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By the 1980s, critics and the public alike considered James Baldwin irrelevant. Yet Baldwin remained an important, prolific writer until his death in 1987. Indeed, his work throughout the decade pushed him into new areas, in particular an expanded interest in the social and psychological consequences of popular culture and mass media.

Joseph Vogel offers the first in-depth look at Baldwin's dynamic final decade of work. Delving into the writer's creative endeavors, crucial essays and articles, and the impassioned polemic The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Vogel finds Baldwin as prescient and fearless as ever. Baldwin's sustained grappling with "the great transforming energy" of mass culture revealed his gifts for media and cultural criticism. It also brought him into the fray on issues ranging from the Reagan-era culture wars to the New South, from the deterioration of inner cities to the disproportionate incarceration of black youth, and from pop culture gender-bending to the evolving women's and gay rights movements.

Astute and compelling, James Baldwin and the 1980s revives and redeems the final act of a great American writer.

"This fine collection of essays represents an important contribution to the rediscovery of Baldwin's stature as essayist, novelist, black prophetic political voice, and witness to the Civil Rights era. The title provides an excellent thematic focus. He understood both the necessity, and the impossibility, of being a black 'American' writer. He took these issues 'Beyond'---Paris, Istanbul, various parts of Africa---but this formative experience only returned him to the unresolved dilemmas. He was a fine novelist and a major prophetic political voice. He produced some of the most important essays of the twentieth century and addressed in depth the complexities of the black political movement. His relative invisibility almost lost us one of the most significant voices of his generation. This welcome 'revival' retrieves it. Close call."
---Stuart Hall, Professor Emeritus, Open University
 
 This interdisciplinary collection by leading writers in their fields brings together a discussion of the many facets of James Baldwin, both as a writer and as the prophetic conscience of a nation. The core of the volume addresses the shifting, complex relations between Baldwin as an American—“as American as any Texas GI” as he once wryly put it—and his life as an itinerant cosmopolitan. His ambivalent imaginings of America were always mediated by his conception of a world “beyond” America: a world he knew both from his travels and from his voracious reading. He was a man whose instincts were, at every turn, nurtured by America; but who at the same time developed a ferocious critique of American exceptionalism. In seeking to understand how, as an American, he could learn to live with difference—breaking the power of fundamentalisms of all stripes—he opened an urgent, timely debate that is still ours. His America was an idea fired by desire and grief in equal measure. As the authors assembled here argue, to read him now allows us to imagine new possibilities for the future.

With contributions by Kevin Birmingham, Douglas Field, Kevin Gaines, Briallen Hopper, Quentin Miller, Vaughn Rasberry, Robert Reid-Pharr, George Shulman, Hortense Spillers, Colm Tóibín, Eleanor W. Traylor, Cheryl A. Wall, and Magdalena Zaborowska.

Singer. Dancer. Movie star. Activist. Queer icon. Afrofuturist. Working class heroine. Time traveler. Prophet. Feminist. Android. Dirty Computer.
 
Janelle Monáe is all these things and more, making her one of the most fascinating artists to emerge in the twenty-first century. This provocative new study explores how Monáe’s work has connected different media platforms to strengthen and enhance new movements in art, theory, and politics. It considers not only Monáe’s groundbreaking albums The ArchAndroid, The Electric Lady, and Dirty Computer, but also Monáe’s work as an actress in such films as Hidden Figures and Antebellum, as well as her soundtrack appearances in socially-engaged projects ranging from I May Destroy You to Us. Examining Monáe as a cultural icon whose work is profoundly intersectional, this book maps how she is actively reshaping discourses around race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism. Tracing Monáe’s performances of joy, desire, pain, and hope across a wide range of media forms, it shows how she imagines Afrofuturist, posthumanist, and postcapitalist utopias, while remaining grounded in the realities of being a Black woman in a white-dominated industry. This is an exciting introduction to an audacious innovator whose work offers us fresh ways to talk about identity, desire, and power.

Jazz emerged during the political and social upheaval of world war, communist revolution, Red Scares, and the Black Migration. The tumult bred disagreements about the cultural significance of jazz that concerned both its African American roots and its international appeal. The questions about what was new or even radical about the music initiated debates that writers recapitulated for decades.

Jazz Internationalism offers a bold reconsideration of jazz's influence in Afro-modernist literature. Ranging from the New Negro Renaissance through the social movements of the 1960s, John Lowney articulates nothing less than a new history of Afro-modernist jazz writing. Jazz added immeasurably to the vocabulary for discussing radical internationalism and black modernism in leftist African American literature. Lowney examines how Claude McKay, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, and many other writers employed jazz as both a critical social discourse and mode of artistic expression to explore the possibilities—and challenges—of black internationalism. The result is an expansive understanding of jazz writing sure to spur new debates.

A biography of the pioneering Black leader

Privileged beyond other members of his race, yet sharing their disadvantages, the young John Mercer Langston stood in an uncertain position in the years before the Civil War. His confrontation with a critical personal question was tempered by a crucial national reality: from what sources could he derive his model of manhood and human dignity? This book explores John Mercer Langston's decisions to work out his destiny through the resources and fortunes of the northern black community.

Although Langston, who died in 1897, was a black Politician, orator, lawyer, intellectual, diplomat, and congressman, he has never before been accorded fullscale biographical treatment. Born free on a Virginia plantation, Langston graduated from Oberlin College in 1849, gained admission to the Ohio bar, and by the age of twenty-five, became the first black American to hold elective office. Still in the years of his political apprenticeship, he promoted black civil rights, helped shape the nascent Republican party, aided in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue and John Brown's raid, and recruited black soldier for the Union cause. In 1864 he became the first president of the National Equal Rights League.

From an extensive search of primary sources, the authors construct a richly textured picture of the beginnings of Langston's career as a national black leader. More than a biography, the work also incorporates social and political history. Embedded firmly in a study of northern black community life and activism, it reveals the degree to which Langston and his cohorts set the terms of the fight for freedom and citizenship.

The book, Julius Scott and the Importance of Being, introduces readers to the historian Julius Scott, his own history, personal qualities, and work. Julius is remembered for the book, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, published in 2018, which was widely regarded as a transformative contribution to Atlantic world history. Admiringly reviewed in many important journals, the book received several awards. These accolades came as a sort of compensation at the time of worsening health, a consequence of type 1 diabetes. The consequences of having type 1 diabetes are documented with a detailed discussion of the relentless effects of this disease. Furthermore, as the first Black student to integrate Southern schools, which included his first-grade class in Houston, Texas, and later, secondary schools, first in Atlanta and then in Alabama, along with Julius’s family background, these experiences enabled him to astutely observe racism in its various forms. Throughout his life, Julius managed, despite his terrible illness, to carry on, with ingenuity, grace, and humor.

This biography of Julius Scott is based on primary and secondary sources and focuses on aspects of Julius’s life in order to underscore the personal connection between scholarly achievement, his experiences of living the United States as an African American, and the relentless consequences of having type 1 diabetes. The book, Julius Scott and the Importance of Being, also underscores the importance of documenting the continuing significance of race and religion in political life in the US and the Caribbean.

As the twentieth century began, Black and white southerners alike dealt with low life expectancy and poor healthcare in a region synonymous with early death. But the modernization of death care by a diverse group of actors changed not only death rituals but fundamental ideas about health and wellness.

Kristine McCusker charts the dramatic transformation that took place when southerners in particular and Americans in general changed their thinking about when one should die, how that death could occur, and what decent burial really means. As she shows, death care evolved from being a community act to a commercial one where purchasing a purple coffin and hearse ride to the cemetery became a political statement and the norm. That evolution also required interactions between perfect strangers, especially during the world wars as families searched for their missing soldiers. In either case, being put away decent, as southerners called burial, came to mean something fundamentally different in 1955 than it had just fifty years earlier.

On May 1, 1951, Orestes “Minnie” Miñoso took the field for the Chicago White Sox and broke the color line for Chicago major league baseball. Ernie Banks integrated the Chicago Cubs two years later. The future Hall of Famers began their Chicago baseball careers against the backdrop of a 1951 race riot in suburban Cicero, where a white mob abetted by local police attacked a building that had rented to Black tenants.

Don Zminda’s account looks at these interconnected events alongside the little-known chronicle of Chicago’s slow track to integrating major league baseball. By the early 1950s, the Cubs and White Sox organizations had become rich in Black and Afro-Latino stars and talented prospects. Unlike Miñoso and Banks, however, most of these minor leaguers never advanced to the majors or, if they did, it was for little more than a cup of coffee. Zminda also profiles these players, from Charles Pope, the Cubs’ first Black signee, to larger-than-life fireballer Blood Burns.

Essential and dramatic, Justice Batted Last uses the lives and careers of two Chicago legends to tell a story of integration on and off the diamond.