Results by title
1048 books match the query 'African American & Black' and 29 start with d
Dance of Life
The Novels of Zakes Mda in Post-apartheid South AfricaGail Fincham
Ohio University Press, 2012
In recent years, the work of Zakes Mda—novelist, painter, composer, theater director and filmmaker—has attracted worldwide critical attention. Gail Fincham’s book examines the five novels Mda has written since South Africa’s transition to democracy: Ways of Dying (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), The Whale Caller (2005), and Cion (2007). Dance of Life explores how refigured identity is rooted in Mda’s strongly painterly imagination that creates changed spaces in memory and culture. Through a combination of magic realism, African orature, and intertextuality with the Western canon, Mda rejects dualistic thinking of the past and the present, the human and the nonhuman, the living and the dead, the rural and the urban. He imbues his fictional characters with the power to orchestrate a reconfigured subjectivity that is simultaneously political, social, and aesthetic.
Dangerous Subjects
James D. Saules and the Rise of Black Exclusion in OregonKenneth R. Coleman
Oregon State University Press, 2017
In Oregon, Saules encountered a multiethnic population already transformed by colonialism—in particular, the fur industry and Protestant missionaries. Once the Oregon Trail emigrants began arriving in large numbers, in 1843, Saules had to adapt to a new reality in which Anglo-American settlers persistently sought to marginalize and exclude black residents from the region. Unlike Saules, who adapted and thrived in Oregon’s multiethnic milieu, the settler colonists sought to remake Oregon as a white man’s country. They used race as shorthand to determine which previous inhabitants would be included and which would be excluded. Saules inspired and later had to contend with a web of black exclusion laws designed to deny black people citizenship, mobility, and land.
In Dangerous Subjects, Kenneth Coleman sheds light on a neglected chapter in Oregon’s history. His book will be welcomed by scholars in the fields of western history and ethnic studies, as well as general readers interested in early Oregon and its history of racial exclusion.
Dark Mirror
African Americans and the Federal Writers' ProjectJ. J. Butts
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
Darkroom
A Memoir in Black and WhiteLila Quintero Weaver
University of Alabama Press, 2012
A Latina girl’s journey through the shadows of the civil rights era.
Darkroom is a deeply moving graphic memoir that chronicles Lila Quintero Weaver’s experience growing up as an Argentine immigrant in 1960s Alabama during the height of the civil rights movement. Through striking black-and-white illustrations and heartfelt narrative, Weaver explores the complexities of race, identity, and belonging in a society divided by segregation. Neither Black nor White, her family occupies a unique position that offers a powerful lens on the struggles for justice and equality. This coming-of-age story blends personal history with pivotal social change, inviting readers to reflect on themes of immigration, cultural assimilation, and moral courage. Darkroom is both an intimate portrait and a universal tale of resilience, making it an essential read for those interested in civil rights, memoirs, and graphic storytelling.
Darktown Strutters
A NovelWesley Brown
University of Massachusetts Press, 2000
Daughters of Harriet
Cynthia Parker-Ohene
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Finalist, 2022 Foreword INDIES for Poetry
Finalist, 2022 Golden Poppy Award for Poetry
Finalist, 2022 San Francisco/Nomadic Literary Award for Poetry
Drawing inspiration from the life of Harriet Tubman, Cynthia Parker-Ohene’s poetic narratives follow a historical arc of consciousness of Black folks: mislaid in potters’ fields and catalogued with other misbegotten souls, now unsettled as the unknown Black denominator. Who loved them? Who turned them away? Who dismembered their souls? In death, they are the institutionalized marked Black bodies assigned to parcels, scourged beneath plastic sheets identified as a number among Harriets as black, marked bodies. These poems speak to how the warehousing of enslaved and somewhat free beings belies their humanity through past performances in reformatories, workhouses, and hospitals for the negro insane. To whom did their Black lives belong? How are Black grrls socialized within the family to be out in the world? What is the beingness of Black women? How have the Harriets—the descended daughters of Harriet Tubman—confronted issues of caste and multiple oppressions? These poems give voice to the unspeakable, the unreachable, the multiple Black selves waiting to become.
Dealmaking Detroit
Two Essays About White Privilege, Private Gain, and Public LossJamon Jordan and Craig Regester, with an introduction by Stephen M. Ward
Disobedience Press, 2027
Who profits from Detroit’s “reinvention”?
In two incisive essays, historian Jamon Jordan and lecturer and labor activist Craig Regester dismantle the facile, corporate narratives surrounding Detroit’s past, present, and future.
Jordan reveals how racial hierarchy has consistently shaped the making and unmaking of the city. He traces a direct line from 19th-century laws requiring “negroes” to pay $500 just to exist in Michigan, through generations of White managers overseeing Black auto workers, to mid-century “redevelopment” plans that displaced and demolished thousands of homes and 350 businesses in Black neighborhoods—and into the present day, where a banner celebrates White capitalist saviors for rescuing Detroit from failure.
Building on this trajectory, Regester scrutinizes the upcoming University of Michigan Center for Innovation in Detroit, a foregone conclusion and joint venture between a public university and a pair of billionaires. Though funded with $100 million in taxpayer dollars, neither the university, the state, nor the developers seriously considered community visions for how the center should serve Detroiters. Regester exposes how the avarice and technocentric whims of the ultra-rich increasingly compromise the public service missions of major research universitie
Death at Cross Plains
An Alabama Reconstruction TragedyGene L. Howard with a foreword by Gary B. Mills
University of Alabama Press, 1984
Reconstruction in the South is a much studied and yet little understood period in the region’s history. In many areas it was marked by such violence as to have been guerrilla warfare in all but name. Death at Cross Plains is the gripping story of one local incident that illuminates the aftermath of the Civil War throughout the region.
Deep Are the Roots
Memoirs of a Black ExpatriateGordon Heath
University of Massachusetts Press, 1992
Defiant Acts
A NovelJames Stewart III
Acre Books, 2025
James Stewart III’s powerful debut novel documents the life of a working-class interracial couple and their children in a Chicago suburb in the early 1990s. The father, Jim, is a Black man married to Connie, a white woman with two white sons from a previous marriage. Connie and Jim have three more children together, and the entire family lives in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a well-to-do, predominantly white community.
Defiant Acts follows the Stewarts through a year in which Jim fights to earn a promotion, the adolescent boys struggle to find themselves, one of the younger children becomes gravely ill, and the parents try to stay afloat in a shaky economy. Within the walls of the Stewarts’ home, race doesn’t factor, but when the family interacts with the outside world, it is inescapable, a basis for identity and inclusion as well as a spur for exclusion and abuse.
Rooted in the tradition of Black authors from Chicago and drawing on the author’s own experiences, Defiant Acts eschews a conventional plot, presenting a series of captured moments—past and present—and multiple perspectives to build a mosaic of the family’s lives. In clear, concise prose, Stewart focuses on the complexities of human relationships and on race relations both in and outside the domestic space, placing emphasis on the values that bind this tight-knit family together: solidarity, care, and hope.
Desegregating Comics
Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American ComicsQiana Whitted
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Shortlisted for the Best Academic / Scholarly Work Eisner Award
Honorable Mention for the Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies from the Popular Culture Association
Some comics fans view the industry’s Golden Age (1930s-1950s) as a challenging time when it comes to representations of race, an era when the few Black characters appeared as brutal savages, devious witch doctors, or unintelligible minstrels. Yet the true portrait is more complex and reveals that even as caricatures predominated, some Golden Age comics creators offered more progressive and nuanced depictions of Black people.
Desegregating Comics assembles a team of leading scholars to explore how debates about the representation of Blackness shaped both the production and reception of Golden Age comics. Some essays showcase rare titles like Negro Romance and consider the formal innovations introduced by Black comics creators like Matt Baker and Alvin Hollingsworth, while others examine the treatment of race in the work of such canonical cartoonists as George Herriman and Will Eisner. The collection also investigates how Black fans read and loved comics, but implored publishers to stop including hurtful stereotypes. As this book shows, Golden Age comics artists, writers, editors, distributors, and readers engaged in heated negotiations over how Blackness should be portrayed, and the outcomes of those debates continue to shape popular culture today.
Desert Rose
The Life and Legacy of Coretta Scott KingEdythe Scott Bagley with Joe Hilley
University of Alabama Press, 2012
An intimate biography illuminating the life, leadership, and legacy of Coretta Scott King within the American Civil Rights Movement.
Coretta Scott King—noted author, human rights activist, and wife and partner of famed Civil Rights Movement leader Martin Luther King Jr.—grew up in the rural Alabama Black Belt with her older sister, Edythe Scott Bagley. Bagley chronicles the sisters’ early education together at the Crossroads School and later at the progressive Lincoln School in Marion. She describes Coretta’s burgeoning talent for singing and her devotion to musical studies, and the sisters’ experiences matriculating at Antioch College, an all-white college far from the rural South. Bagley provides vivid insights into Coretta’s early passion for racial and economic justice, which lead to her involvement in the Peace Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
As Coretta’s older sister, Edythe shared in almost all of Coretta’s many trials and tribulations. Desert Rose charts Coretta’s hesitance about her romance with Martin Luther King and the prospect of having to sacrifice her dream of a career in music to become a minister’s wife. Ultimately, Coretta chose to utilize her artistic gifts and singing voice for the Movement through the development and performance of Freedom Concerts. This book also charts Coretta’s own commitment and dedication, in the years that followed King’s death, to the causes of international civil rights, the antiapartheid movement, and the establishment of the King Center in Atlanta and the national King Holiday. Coretta’s devotion to activism, motherhood, and the movement led by her husband, and her courageous assumption of the legacy left in the wake of King’s untimely assassination, are wonderfully detailed in this intimate biography.
Destiny and Race
Selected Writings, 1840-1898Alexander Crummell
University of Massachusetts Press, 1992
A major reformer and intellectual, Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) was the first black American to graduate from Cambridge University. From 1858 to 1872, he lived in Liberia, where he worked as a farmer, educator, and Episcopal missionary. Returning to America, he established St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Washington D.C., serving as its pastor until 1894. In 1897 he founded the American Negro Academy, which he intended as a challenge to the accommodationist philosophy of Booker T. Washington.
A prolific writer, Crummell produced pioneering works on black nationalism, black self-determination, and Pan Africanism that influenced W.E.B. Du Bois and other African-American leaders of the time. His surviving papers include over four hundred sermons and political essays and a voluminous correspondence.
Yet despite his importance to American and African-American history, Crummell is little known today, and there have been virtually no modern printings of his writing. This volume is intended to restore Crummell’s voice and to prompt a reevaluation of his work.
Devonte Travels the Sorry Route
T.J. Anderson III
Omnidawn, 2019
As fantastical as this account seems, in these poems, T.J. Anderson III captures a critical aspect of the ways identity is formed through community and collective memory, particularly among the peoples of the African diaspora. The way the words expand across the page enacts this polyvocal coalescing, and the blank space in between evokes the vast oceans that first separated and continue to resonate in the collective imagination of the Black community. At the same time that he relates the difficulty of crossing vast expanses of time and space to connect with our history, in these gripping poems Anderson proposes that the past is never far off—in fact, like Devonte, it lives in our own personalities and experiences today.
Diamond and Juba
The Raucous World of 19th-Century Challenge DancingApril F. Masten
University of Illinois Press, 2025
Digest
Gregory Pardlo
Four Way Books, 2014
Dignity
Bob Moses and the Civil Rights MovementAlan Draper
University of Illinois Press, 2027
Challenging entrenched accounts, Alan Draper reveals that Moses could pursue either “Freedom Now” or develop local leaders, but not both. Rich with new details, Dignity follows Bob Moses from his early years through his death in 2021, presenting a clear-eyed view of his personality and achievements. Draper describes how Moses pursued Black voter registration in Mississippi and then in a second career devoted himself to math education. Just as dignity for Blacks in the twentieth century required voting rights, so did Moses believe that dignity for Blacks in the next century required math skills.
Dissonant Voices
Race, Jazz, and Innovative Poetics in Midcentury AmericaJoseph Pizza
University of Iowa Press, 2023
Diverse Futures
Science Fiction and Authors of ColorJoy Sanchez-Taylor
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
Dividing Lines
Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black FictionAndreá N. Williams
University of Michigan Press, 2013
Divine Days
A NovelLeon Forrest; Foreword by Kenneth W. Warren, Preface by Zachary Price
Northwestern University Press, 2023
“I have an awful memory for faces, but an excellent one for voices,” muses Joubert Jones, the aspiring playwright at the center of Divine Days. A kaleidoscopic whorl of characters, language, music, and Black experience, this saga follows Jones for one week in 1966 as he pursues the lore and legends of fictional Forest County, a place resembling Chicago’s South Side. Joubert is a veteran, recently returned to the city, who works for his aunt Eloise’s newspaper and pours drinks at her Night Light Lounge. He wants to write a play about Sugar-Groove, a drifter, “eternal wunderkind,” and local folk hero who seems to have passed away. Sugar-Groove’s disappearance recalls the subject of one of Joubert’s earlier writing attempts—W. A. D. Ford, a protean, diabolical preacher who led a religious sect known as “Divine Days.” Joubert takes notes as he learns about both tricksters, trying to understand their significance.
Divine Days introduces readers to a score of indelible characters: Imani, Joubert’s girlfriend, an artist and social worker searching for her lost siblings and struggling to reconcile middle class life with her values and Black identity; Eloise, who raised Joubert and whose influence is at odds with his writerly ambitions; (Oscar) Williemain, a local barber, storyteller, and founder of the Royal Rites and Righteous Ramblings Club; and the Night Light’s many patrons. With a structure inspired by James Joyce and jazz, Leon Forrest folds references to African American literature and cinema, Shakespeare, the Bible, and classical mythology into a heady quest that embraces life in all its tumult and adventure.
This edition brings Forrest’s masterpiece back into print, incorporating hundreds of editorial changes that the author had requested from W. W. Norton, but were not made for their editions in 1993 and 1994. Much of the inventory from the original printing of the book by Another Chicago Press in 1992 had been destroyed in a disastrous warehouse fire.
Do My Heart Good
My Odyssey Through Country Music, Medicine, and HistoryCleve Francis
University of Illinois Press, 2026
Francis’s account follows his “multidimensional life” through two milieus that rarely welcome Black men: country music and medicine. Merging rich storytelling with thoughtful insights, Francis shares the obstacles and triumphs he experienced through his lifelong love of performing music and writing songs, his abiding interest in science and medicine, and his determination to overcome racial barriers. He also offers an insider’s view of the 1990s country music world—the discipline of finding songs and recording in Nashville, the fight to get his music on the radio, and a whirlwind of shows and encounters with country music legends.
Engaging and inspiring, Do My Heart Good is the story of how resolve, hard work, and joy composed a uniquely American success story.
Dorothy West's Paradise
A Biography of Class and ColorSherrard-Johnson, Cherene
Rutgers University Press, 2012
Dorothy West is best known as one of the youngest writers involved in the Harlem Renaissance. Subsequently, her work is read as a product of the urban aesthetics of this artistic movement. But West was also intimately rooted in a very different milieu—Oak Bluffs, an exclusive retreat for African Americans on Martha’s Vineyard. She played an integral role in the development and preservation of that community. In the years between publishing her two novels, 1948’s The Living is Easy and the 1995 bestseller The Wedding, she worked as a columnist for the Vineyard Gazette.
Dorothy West’s Paradise captures the scope of the author’s long life and career, reading it alongside the unique cultural geography of Oak Bluffs and its history as an elite African American enclave—a place that West envisioned both as a separatist refuge and as a space for interracial contact. An essential book for both fans of West’s fiction and students of race, class, and American women’s lives, Dorothy West’s Paradise offers an intimate biography of an important author and a privileged glimpse into the society that shaped her work.
Double-Consciousness/Double Bind
Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black LiteratureSandra Adell
University of Illinois Press, 1994
Double-Take
A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance AnthologyPatton, Venetria K
Rutgers University Press, 2001
The editors have included works from a wide variety of genres-poetry, short stories, drama, and essays-allowing readers to understand the true interdisciplinary quality of this cultural movement. Biographical sketches of the authors are provided and most of the pieces are included in their entirety. Double-Take also includes artwork and illustrations, many of which are from original journals and have never before been reprinted. Significantly, Double-Take is the first Harlem Renaissance title to include song lyrics to illustrate the interrelation of various art forms.
Dream Books and Gamblers
Black Women's Work in Chicago's Policy GameElizabeth Schroeder Schlabach
University of Illinois Press, 2022
Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach examines the complexities of Black women’s work in policy gambling. Policy provided Black women with a livelihood for themselves and their families. At the same time, navigating gender expectations, aggressive policing, and other hazards of the infromal economy led them to refashion ideas about Black womanhood and respectability. Policy earnings also funded above-board enterprises ranging from neighborhood businesses to philanthropic institutions, and Schlabach delves into the various ways Black women straddled the illegal policy business and reputable community involvement.
Vivid and revealing, Dream Books and Gamblers tells the stories of Black women in the underground economy and how they used their work to balance the demands of living and laboring in Black Chicago.
Dreaming Out Loud
African American Novelists at WorkHorace Porter
University of Iowa Press, 2015
Some essays explore the challenges of being an African American writer in the United States, broadly addressing aesthetic and racial prejudice in American publishing and literature and its changing face over the decades. Others are more specific and personal, recounting how the authors came to be a reader and writer in a culture that did not always encourage them to do so. Some are more general and focus on practice and craft, while still other essays offer detailed behind-the-scenes accounts of how famous novels, such as Native Son, Invisible Man, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and The Color Purple, came to life. Ranging from the Harlem Renaissance, through the Civil Rights movement, and into the twenty-first century, this anthology explores what it has meant to be an African American novelist over the past hundred years.
Found within are essays by twenty-one African American novelists, including Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, National Book Award-winners Ralph Ellison and Charles Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winners Alice Walker and James Alan McPherson, and well-known canonical writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Margaret Walker. Dreaming Out Loud seeks to inspire writers and readers alike, while offering a fascinating and important portrait of novelists at work in their own words.
CONTRIBUTORS
James Baldwin, Arna Bontemps, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Gaines, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Charles Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Gayl Jones, Terry McMillan, James Alan McPherson, Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, Ishmael Reed, Martha Southgate, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, John Edgar Wideman, Richard Wright
Dub
Finding CeremonyAlexis Pauline Gumbs
Duke University Press, 2019
Duties, Pleasures, and Conflicts
Essays in StruggleMichael M. Thelwell
University of Massachusetts Press, 1987
This powerful collection of essays and short stories provides a unique perspective on the black civil rights movement over the past twenty-five years. A long-time activist, Michael Thelwell was a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in the early 1960s, a founder of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts in 1970, author of the widely praised novel The Harder They Come published in 1980, and an organizer for Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign in 1984. Thelwell is a writer of rare grace, integrity, and strong political convictions.
The collection begins with three stories. Set in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s, the stories explore how individuals manage to preserve their dignity in a world of racism and violence. The next six essays, also written in the 1960s, are historical and journalistic. They discuss the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the situation in the South as seen by SNCC workers, the political challenges in Mississippi, the articulation of the Black Power movement, the causes of the black student revolt at Cornell, and the need for Black Studies as the intellectual offensive in the struggle for black liberation.
The section that follows is composed of literary pieces: two appreciative essays on James Baldwin, two critical reviews of William Styron and his treatment of Nat Turner, an excoriating assessment of V. S. Naipaul, a profile of Amos Tutuola, and a thoughtful analysis of the social responsibility of the black writer.
The final essay examines the history of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign and comments on the political climate of the 1980s.