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1563 books match the query 'African American & Black Studies' and 68 start with m

cover of Monumental Opacity: Commemorations of Enslaved Resistance

Monumental Opacity

Commemorations of Enslaved Resistance

Sarah Juliet Lauro

University of Minnesota Press, 2027

A groundbreaking exploration of how opaque monuments demand respectful commemoration of enslaved lives

In an era of debate over how monuments should function and whose stories they should tell, Monumental Opacity asks us to consider how some commemorations withhold information to resist appropriation. Sarah Juliet Lauro posits that monuments, broadly defined, that shape public memories of slavery and its resistance could employ intentional obfuscation as an insurgent strategy to protect the self-emancipation of the enslaved person and combat visual possession by curious visitors.

Construing opacity as a form of opposition that renders its subject unapprehendable to viewers, Lauro explores how this concept plays out in museums devoted to the history of slavery, as well as in literature, film, art, countermovements, and protests, with particular attention to artistic works by Kara Walker and Kerry James Marshall and literary works by Victor Hugo and Herman Melville. Opaque commemorations of rebels and freedom fighters create an unbridgeable distance between the spectator and the history they represent. In that space, we are called to consider all that we don’t know about the figures we celebrate and their choice to resist their own objectification, thereby fostering a deeper sense of recognition.

Monumental Opacity is a timely and necessary call to reconsider the very act of commemoration and what it accomplishes. Offering a powerful aesthetic of subversion, Lauro inspires us to think about how—and why—history can be made unconsumable, protected from a voracious public.

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cover of More Than an Ocean: Reflections of a Diasporic Daughter

More Than an Ocean

Reflections of a Diasporic Daughter

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Duke University Press, 2027

More Than an Ocean brings together over two decades of thoughtful, experimental writings in Black feminist diasporic practice by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. These essays, letters, poems, and meditations question the terms of Black diaspora across geography and generations. The collected works range from some of her earliest critical engagements with the scholars who have shaped her inquiry since graduate school, including Dionne Brand and Audre Lorde, to her most recent critical writings, to letters she’s exchanged with Christina Sharpe, Torkwase Dyson, and others. In all stages, Gumbs challenges traditional tenets of Black Studies, centering the Caribbean as a nodal point of the Black diaspora and placing Black women at the center of intellectual history, artistic communities, and political movements. By transversing form and discipline, More Than an Ocean paints an image not only of a Black queer feminist thinker but of what is possible in the work of inquiry and solidarity across differences and intimacies.
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cover of Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power

Move On Up

Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power

Aaron Cohen

University of Chicago Press, 2019

A Chicago Tribune Book of 2019, Notable Chicago Reads

A Booklist Top 10 Arts Book of 2019

A No Depression Top Music Book of 2019

Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago’s place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s was more than just a series of hits: it was a marker and a source of black empowerment. In Move On Up, Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. Together, soul music and black-owned businesses thrived. Record producers and song-writers broadcast optimism for black America’s future through their sophisticated, jazz-inspired productions for the Dells and many others. Curtis Mayfield boldly sang of uplift with unmistakable grooves like “We’re a Winner” and “I Plan to Stay a Believer.” Musicians like Phil Cohran and the Pharaohs used their music to voice Afrocentric philosophies that challenged racism and segregation, while Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire and Chaka Khan created music that inspired black consciousness. Soul music also accompanied the rise of African American advertisers and the campaign of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983. This empowerment was set in stark relief by the social unrest roiling in Chicago and across the nation: as Chicago’s homegrown record labels produced rising stars singing songs of progress and freedom, Chicago’s black middle class faced limited economic opportunities and deep-seated segregation, all against a backdrop of nationwide deindustrialization.

Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and a music critic’s passion for the unmistakable Chicago soul sound, Cohen shows us how soul music became the voice of inspiration and change for a city in turmoil.
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cover of Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Shaping of Global Black Consciousness

Moving Against the System

The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Shaping of Global Black Consciousness

Edited by David Austin

Pluto Press, 2018

In 1968, as protests shook France and war raged in Vietnam, the giants of black radical politics descended on Montreal to discuss the unique challenges and struggles facing their black comrades all over the world.

Against a backdrop of widespread racism in the West and ongoing colonialism and imperialism in the Global South, this group of activists, writers, and political figures gathered to discuss the history and struggles of people of African descent and the meaning of black power.

For the first time since 1968, David Austin brings alive the speeches and debates of the most important international gathering of black radicals of the era. With never-before-seen texts from Stokely Carmichael, Walter Rodney and C.L.R. James, these documents will prove invaluable to anyone interested in black radical thought and political activism of the 1960s.
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cover of Moving Performances: Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage

Moving Performances

Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage

Scheper, Jeanne

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Fabulous yet fierce, imperious yet impetuous, boss yet bitchy—divas are figures of paradox. Their place in culture is equally contradictory, as they are simultaneously venerated and marginalized, hailed as timeless but then frequently forgotten or exhumed as cult icons by future generations. 
 
Focusing on four early twentieth-century divas—Aida Overton Walker, Loïe Fuller, Libby Holman, and Josephine Baker—who were icons in their own time, Moving Performances considers what their past and current reception reveals about changing ideas of race and gender. Jeanne Scheper examines how iconicity can actually work to the diva’s detriment, reducing her to a fetish object, a grotesque, or a figure of nostalgia. Yet she also locates more productive modes of reception that reach to revive the diva’s moving performances, imbuing her with an affective afterlife.  
 
As it offers innovative theorizations of performance, reception, and affect, Moving Performances also introduces readers to four remarkable women who worked as both cultural producers and critics, deftly subverting the tropes of exoticism, orientalism, and primitivism commonly used to dismiss women of color. Rejecting iconic depictions of these divas as frozen in a past moment, Scheper vividly demonstrates how their performances continue to inspire ongoing movements. 
 
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cover of Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis

Moving Stones

About the Art of Edmonia Lewis

Jennifer DeVere Brody

Duke University Press, 2026

Moving Stones explores the extraordinary life and work of Edmonia Lewis, the Black and Ojibwe sculptor who rose to international fame in the nineteenth century. Blending biography, history, and theory, Jennifer DeVere Brody approaches Lewis’s legacy through a Black feminist and queer lens, illuminating how her sculptures and self-fashioning challenged constraints of her time. Living much of her life in Rome as a free Afro-Native woman, Lewis used neoclassical forms to carve out a life in art. Brody considers how Lewis’s works were viewed historically and how they resonate with postmodern artists, engaging themes of race, materiality, sexuality, and embodiment. Rethinking one of the most important sculptors of her era, Moving Stones shows how Lewis’s art continues to inspire contemporary artists and scholars today.
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cover of Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition

Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition

Sora Y. Han

Duke University Press, 2024

In March 2020, Sora Y. Han learned her father was dying of cancer just as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived on California's shores. These two events led Han to introspection: “Who have I been writing to?” and “Who have I been writing for?” In her observance of the 49 days of mourning in Buddhist tradition, answers come in the form of mu – no thing, nothingness. Han’s poetic meditations on freedom struggle come alive in the empty spaces between words, letters, and pictograms spanning her many languages—English, Korean, Chinese, jazz, law, and poetry. Transliterating and dystranslating the writings of Fred Moten, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, and others through the Korean alphabet, Han weaves the DMZ, Betty’s Case, the Thirteenth Amendment, Afro-pessimism, and psychoanalytic desire together into the open field of Bay Area radicalism. Mu is both a loving homage to and a playful subversion of political inheritances and the unsayable beyond law.
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cover of Murder Town, USA: Homicide, Structural Violence, and Activism in Wilmington

Murder Town, USA

Homicide, Structural Violence, and Activism in Wilmington

Yasser Arafat Payne

Rutgers University Press, 2023

James Short Senior Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology

Far too many poor Black communities struggle with gun violence and homicide. The result has been the unnatural contortion of Black families and the inter-generational perpetuation of social chaos and untimely death. Young people are repeatedly ripped away from life by violence, while many men are locked away in prisons. In neighborhoods like those of Wilmington, Delaware, residents routinely face the pressures of violence, death, and incarceration. Murder Town, USA is thus a timely ethnography with an innovative structure: the authors helped organize fifteen residents formerly involved with the streets and/or the criminal justice system to document the relationship between structural opportunity and experiences with violence in Wilmington's Eastside and Southbridge neighborhoods. 
Earlier scholars offered rich cultural analysis of violence in low-income Black communities, and yet this literature has mostly conceptualized violence through frameworks of personal responsibility or individual accountability. And even if acknowledging the pressure of structural inequality, most earlier researchers describe violence as the ultimate result of some moral failing, a propensity for crime, and the notion of helplessness. Instead, in Murder Town USA, Payne, Hitchens, and Chamber, along with their collaborative team of street ethnographers, instead offer a radical re-conceptualization of violence in low-income Black communities by describing the penchant for violence and involvement in crime overall to be a logical, "resilient" response to the perverse context of structural inequality.
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cover of Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing

Murder in New Orleans

The Creation of Jim Crow Policing

Jeffrey S. Adler

University of Chicago Press, 2019

New Orleans in the 1920s and 1930s was a deadly place. In 1925, the city’s homicide rate was six times that of New York City and twelve times that of Boston. Jeffrey S. Adler has explored every homicide recorded in New Orleans between 1925 and 1940—over two thousand in all—scouring police and autopsy reports, old interviews, and crumbling newspapers. More than simply quantifying these cases, Adler places them in larger contexts—legal, political, cultural, and demographic—and emerges with a tale of racism, urban violence, and vicious policing that has startling relevance for today.

Murder in New Orleans shows that whites were convicted of homicide at far higher rates than blacks leading up to the mid-1920s. But by the end of the following decade, this pattern had reversed completely, despite an overall drop in municipal crime rates. The injustice of this sharp rise in arrests was compounded by increasingly brutal treatment of black subjects by the New Orleans police department. Adler explores other counterintuitive trends in violence, particularly how murder soared during the flush times of the Roaring Twenties, how it plummeted during the Great Depression, and how the vicious response to African American crime occurred even as such violence plunged in frequency—revealing that the city’s cycle of racial policing and punishment was connected less to actual patterns of wrongdoing than to the national enshrinement of Jim Crow. Rather than some hyperviolent outlier, this Louisiana city was a harbinger of the endemic racism at the center of today’s criminal justice state. Murder in New Orleans lays bare how decades-old crimes, and the racially motivated cruelty of the official response, have baleful resonance in the age of Black Lives Matter.

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cover of Murder on Shades Mountain: The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham

Murder on Shades Mountain

The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham

Melanie S. Morrison

Duke University Press, 2018

One August night in 1931, on a secluded mountain ridge overlooking Birmingham, Alabama, three young white women were brutally attacked. The sole survivor, Nell Williams, age eighteen, said a black man had held the women captive for four hours before shooting them and disappearing into the woods. That same night, a reign of terror was unleashed on Birmingham's black community: black businesses were set ablaze, posses of armed white men roamed the streets, and dozens of black men were arrested in the largest manhunt in Jefferson County history. Weeks later, Nell identified Willie Peterson as the attacker who killed her sister Augusta and their friend Jennie Wood. With the exception of being black, Peterson bore little resemblance to the description Nell gave the police. An all-white jury convicted Peterson of murder and sentenced him to death.

In Murder on Shades Mountain Melanie S. Morrison tells the gripping and tragic story of the attack and its aftermath—events that shook Birmingham to its core. Having first heard the story from her father—who dated Nell's youngest sister when he was a teenager—Morrison scoured the historical archives and documented the black-led campaigns that sought to overturn Peterson's unjust conviction, spearheaded by the NAACP and the Communist Party. The travesty of justice suffered by Peterson reveals how the judicial system could function as a lynch mob in the Jim Crow South. Murder on Shades Mountain also sheds new light on the struggle for justice in Depression-era Birmingham. This riveting narrative is a testament to the courageous predecessors of present-day movements that demand an end to racial profiling, police brutality, and the criminalization of black men.
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cover of Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz

Music Is My Life

Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz

Daniel Stein

University of Michigan Press, 2012

Music Is My Life is the first comprehensive analysis of Louis Armstrong's autobiographical writings (including his books, essays, and letters) and their relation to his musical and visual performances. Combining approaches from autobiography theory, literary criticism, intermedia studies, cultural history, and musicology, Daniel Stein reconstructs Armstrong's performances of his life story across various media and for different audiences, complicating the monolithic and hagiographic views of the musician.

The book will appeal to academic readers with an interest in African American studies, jazz studies, musicology, and popular culture, as well as general readers interested in Armstrong's life and music, jazz, and twentieth-century entertainment. While not a biography, it provides a key to understanding Armstrong's oeuvre as well as his complicated place in American history and twentieth-century media culture.

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cover of Music in Black American Life, 1600-1945: A University of Illinois Press Anthology

Music in Black American Life, 1600-1945

A University of Illinois Press Anthology

Compiled by Laurie Matheson. Introduction by Sandra Jean Graham

University of Illinois Press, 2022

This first volume of Music in Black American Life collects research and analysis that originally appeared in the journals American Music and the Black Music Research Journal, and in the University of Illinois Press's acclaimed book series Music in American Life. In these selections, experts from a cross-section of disciplines engage with fundamental issues in ways that changed our perceptions of Black music. The topics includes the culturally and musically complex Black music-making of colonial America; string bands and other lesser-known genres practiced by Black artists; the jubilee industry and its audiences; and innovators in jazz, blues, and Black gospel.

Eclectic and essential, Music in Black American Life, 1600–1945 offers specialists and students alike a gateway to the history and impact of Black music in the United States.

Contributors: R. Reid Badger, Rae Linda Brown, Samuel A. Floyd Jr., Sandra Jean Graham, Jeffrey Magee, Robert M. Marovich, Harriet Ottenheimer, Eileen Southern, Katrina Dyonne Thompson, Stephen Wade, and Charles Wolfe

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cover of Music in Black American Life, 1945-2020: A University of Illinois Press Anthology

Music in Black American Life, 1945-2020

A University of Illinois Press Anthology

Compiled by Laurie Matheson. Introduction by Tammy L. Kernodle

University of Illinois Press, 2022

This second volume of Music in Black American Life offers research and analysis that originally appeared in the journals American Music and Black Music Research Journal, and in two book series published by the University of Illinois Press: Music in American Life, and African American Music in Global Perspective. In this collection, a group of predominately Black scholars explores a variety of topics with works that pioneered new methodologies and modes of inquiry for hearing and studying Black music. These extracts and articles examine the World War II jazz scene; look at female artists like gospel star Shirley Caesar and jazz musician-arranger Melba Liston; illuminate the South Bronx milieu that folded many forms of black expressive culture into rap; and explain Hamilton's massive success as part of the "tanning" of American culture that began when Black music entered the mainstream.

Part sourcebook and part survey of historic music scholarship, Music in Black American Life, 1945–2020 collects groundbreaking work that redefines our view of Black music and its place in American music history.

Contributors: Nelson George, Wayne Everett Goins, Claudrena N. Harold, Eileen M. Hayes, Loren Kajikawa, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tammy L. Kernodle, Cheryl L. Keyes, Gwendolyn Pough, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Mark Tucker, and Sherrie Tucker

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cover of Musical Landscapes in Color: Conversations with Black American Composers

Musical Landscapes in Color

Conversations with Black American Composers

William C. Banfield

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Now available in paperback, William C. Banfield’s acclaimed collection of interviews delves into the lives and work of forty-one Black composers. Each of the profiled artists offers a candid self-portrait that explores areas from training and compositional techniques to working in a exclusive canon that has existed for a very long time. At the same time, Banfield draws on sociology, Western concepts of art and taste, and vernacular musical forms like blues and jazz to provide a frame for the artists’ achievements and help to illuminate the ongoing progress and struggles against industry barriers. Expanded illustrations and a new preface by the author provide invaluable added context, making this new edition an essential companion for anyone interested in Black composers or contemporary classical music.

Composers featured: Michael Abels, H. Leslie Adams, Lettie Beckon Alston, Thomas J. Anderson, Dwight Andrews, Regina Harris Baiocchi, David Baker, William C. Banfield, Ysaye Maria Barnwell, Billy Childs, Noel DaCosta, Anthony Davis, George Duke, Leslie Dunner, Donal Fox, Adolphus Hailstork, Jester Hairston, Herbie Hancock, Jonathan Holland, Anthony Kelley, Wendell Logan, Bobby McFerrin, Dorothy Rudd Moore, Jeffrey Mumford, Gary Powell Nash, Stephen Newby, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Michael Powell, Patrice Rushen, George Russell, Kevin Scott, Evelyn Simpson-Curenton, Hale Smith, Billy Taylor, Frederick C. Tillis, George Walker, James Kimo Williams, Julius Williams, Tony Williams, Olly Wilson, and Michael Woods

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cover of Mutha’ Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture

Mutha’ Is Half a Word

Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture

L. H. Stallings

The Ohio State University Press, 2007

Mutha’ is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture explores the importance of sexual desire in the formation of radical Black females’ subjectivities in Black women’s culture through the trope of the indefinable trickster figure.  L. H. Stallings offers distinct close readings of understudied African American women’s texts through a critical engagement with folklore and queer theory. To date, most studies on the trickster figure have rarely reflected the boldness and daring of the figure itself. Emblematic of change and transgression, the trickster has inappropriately become the methodological tool for conservative cultural studies analysis. Mutha’ is Half a Word strives to break that convention.
 
This book provides a much-needed analysis of trickster tradition in regard to gender, sexuality, and Black female sexual desire. It is the only study to focus specifically on trickster figures and African American female culture. In addition, it contributes to conversations regarding the cultural representation of Black female desire in ways that are not strategically invested in heteronormative binaries of male/female and heterosexual/homosexual. The study is distinctly different because it explores folklore, vernacular, and trickster strategies of queerness alongside theories of queer studies to create new readings of desire in literary texts, hip-hop and neo-soul music, and comedic performances by Black females.
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cover of Mutual Reflections: Jews and Blacks in American Art

Mutual Reflections

Jews and Blacks in American Art

Heyd, Milly

Rutgers University Press, 1998

Relations between Jewish Americans and African Americans have always had a unique, complex character. Both groups have long been considered outsiders in mainstream American society, sharing a history in which both their physical appearance and moral attributes were denigrated. African Americans have drawn parallels between their situation in the United States and the Jews' struggles for freedom when they were slaves in Egypt. Jewish Americans have often become involved in the black cause through their interest in social issues and association with liberal politics.

Mutual Reflections is the first book to examine this many-layered relationship through its visual dimension. Milly Heyd investigates how artists of both backgrounds have viewed each other during the last hundred years-how the visual languages and the-matic choices of their art have reflected changing concerns from symbiosis to disillusionment. She explores a wide range of artistic mediums: painting, sculpture, cartoons, comic strips, and installations. Interviews with artists provide additional insight. The post modern discourse poses questions problematizing ethnic and racial stereotyping.

As Heyd states, when an artist of one group investigates the other group, that person is embarking on a journey of self-discovery. And while that journey can lead to disillusionment and criticism, the artist's vision-and final work of art-very often can help put all of us on our own paths of self-discovery.

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cover of My Bondage and My Freedom

My Bondage and My Freedom

Frederick Douglass

University of Illinois Press, 1988

This is the first annotated edition of a work Eric J. Sundquist has called "a classic text of the American Renaissance." As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has pointed out, My Bondage and My Freedom has been largely ignored by critics, in part because it is longer and less accessible than Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass but also because it has not up to now been "read" by a sensitive critic. "The latter reason is paramount and urgently needed to be addressed, and William Andrews is just the person to introduce Douglass's second autobiography to our generation of readers. He has few peers in nineteenth-century black criticism."
 
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cover of My Father's Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War

My Father's Name

A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War

Lawrence P. Jackson

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Armed with only early boyhood memories, Lawrence P. Jackson begins his quest by setting out from his home in Baltimore for Pittsylvania County, Virginia, to try to find his late grandfather’s old home by the railroad tracks in Blairs. My Father’s Name tells the tale of the ensuing journey, at once a detective story and a moving historical memoir, uncovering the mixture of anguish and fulfillment that accompanies a venture into the ancestral past, specifically one tied to the history of slavery.
After asking around in Pittsylvania County and carefully putting the pieces together, Jackson finds himself in the house of distant relations. In the pages that follow, he becomes increasingly absorbed by the search for his ancestors and increasingly aware of how few generations an African American needs to map back in order to arrive at slavery, “a door of no return.” Ultimately, Jackson’s dogged research in libraries, census records, and courthouse registries enables him to trace his family to his grandfather’s grandfather, a man who was born or sold into slavery but who, when Federal troops abandoned the South in 1877, was able to buy forty acres of land. In this intimate study of a black Virginia family and neighborhood, Jackson vividly reconstructs moments in the lives of his father’s grandfather, Edward Jackson, and great-grandfather, Granville Hundley, and gives life to revealing narratives of Pittsylvania County, recalling both the horror of slavery and the later struggles of postbellum freedom.
My Father’s Name is a family story full of twists and turns—and one of haunting familiarity to many Americans, who may question whether the promises of emancipation have ever truly been fulfilled. It is also a resolute look at the duties that come with reclaiming and honoring Americans who survived slavery and a thoughtful meditation on its painful and enduring history.
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