Results by title

1563 books match the query 'African American & Black Studies' and 221 start with b

cover of Black New Orleans, 1860-1880

Black New Orleans, 1860-1880

John W. Blassingame

University of Chicago Press, 1976

Reissued for the first time in over thirty years, Black New Orleans explores the twenty-year period in which the city’s black population more than doubled. Meticulously researched and replete with archival illustrations from newspapers and rare periodicals, John W. Blassingame’s groundbreaking history offers a unique look at the economic and social life of black people in New Orleans during Reconstruction. Not a conventional political treatment, Blassingame’s history instead emphasizes the educational, religious, cultural, and economic activities of African Americans during the late nineteenth century.

“Blending historical and sociological perspectives, and drawing with skill and imagination upon a variety of sources, [Blassingame] offers fresh insights into an oft-studied period of Southern history. . . .  In both time and place the author has chosen an extraordinarily revealing vantage point from which to view his subject. ”—Neil R. McMillen, American Historical Review
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cover of Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement

Black Opera

History, Power, Engagement

Naomi Andre

University of Illinois Press, 2018

From classic films like Carmen Jones to contemporary works like The Diary of Sally Hemings and U-Carmen eKhayelitsa, American and South African artists and composers have used opera to reclaim black people's place in history. Naomi André draws on the experiences of performers and audiences to explore this music's resonance with today's listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as well as with the works themselves, André reveals how black opera unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and political force that employs an immense, transformative power to represent or even liberate. Viewing opera as a fertile site for critical inquiry, political activism, and social change, Black Opera lays the foundation for innovative new approaches to applied scholarship.
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cover of Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction

Black Over White

Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction

Thomas Holt

University of Illinois Press, 1979

 In this prize-winning book Thomas Holt is concerned not only with the identities of the black politicians who gained power in South Carolina during Reconstruction, but also with the question of how they functioned within the political system. Thus, as one reviewer has commented, "he penetrates the superficial preoccupations over whether black politicians were venal or gullible to see whether they wielded power and influence and, if they did, how and to what ends and against what obstacles."

"Well crafted and well written, it not only broadens our knowledge of the period, but also deepens it, something that recent books on Reconstruction have too often failed to do." --  Michael Perman, American Historical Review.
" . . . a valuable study of post-Civil War black leaders in a state where Negro control came closest to realization during Reconstruction. . . . Effectively merging the techniques of quantitative analysis with those of narrative history, Holt shatters a number of myths and misconceptions. . . . It should be on the reading list of all students of Reconstruction and nineteenth-century black history." --  William C. Harris, Journal of Southern History
"Holt presents his work modestly as a state study of reconstruction politics. But this should not obscure a significant intellectual achievement and a contribution of fundamental importance, demonstrating the value of social-class analysis in understanding the politics of the black community." --  Jonathan M. Wiener, Journal of American History.
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cover of Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence

Black Patriots and Loyalists

Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence

Alan Gilbert

University of Chicago Press, 2012

We commonly think of the American Revolution as simply the war for independence from British colonial rule. But, of course, that independence actually applied to only a portion of the American population—African Americans would still be bound in slavery for nearly another century. Alan Gilbert asks us to rethink what we know about the Revolutionary War, to realize that while white Americans were fighting for their freedom, many black Americans were joining the British imperial forces to gain theirs. Further, a movement led by sailors—both black and white—pushed strongly for emancipation on the American side. There were actually two wars being waged at once: a political revolution for independence from Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality.

Gilbert presents persuasive evidence that slavery could have been abolished during the Revolution itself if either side had fully pursued the military advantage of freeing slaves and pressing them into combat, and his extensive research also reveals that free blacks on both sides played a crucial and underappreciated role in the actual fighting. Black Patriots and Loyalists contends that the struggle for emancipation was not only basic to the Revolution itself, but was a rousing force that would inspire freedom movements like the abolition societies of the North and the black loyalist pilgrimages for freedom in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.
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cover of Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s

Black Pearls

Blues Queens of the 1920s

Daphne Duval Harrison

Rutgers University Press, 1990

Throughout the 1920s, in tents, theaters, dance halls and cabarets, and on "race" records, black American women captivated large audiences with their singing of the blues. University of Maryland professor Harrison examines the subjects and texts of their songs, the toll these performers paid for their right to be heard, and what they did to transform a folk tradition into a popular art. She describes the singing and lifestyles of Sippie Wallace, Victoria Spivey, Edith Wilson and Alberta Hunter to illustrate how they introduced a new model of the black woman: assertive and sexy, gutsy yet tender, bereft but not downtrodden, exploited but not resentful, independent yet vulnerable. The author shows that their choice of performing style, inflection, emphasis and improvisation provided a perspective and expressiveness that profoundly affected later American popular music. -- Publishers Weekly

Blues music spawned legendary performers whose influence has been felt in many musical forms here and around the world. Until now the important role of the great women blues singers has largely gone unexplored. This book tells of the cultural and social impact of the blues during the 1920s when the genre was dominated by women, both on stage and on record. Harrison (Afro-American Studies Department, University of Maryland) writes with authority, focusing particularly on Sippie Wallace, Edith Wilson, Victoria Spivey, and Alberta Hunter as she analyzes the music and the collective black experience out of which it grew. A significant book, particularly for collections of music history, black studies, and women's studies. -- Library Journal
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cover of Black Performance Theory

Black Performance Theory

Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, eds.

Duke University Press, 2014

Black performance theory is a rich interdisciplinary area of study and critical method. This collection of new essays by some of its pioneering thinkers—many of whom are performers—demonstrates the breadth, depth, innovation, and critical value of black performance theory. Considering how blackness is imagined in and through performance, the contributors address topics including flight as a persistent theme in African American aesthetics, the circulation of minstrel tropes in Liverpool and in Afro-Mexican settlements in Oaxaca, and the reach of hip-hop politics as people around the world embrace the music and dance. They examine the work of contemporary choreographers Ronald K. Brown and Reggie Wilson, the ways that African American playwrights translated the theatricality of lynching to the stage, the ecstatic music of Little Richard, and Michael Jackson's performance in the documentary This Is It. The collection includes several essays that exemplify the performative capacity of writing, as well as discussion of a project that re-creates seminal hip-hop album covers through tableaux vivants. Whether deliberating on the tragic mulatta, the trickster figure Anansi, or the sonic futurism of Nina Simone and Adrienne Kennedy, the essays in this collection signal the vast untapped critical and creative resources of black performance theory.

Contributors. Melissa Blanco Borelli, Daphne A. Brooks, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Nadine George-Graves, Anita Gonzalez, Rickerby Hinds, Jason King, D. Soyini Madison, Koritha Mitchell, Tavia Nyong'o, Carl Paris, Anna B. Scott, Wendy S. Walters, Hershini Bhana Young
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cover of Black Physicians in the Jim Crow South

Black Physicians in the Jim Crow South

Thomas J. Ward

University of Arkansas Press, 2016

Drawing on a variety of sources from oral histories to the records of professional organizations, Thomas J. Ward, Jr. examines the development of the African American medical profession in the South. Illuminating the contradictions of race and class, this research provides valuable new insight into class divisions within African American communities in the era of segregation.
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cover of Black Picket Fences, Second Edition: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class

Black Picket Fences, Second Edition

Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class

Mary Pattillo

University of Chicago Press, 2013

First published in 1999, Mary Pattillo’s Black Picket Fences explores an American demographic group too often ignored by both scholars and the media: the black middle class. Nearly fifteen years later, this book remains a groundbreaking study of a group still underrepresented in the academic and public spheres. The result of living for three years in “Groveland,” a black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, Black Picket Fences explored both the advantages the black middle class has and the boundaries they still face. Despite arguments that race no longer matters, Pattillo showed a different reality, one where black and white middle classes remain separate and unequal.

 Stark, moving, and still timely, the book is updated for this edition with a new epilogue by the author that details how the neighborhood and its residents fared in the recession of 2008, as well as new interviews with many of the same neighborhood residents featured in the original. Also  included is a new foreword by acclaimed University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau.
 

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cover of Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class

Black Picket Fences

Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class

Mary Pattillo-McCoy

University of Chicago Press, 1999

Black Picket Fences is a stark, moving, and candid look at a section of America that is too often ignored by both scholars and the media: the black middle class. The result of living for three years in "Groveland," a black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, sociologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy has written a book that explores both the advantages and the boundaries that exist for members of the black middle class. Despite arguments that race no longer matters, Pattillo-McCoy shows a different reality, one where black and white middle classes remain separate and unequal.

"An insightful look at the socio-economic experiences of the black middle class. . . . Through the prism of a South Side Chicago neighborhood, the author shows the distinctly different reality middle-class blacks face as opposed to middle-class whites." —Ebony

"A detailed and well-written account of one neighborhood's struggle to remain a haven of stability and prosperity in the midst of the cyclone that is the American economy." —Emerge
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cover of Black Political Organizations in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Black Political Organizations in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Edited by Ollie A. Johnson III, Karin L. Stanford

Rutgers University Press, 2002

We know a great deal about civil rights organizations during the 1960s, but relatively little about black political organizations since that decade. Questions of focus, accountability, structure, and relevance have surrounded these groups since the modern Civil Rights Movement ended in 1968. Political scientists Ollie A. Johnson III and Karin L. Stanford have assembled a group of scholars who examine the leadership, membership, structure, goals, ideology, activities, accountability, and impact of contemporary black political organizations and their leaders. Questions considered are: How have these organizations adapted to the changing sociopolitical and economic environment? What ideological shifts, if any, have occurred within each one? What issues are considered important to black political groups and what strategies are used to implement their agendas? The contributors also investigate how these organizations have adapted to changes within the black community and American society as a whole.

Organizations covered include well-known ones such as the NAACP, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Urban League, and the Congress of Racial Equality, as well as organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. Religious groups, including black churches and the Nation of Islam, are also considered.

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cover of Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African-American Heritage

Black Portsmouth

Three Centuries of African-American Heritage

Mark J. Sammons

University of New Hampshire Press, 2004

Few people think of a rich Black heritage when they think of New England. In the pioneering book Black Portsmouth, Mark J. Sammons and Valerie Cunningham celebrate it, guiding the reader through more than three centuries of New England and Portsmouth social, political, economic, and cultural history as well as scores of personal and site-specific stories. 

Here, we meet such Africans as the likely negro boys and girls from Gambia, who debarked at Portsmouth from a slave ship in 1758, and Prince Whipple, who fought in the American Revolution. We learn about their descendants, including the performer Richard Potter and John Tate of the People's Baptist Church, who overcame the tragedies and challenges of their ancestors' enslavement and subsequent marginalization to build communities and families, found institutions, and contribute to their city, region, state, and nation in many capacities. Individual entries speak to broader issues—the anti-slavery movement, American religion, and foodways, for example. We also learn about the extant historical sites important to Black Portsmouth—including the surprise revelation of an African burial ground in October 2003—as well as the extraordinary efforts being made to preserve remnants of the city's early Black heritage.

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cover of Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics

Black Post-Blackness

The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics

Margo Natalie Crawford

University of Illinois Press, 2017

A 2008 cover of The New Yorker featured a much-discussed Black Power parody of Michelle and Barack Obama. The image put a spotlight on how easy it is to flatten the Black Power movement as we imagine new types of blackness. Margo Natalie Crawford argues that we have misread the Black Arts Movement's call for blackness. We have failed to see the movement's anticipation of the "new black" and "post-black." Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics. Crawford zooms in on the 1970s second wave of the Black Arts Movement and shows the connections between this final wave of the Black Arts movement and the early years of twenty-first century black aesthetics. She uncovers the circle of black post-blackness that pivots on the power of anticipation, abstraction, mixed media, the global South, satire, public interiority, and the fantastic.
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cover of Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African American Political Thought

Black Power Ideologies

An Essay in African American Political Thought

John T. McCartney

Temple University Press, 1993

In a systematic survey of the manifestations and meaning of Black Power in America, John McCartney analyzes the ideology of the Black Power Movement in the 1960s and places it in the context of both African-American and Western political thought. He demonstrates, though an exploration of historic antecedents, how the Black Power versus black mainstream competition of the sixties was not unique in American history. Tracing the evolution of black social and political movements from the 18th century to the present, the author focuses on the ideas and actions of the leaders of each major approach.

Starting with the colonization efforts of the Pan-Negro Nationalist movement in the 18th century, McCartney contrasts the work of Bishop Turner with the opposing integrationist views of Frederick Douglass and his followers. McCartney examines the politics of accommodation espoused by Booker T. Washington; W.E.B. Du Bois's opposition to this apolitical stance; the formation of the NAACP, the Urban League, and other integrationist organizations; and Marcus Garvey's reawakening of the separatist ideal in the early 20th century. Focusing on the intense legal activity of the NAACP from the 1930s to the 1960s, McCartney gives extensive treatment to the moral and political leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his challenge from the Black Power Movement in 1966.

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cover of Black Power Praxis: Theory, Practice, and Activist Intellectuals in Detroit's Black Power Movement

Black Power Praxis

Theory, Practice, and Activist Intellectuals in Detroit's Black Power Movement

Matt Birkhold

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Black Power Praxis shows how four groups of activist-intellectuals—James and Grace Lee Boggs, Richard and Milton Henry, Reverend Albert Cleage, and a group of college students called Uhuru—shifted the consciousness and political perspectives of Black Detroiters in the 1960s and 1970s. By developing theories that they could unite with community-organizing practices, these activist-intellectuals turned the focus of the grassroots movement for racial equality from Civil Rights to Black Power. Following the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, these Black Power activist-intellectuals were already positioned to harness the energy that emerged from the uprising and directed it into the city’s first citywide Black Power organization, the Citywide Citizens Action Committee.

Even as Black Power theories became dominant over Detroit’s grassroots movement, their influence faltered when they failed to develop community organizing practices corresponding to the lived experiences of Black Detroiters. Black Power Praxis reveals how the relationships between ideas, practices, leadership, material reality, and consciousness drove the historical development of Black Power. Ideal for readers curious about social movements, Detroit history, African American history, and African American Studies, the book sheds light on how, why, and when Detroit’s activist-intellectual leaders successfully showed everyday people how their power might be used in transformative ways.

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cover of Black Power TV

Black Power TV

Devorah Heitner

Duke University Press, 2013

In Black Power TV, Devorah Heitner chronicles the emergence of Black public affairs television starting in 1968. She examines two local shows, New York's Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant and Boston's Say Brother, and the national programs Soul! and Black Journal. These shows offered viewers radical and innovative programming: the introspections of a Black police officer in Harlem, African American high school students discussing visionary alternatives to the curriculum, and Miriam Makeba comparing race relations in the United States to apartheid in South Africa. While Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant and Say Brother originated from a desire to contain Black discontent during a period of urban uprisings and racial conflict, these shows were re-envisioned by their African American producers as venues for expressing Black critiques of mainstream discourse, disseminating Black culture, and modeling Black empowerment. At the national level, Soul! and Black Journal allowed for the imagining of a Black nation and a distinctly African American consciousness, and they played an influential role in the rise of the Black Arts Movement. Black Power TV reveals how regulatory, activist, and textual histories are interconnected and how Black public affairs television redefined African American representations in ways that continue to reverberate today.
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cover of Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965-75

Black Power on Campus

The University of Illinois, 1965-75

Joy Ann Williamson

University of Illinois Press, 2003

Joy Ann Williamson charts the evolution of black consciousness on predominately white American campuses during the critical period between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, with the Black student movement at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign serving as an illuminating microcosm of similar movements across the country.

Drawing on student publications of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as interviews with student activists, former administrators, and faculty, Williamson discusses the emergence of Black Power ideology, what constituted "blackness," and notions of self-advancement versus racial solidarity. Promoting an understanding of the role of black youth in protest movements, Black Power on Campus is an important contribution to the literature on African American liberation movements and the reform of American higher education.

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cover of Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915

Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915

Loren Schweninger

University of Illinois Press, 1990

Property ownership has been a traditional means for African Americans to gain recognition and enter the mainstream of American life. This landmark study documents this significant, but often overlooked, aspect of the black experience from the late eighteenth century to World War I.
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cover of Black Public History in Chicago: Civil Rights Activism from World War II into the Cold War

Black Public History in Chicago

Civil Rights Activism from World War II into the Cold War

Ian Rocksborough-Smith

University of Illinois Press, 2018

In civil-rights-era Chicago, a dedicated group of black activists, educators, and organizations employed black public history as more than cultural activism. Their work and vision energized a movement that promoted political progress in the crucial time between World War II and the onset of the Cold War.

Ian Rocksborough-Smith’s meticulous research and adept storytelling provide the first in-depth look at how these committed individuals leveraged Chicago’s black public history. Their goal: to engage with the struggle for racial equality. Rocksborough-Smith shows teachers working to advance curriculum reform in public schools, while well-known activists Margaret and Charles Burroughs pushed for greater recognition of black history by founding the DuSable Museum of African American History. Organizations like the Afro-American Heritage Association, meanwhile, used black public history work to connect radical politics and nationalism. Together, these people and their projects advanced important ideas about race, citizenship, education, and intellectual labor that paralleled the shifting terrain of mid-twentieth-century civil rights.

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cover of Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow

Black Pulp

Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow

Brooks E. Hefner

University of Minnesota Press, 2021

A deep dive into mid-century African American newspapers, exploring how Black pulp fiction reassembled genre formulas in the service of racial justice

In recent years, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Marvel’s Black Panther, and HBO’s Watchmen have been lauded for the innovative ways they repurpose genre conventions to criticize white supremacy, celebrate Black resistance, and imagine a more racially just world—important progressive messages widely spread precisely because they are packaged in popular genres. But it turns out, such generic retooling for antiracist purposes is nothing new.  

As Brooks E. Hefner’s Black Pulp shows, this tradition of antiracist genre revision begins even earlier than recent studies of Black superhero comics of the 1960s have revealed. Hefner traces it back to a phenomenon that began in the 1920s, to serialized (and sometimes syndicated) genre stories written by Black authors in Black newspapers with large circulations among middle- and working-class Black readers. From the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American, Hefner recovers a rich archive of African American genre fiction from the 1920s through the mid-1950s—spanning everything from romance, hero-adventure, and crime stories to westerns and science fiction. Reading these stories, Hefner explores how their authors deployed, critiqued, and reassembled genre formulas—and the pleasures they offer to readers—in the service of racial justice: to criticize Jim Crow segregation, racial capitalism, and the sexual exploitation of Black women; to imagine successful interracial romance and collective sociopolitical progress; and to cheer Black agency, even retributive violence in the face of white supremacy. 

These popular stories differ significantly from contemporaneous, now-canonized African American protest novels that tend to represent Jim Crow America as a deterministic machine and its Black inhabitants as doomed victims. Widely consumed but since forgotten, these genre stories—and Hefner’s incisive analysis of them—offer a more vibrant understanding of African American literary history.   

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cover of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology

Black Queer Studies

A Critical Anthology

E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, eds.

Duke University Press, 2005

While over the past decade a number of scholars have done significant work on questions of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered identities, this volume is the first to collect this groundbreaking work and make black queer studies visible as a developing field of study in the United States. Bringing together essays by established and emergent scholars, this collection assesses the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality and highlights the theoretical and political issues at stake in the nascent field of black queer studies. Including work by scholars based in English, film studies, black studies, sociology, history, political science, legal studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, the volume showcases the broadly interdisciplinary nature of the black queer studies project.

The contributors consider representations of the black queer body, black queer literature, the pedagogical implications of black queer studies, and the ways that gender and sexuality have been glossed over in black studies and race and class marginalized in queer studies. Whether exploring the closet as a racially loaded metaphor, arguing for the inclusion of diaspora studies in black queer studies, considering how the black lesbian voice that was so expressive in the 1970s and 1980s is all but inaudible today, or investigating how the social sciences have solidified racial and sexual exclusionary practices, these insightful essays signal an important and necessary expansion of queer studies.

Contributors. Bryant K. Alexander, Devon Carbado, Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Keith Clark, Cathy Cohen, Roderick A. Ferguson, Jewelle Gomez, Phillip Brian Harper, Mae G. Henderson, Sharon P. Holland, E. Patrick Johnson, Kara Keeling, Dwight A. McBride, Charles I. Nero, Marlon B. Ross, Rinaldo Walcott, Maurice O. Wallace

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cover of Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature

Black Resonance

Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature

Lordi, Emily J.

Rutgers University Press, 2013

Ever since Bessie Smith’s powerful voice conspired with the “race records” industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women’s singing. In Black Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin.

Focusing on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s, Black Resonance reveals a musical-literary tradition in which singers and writers, faced with similar challenges and harboring similar aims, developed comparable expressive techniques. Drawing together such seemingly disparate works as Bessie Smith’s blues and Richard Wright’s neglected film of Native Son, Mahalia Jackson’s gospel music and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice. In the process, Lordi demonstrates that popular female singers are not passive muses with raw, natural, or ineffable talent. Rather, they are experimental artists who innovate black expressive possibilities right alongside their literary peers.

The first study of black music and literature to centralize the music of black women, Black Resonance offers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century’s most beloved and challenging voices.

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cover of Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle

Black Revolutionary

William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle

Gerald Horne

University of Illinois Press, 2013

A leading African American Communist, lawyer William L. Patterson (1891–1980) was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the defeat of Jim Crowby virtue of his leadership of the Scottsboro campaign in the 1930s. In this watershed biography, historian Gerald Horne shows how Patterson helped to advance African American equality by fostering and leveraging international support for the movement. Horne highlights key moments in Patterson's global activism: his early education in the Soviet Union, his involvement with the Scottsboro trials and other high-profile civil rights cases of the 1930s to 1950s, his 1951 "We Charge Genocide" petition to the United Nations, and his later work with prisons and the Black Panther Party.
 
Through Patterson's story, Horne examines how the Cold War affected the freedom movement, with civil rights leadership sometimes disavowing African American leftists in exchange for concessions from the U.S. government. He also probes the complex and often contradictory relationship between the Communist Party and the African American community, including the impact of the FBI's infiltration of the Communist Party. Drawing from government and FBI documents, newspapers, periodicals, archival and manuscript collections, and personal papers, Horne documents Patterson's effectiveness at carrying the freedom struggle into the global arena and provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century struggles for racial justice.
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cover of Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western

Black Rodeo

A History of the African American Western

Mia Mask

University of Illinois Press, 2023

African American westerns have a rich cinematic history and visual culture. Mia Mask examines the African American western hero within the larger context of film history by considering how Black westerns evolved and approached wide-ranging goals. Woody Strode’s 1950s transformation from football star to actor was the harbinger of hard-edged western heroes later played by Jim Brown and Fred Williamson. Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher provided a narrative helmed by a groundbreaking African American director and offered unconventionally rich roles for women. Mask moves from these discussions to consider blaxploitation westerns and an analysis of Jeff Kanew’s hard-to-find 1972 documentary about an all-Black rodeo. The book addresses how these movies set the stage for modern-day westploitation films like Django Unchained. 

A first-of-its kind survey, Black Rodeo illuminates the figure of the Black cowboy while examining the intersection of African American film history and the western.

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cover of Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States

Black Scare / Red Scare

Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States

Charisse Burden-Stelly

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A radical explication of the ways anti-Black racial oppression has infused the US government’s anti-communist repression.
 
In the early twentieth century, two panics emerged in the United States. The Black Scare was rooted in white Americans’ fear of Black Nationalism and dread at what social, economic, and political equality of Black people might entail. The Red Scare, sparked by communist uprisings abroad and subversion at home, established anticapitalism as a force capable of infiltrating and disrupting the American order. In Black Scare / Red Scare, Charisse Burden-Stelly meticulously outlines the conjoined nature of these state-sanctioned panics, revealing how they unfolded together as the United States pursued capitalist domination. Antiradical repression, she shows, is inseparable from anti-Black oppression, and vice versa.
 
Beginning her account in 1917—the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, the East St. Louis Race Riot, and the Espionage Act—Burden-Stelly traces the long duration of these intertwined and mutually reinforcing phenomena. She theorizes two bases of the Black Scare / Red Scare: US Capitalist Racist Society, a racially hierarchical political economy built on exploitative labor relationships, and Wall Street Imperialism, the violent processes by which businesses and the US government structured domestic and foreign policies to consolidate capital and racial domination. In opposition, Radical Blackness embodied the government’s fear of both Black insurrection and Red instigation. The state’s actions and rhetoric therefore characterized Black anticapitalists as foreign, alien, and undesirable. This reactionary response led to an ideology that Burden-Stelly calls True Americanism, the belief that the best things about America were absolutely not Red and not Black, which were interchangeable threats.
 
Black Scare / Red Scare illuminates the anticommunist nature of the US and its governance, but also shines a light on a misunderstood tradition of struggle for Black liberation. Burden-Stelly highlights the Black anticapitalist organizers working within and alongside the international communist movement and analyzes the ways the Black Scare/Red Scare reverberates through ongoing suppression of Black radical activism today. Drawing on a range of administrative, legal, and archival sources, Burden-Stelly incorporates emancipatory ideas from several disciplines to uncover novel insights into Black political minorities and their legacy.
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cover of Black Scholars Matter: Visions, Struggles, and Hopes in Africana Biblical Studies

Black Scholars Matter

Visions, Struggles, and Hopes in Africana Biblical Studies

Gay L. Byron

SBL Press, 2022

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.

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cover of Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital

Black Sexual Economies

Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital

Edited by Adrienne D. Davis and the BSE Collective

University of Illinois Press, 2019

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
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cover of Black Sexualities: Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, and Policies

Black Sexualities

Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, and Policies

Edited and with an Introduction by Juan Battle and Sandra L. Barnes

Rutgers University Press, 2009

Why does society have difficulty discussing sexualities? Where does fear of Black sexualities emerge and how is it manifested? How can varied experiences of Black females and males who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), or straight help inform dialogue and academic inquiry?

From questioning forces that have constrained sexual choices to examining how Blacks have forged healthy sexual identities in an oppressive environment, Black Sexualities acknowledges the diversity of the Black experience and the shared legacy of racism. Contributors seek resolution to Blacks' understanding of their lives as sexual beings through stories of empowerment, healing, self-awareness, victories, and other historic and contemporary life-course panoramas and provide practical information to foster more culturally relative research, tolerance, and acceptance.

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cover of Black Society in Spanish Florida

Black Society in Spanish Florida

Jane Landers

University of Illinois Press, 1999

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.

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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 Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967-1990

Black Students in the Ivory Tower

African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967-1990

Wayne C. Glasker

University of Massachusetts Press, 2002

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the number of African American undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania grew dramatically. This book describes the circumstances surrounding the university's decision to increase its black enrollment and the consequences that followed. Focusing on the role of black student activism, Wayne C. Glasker traces the trajectory of controversy and debate over such issues as assimilation, integration, black nationalism, and cultural pluralism on a single university campus.

Glasker begins his study in the late 1960s, when the university's expansion into a predominantly black Philadelphia neighborhood precipitated a massive sit-in and protest. In response, Penn accelerated the process of admitting more black students, doubling the number of black matriculants by September 1969. Many came from inner city public high schools with backgrounds, ideas, and interests far different from those of the affluent middle- and upper-class white students who constituted the majority of the undergraduate population. As a result, the next decade was marked by recurrent tension and conflict, as black students at Penn rejected assimilation and agitated successfully for the creation of a variety of institutions that recognized their needs. These included an Afro-American studies program, a residence for students interested in black culture, and a Black Student League. Following a 1978 sit-in, they won a demand for an Inter-cultural Center and formed the United Minorities Council, and in 1986 they joined with white activists to press the university to divest its holdings from companies doing business in South Africa.

Throughout the book Glasker interweaves two parallel stories: that of an Ivy League university wrestling with questions of diversity, compensatory education, and the meaning of merit and qualification; and that of black students grappling with issues of assimilation, separatism, and cultural pluralism. In the end, he argues, the students sought to preserve their own distinctive ethnic culture, identity, and heritage while pursuing economic upward mobility. Rather than separatism, they aspired to a form of biculturalism that involved economic empowerment without cultural assimilation.
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cover of Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy

Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy

Houston A. Baker Jr.

University of Chicago Press, 1993

In this explosive book, Houston Baker takes stock of the current state of Black Studies in the university and outlines its responsibilities to the newest form of black urban expression—rap. A frank, polemical essay, Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy is an uninhibited defense of Black Studies and an extended commentary on the importance of rap. Written in the midst of the political correctness wars and in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, Baker's meditation on the academy and black urban expression has generated much controversy and comment from both ends of the political spectrum.
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cover of Black Texas Women: A Sourcebook

Black Texas Women

A Sourcebook

By Ruthe Winegarten

University of Texas Press, 1994

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.

[more]
cover of Black Theatre: Ritual Performance In The African Diaspora

Black Theatre

Ritual Performance In The African Diaspora

edited by Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II and Gus Edwards

Temple University Press, 2002

Generating a new understanding of the past—as well as a vision for the future—this path-breaking volume contains essays written by playwrights, scholars, and critics that analyze African American theatre as it is practiced today.Even as they acknowledge that Black experience is not monolithic, these contributors argue provocatively and persuasively for a Black consciousness that creates a culturally specific theatre. This theatre, rooted in an African mythos, offers ritual rather than realism; it transcends the specifics of social relations, reaching toward revelation. The ritual performance that is intrinsic to Black theatre renews the community; in Paul Carter Harrison's words, it "reveals the Form of Things Unknown" in a way that "binds, cleanses, and heals."
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Black Trans Feminism

Marquis Bey

Duke University Press, 2022

In Black Trans Feminism Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each. Theorizing black trans feminism from the vantages of abolition and gender radicality, Bey articulates blackness as a mutiny against racializing categorizations; transness as a nonpredetermined, wayward, and deregulated movement that works toward gender’s destruction; and black feminism as an epistemological method to fracture hegemonic modes of racialized gender. In readings of the essays, interviews, and poems of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, jayy dodd, and Venus Di’Khadijah Selenite, Bey turns black trans feminism away from a politics of gendered embodiment and toward a conception of it as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power. Together, blackness and transness actualize themselves as on the run from gender. In this way, Bey presents black trans feminism as a mode of enacting the wholesale dismantling of the world we have been given.
[more]
cover of Black Troops, White Commanders and Freedmen during the Civil War

Black Troops, White Commanders and Freedmen during the Civil War

Howard C. Westwood

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Recounting the experiences of black soldiers in the Civil War

In the ten probing essays collected in this volume, Howard C. Westwood recounts the often bitter experiences of black men who were admitted to military service and the wrenching problems associated with the shifting status of African Americans during the Civil War.

Black Troops, White Commanders and Freedmen during the Civil War covers topics ranging from the roles played by Lincoln and Grant in beginning black soldiery to the sensitive issues that arose when black soldiers (and their white officers) were captured by the Confederates. The essays relate the exploits of black heroes such as Robert Smalls, who single-handedly captured a Confederate steamer, as well as the experiences of the ignoble Reverend Fountain Brown, who became the first person charged with violating the Emancipation Proclamation.

Although many thousands were enlisted as soldiers, blacks were barred from becoming commissioned officers and for a long time they were paid far less than their white counterparts. These and other blatant forms of discrimination understandably provoked discontent among black troops which, in turn, sparked friction with their white commanders. Westwood's fascinating account of the artillery company from Rhode Island amply demonstrates how frustrations among black soldiers came to be seen as "mutiny" by some white officers.

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cover of Black Undertow

Black Undertow

Hugo ka Canham

Duke University Press, 2026

Meditative and theoretical, Black Undertow reorients the thinking of blackness away from the Atlantic to the African shorelines of the Indian Ocean, places where queerness and black life frequently brush up against one another. Hugo ka Canham listens for what he names the buzz of the undertow, the traces of African ancestors who linger in water, sand, coastal forts, corals, ritual practices, and unruly imaginations along the shore. In tracking these elusive figures, he develops an approach that honors a queer right to opacity. Canham reconstitutes the siloed disciplinarity that imagines African studies, Black studies, Queer African studies, and Queer studies as necessarily different. When read as coconstitutive instead, Canham demonstrates that they better allow for explicating local life, history, poetics, and theory. In so doing, he forges methods of studying black life that think beyond the limits of traditional, textual archives.
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cover of Black Unhappiness: The Philosophy of W. E. B. Du Bois

Black Unhappiness

The Philosophy of W. E. B. Du Bois

Grant Farred

Duke University Press, 2027

In Black Unhappiness, Grant Farred offers an incisive philosophical investigation of Black Being through the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Farred takes up a single chapter of Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Coming of John,” in which Du Bois allegorizes unhappiness in the lives of John Jones, a fictional Black student of a Northern Negro college, and his sister Jennie. Farred treats this chapter as a philosophical treatise and, through close analysis, articulates the dimensions of John and Jennie’s unhappiness as a critical map for understanding the structure of Black Being in-the-world. Farred engages with a wide array of thinkers like G. W. F. Hegel, Ralph Ellison, Edouard Glissant, Martin Heidegger, and Fredric Jameson to explicate Du Bois’ philosophy of unhappiness in the Reconstruction South. Through a series of meditations and concepts, Farred illuminates the ways that thought and thinking are integral to Black Being, that Black Being is Black consciousness, and that this consciousness is critically, necessarily, and productively unhappy.
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cover of Black Visual Cultures of the Midwest

Black Visual Cultures of the Midwest

Freda L. Fair

University of Minnesota Press, 2027

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.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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cover of Black Wellness: Health Beyond Outcomes

Black Wellness

Health Beyond Outcomes

GerShun Avilez

University of Minnesota Press, 2027

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.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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cover of Black Women and Politics in New York City

Black Women and Politics in New York City

Julie A. Gallagher

University of Illinois Press, 2014

An essential contribution to twentieth-century political history, Black Women and Politics in New York City documents African American women in New York City fighting for justice, civil rights, and equality in the turbulent world of formal politics from the suffrage and women's rights movements to the feminist era of the 1970s.

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.

[more]
cover of Black Women's Lives: Stories of Power and Pain — Twenty Years Later

Black Women's Lives

Stories of Power and Pain — Twenty Years Later

Kristal Brent Zook

Rutgers University Press, 2027

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. 

[more]
cover of Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)Becoming the Subject

Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory

(Un)Becoming the Subject

Kevin Everod Quashie

Rutgers University Press, 2004

 In Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory, Kevin Everod Quashie explores the metaphor of the “girlfriend” as a new way of understanding three central concepts of cultural studies: self, memory, and language. He considers how the work of writers such as Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Dionne Brand, photographer Lorna Simpson, and many others, inform debates over the concept of identity. Quashie argues that these authors and artists replace the notion of a stable, singular identity with the concept of the self developing in a process both communal and perpetually fluid, a relationship that functions in much the same way that an adult woman negotiates with her girlfriend(s). He suggests that memory itself is corporeal, a literal body that is crucial to the process of becoming. Quashie also explores the problem language poses for the black woman artist and her commitment to a mastery that neither colonizes nor excludes.

The analysis throughout interacts with schools of thought such as psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and post-colonialism, but ultimately moves beyond these to propose a new cultural aesthetic, one that ultimately aims to center black women and their philosophies.

[more]
cover of Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds

Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions

Speaking Their Minds

Edited by Kristin B. Waters and Carol B. Conaway

University Press of New England, 2007

An astonishing wealth of literary and intellectual work by nineteenth-century black women is being rediscovered and restored to print in scholarly and popular editions. In Kristin Waters’s and Carol B. Conaway’s landmark edited collection, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, sophisticated commentary on this rich body of work chronicles a powerful and interwoven legacy of activism based in social and political theories that helped shape the history of North America. The book meticulously reclaims this American legacy, providing a collection of critical analyses of the primary sources and their vital traditions. Written by leading scholars, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions is particularly powerful in its exploration of the pioneering thought and action of the nineteenth-century black woman lecturer and essayist Maria W. Stewart, abolitionist Sojourner Truth, novelist and poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, educator Anna Julia Cooper, newspaper editor Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and activist Ida B. Wells. The distinguished contributors are Hazel V. Carby, Patricia Hill Collins, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Kristin Waters, R. Dianne Bartlow, Carol B. Conaway, Olga Idriss Davis, Vanessa Holford Diana, Evelyn Simien, Janice W. Fernheimer, Michelle N. Garfield, Joy James, Valerie Palmer-Mehta, Carla L. Peterson, Marilyn Richardson, Evelyn M. Simien, Ebony A. Utley, Mary Helen Washington, Melina Abdullah, and Lena Ampadu. The volume will interest scholars and readers of African-American and women’s studies, history, rhetoric, literature, poetry, sociology, political science, and philosophy.
[more]
cover of Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds

Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions

Speaking Their Minds

Edited by Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway

Brandeis University Press, 2022

A new edition of a landmark work on Black women’s intellectual traditions.
 
An astonishing wealth of literary and intellectual work by nineteenth-century Black women is being rediscovered and restored to print in scholarly and popular editions. In Kristin Waters’s and Carol B. Conaway’s landmark edited collection, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, sophisticated commentary on this rich body of work chronicles a powerful and interwoven legacy of activism based in social and political theories that helped shape the history of North America. The book meticulously reclaims this American legacy, providing a collection of critical analyses of the primary sources and their vital traditions. Written by leading scholars, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions is particularly powerful in its exploration of the pioneering thought and action of the nineteenth-century Black woman lecturer and essayist Maria W. Stewart, abolitionist Sojourner Truth, novelist and poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, educator Anna Julia Cooper, newspaper editor Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and activist Ida B. Wells. The distinguished contributors are Hazel V. Carby, Patricia Hill Collins, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Kristin Waters, R. Dianne Bartlow, Carol B. Conaway, Olga Idriss Davis, Vanessa Holford Diana, Evelyn Simien, Janice W. Fernheimer, Michelle N. Garfield, Joy James, Valerie Palmer-Mehta, Carla L. Peterson, Marilyn Richardson, Evelyn M. Simien, Ebony A. Utley, Mary Helen Washington, Melina Abdullah, and Lena Ampadu. The volume will interest scholars and readers of African-American and women’s studies, history, rhetoric, literature, poetry, sociology, political science, and philosophy. This updated edition features a new preface by the editors in the light of new developments in current scholarship.
 
[more]
cover of Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in Birmingham

Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in Birmingham

Edited by Horace Huntley and David Montgomery

University of Illinois Press, 2004

Horace Huntley and David Montgomery curate a collection of annotated oral interviews of black workers who served on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Alabama. As the interviewees recount their struggles against discrimination, they show how collective action--whether through unions, the Movement, or networks of workplace activists--sought to gain access to better jobs, municipal services, housing, and less restrictive voter registration. 

Powerful and honest, Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in Birmingham draws on work by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to offer readers vivid eyewitness accounts of American history in the making.

[more]
cover of Black and Blue TV: Industry Responses to the Black Lives Matter Movement

Black and Blue TV

Industry Responses to the Black Lives Matter Movement

Laurena Bernabo

Rutgers University Press, 2026

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.

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cover of Black and Smart: How Black High-Achieving Women Experience College

Black and Smart

How Black High-Achieving Women Experience College

Adrianne Musu Davis

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Even academically talented students face challenges in college. For high-achieving Black women, their racial, gender, and academic identities intensify those issues. Inside the classroom, they are spotlighted and feel forced to be representatives for their identity groups. In campus life, they are isolated and face microaggressions from peers. Using intersectionality as a theoretical framework, Davis addresses the significance of the various identities of high-achieving Black women in college individually and collectively, revealing the ways institutional oppression functions at historically white institutions and in social interactions on and off campus. Based on interviews with collegiate Black women in honors communities, Black and Smart analyzes the experiences of academically talented Black undergraduate women navigating their social and academic lives at urban historically white institutions and offers strategies for creating more inclusive academic and social environments for talented undergraduates.
 
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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 behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops

Black behind the Ears

Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops

Ginetta E. B. Candelario

Duke University Press, 2007

Black behind the Ears is an innovative historical and ethnographic examination of Dominican identity formation in the Dominican Republic and the United States. For much of the Dominican Republic’s history, the national body has been defined as “not black,” even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. Rejecting simplistic explanations, Ginetta E. B. Candelario suggests that it is not a desire for whiteness that guides Dominican identity discourses and displays. Instead, it is an ideal norm of what it means to be both indigenous to the Republic (indios) and “Hispanic.” Both indigeneity and Hispanicity have operated as vehicles for asserting Dominican sovereignty in the context of the historically triangulated dynamics of Spanish colonialism, Haitian unification efforts, and U.S. imperialism. Candelario shows how the legacy of that history is manifest in contemporary Dominican identity discourses and displays, whether in the national historiography, the national museum’s exhibits, or ideas about women’s beauty. Dominican beauty culture is crucial to efforts to identify as “indios” because, as an easily altered bodily feature, hair texture trumps skin color, facial features, and ancestry in defining Dominicans as indios.

Candelario draws on her participant observation in a Dominican beauty shop in Washington Heights, a New York City neighborhood with the oldest and largest Dominican community outside the Republic, and on interviews with Dominicans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Santo Domingo. She also analyzes museum archives and displays in the Museo del Hombre Dominicano and the Smithsonian Institution as well as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European and American travel narratives.

[more]
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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