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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.

For many black Americans, the prominence and success of black Cubans in early efforts for independence and abolition highlighted a sense of racial identity and pride, while after U.S. intervention the suppression of Afro-Cuban aspirations created a strong interest among African-Americans concerning Cuban affairs. This collection, edited by a black Cuban and a black American, traces the relations between Cubans and African-Americans from the abolitionist era to the Cuban Revolution of 1959.

The eleven essays gathered here, written by scholars from both countries, heighten our appreciation of African-Americans as international actors and challenge the notion that Cubans had little or no race consciousness. This is the  first study of the world capitalist system to track the international consciousness of working peoples, peoples of color, and women. With a focus on two sets of peoples not in state power, Between Race and Empire expands our understanding of "history from below," and reflects current trends in PanAfricanist and African Diaspora studies by tracing  a little-studied linkage between two peoples of African descent.

Black British Cultural Studies has attracted significant attention recently in the American academy both as a model for cultural studies generally and as a corrective to reigning constructions of Blackness within African-American studies. This anthology offers the first book-length selection of writings by key figures in this field.

From Stuart Hall's classic study of racially structured societies to an interview by Manthia Diawara with Sonia Boyce, a leading figure in the Black British arts movement, the papers included here have transformed cultural studies through their sustained focus on the issue of race. Much of the book centers on Black British arts, especially film, ranging from a historical overview of Black British cinema to a weighing of the costly burden on Black artists of representing their communities. Other essays consider such topics as race and representation and colonial and postcolonial discourse.

This anthology will be an invaluable and timely resource for everyone interested in cultural studies. It also has much to offer students of anthropology, sociology, media and film studies, and literary criticism.

Under apartheid, black South Africans experienced severe material and social disadvantages occasioned by the government’s policies, and they had limited time for entertainment. Still, they closely engaged with an array of textual and visual cultures in ways that shaped their responses to this period of ethical crisis. Marshaling forms of historical evidence that include passbooks, memoirs, American “B” movies, literary and genre fiction, magazines, and photocomics, Black Cultural Life in South Africa considers the importance of popular genres and audiences in the relationship between ethical consciousness and aesthetic engagement.

This study provocatively posits that states of oppression, including colonial and postcolonial rule, can elicit ethical responses to imaginative identification through encounters with popular culture, and it asks whether and how they carry over into ethical action. Its consideration of how globalized popular culture “travels” not just in material form, but also through the circuits of the imaginary, opens a new window for exploring the ethical and liberatory stakes of popular culture. Each chapter focuses on a separate genre, yet the overall interdisciplinary approach to the study of genre and argument for an expansion of ethical theory that draws on texts beyond the Western canon speak to growing concerns about studying genres and disciplines in isolation. Freed from oversimplified treatments of popular forms—common to cultural studies and ethical theory alike—this book demonstrates that people can do things with mass culture that reinvigorate ethical life.

Lily Saint’s new volume will interest Africanists across the humanities and the social sciences, and scholars of Anglophone literary, globalization, and cultural studies; race; ethical theories and philosophies; film studies; book history and material cultures; and the burgeoning field of comics and graphic novels.

"A shrewdly designed, generously expansive, timely contribution to our understanding of how 'black' expression continues to define and defy the contours of global (post)modernity. The essays argue persuasively for a transnational ethos binding disparate African and diasporic enactments, and together provide a robust conversation about the nature, history, future, and even possibility of 'blackness' as a distinctive mode of cultural practice."
--Kimberly Benston, author of Performing Blackness

"Black Cultural Traffic is nothing less than our generation's manifesto on black performance and popular culture. With a distinguished roster of contributors and topics ranging across academic disciplines and the arts (including commentary on film, music, literature, theater, television, and visual cultures), this volume is not only required reading for scholars serious about the various dimensions of black performance, it is also a timely and necessary teaching tool. It captures the excitement and intellectual innovation of a field that has come of age. Kudos!"
--Dwight A. McBride, author of Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch

"The explosion of interest in black popular culture studies in the past fifteen years has left a significant need for a reader that reflects this new scholarly energy. Black Cultural Traffic answers that need."
--Mark Anthony Neal, author of Songs in the Key of Black Life

"A revolutionary anthology that will be widely read and taught. It crisscrosses continents and cultures and examines confluences and influences of black popular culture -- music, dance, theatre, television, fashion and film. It also adds a new dimension to current discussions of racial, ethnic, and national identity."
--Horace Porter, author of The Making of a Black Scholar

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.

In the struggle against apartheid, one often overlooked group of crusaders was the coterie of black lawyers who overcame the Byzantine system that the government established oftentimes explicitly to block the paths of its black citizens from achieving justice.

Now, in their own voices, we have the narratives of many of those lawyers as recounted in a series of oral interviews. Black Lawyers, White Courts is their story and the anti-apartheid story that has before now gone untold.

Professor Kenneth Broun conducted interviews with twenty-seven black South African lawyers. They were asked to tell about their lives, including their family backgrounds, education, careers, and their visions for the future. In many instances they also discussed their years in prison or exile, or under house arrest. Most told of both education and careers interrupted because of the ongoing struggle.

The story of the professional achievements of black lawyers in South Africa—indeed their very survival—provides an example of the triumph of individuals and, ultimately, of the law. Black Lawyers, White Courts is about South Africa, and about black professionals in that country, but the lessons its protagonists teach extend far beyond circumstances, geography, or race.

'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.

A daring collaboration among scholars, Black Sexual Economies challenges thinking that sees black sexualities as a threat to normative ideas about sexuality, the family, and the nation. The essays highlight alternative and deviant gender and sexual identities, performances, and communities, and spotlights the sexual labor, sexual economy, and sexual agency to black social life. Throughout, the writers reveal the lives, everyday negotiations, and cultural or aesthetic interventions of black gender and sexual minorities while analyzing the systems and beliefs that structure the possibilities that exist for all black sexualities. They also confront the mechanisms of domination and subordination attached to the political and socioeconomic forces, cultural productions, and academic work that interact with the energies at the nexus of sexuality and race. Contributors: Marlon M. Bailey, Lia T. Bascomb, Felice Blake, Darius Bost, Ariane Cruz, Adrienne D. Davis, Pierre Dominguez, David B. Green Jr., Jillian Hernandez, Cheryl D. Hicks, Xavier Livermon, Jeffrey McCune, Mireille Miller-Young, Angelique Nixon, Shana L. Redmond, Matt Richardson, L. H. Stallings, Anya M. Wallace, and Erica Lorraine Williams

“The same rebellion, the same impatience, the same anger that exists in the hearts of the dark people in Africa and Asia,” Malcolm X declared in a 1962 speech, “is existing in the hearts and minds of 20 million black people in this country who have been just as thoroughly colonized as the people in Africa and Asia.” Four decades later, the hip-hop artist Talib Kweli gave voice to a similar Pan-African sentiment in the song “K.O.S. (Determination)”: “The African diaspora represents strength in numbers, a giant can't slumber forever.”

Linking discontent and unrest in Harlem and Los Angeles to anticolonial revolution in Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere, Black leaders in the United States have frequently looked to the anti-imperialist movements and antiracist rhetoric of the Muslim Third World for inspiration. In Black Star, Crescent Moon, Sohail Daulatzai maps the rich, shared history between Black Muslims, Black radicals, and the Muslim Third World, showing how Black artists and activists imagined themselves not as national minorities but as part of a global majority, connected to larger communities of resistance. Daulatzai traces these interactions and alliances from the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power era to the “War on Terror,” placing them within a broader framework of American imperialism, Black identity, and the global nature of white oppression.

From Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali to contemporary artists and activists like Rakim and Mos Def, Black Star, Crescent Moon reveals how Muslim resistance to imperialism came to occupy a central position within the Black radical imagination, offering a new perspective on the political and cultural history of Black internationalism from the 1950s to the present.

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.

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.

For much of the twentieth century Brazil enjoyed an international reputation as a “racial democracy,” but that image has been largely undermined in recent decades by research suggesting the existence of widespread racial inequality.  George Reid Andrews provides the first thoroughly documented history of Brazilian racial inequality from the abolition of slavery in 1888 up to the late 1980s, showing how economic, social, and political changes in Brazil during the last one hundred years have shaped race relations.
    No laws of segregation or apartheid exist in Brazil, but by looking carefully at government policies, data on employment, mainstream and Afro-Brazilian newspapers, and a variety of other sources, Andrews traces pervasive discrimination against Afro-Brazilians over time.  He draws his evidence from the country’s largest and most economically important state, São Paulo, showing how race relations were affected by its transformation from a plantation-based economy to South America’s most urban, industrialized society.
    The book focuses first on Afro-Brazilians' entry into the agricultural and urban working class after the abolition of slavery.  This transition, Andrews argues, was seriously hampered by state policies giving the many European immigrants of the period preference over black workers.  As immigration declined and these policies were overturned in the late 1920s, black laborers began to be employed in agriculture and industry on nearly equal terms with whites.  Andrews then surveys efforts of blacks to move into the middle class during the 1900s.  He finds that informal racial solidarity among middle-class whites has tended to exclude Afro-Brazilians from the professions and other white-collar jobs.
    Andrews traces how discrimination throughout the century led Afro-Brazilians to mobilize, first through the antislavery movement of the 1880s, then through such social and political organizations of the 1920s and 1930s as the Brazilian Black Front, and finally through the anti-racism movements of the 1970s and 1980s.  These recent movements have provoked much debate among Brazilians over their national image as a racial democracy.  It remains to be seen, Andrews concludes, whether that debate will result in increased opportunities for black Brazilians.

Winner of the 1993 Arthur P. Whitaker Prize

How did South Africans become black? How did the idea of blackness influence conceptions of disadvantaged groups in England such as women and the poor, and vice versa?

Bringing the Empire Home tracks colonial images of blackness from South Africa to England and back again to answer questions such as these. Before the mid-1800s, black Africans were considered savage to the extent that their plight mirrored England's internal Others—women, the poor, and the Irish. By the 1900s, England's minority groups were being defined in relation to stereotypes of black South Africans. These stereotypes, in turn, were used to justify both new capitalist class and gender hierarchies in England and the subhuman treatment of blacks in South Africa. Bearing this in mind, Zine Magubane considers how marginalized groups in both countries responded to these racialized representations.

Revealing the often overlooked links among ideologies of race, class, and gender, Bringing the Empire Home demonstrates how much black Africans taught the English about what it meant to be white, poor, or female.