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Distinctive, Powerful, Transformational

This book collects the presentations of twelve leading Africana scholars who participated in the groundbreaking #Black Scholars Matter virtual symposium held in August 2020 that was organized by the Society of Biblical Literature's Black Scholars Matter Task Force in coordination with the SBL’s Committee on Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession. These scholars share their perspectives on biblical studies and their experiences in the discipline on a range of topics, including blatant and subtle forms of bias and racism; mentoring; lessons of struggle, sacrifice, and lack of support; reflections on the obstacles of national tragedies, geographical locations, and academic disciplines; and the challenges of creating a more welcoming environment for the next generation of Black biblical scholars. Eight additional contributors and stakeholders that have administrative and decision-making responsibilities within theological and other settings address the need for institutional and personal accountability. Contributors include Efraín Agosto, Cheryl B. Anderson, Randall C. Bailey, Gay L. Byron, Ronald Charles, Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, Steed Vernyl Davidson, Sharon Watson Fluker, John F. Kutsko, Vanessa Lovelace, Madipoane Masenya (Ngwan'a Mphahlele), Raj Nadella, Hugh R. Page Jr., Adele Reinhartz, Kimberly D. Russaw, Abraham Smith, Shively T. J. Smith, Mai-Anh Le Tran, Renita J. Weems, and Vincent L. Wimbush.

Blacks under Spanish rule in Florida lived in a more complex and international world that linked the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe with a powerful and diverse Indian hinterland. Jane Landers’s pioneering study of people of the African diaspora under Spain’s colonial rule rewrites Florida history and enriches our understanding of the powerful links between race relations and cultural custom. 

As Landers shows, Spanish Florida was a sanctuary to Blacks fleeing enslavement on plantations. Castilian law, meanwhile, offered many avenues out of slavery. In St. Augustine and elsewhere, society accepted European-African unions, with families developing community connections through marriage, concubinage, and godparents. Assisted by Spanish traditions and ever-present geopolitical threats, people of African descent leveraged linguistic, military, diplomatic, and artisanal skills into citizenship and property rights. Landers details how Blacks became homesteaders, property owners, and entrepreneurs, and in the process enjoyed greater legal and social protection than in the two hundred years of Anglo history that followed.

Winner, Rollins Book Award, Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2008

Science fiction film offers its viewers many pleasures, not least of which is the possibility of imagining other worlds in which very different forms of society exist. Not surprisingly, however, these alternative worlds often become spaces in which filmmakers and film audiences can explore issues of concern in our own society. Through an analysis of over thirty canonic science fiction (SF) films, including Logan's Run, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Back to the Future, Gattaca, and Minority Report, Black Space offers a thorough-going investigation of how SF film since the 1950s has dealt with the issue of race and specifically with the representation of blackness.

Setting his study against the backdrop of America's ongoing racial struggles and complex socioeconomic histories, Adilifu Nama pursues a number of themes in Black Space. They include the structured absence/token presence of blacks in SF film; racial contamination and racial paranoia; the traumatized black body as the ultimate signifier of difference, alienness, and "otherness"; the use of class and economic issues to subsume race as an issue; the racially subversive pleasures and allegories encoded in some mainstream SF films; and the ways in which independent and extra-filmic productions are subverting the SF genre of Hollywood filmmaking.

The first book-length study of African American representation in science fiction film, Black Space demonstrates that SF cinema has become an important field of racial analysis, a site where definitions of race can be contested and post-civil rights race relations (re)imagined.

Black Star documents the vibrant Asian Youth Movements in 1970s and 80s Britain who struggled against the racism of the street and the state. Anandi Ramamurthy shows how they drew inspiration from Black Power movements as well as anti-imperialist and workers' struggles across the globe.

Drawing on her intimate knowledge and extensive research, Ramamurthy shows how the struggle to make Britain 'home' led to a broad-based identity where 'black' was a political colour inspiring unity amongst all those struggling against racism.

Ramamurthy documents how by the late 1980s this broad based black identity disintegrated as Islamophobia became a new form of racism. In the process the legacy of the Asian Youth Movements has been largely hidden. Black Star retrieves this history and demonstrates its importance for political struggles today.

Black Tech Ecosystems reports on a year-long ethnographic study of low-income Black adult learners attending Clearwater Academy, a nonprofit computer code bootcamp that teaches coding literacy to help end racism and poverty. While Clearwater Academy offers pathways into a lucrative career that promotes Black social mobility and a diverse tech industry, Antonio Byrd describes a more complicated story. The core challenges of weak social-support networks, embedded cultures in tech, financial strains, and racism persistently present roadblocks to Clearwater Academy’s Black adult learners’ success. However, through this experience, Black adult learners develop new knowledge and frameworks that change their relationship with coding literacy and labor. Instead of solely focusing on learning computer programming for work, Black Tech Ecosystems describes a liberatory and transformative use of computer programming that centers Black lives instead of the tech industry.

When Black Texas Women: 150 Years of Trial and Triumph was published in 1995, it was acclaimed as the first comprehensive history of black women's struggles and achievements. This companion volume contains the original source materials that Ruthe Winegarten uncovered during her extensive research.

Like a time capsule of black women's history, A Sourcebook includes petitions from free women of color, lawsuits, slave testimonies, wills, plantation journals, club minutes, autobiographies, ads, congressional reports, contracts, prison records, college catalogues, newspaper clippings, protest letters, and much more.

In addition to the documents, a biographical section highlights the lives of women from various walks of life. The book concludes with a timeline that begins in 1777 and reaches to 1992. This wealth of original material will be a treasure trove for scholars and general readers interested in the emerging field of black women's history.

Recentering black creativity and resistance in the history of the Midwest

African American creators have unsettled and upended racism in the Midwest region since as far back as 1787, and Black Visual Cultures of the Midwest examines the work of many such innovators, presenting an unruly, transgressive, and defiant vision of queer blackness that complicates fundamental American ideals of liberty, progress, life, and property.

Spanning the nineteenth century to the present, Freda L. Fair draws from a broad array of sources, including film, visual art, and even arrest records to examine concepts of freedom and resistance grounded in black cultural production in the Midwest. Through subjects such as Joshua Glover, who escaped slavery in Missouri and relocated to Wisconsin; sex workers in the Twin Cities; Ruth Ellis, a black lesbian elder in Detroit; and Nick Cave, who created Soundsuits in response to the police beating of Rodney King, Fair challenges monolithic formulations of blackness and black culture. Fair also queers Midwest history, engaging an LGBTQ lens to reexamine Wisconsin’s 1854 decision to declare the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 unconstitutional, the Springfield Race Riot of 1908, and other historic moments.

Revealing how black visual cultures in the Midwest both illuminate black gendered and sexual difference and actively resist antiblackness, Fair shows that the region is a site that can advance freedom and social change.

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Revealing how contemporary Black creatives explore personal and collective wellness within anti-Black societies

Black Wellness tracks how Black artists, writers, poets, and other cultural producers explore Black health as feeling good while attending to underlying physical and mental exhaustion resulting from racism, homophobia, and sexism. Considering depictions of and discourse about pain, HIV/AIDS, Covid-19, cancer, and diabetes, GerShun Avilez moves beyond pathologies of Black illness and the outcome-motivated medical field to delineate the nature of Black wellness as the basis for artistic experiments, envisioning manifold expressions of health.

Responding to the history and impact of racial health disparities, Avilez locates a complex interplay between pain and care, stigma and pleasure, self-management and blame, and isolation and contact. In Black Wellness, he delves into innovative literary writing and digital projects: poetry by Danez Smith, Claudia Rankine, and Bettina Judd; personal reflections by Zadie Smith, Audre Lorde, and Yohanes Godanna Gatiso; novels by Toni Cade Bambara and Masande Ntshanga; and video, theatrical, and multimedia projects by Faithe Daye, Seth E. Davis, and Robbie McCauley.

Reading and thinking across borders to analyze African diasporic artists originating from the United States, Jamaica, South Africa, Ethiopia, and the United Kingdom, Avilez highlights how interconnected histories of racialization, minoritization, and colonization contextualize the lived experiences of Black wellness and illness. By deemphasizing—but not discounting—health outcomes, Black Wellness argues that cultural acts of envisioning and communicating Black health are always double pronged, simultaneously attending to states of debility and vitality in Black bodies.

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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.
 

Rethinking the theoretical and political deployment of madness in the late twentieth century through the critical work of black women novelists

Black Women Unhinged revisits the “black women’s literary renaissance” to offer new terms at the intersection of gender, race, and madness before and beyond its crystallization into discourses of mental health and disability. Reconstructing the cultural zeitgeist of the 1960s–1980s, when madness emerged as a radical position in the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, and David Cooper, and in the politics of feminists and Black Power activists, Black Women Unhinged reassesses black women’s overlooked contributions to this politics of madness. Megan Finch reads this renaissance’s catalogue of ostensibly mad literary characters—schizophrenic girls, infanticidal and drug-addicted mothers, castrating murderesses, and suicidal revolutionaries—beyond madness’s philosophical and political bounds.

Centering the relationship between Reason and the multiple forms of unReason central to modern politics, Finch traces the deployment of madness by the Black Power/Art’s movements and second-wave feminists to fortify black men’s and white women’s civic inclusion while dismissing black women’s politics as irremediable folly. Finch argues that black women’s novels of the period—including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Eva’s Man, Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, and Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales—depict characters who exceed the category of madness and are unhinged from the curative politics of inclusion purchased through another’s abjection. Black Women Unhinged reckons with black women’s literary and theoretical contributions to the politics of madness and their attempts, past and present, to move beyond them to something akin to freedom.

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Historian and human rights activist Julie A. Gallagher deftly examines how race, gender, and the structure of the state itself shape outcomes, and exposes the layers of power and discrimination at work in American society. She combines her analysis with a look at the career of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress and the first to run for president on a national party ticket. In so doing, she rewrites twentieth-century women's history and the dominant narrative arcs of feminist history that hitherto ignored African American women and their accomplishments.

When author Kristal Brent Zook first published Black Women’s Lives: Stories of Power and Pain, nearly 20 years ago, the reality of so many Black women's lived experiences was not widely discussed in mainstream media. Two decades later, after much social change in the United States, including national media attention on Black women following the police murder of Breonna Taylor and the #SayHerName movement, the election of the first Black female vice president, Kamala Harris, and massive political and social backlash because of these gains, the timing for a refreshed look at these women's lives has never been better.

The stories in this collection invite readers into the intimate spaces of ten African American women from all walks of life, in cities and towns across the country. Twenty years later, we revisit them to learn how their lives have evolved. There are fresh new codas at the end of each chapter that illustrate how the women have fared over the last two decades. Did they achieve their dreams? What twists and turns did they meet along the way? These stories highlight the complex, nuanced, and passionate lives that Black women lead, often requiring ambition, ingenuity, and creativity to survive and thrive in the United States. This collection is a testament to the fact that the past repeats — and we remain, each of us, still, connected. 

Black and Blue TV explores the ways television productions have responded to the Black Lives Matter movement. Television programs’ engagement with BLM was common before George Floyd’s murder sparked international protests in the summer of 2020, at which point it became nearly unavoidable for many series. Images of police using violence against Black Americans fueled criticisms of the role of television—especially cop shows—in perpetuating “copaganda,” highlighting the fact that television’s cops are nearly always the good guys, even when they break the law and use excessive force. Black and Blue TV identifies trends and anomalies in television’s engagement with BLM but also investigates the people who influence what those representations look like. Pairing textual criticism with interviews with television creatives, executives, and media activists, author Laurena Bernabo traces shifts in how these individuals understand their role in televisual culture and the cultural forum of narratives that are produced and distributed as a result.