384 books match the query 'Black Studies (Global)' and 56 start with b

cover of Barack Obama and African Diasporas: Dialogues and Dissensions

Barack Obama and African Diasporas

Dialogues and Dissensions

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

Ohio University Press, 2009

An active blogger on The Zeleza Post, from which these essays are drawn, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza provides a genuinely critical engagement with Africa’s multiple worlds. With a blend of erudition and lively style, Zeleza writes about the role of Africa and Africans in the world and the interaction of the world with Africa.

In the title essay, Zeleza analyzes the significance of the election of a member of the African diaspora to the presidency of the United States. He also addresses Africa’s urgent political concerns: China’s role in Africa, South Africa's difficulties in making the transition to a postapartheid society, the agony of Zimbabwe, and a discussion of Pan-Africanism, its history and contemporary challenges. Other posts introduce the reader to the rhythms of daily life, including football and other leisure activities, in capturing the different aspects of Africa.

An original and respected voice, Zeleza engages the reader in a series of passionate public conversations on issues and events of utmost importance to the globalized world. He deserves a wide readership.
[more]
cover of Basketball Trafficking: Stolen Black Panamanian Dreams

Basketball Trafficking

Stolen Black Panamanian Dreams

Javier Wallace

Duke University Press, 2025

Tito is a Black Panamanian teenager whose hoop dreams include playing in the NBA. When a private high school in Texas recruits him under the guise of an athletic scholarship, he believes he’s one step closer. Instead, he becomes entangled in a system that exploits young Black athletes through the F-1 student visa program. In Basketball Trafficking, Javier Wallace follows Tito’s journey from international tournaments and high school to his near deportation, exposing the underbelly of the basketball pipeline that stretches across borders. Wallace situates Tito’s experience within a broader framework of anti-Blackness, labor exploitation, and the unchecked power of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and US immigration system. Tito’s story is more than a sports story—it is an urgent account of the policing and manipulation of Black male athletic labor for institutional profit. Prompting readers to consider how the global athletic industrial complex extracts and discards Black labor, Wallace demands that readers see young Black athletes like Tito not just as bodies for entertainment but as human beings whose dreams, struggles, and lives matter.
[more]
cover of Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize

Becoming Creole

Nature and Race in Belize

Johnson, Melissa A.

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Becoming Creole explores how people become who they are through their relationships with the natural world, and it shows how those relationships are also always embedded in processes of racialization that create blackness, brownness, and whiteness. Taking the reader into the lived experience of Afro-Caribbean people who call the watery lowlands of Belize home, Melissa A. Johnson traces Belizean Creole peoples’ relationships with the plants, animals, water, and soils around them, and analyzes how these relationships intersect with transnational racial assemblages. She provides a sustained analysis of how processes of racialization are always present in the entanglements between people and the non-human worlds in which they live. 
[more]
cover of Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo

Being La Dominicana

Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo

Rachel Afi Quinn

University of Illinois Press, 2021

Rachel Afi Quinn investigates how visual media portray Dominican women and how women represent themselves in their own creative endeavors in response to existing stereotypes. Delving into the dynamic realities and uniquely racialized gendered experiences of women in Santo Domingo, Quinn reveals the way racial ambiguity and color hierarchy work to shape experiences of identity and subjectivity in the Dominican Republic. She merges analyses of context and interviews with young Dominican women to offer rare insights into a Caribbean society in which the tourist industry and popular media reward, and rely upon, the ability of Dominican women to transform themselves to perform gender, race, and class.

Engaging and astute, Being La Dominicana reveals the little-studied world of today's young Dominican women and what their personal stories and transnational experiences can tell us about the larger neoliberal world.

[more]
cover of Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners

Beneath the Surface

A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners

Lynn M. Thomas

Duke University Press, 2020

For more than a century, skin lighteners have been a ubiquitous feature of global popular culture—embraced by consumers even as they were fiercely opposed by medical professionals, consumer health advocates, and antiracist thinkers and activists. In Beneath the Surface, Lynn M. Thomas constructs a transnational history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond. Analyzing a wide range of archival, popular culture, and oral history sources, Thomas traces the changing meanings of skin color from precolonial times to the postcolonial present. From indigenous skin-brightening practices and the rapid spread of lighteners in South African consumer culture during the 1940s and 1950s to the growth of a billion-dollar global lightener industry, Thomas shows how the use of skin lighteners and experiences of skin color have been shaped by slavery, colonialism, and segregation as well as by consumer capitalism, visual media, notions of beauty, and protest politics. In teasing out lighteners’ layered history, Thomas theorizes skin as a site for antiracist struggle and lighteners as a technology of visibility that both challenges and entrenches racial and gender hierarchies.
[more]
cover of Between Brown and Black: Anti-Racist Activism in Brazil

Between Brown and Black

Anti-Racist Activism in Brazil

Antonio José Bacelar da Silva

Rutgers University Press, 2022

With new momentum, the Brazilian black movement is working to bring attention to and change the situation of structural racism in Brazil. Black consciousness advocates are challenging Afro-Brazilians to define themselves and politically organize around being black, and more Afro-Brazilians are increasingly doing so. Other segments of the Brazilian black movement are working to influence legislation and implement formal mechanisms that aim to promote racial equality, including Affirmative Action Racial Verification Committees. For advocates of these committees, one needs to be phenotypically black enough to be a more likely target of racism to qualify for Affirmative Action programs. Paradoxically, individuals are told to identify as black but only some people are considered black enough to benefit from these policies. Afro-Brazilians are presented with a whole range of identity choices, from how to classify oneself, to whether one votes for political candidates based on shared racial experiences. Between Brown and Black argues that Afro-Brazilian activists’ continued exploration of blackness confronts anti-blackness while complicating understandings of what it means to be black. Blending linguistic and ethnographic accounts, this book raises complex questions about current black struggles in Brazil and beyond, including the black movements’ political initiatives and antiracist agenda.
[more]
cover of Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean

Between Fitness and Death

Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean

Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy

University of Illinois Press, 2020

Long before the English became involved in the African slave trade, they imagined Africans as monstrous and deformed beings. The English drew on pre-existing European ideas about monstrosity and deformity to argue that Africans were a monstrous race, suspended between human and animal, and as such only fit for servitude. Joining blackness to disability transformed English ideas about defective bodies and minds. It also influenced understandings of race and ability even as it shaped the embodied reality of people enslaved in the British Caribbean.

Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy provides a three-pronged analysis of disability in the context of Atlantic slavery. First, she examines the connections of enslavement and representations of disability and the parallel development of English anti-black racism. From there, she moves from realms of representation to reality in order to illuminate the physical, emotional, and psychological impairments inflicted by slavery and endured by the enslaved. Finally, she looks at slave law as a system of enforced disablement.

Audacious and powerful, Between Fitness and Death is a groundbreaking journey into the entwined histories of racism and ableism.

[more]
cover of Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined

Between Shadows and Noise

Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined

Amber Jamilla Musser

Duke University Press, 2024

In Between Shadows and Noise Amber Jamilla Musser theorizes sensation as a Black feminist method for aesthetic interpretation and criticism that uses the knowledges held by the body to access the unrepresentable. Thinking through Blackness, empire, and colonialism, Musser examines artworks ranging from Ming Smith’s Flamingo Fandango, Jordan Peele’s Us, and Katherine Dunham’s Shango to Samita Sinha’s This ember state, Titus Kaphar’s A Pillow for Fragile Fictions, and Teresita Fernández’s Puerto Rico (Burned) 6. She engages with these works from an embodied situatedness to grapple with the questions and sensations of racialization and difference that the works produce. Throughout, Musser rethinks how we consider the relationships between race, representation, and politics by dwelling in those spaces and concepts that elude Western norms of representation, objectivity, and logic. In so doing, she explores ways of being and knowing that exceed overdetermined parameters while offering a blueprint for sensing, imagining, and living otherwise.
[more]
cover of Beyond Boundaries: C.L.R. James and Postnational Studies

Beyond Boundaries

C.L.R. James and Postnational Studies

Edited by Christopher Gair

Pluto Press, 2006

This book brings together leading critics to explore the work of CLR James, the world-famous Carribean intellectual. It's an exciting and innovative examination of the wide impact that CLR James has had on contemporary thought -- as a historian, novelist, cultural and political theorist and activist. The contributors reinvigorate James's inspiring critical output, with particular reference to the impact he has had on cultural studies.

Invaluable for students of post-colonial studies, the book examines points where James crosses with other theorists, such as Lacan and Gramsci. Racial identity and cultural politics are key themes in his work, not to mention his unique writings on cricket. Contributors including Donald E Pease, Nicole King, Christopher Gair and Anthony Bogues illuminate the key themes in James's writing, and put forward the idea that the breath of James's thinking can be identified as the beginning of 'post-national' studies.

Christopher Gair is a lecturer in the Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham. He is the author of Complicity and Resistance in Jack London¹ s Novels (Edwin Mullen Press, 1997), of The American Counterculture (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press, 2006), and of numerous essays on American literature and culture. He is the editor of the journal Symbiosis.

[more]
cover of Beyond Constraint: Middle/Passages of Blackness and Indigeneity in the Radical Tradition

Beyond Constraint

Middle/Passages of Blackness and Indigeneity in the Radical Tradition

Shona N. Jackson

Duke University Press, 2024

In Beyond Constraint, Shona N. Jackson offers a new approach to labour and its analysis by demonstrating the fundamental relation between black and Indigenous People’s sovereign, free, and coerced labour in the Americas. Through the writings of Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, and Sylvia Wynter, Jackson confronts the elision of Indigenous People’s labour in the black radical tradition. She argues that this elision is an effect of the structural relation of antiblackness to anti-indigeneity through which native and black bodies are arranged on either side of a split between unproductive labour and productive work necessary for capital accumulation and for how we read capital in political economic critique. This division between labour and work forces the radical tradition to sustain the break between black and Indigenous peoples as part of its critical strategies of liberation. To address this impasse, Jackson reads the tradition against the grain for openings to indigeneity and a method for recovering lost labours.
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cover of Beyond Sanctuary: The Humanism of a World in Motion

Beyond Sanctuary

The Humanism of a World in Motion

Ananya Roy and Veronika Zablotsky, editors

Duke University Press, 2025

The contributors to Beyond Sanctuary examine how the liberal democracies of the West recognize and include racial others through technologies of state power that promise but rarely grant sanctuary and refuge. Conceptualized at a time of resurgent white nationalism, this volume critically interrogates not only right-wing xenophobia but also the liberal ruse of asylum and its place in Western humanism. Drawing on the liberatory histories and countercartographies of migrant movements and the intellectual traditions of the Black radical tradition, Indigenous studies, postcolonial thought, and critical refugee studies, the contributors analyze the colonial-racial logics of humanitarian reason and its carceral geographies of camps and crossings. Whether analyzing guerrilla art projects that memorialize female migrants who died crossing the US-Mexico border, schools for undocumented students, housing solidarity movements in state-run camps in Greece, or transnational struggles for abolition, this collection foregrounds ideas and practices of fugitivity and freedom that refuse and reworld the West.

Contributors. Leisy Abrego, Damon Azali-Rojas, Amy Sara Carroll, Sharad Chari, Nicholas De Genova, Ricardo Dominguez, Lorgia García-Peña, Sarah Haley, Gaye Theresa Johnson, Moon-Kie Jung, Maria Kaika, Saree Makdisi, Kyle T. Mays, Ananya Roy, Charles Sepulveda, SA Smythe, Vanessa E. Thompson, Charalampos Tsavdaroglou, João H. Costa Vargas, Rinaldo Walcott, Veronika Zablotsky, Maite Zubiaurre
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cover of Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985

Black Athena

Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985

Edited by Martin Bernal

Rutgers University Press, 1987

Could Greek philosophy be rooted in Egyptian thought? Is it possible that the Pythagorean theory was conceived on the shores of the Nile and the Euphrates rather than in ancient Greece? Could it be that much of Western civilization was formed on the “Dark Continent”? For almost two centuries, Western scholars have given little credence to the possibility of such scenarios.

 In Black Athena, an audacious three-volume series that strikes at the heart of today’s most heated culture wars, Martin Bernal challenges Eurocentric attitudes by calling into question two of the longest-established explanations for the origins of classical civilization. To use his terms, the Aryan Model, which is current today, claims that Greek culture arose as the result of the conquest from the north by Indo-European speakers, or “Aryans,” of the native “pre-Hellenes.” The Ancient Model, which was maintained in Classical Greece, held that the native population of Greece had initially been civilized by Egyptian and Phoenician colonists and that additional Near Eastern culture had been introduced to Greece by Greeks studying in Egypt and Southwest Asia. Moving beyond these prevailing models, Bernal proposes a Revised Ancient Model, which suggests that classical civilization in fact had deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures.

This long-awaited third and final volume of the series is concerned with the linguistic evidence that contradicts the Aryan Model of ancient Greece. Bernal shows how nearly 40 percent of the Greek vocabulary has been plausibly derived from two Afroasiatic languages—Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic. He also reveals how these derivations are not limited to matters of trade, but extended to the sophisticated language of politics, religion, and philosophy. This evidence, according to Bernal, greatly strengthens the hypothesis that in Greece an Indo-European–speaking population was culturally dominated by Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic speakers

Provocative, passionate, and colossal in scope, this volume caps a thoughtful rewriting of history that has been stirring academic and political controversy since the publication of the first volume.

[more]
cover of Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence

Black Athena

Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence

Bernal, Martin

Rutgers University Press, 1991

This volume is the second in a projected four-part series concerned with the competition between two historical models for the origins of Greek civilization. The model current today is the Aryan Model, according to which Greek culture arose as the result of the conquest from the north by Indo-European speakers or "Aryans" of the native "pre-Hellenes." The Ancient Model, which was the model maintained in Classical Greece, held that the native population of Greece had initially been civilized by Egyptian and Phoenician colonists and that more Near Eastern culture had been introduced to Greece by Greeks studying in Egypt and Southwest Asia. In these and later volumes, Martin Bernal proposes a Revised Ancient Model. According to this, the Indo-European aspects of Greek language and culture should be recognized as fundamental and the considerable non-Indo-European elements should be seen largely as Egyptian and Levantine additions to this basis.

Volume II is concerned with the archaeological and documentary evidence for contacts between Egypt and the Levant on the one hand and the Aegean on the other, during the Bronze Age from c. 3400 B.C. to c. 1100 B.C. These approaches are supplemented by information from later Greek myths, legends, religious cults, and language. The author concludes that contact between the two regions was far more extensive and influential than is generally believed. In the introduction to this volume, Bernal also responds to some reviews and criticisms of Volume I of Black Athena.

Martin Bernal is Professor of Government at Cornell University.

[more]
cover of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilation Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence

Black Athena

The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilation Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence

Martin Bernal

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Winner of the 1990 American Book Award

What is classical about Classical civilization? In one of the most audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the foundation of our thinking about this question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. But these Afroasiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied or suppressed since the eighteenth century—chiefly for racist reasons.

The popular view is that Greek civilization was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers—Aryans—from the North. But the Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this “Aryan model.” They did not see their institutions as original, but as derived from the East and from Egypt in particular.

This long-awaited third and final volume of the series is concerned with the linguistic evidence that contradicts the Aryan Model of ancient Greece. Bernal shows how nearly 40 percent of the Greek vocabulary has been plausibly derived from two Afroasiatic languages – Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic. He also reveals how these derivations are not limited to matters of trade, but extended to the sophisticated language of politics, religion, and philosophy. This evidence, according to Bernal, greatly strengthens the hypothesis that in Greece an Indo-European-speaking population was culturally dominated by Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic speakers.

Provocative, passionate, and colossal in scope, this volume caps a thoughtful rewriting of history that has been stirring academic and political controversy since the publication of the first volume.
[more]
cover of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985

Black Athena

The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985

Martin Bernal

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Winner of the 1990 American Book Award

What is classical about Classical civilization? In one of the most audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the foundation of our thinking about this question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. But these Afroasiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied or suppressed since the eighteenth century—chiefly for racist reasons.

The popular view is that Greek civilization was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers—Aryans—from the North. But the Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this “Aryan model.” They did not see their institutions as original, but as derived from the East and from Egypt in particular.

In an unprecedented tour de force, Bernal links a wide range of areas and disciplines—drama, poetry, myth, theological controversy, esoteric religion, philosophy, biography, language, historical narrative, and the emergence of “modern scholarship.”
[more]
cover of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence

Black Athena

The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence

Martin Bernal

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Winner of the 1990 American Book Award

What is classical about Classical civilization? In one of the most audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the foundation of our thinking about this question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. But these Afroasiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied or suppressed since the eighteenth century—chiefly for racist reasons.

The popular view is that Greek civilization was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers—Aryans—from the North. But the Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this “Aryan model.” They did not see their institutions as original, but as derived from the East and from Egypt in particular.

In an unprecedented tour de force, Bernal links a wide range of areas and disciplines—drama, poetry, myth, theological controversy, esoteric religion, philosophy, biography, language, historical narrative, and the emergence of “modern scholarship.”

This volume is the second in a three-part series concerned with the competition between two historical models for the origins of Greek civilization. Volume II is concerned with the archaeological and documentary evidence for contacts between Egypt and the Levant on the one hand, and the Aegean on the other, during the Bronze Age from c. 34000 BC to c. 1100 BC. These approaches are supplemented by information from later Greek myths, legends, religious cults, and language. The author concludes that contact between the two regions was far more extensive and influential than is generally believed. In the introduction to this volume, Bernal also responds to some reviews and criticism of Volume I of Black Athena.
[more]
cover of Black Bodies, Black Rights: The Politics of Quilombolismo in Contemporary Brazil

Black Bodies, Black Rights

The Politics of Quilombolismo in Contemporary Brazil

By Elizabeth Farfán-Santos

University of Texas Press, 2016

Under a provision in the Brazilian constitution, rural black communities identified as the modern descendants of quilombos—runaway slave communities—are promised land rights as a form of reparations for the historic exclusion of blacks from land ownership. The quilombo provision has been hailed as a success for black rights; however, rights for quilombolas are highly controversial and, in many cases, have led to violent land conflicts. Although thousands of rural black communities have been legally recognized, only a handful have received the rights they were promised. Conflict over quilombola rights is widespread and carries important consequences for race relations and political representations of blackness in twenty-first century Brazil.

Drawing on a year of field research in a quilombola community, Elizabeth Farfán-Santos explores how quilombo recognition has significantly affected the everyday lives of those who experience the often-complicated political process. Questions of identity, race, and entitlement play out against a community’s struggle to prove its historical authenticity—and to gain the land and rights they need to survive. This work not only demonstrates the lived experience of a new, particular form of blackness in Brazil, but also shows how blackness is being mobilized and reimagined to gain social rights and political recognition. Black Bodies, Black Rights thus represents an important contribution to the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of Afro-Latino studies.

[more]
cover of Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World

Black Bodies, White Gold

Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World

Anna Arabindan-Kesson

Duke University Press, 2021

In Black Bodies, White Gold Anna Arabindan-Kesson uses cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade and colonialism, as a focus for new interpretations of the way art, commerce, and colonialism were intertwined in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In doing so, Arabindan-Kesson models an art historical approach that makes the histories of the Black diaspora central to nineteenth-century cultural production. She traces the emergence of a speculative vision that informs perceptions of Blackness in which artistic renderings of cotton—as both commodity and material—became inexorably tied to the monetary value of Black bodies. From the production and representation of “negro cloth”—the textile worn by enslaved plantation workers—to depictions of Black sharecroppers in photographs and paintings, Arabindan-Kesson demonstrates that visuality was the mechanism through which Blackness and cotton became equated as resources for extraction. In addition to interrogating the work of nineteenth-century artists, she engages with contemporary artists such as Hank Willis Thomas, Lubaina Himid, and Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, who contend with the commercial and imperial processes shaping constructions of Blackness and meanings of labor.
[more]
cover of Black Catholic Studies Reader: History and Theology

Black Catholic Studies Reader

History and Theology

David J. Endres

Catholic University of America Press, 2021

This first-ever Black Catholic Studies Reader offers an introduction to the theology and history of the Black Catholic experience from those who know it best: Black Catholic scholars, teachers, activists, and ministers. The reader offers a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary approach that illuminates what it means to be Black and Catholic in the United States. This collection of essays from prominent scholars, both past and present, brings together contributions from theologians M. Shawn Copeland, Kim Harris, Diana Hayes, Bryan Massingale, and C. Vanessa White, and historians Cecilia Moore, Diane Batts Morrow, and Ronald Sharps, and selections from an earlier generation of thinkers and activists, including Thea Bowman, Cyprian Davis, and Clarence Rivers. Contributions delve into the interlocking fields of history, spirituality, liturgy, and biography. Through their contributions, Black Catholic Studies scholars engage theologies of liberation and the reality of racism, the Black struggle for recognition within the Church, and the distinctiveness of African-inspired spirituality, prayer, and worship. By considering their racial and religious identities, these select Black Catholic theologians and historians add their voices to the contemporary conversation surrounding culture, race, and religion in America, inviting engagement from students and teachers of the American experience, social commentators and advocates, and theologians and persons of faith.
[more]
cover of Black Enlightenment

Black Enlightenment

Surya Parekh

Duke University Press, 2023

In Black Enlightenment Surya Parekh reimagines the Enlightenment from the position of the Black subject. Parekh examines the works of such Black writers as the free Jamaican Francis Williams (1697–1762), Afro-British thinker Ignatius Sancho (1729?–1780), and Afro-American poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784), placing them alongside those of their white European contemporaries David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). By rethinking the Enlightenment and its canons, Parekh complicates common understandings of the Enlightenment wherein Black subjects could exist only in negation to white subjects. Black Enlightenment points to the anxiety of race in Hume, Kant, and others while showing the importance of Black Enlightenment thought. Parekh prompts us to consider the timeliness of reading Black Enlightenment authors who become “free” in a society hostile to that freedom.
[more]
cover of Black Environmentalisms

Black Environmentalisms

Cajetan Iheka and Jonathan Howard, editors

Duke University Press, 2027

In Black Environmentalisms, editors Cajetan Iheka and Jonathan Howard reengage African and African Diaspora studies around the urgent question of environmental crisis. Probing the continuities between global antiblackness and the endangerment of planetary life, contributors argue that black life and expressive culture constitute unique sources of ecological thought and practice. Across a wide variety of black geographies and thought, their essays bear witness to not only black ecological precarity but also the cultivational practices that people of African descent have summoned over time to combat their exploitation and enact a living relationship to the earth. As they show, the rich practices of black communities emerge from a radical alignment with, rather than paternalistic conservation of, the nonhuman natural world. Reimagining environmentalism beyond the limits of western humanism, Black Environmentalisms charts new pathways of environmental criticism by foregrounding the ecological worldmaking practices of black people across the planet.
[more]
cover of Black Epic: Poetics in the Time of Black Lives Matter

Black Epic

Poetics in the Time of Black Lives Matter

David M. de León

Duke University Press, 2027

At the time of the Black Lives Matter protests, intricate, innovative works by Black artists filled screens, airwaves, and bookshelves. Capacious in scope, heterogeneous and polyvocal in material, and taking up space in the cultural imaginary the way that activists take up space in the public square, these works aim toward making Black lives matter from within institutions that persist on the subjugation and appropriation of Black people. In Black Epic, David M. de León elucidates the twenty-first-century Black epic form, the song of the collective that takes up space and builds new worlds. Drawing on Kevin Quashie’s black aliveness, Édouard Glissant’s nation consciousness, and Richard Iton’s black fantastic, they describe how Tyehimba Jess, Claudia Rankine, Robin Coste Lewis, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and others create space in antiblackness to imagine a Black world. With keen attention to how poetics—language, poetry, music, dance, marches, riots, and informal politics—bend the cultural imaginary, de León reveals the Black epic as a self-monumentalizing totality that subsumes oppression into a new story, a Black story.
[more]
cover of Black Europe and the African Diaspora

Black Europe and the African Diaspora

Edited by Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small

University of Illinois Press, 2009

The presence of Blacks in a number of European societies has drawn increasing interest from scholars, policymakers, and the general public. This interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary collection penetrates the multifaceted Black presence in Europe, and, in so doing, complicates the notions of race, belonging, desire, and identities assumed and presumed in revealing portraits of Black experiences in a European context. In focusing on contemporary intellectual currents and themes, the contributors theorize and re-imagine a range of historical and contemporary issues related to the broader questions of blackness, diaspora, hegemony, transnationalism, and "Black Europe" itself as lived and perceived realities. 

Contributors are Allison Blakely, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Tina Campt, Fred Constant, Alessandra Di Maio, Philomena Essed, Terri Francis, Barnor Hesse, Darlene Clark Hine, Dienke Hondius, Eileen Julien, Trica Danielle Keaton, Kwame Nimako, Tiffany Ruby Patterson, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Stephen Small, Tyler Stovall, Alexander G. Weheliye, Gloria Wekker, and Michelle M. Wright.

[more]
cover of Black Female Sexualities

Black Female Sexualities

Melancon, Trimiko

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Western culture has long regarded black female sexuality with a strange mix of fascination and condemnation, associating it with everything from desirability, hypersexuality, and liberation to vulgarity, recklessness, and disease. Yet even as their bodies and sexualities have been the subject of countless public discourses, black women’s voices have been largely marginalized in these discussions. In this groundbreaking collection, feminist scholars from across the academy come together to correct this omission—illuminating black female sexual desires marked by agency and empowerment, as well as pleasure and pain, to reveal the ways black women regulate their sexual lives. 

The twelve original essays in Black Female Sexualities reveal the diverse ways black women perceive, experience, and represent sexuality. The contributors highlight the range of tactics that black women use to express their sexual desires and identities. Yet they do not shy away from exploring the complex ways in which black women negotiate the more traumatic aspects of sexuality and grapple with the legacy of negative stereotypes. 

Black Female Sexualities takes not only an interdisciplinary approach—drawing from critical race theory, sociology, and performance studies—but also an intergenerational one, in conversation with the foremothers of black feminist studies. In addition, it explores a diverse archive of representations, covering everything from blues to hip-hop, from Crash to Precious, from Sister Souljah to Edwidge Danticat. Revealing that black female sexuality is anything but a black-and-white issue, this collection demonstrates how to appreciate a whole spectrum of subjectivities, experiences, and desires.  
[more]
cover of Black Feminist Anthropology, 25th Anniversary Edition: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics

Black Feminist Anthropology, 25th Anniversary Edition

Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics

Irma McClaurin

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis and Poetics is a groundbreaking collection that centers the imaginative intellectual perspectives, voices, and experiences of Black American feminist anthropologists.  Twenty-five years ago, as the Foreword states, this book dared to put three words together in the title—Black. Feminist. Anthropology— “that have not always kept company with each other—and in the minds of many both in and outside of the academy, they should remain separate.” Standing the test of time, it is still a bold reimagining of anthropology, and all social sciences, as inclusive and decolonized, while establishing a new Black feminist anthropology canon that decades later is too often taken for granted as normative. Black Feminist Anthropology is filled with a message of theoretical possibilities that anyone who enters its pages will find “healing,” “life-saving,” and an affirmation that Black women anthropologists have contributed much to the theory, politics, praxis and poetics of anthropology, gender and women’s studies, masculinity studies, queer studies, the social sciences generally, and any other discipline that seeks transformation from the inside out. It is both an archive and a legacy for the next generation.
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cover of Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics

Black Feminist Anthropology

Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics

McClaurin, Irma

Rutgers University Press, 2001

In the discipline's early days, anthropologists by definition were assumed to be white and male. Women and black scholars were relegated to the field's periphery. From this marginal place, white feminist anthropologists have successfully carved out an acknowledged intellectual space, identified as feminist anthropology. Unfortunately, the works of black and non-western feminist anthropologists are rarely cited, and they have yet to be respected as significant shapers of the direction and transformation of feminist anthropology.

In this volume, Irma McClaurin has collected-for the first time-essays that explore the role and contributions of black feminist anthropologists. She has asked her contributors to disclose how their experiences as black women have influenced their anthropological practice in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, and how anthropology has influenced their development as black feminists. Every chapter is a unique journey that enables the reader to see how scholars are made. The writers present material from their own fieldwork to demonstrate how these experiences were shaped by their identities. Finally, each essay suggests how the author's field experiences have influenced the theoretical and methodological choices she has made throughout her career.

Not since Diane Wolf's Feminist Dilemmas in the Field or Hortense Powdermaker's Stranger and Friend have we had such a breadth of women anthropologists discussing the critical (and personal) issues that emerge when doing ethnographic research.
[more]
cover of Black Feminist Constellations: Dialogue and Translation across the Americas

Black Feminist Constellations

Dialogue and Translation across the Americas

Edited by Christen A. Smith and Lorraine Leu

University of Texas Press, 2023

A collection of essays, interviews, and conversations by and between scholars, activists, and artists from Latin America and the Caribbean that paints a portrait of Black women's experiences across the region.

Black women in Latin America and the Caribbean suffer a triple erasure: as Black people, as women, and as non-English speakers in a global environment dominated by the Anglophone North. Black Feminist Constellations is a passionate and necessary corrective. Focused on and written by Black women of the southern Americas, the original works composing this volume make legible the epistemologies that sustain radical scholarship, art, and political organizing by Black women everywhere.

In essays, poems, and dialogues, the writers in Black Feminist Constellations reimagine liberation from the perspectives of radical South American and Caribbean Black women thinkers. The volume’s methodologically innovative approach reflects how Black women come together to theorize the world and challenges the notion that the university is the only site where knowledge can emerge. A major work of intellectual history, Black Feminist Constellations amplifies rarely heard voices, centers the uncanonized, and celebrates the overlooked work of Black women.

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cover of Black Gurl Reliable: Pedagogies of Vulnerability and Transgression

Black Gurl Reliable

Pedagogies of Vulnerability and Transgression

Dominique C. Hill

Vanderbilt University Press, 2025

Black Gurl Reliable does the original work of curating Black girls’ and women’s experiences and experiential knowledge, indexing sociocultural tactics (schooling) that foreclose Black girl aliveness, while advancing embodiment as a key ingredient of Black mattering. Elevating Black Girlhood Studies as an ethos, narratives presented offer redress to inequities and hauntings of race-gender structures of dominance and position Black girls and girlhood as more than lamentation and what happens to the body. Hill solicits the strength and utility of arts-based methods in capturing identity, performance, and experimental design for ephemerality and improvisation. Hill makes clear Black feminism’s insistence that knowledge and possibility are produced through the body.

As a means of mitigating the deleterious effects of schooling on Black girls’ and women’s bodies and making legible the insights and knowledge produced from schooling experiences, Hill introduces the concept of Transgressngroove. This living feminist practice explores the relationships between Black girlhood, education, and the body, as researched for over a decade through workshops, consulting, classrooms, personal development, and other teaching/learning spaces.
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cover of Black Life Matter: Blackness, Religion, and the Subject

Black Life Matter

Blackness, Religion, and the Subject

Biko Mandela Gray

Duke University Press, 2022

In Black Life Matter, Biko Mandela Gray offers a philosophical eulogy for Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, and Sandra Bland that attests to their irreducible significance in the face of unremitting police brutality. Gray employs a theoretical method he calls “sitting-with”—a philosophical practice of care that seeks to defend the dead and the living. He shows that the police who killed Stanley-Jones and Rice reduced them to their bodies in ways that turn black lives into tools that the state uses to justify its violence and existence. He outlines how Bland’s arrest and death reveal the affective resonances of blackness, and he contends that Sterling’s physical movement and speech before he was killed point to black flesh as unruly living matter that exceeds the constraints of the black body. These four black lives, Gray demonstrates, were more than the brutal violence enacted against them; they speak to a mode of life that cannot be fully captured by the brutal logics of antiblackness.
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cover of Black Magic City: How Gods, Money, and Healing Shaped Rio de Janeiro

Black Magic City

How Gods, Money, and Healing Shaped Rio de Janeiro

Ana Paulina Lee

Duke University Press, 2027

In Black Magic City, Ana Paulina Lee tells the untold story of how “black magic” became one of modern Brazil’s most dangerous and revealing phrases for governing life after slavery. Drawing on criminal trials, archives, literature, and anthropology, Lee shows how authorities turned ritual into evidence, sacred objects into contraband, healing into crime, and care into fraud. Lee restores the worlds that policing tried and failed to contain: women who read cards and palms, Afro-Brazilian healers who offered protection and counsel, migrants searching for spiritual aid, and writers who saw magic as one of the hidden engines of modern life. Lee offers a vivid new history of religion, race, law, and urban power in Brazil and reveals how accusations of black magic helped define the boundaries of freedom, labor, sexuality, and religious legitimacy after slavery. At once a story of repression and survival, Black Magic City shows how modern Rio was made through battles over who could heal, who could believe, and who had the power to decide what counted as crime.
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cover of Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics

Black Movements

Performance and Cultural Politics

Colbert, Soyica Diggs

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Received the 2018 Honorable Mention for the Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre​

Black Movements analyzes how artists and activists of recent decades reference earlier freedom movements in order to imagine and produce a more expansive and inclusive democracy. The post–Jim Crow, post–apartheid, postcolonial era has ushered in a purportedly color blind society and along with it an assault on race-based forms of knowledge production and coalition formation. Soyica Diggs Colbert argues that in the late twentieth century race went “underground,” and by the twenty-first century race no longer functioned as an explicit marker of second-class citizenship.

The subterranean nature of race manifests itself in discussions of the Trayvon Martin shooting that focus on his hoodie, an object of clothing that anyone can choose to wear, rather than focusing on structural racism; in discussions of the epidemic proportions of incarcerated black and brown people that highlight the individual’s poor decision making rather than the criminalization of blackness; in evaluations of black independence struggles in the Caribbean and Africa that allege these movements have accomplished little more than creating a black ruling class that mirrors the politics of its former white counterpart. Black Movements intervenes in these discussions by highlighting the ways in which artists draw from the past to create coherence about blackness in present and future worlds.

Through an exploration of the way that black movements create circuits connecting people across space and time, Black Movements offers important interventions into performance, literary, diaspora, and African American studies.
[more]
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Black Orpheus and the Globalization of Afro-Brazilian Culture

Darién J. Davis

Rutgers University Press, 2026

“Black Orpheus” and the Globalization of Afro-Brazilian Culture is the first historical study in English to examine the development, production, and reception of the 1958 film Black Orpheus and its legacy in the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the making of the film and the trajectories of the major actors and musicians who helped construct an image of Black Brazil and provides an analysis of the globalization of Afro-Brazilian images and music in France and the United States in the wake of the movie’s success. Using archival sources, interviews, and the secondary literature from France, Brazil, and the United States, this book reveals information about the cultural histories of all three countries and gives readers new insight into the trajectories of diverse actors such as Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn, and Léa Garcia and performers such as Agostinho dos Santos, Baden Powell, and Maria D’Apparecida.

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cover of Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time

Black Paper

Writing in a Dark Time

Teju Cole

University of Chicago Press, 2021

A profound book of essays from a celebrated master of the form.

“Darkness is not empty,” writes Teju Cole in Black Paper, a book that meditates on what it means to sustain our humanity—and witness the humanity of others—in a time of darkness. One of the most celebrated essayists of his generation, Cole here plays variations on the essay form, modeling ways to attend to experience—not just to take in but to think critically about what we sense and what we don’t.

Wide-ranging but thematically unified, the essays address ethical questions about what it means to be human and what it means to bear witness, recognizing how our individual present is informed by a collective past. Cole’s writings in Black Paper approach the fractured moment of our history through a constellation of interrelated concerns: confrontation with unsettling art, elegies both public and private, the defense of writing in a time of political upheaval, the role of the color black in the visual arts, the use of shadow in photography, and the links between literature and activism. Throughout, Cole gives us intriguing new ways of thinking about blackness and its numerous connotations. As he describes the carbon-copy process in his epilogue: “Writing on the top white sheet would transfer the carbon from the black paper onto the bottom white sheet. Black transported the meaning.”
 
[more]
cover of Black People in the British Empire

Black People in the British Empire

Peter Fryer

Pluto Press, 2021

'Fantastic … the most important book on Black British history’ - Akala

Black People in the British Empire is a challenge to the official version of British history. It tells the story of Britain's exploitation and oppression of its subject peoples in its colonies, and in particular the people of Africa, Asia and Australasia

Peter Fryer reveals how the ideology of racism was used as justification for acquiring and expanding the Empire; how the British Industrial Revolution developed out of profits from the slave trade; and how the colonies were deliberately de-industrialised to create a market for British manufacturers.

In describing the frequency and the scale of revolts by subject peoples against slavery and foreign domination - and the brutality used in crushing them - Peter Fryer exposes the true history of colonialism, and restores to Black people their central role in Britain's past.
[more]
cover of Black People in the British Empire

Black People in the British Empire

Peter Fryer

Pluto Press, 2021

'Fantastic … the most important book on Black British history’ - Akala

Black People in the British Empire is a challenge to the official version of British history. It tells the story of Britain's exploitation and oppression of its subject peoples in its colonies, and in particular the people of Africa, Asia and Australasia

Peter Fryer reveals how the ideology of racism was used as justification for acquiring and expanding the Empire; how the British Industrial Revolution developed out of profits from the slave trade; and how the colonies were deliberately de-industrialised to create a market for British manufacturers.

In describing the frequency and the scale of revolts by subject peoples against slavery and foreign domination - and the brutality used in crushing them - Peter Fryer exposes the true history of colonialism, and restores to Black people their central role in Britain's past.

[more]
cover of Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire

Black Queer Freedom

Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire

GerShun Avilez

University of Illinois Press, 2020

Whether 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.
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cover of Black Sporting Resistance: Diaspora, Transnationalism, and Internationalism

Black Sporting Resistance

Diaspora, Transnationalism, and Internationalism

Joseph N. Cooper

Rutgers University Press, 2025

In recent years, there has been increased attention towards activism in sporting spaces. A vast majority of these contributions have focused on intra-nation tensions and impact. Yet, there is a dearth of scholarship that has engaged in a theoretically grounded analysis of how Black sportspersons have exhibited resistance in and through sport across national borders across time, space, and context. In this text, Joseph N. Cooper introduces the Black Sporting Resistance Framework (BSRF) as an analytic lens to examine how resistance actions in and through sport have contributed to the advancement of local and global racial justice efforts. Key concepts such as African (Black) diaspora, transnationalism, internationalism, sporting resistance typology, and sport activism typology are incorporated throughout the book. Black sporting resistance is also analyzed alongside broader social movements such as the Black Liberation Struggle, Black Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Black Radicalism. Insights on the ways in which sport can be used to advance social justice in the future are presented.
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cover of Black Star: African American Activism in the International Political Economy

Black Star

African American Activism in the International Political Economy

Ramla M. Bandele

University of Illinois Press, 2007

This book describes how the first African American mass political organization was able to gain support from throughout the African diaspora to finance the Black Star Line, a black merchant marine that would form the basis of an enclave economy after World War I. Ramla M. Bandele explores the concept of diaspora itself and how it has been applied to the study of émigré and other ethnic networks.

In characterizing the historical and political context of the Black Star Line, Bandele analyzes the international political economy during 1919-25 and considers the black politics of the era, focusing particularly on Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association for its creation of the Black Star Line. She offers an in-depth case study of the Black Star Line as an instance of the African diaspora attempting to link communities and carry out a transnational political and economic project. Arguing that ethnic networks can be legitimate actors in international politics and economics, Bandele also suggests, however, that activists in any given diaspora do not always function as a unit.

[more]
cover of Black Studies in Europe: An Anthology of Soil and Seeds

Black Studies in Europe

An Anthology of Soil and Seeds

Nicole Grégoire, Sarah Fila-Bakabadio, and Jacinthe Mazzocchetti (eds.)

Northwestern University Press, 2025

Reflecting on contemporary epistemologies of European Blackness
 
Long absent from research in the humanities and social sciences, Black people in continental Europe have become the focus of a growing body of literature in the past two decades that addresses their unique history and social positioning. Black Studies in Europe: An Anthology of Soil and Seeds brings together essays and case studies by a collective of scholars, writers, and activists to offer a critical overview of the emerging field of Black European studies and a vital reflection on contemporary epistemologies of European Blackness. This collection addresses key questions: What is Blackness from a European standpoint? Which epistemologies and theoretical tools have been used to offer a better understanding of Black experiences in Europe? How is this knowledge being produced and by whom? Can we define a common European conceptual framework for Black studies? Related to this work is an even more urgent enterprise: forging an epistemological distinction between the study of Black people and “Black studies” as an emancipatory project.
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cover of Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds

Black Utopias

Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds

Jayna Brown

Duke University Press, 2021

In 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.
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cover of Black Victorians / Black Victoriana

Black Victorians / Black Victoriana

Edited by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina

Rutgers University Press, 2003

Black Victorians/Black Victoriana is a welcome attempt to correct the historical record. Although scholarship has given us a clear view of nineteenth-century imperialism, colonialism, and later immigration from the colonies, there has for far too long been a gap in our understanding of the lives of blacks in Victorian England. Without that understanding, it remains impossible to assess adequately the state of the black population in Britain today. Using a transatlantic lens, the contributors to this book restore black Victorians to the British national picture. They look not just at the ways blacks were represented in popular culture but also at their lives as they experienced them—as workers, travelers, lecturers, performers, and professionals. Dozens of period photographs bring these stories alive and literally give a face to the individual stories the book tells.

The essays taken as a whole also highlight prevailing Victorian attitudes toward race by focusing on the ways in which empire building spawned a "subculture of blackness" consisting of caricature, exhibition, representation, and scientific racism absorbed by society at large. This misrepresentation made it difficult to be both black and British while at the same time it helped to construct British identity as a whole. Covering many topics that detail the life of blacks during this period, Black Victorians/Black Victoriana will be a landmark contribution to the emergent field of black history in England.

[more]
cover of Black Women Directors

Black Women Directors

Christina N. Baker

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Black women have long recognized the power of film for storytelling. For far too long, however, the cultural and historical narratives about film have not accounted for the contributions of Black women directors. This book remedies this omission by highlighting the trajectory of the culturally significant work of Black women directors in the United States, from the under-examined pioneers of the silent era, to the documentarians who sought to highlight the voices and struggles of Black women, and the contemporary Black women directors in Hollywood.  Applying a Black feminist perspective, this book examines the ways that Black women filmmakers have made a way for themselves and their work by resisting the dominant cultural expectations for Black women and for the medium of film, as a whole.
 

[more]
cover of Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil

Black Women against the Land Grab

The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry

University of Minnesota Press, 2013

In Brazil and throughout the African diaspora, black women, especially poor black women, are rarely considered leaders of social movements let alone political theorists. But in the northeastern city of Salvador, Brazil, it is these very women who determine how urban policies are established. Focusing on the Gamboa de Baixo neighborhood in Salvador’s city center, Black Women against the Land Grab explores how black women’s views on development have radicalized local communities to demand justice and social change.

In Black Women against the Land Grab, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry describes the key role of local women activists in the citywide movement for land and housing rights. She reveals the importance of geographic location for understanding the gendered aspects of urban renewal and the formation of black women–led social movements. How have black women shaped the politics of urban redevelopment, Perry asks, and what does this kind of political intervention tell us about black women’s agency? Her work uncovers the ways in which political labor at the neighborhood level is central to the mass mobilization of black people against institutional racism and for citizenship rights and resources in Brazil.

Highlighting the political life of black communities, specifically those in urban contexts often represented as socially pathological and politically bankrupt, Black Women against the Land Grab offers a valuable corrective to how we think about politics and about black women, particularly poor black women, as a political force.

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cover of Black Women and da ’Rona: Community, Consciousness, and Ethics of Care

Black Women and da ’Rona

Community, Consciousness, and Ethics of Care

Edited by Julia S. Jordan-Zachery and Shamara Wyllie Alhassan

University of Arizona Press, 2023

Rooted in the ways Black women understand their lives, this collection archives practices of healing, mothering, and advocacy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recognizing that Black women have been living in pandemics as far back as colonialism and enslavement, this volume acknowledges that records of the past—from the 1918 flu pandemic to the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic—often erase the existence and experiences of Black women as a whole. Writing against this archival erasure, this collection consciously recenters the real-time experiences and perspectives of care, policy concerns, grief, and joy of Black women throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nineteen contributors from interdisciplinary fields and diverse backgrounds explore Black feminine community, consciousness, ethics of care, spirituality, and social critique. They situate Black women’s multidimensional experiences with COVID-19 and other violences that affect their lives. The stories they tell are connected and interwoven, bound together by anti-Black gendered COVID necropolitics and commitments to creating new spaces for breathing, healing, and wellness.

Ultimately, this time-warping analysis shows how Black women imagine a more just society, rapidly adapt to changing experiences, and innovate ethics of care even in the midst of physical distancing, which can be instructive for thinking of new ways of living both during and beyond the era of COVID-19.

Contributors
Shamara Wyllie Alhassan
Sharnnia Artis
Keisha L. Bentley-Edwards
Candace S. Brown
Jenny Douglas
Kaja Dunn
Onisha Etkins
Rhonda M. Gonzales
Endia Hayes
Ashley E. Hollingshead
Kendra Jason
Julia S. Jordan-Zachery
Stacie LeSure
Janaka B. Lewis
Michelle Meggs
Nitya Mehrotra
Sherine Andreine Powerful
Marjorie Shavers
Breauna Marie Spencer
Tehia Starker Glass
Amber Walker
[more]
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Black and Blur

Fred Moten

Duke University Press, 2017

"Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination

In Black and Blur—the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single being—Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms. Black and Blur is marked by unlikely juxtapositions: Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and José Esteban Muñoz and artists and musicians including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other. Moten holds that blackness encompasses a range of social, aesthetic, and theoretical insurgencies that respond to a shared modernity founded upon the sociological catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. In so doing, he unsettles normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing.
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cover of Black and Green: The Fight For Civil Rights in Northern Ireland & Black America

Black and Green

The Fight For Civil Rights in Northern Ireland & Black America

Brian Dooley

Pluto Press, 1998

‘An excellent book.’ Irish Voice (New York)

'Focusing on the period from the 1960s onward, Brian Dooley suggests that the black rights struggle in the US had a formative influence on Northern Ireland's civil rights movement which adopted similar tactics of protest marches and sit-ins ... A well researched book, written from an unusual angle that illuminates this understudied international influence on the Ulster conflict' Political Studies

Ties between political activists in Black America and Ireland span several centuries, from the days of the slave trade to the close links between Frederick Douglass and Daniel O’Connell, and between Marcus Garvey and Eamon de Valera. This timely book traces those historic links and examines how the struggle for black civil rights in America in the 1960s helped shape the campaign against discrimination in Northern Ireland. The author includes interviews with key figures such as Angela Davis, Bernadette McAliskey and Eamonn McCann.
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cover of Black and White Styles in Conflict

Black and White Styles in Conflict

Thomas Kochman

University of Chicago Press, 1981

"Goes a long way toward showing a lay audience the value, integrity, and aesthetic sensibility of black culture, and moreover the conflicts which arise when its values are treated as deviant version of majority ones."—Marjorie Harness Goodwin, American Ethnologist
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cover of Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life

Black in White Space

The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life

Elijah Anderson

University of Chicago Press, 2021

From the vital voice of Elijah Anderson, Black in White Space sheds fresh light on the dire persistence of racial discrimination in our country.

A birder strolling in Central Park. A college student lounging on a university quad. Two men sitting in a coffee shop. Perfectly ordinary actions in ordinary settings—and yet, they sparked jarring and inflammatory responses that involved the police and attracted national media coverage. Why? In essence, Elijah Anderson would argue, because these were Black people existing in white spaces.
 
In Black in White Space, Anderson brings his immense knowledge and ethnography to bear in this timely study of the racial barriers that are still firmly entrenched in our society at every class level. He focuses in on symbolic racism, a new form of racism in America caused by the stubbornly powerful stereotype of the ghetto embedded in the white imagination, which subconsciously connects all Black people with crime and poverty regardless of their social or economic position. White people typically avoid Black space, but Black people are required to navigate the “white space” as a condition of their existence. From Philadelphia street-corner conversations to Anderson’s own morning jogs through a Cape Cod vacation town, he probes a wealth of experiences to shed new light on how symbolic racism makes all Black people uniquely vulnerable to implicit bias in police stops and racial discrimination in our country.
 
An unwavering truthteller in our national conversation on race, Anderson has shared intimate and sharp insights into Black life for decades. Vital and eye-opening, Black in White Space will be a must-read for anyone hoping to understand the lived realities of Black people and the structural underpinnings of racism in America. 
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cover of Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics

Black or Right

Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics

Louis M. Maraj

Utah State University Press, 2020

Black 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.
 
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cover of Black, Quare, and Then to Where: Theories of Justice and Black Sexual Ethics

Black, Quare, and Then to Where

Theories of Justice and Black Sexual Ethics

jennifer susanne leath

Duke University Press, 2023

In Black, Quare, and Then to Where jennifer susanne leath explores the relationship between Afrodiasporic theories of justice and Black sexual ethics through a womanist engagement with Maât the ancient Egyptian deity of justice and truth. Maât took into account the historical and cultural context of each human’s life, thus encompassing nuances of politics, race, gender, and sexuality. Arguing that Maât should serve as a foundation for reconfiguring Black sexual ethics, leath applies ancient Egyptian moral codes to quare ethics of the erotic, expanding what relationships and democratic practices might look like from a contemporary Maâtian perspective. She also draws on Pan-Africanism and examines the work of Alice Walker, E. Patrick Johnson, Cheikh Anta Diop, Sylvia Wynter, Sun Ra, and others. She shows that together these thinkers and traditions inform and expand the possibilities of Maâtian justice with respect to Black sexual experiences. As a moral force, leath contends, Maât opens new possibilities for mapping ethical frameworks to understand, redefine, and imagine justices in the United States.
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