An immersive multigenerational memoir that recounts the hopes, injustices, and triumphs of a Black family fighting for access to the American dream in the twentieth century.

The late Chicagoan George Nesbitt could perhaps best be described as an ordinary man with an extraordinary gift for storytelling. In his newly uncovered memoir—written fifty years ago, yet never published—he chronicles in vivid and captivating detail the story of how his upwardly mobile Midwestern Black family lived through the tumultuous twentieth century.
 
Spanning three generations, Nesbitt’s tale starts in 1906 with the Great Migration and ends with the Freedom Struggle in the 1960s. He describes his parents’ journey out of the South, his struggle against racist military authorities in World War II, the promise and peril of Cold War America, the educational and professional accomplishments he strove for and achieved, the lost faith in integration, and, despite every hardship, the unwavering commitment by three generations of Black Americans to fight for a better world. Through all of it—with his sharp insights, nuance, and often humor—we see a family striving to lift themselves up in a country that is working to hold them down.
 
Nesbitt’s memoir includes two insightful forewords: one by John Gibbs St. Clair Drake (1911–90), a pioneer in the study of African American life, the other a contemporary rumination by noted Black studies scholar Imani Perry. A rare first-person, long-form narrative about Black life in the twentieth century, Being Somebody and Black Besides is a remarkable literary-historical time capsule that will delight modern readers.
[more]

front cover of Seven Trees Against the Dying Light
Seven Trees Against the Dying Light
A Bilingual Edition
Pablo Antonio Cuadra
Northwestern University Press, 2007

Standing against the visible landscape—the mountainous volcanoes, the jungles and savannahs—the seven trees conjured in these narrative poems by one of Latin America's masters also evoke another, more mysterious terrain.  It is this other landscape, as invisible as poetry before it is written down but etched by history and animated by the collective memory of a people, that speaks through Pablo Antonio Cuadra’s Seven Trees against the Dying Light.            

Storing experience as they exist, these tree-poems conserve local soil and memory in the place they inhabit. They are figures of life, stained by seawater and gun powder, by the bright red, bittersweet juice of the many life-giving plums that flourish in Nicaragua, and blood that has been spilled there.  And they offer a way of remembering who we are, where we come from, and, above all, where we are bound if we cannot learn to root language in the earth that sustains us.            

Printed here in Spanish with facing English translations, the edition includes an introduction with ecocritical focus, as well as complete notes on botanical, historical, mythological, and socio-political references.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter