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In Ghost Woman, Crystal Simone Smith explores the long and deep connections between nature, personhood, ancestry, and trauma through haiku and haibun. Separated into five sections, the poems emphasize the way social bonds and landscapes are reflected in and through the environment. Smith brings her experiences with race, motherhood, and poetry into conversation with the five elements, Wind (fu), Earth (chi), Water (sui), Fire (ka), and Void (ku) to take readers through an introspective haiku journey, an exploration of the nature of the self as well as the nature of the broader world. Balancing shattering grief with ordinary moments of love and trauma with survival, Ghost Woman weaves a narrative verse of single motherhood, bearing witness, and carrying your history with you. The poems in Ghost Woman invite readers to be with nature and themselves more intentionally.

Questions traditional assumptions about power and agency in slave women’s everyday lives.

Through their open defiance, women like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth had a significant impact on the institution of slavery. But what of the countless other women who did not commit public or even private acts of resistance? Are their stories worthy of our attention? While some scholars imply that only the struggle for freedom was legitimate, Jenny Sharpe complicates the linear narrative-from slavery to freedom and literacy-that emerged from the privileging of autobiographical accounts like that of Frederick Douglass. She challenges a paradigm that equates agency with resistance and self-determination, and introduces new ways to examine negotiations for power within the constraints of slavery.

In Ghosts of Slavery, Sharpe introduces a wider range of everyday practices by examining the lives of three distinctive Caribbean women: a maroon leader, a mulatto concubine, and a fugitive slave. Through them she explains how the diasporic experience of slavery enabled black women to claim an authority that they didn’t possess in Africa, how concubines empowered themselves through their mimicry of white women, and how less-privileged slave women manipulated situations that they were powerless to change. Finding the highly mediated portrayal of slave women in the historical records limited and sometimes misleading, Sharpe turns to unconventional sources for investigating these women’s lives. In this fascinating and historically rich account, she calls for new strategies of reading that question traditional narratives of history, and she finds alternative ways to integrate oral storytelling, slave songs, travel writing, court documents, proslavery literature, and contemporary literature into black history. Ultimately, this layered approach not only produces a more complex picture of the slave women’s agency than conventional readings, it encourages a more nuanced understanding of the roles of slaves in the history of slavery.

Living history is a style of instructive and entertaining performance that seeks to bring history to life with the use of costumes, tools, and reenactments appropriate to a specific time period. Done well, living history performances illuminate human experience in powerful, unforgettable ways.

The fifteen living history plays in this collection were commissioned by museums and historic sites in Texas to show the interdependence of African American experiences and contributions to the living history of Texas. The plays cover subject matter ranging from slave celebrations, family breakups, and running away, to the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Each play is research based and performed by Talking Back Living History Theatre as a festival production. These scripts are easily performed, and author Naomi Mitchell Carrier has included production notes in the overviews that precede each play. Lesson plans are also included, which add to the collection's appeal as a classroom tool.

Carrier's talent for bringing historical figures to life is exceptional. The names of most primary characters in these plays are real. By giving them faces, feelings, intelligence, and dignity, Carrier aims to give them new life.

Black virality refers to the spread of Black performance that becomes uncontrollable because of its rapid and ubiquitous circulation through popular media. Gabriel A. Peoples examines Black people and representations of Black people that have gone viral from the eighteenth century to today.

Peoples’s analysis ranges from abolitionist and proslavery visual culture to Do the Right Thing to “Bed Intruder Song” and the cellphone video of Derrion Albert’s murder. After identifying these moments, he considers how performances go viral in Black ways. He also thinks through the ways Black virality circulates ideas that materially affect Black life. As he shows, an interacting person’s vulnerability to racialized gender and racialized sexuality knowledge inspires how they spread a performance. Non-iconic elements of viral moments reveal hard-to-find nuances of Black life while the artists and others represented in viral moments promote both collective and individual liberation by harnessing their visibility and audibility.

Rigorous and expansive, Goin’ Viral uses Black virality as a new way to understand and frame Black performances.

First popularized by newspaper coverage of the Underground Railroad in the 1840s, the underground serves as a metaphor for subversive activity that remains central to our political vocabulary. In Going Underground, Lara Langer Cohen excavates the long history of this now familiar idea while seeking out versions of the underground that were left behind along the way. Outlining how the underground’s figurative sense first took shape through the associations of literal subterranean spaces with racialized Blackness, she examines a vibrant world of nineteenth-century US subterranean literature that includes Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensationalist exposés of the urban underworld, manuals for sex magic, and the initiation rites of secret societies. Cohen finds that the undergrounds in this literature offer sites of political possibility that exceed the familiar framework of resistance, suggesting that nineteenth-century undergrounds can inspire new modes of world-making and world-breaking for a time when this world feels increasingly untenable.

In Grime, Glitter, and Glass, Nikki A. Greene examines how contemporary Black visual artists use sonic elements to refigure the formal and philosophical developments of Black art and culture. Focusing on the multimedia art of Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Greene traces the intersection of the visual’s sonic possibilities with the Black body’s physical, representational, and metaphorical use in art. She employs her concept of “visual aesthetic musicality” to interpret Black visual art by examining the musical genres of jazz and rap, along with the often-overlooked innovations of funk and rumba, within art historiography. From Bailey’s use of multilayered surfaces of glitter, mud, and recycled materials to meditate on Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism to Stout’s life-size cast of her own body that recalls funk musician Betty Davis to Campos-Pons’s performative and sculptural references to sugar that resonate with the legacy of Celia Cruz, Greene outlines how these artists use mediums such as molded glass sculptures, viscous wet plaster, and dazzling mannequin heads to enhance the manifestations of Black identity. By foregrounding the sonic elements of their work, Greene demonstrates that these artists use sound to make themselves legible, recognizable, and audible.

Grounding Practice: Dancing Haiti on Tè Glise tracks the responsive physical techniques Haitian dancers devised for navigating precarity, making place, and igniting repair in the decade following the 2010 earthquake. Via the concept “grounding practice,” which connotes the powerful community building and placemaking made possible by the teaching and practice of Haitian folkloric dance, this interdisciplinary study illustrates how the embodied labor of revitalizing traditions took on increasing relevance as vital reparative worldmaking amidst instability, or tè glise–—Haitian Creole for sliding land or slippery ground.

The dancers in Grounding Practice regenerate understandings of Haitian dance’s potential for fomenting decolonial consciousness, meaningfully sustaining African-derived culture, birthing new social relations, activating the queer potentials of tradition, and ultimately making place. Through ethnography and vivid descriptions, Dasha A. Chapman’s attention to embodied knowledge illuminates how movement practice operates as a site of theorization—wherein not just subjectivity, but also concepts of sovereignty, relation, and futurity, are articulated through the body. Paying homage to important forebears yet moving us beyond static narratives, this study brings our understanding of Haitian dance—and Haiti—through expansive landscapes into the contemporary.

Growing Up Ethnic examines the presence of literary similarities between African American and Jewish American coming-of-age stories in the first half of the twentieth century; often these similarities exceed what could be explained by sociohistorical correspondences alone. Martin Japtok argues that these similarities result from the way both African American and Jewish American authors have conceptualized their "ethnic situation." The issue of "race" and its social repercussions certainly defy any easy comparisons. However, the fact that the ethnic situations are far from identical in the case of these two groups only highlights the striking thematic correspondences in how a number of African American and Jewish American coming-of-age stories construct ethnicity. Japtok studies three pairs of novels--James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Samuel Ornitz's Haunch, Paunch and Jowl, Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun and Edna Ferber's Fanny Herself, and Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones and Anzia Yezierska's Bread Giver--and argues that the similarities can be explained with reference to mainly two factors, ultimately intertwined: cultural nationalism and the Bildungsroman genre. Growing Up Ethnic shows that the parallel configurations in the novels, which often see ethnicity in terms of spirituality, as inherent artistic ability, and as communal responsibility, are rooted in nationalist ideology. However, due to the authors' generic choice--the Bildungsroman--the tendency to view ethnicity through the rhetorical lens of communalism and spiritual essence runs head-on into the individualist assumptions of the protagonist-centered Bildungsroman. The negotiations between these ideological counterpoints characterize the novels and reflect and refract the intellectual ferment of their time. This fresh look at ethnic American literatures in the context of cultural nationalism and the Bildungsroman will be of great interest to students and scholars of literary and race studies.