Results by title

Women of colors and a literature written in corporeal and spiritual scars

The corporeal and spiritual healing in literature by women of colors can be seen to redefine modern thought and printed text. Sarah Soanirina Ohmer traces the impact of colonization and enslavement on Black women and Black women’s contributions to colonial, nineteenth, and twentieth century literature in the US, Brazil, and the Caribbean.

Drawing on intersectional analysis, Ohmer focuses on portrayals of trauma and spirituality in works by Toni Morrison, Conceição Evaristo, Maryse Condé, Gloria Anzaldúa, the Quilombhoje poets, and María de los Reyes Castillo. Ohmer compares literature from different countries along four thematic pathways: ghosts, mirrors, naming, and motherhood. Her analysis unlocks the literature’s power to heal through gut-wrenching descriptions of wounds and thrilling passages of hope and liberation. Throughout, Ohmer weaves in her life story as a Black woman as she reflects on how colonialism, racism, sexism, and capitalism have impacted her work, traumas, and faith journey.

The debut collection from Adroit Managing Editor Chris Crowder, The Kin of Nakedness interrogates the ethics of complaining and self-work beginning with a lens focused on body image. Structured by sections that complicate the biblical definitions of servitude—being Christ’s hands and feet—and a long ars poetica, the speaker risks toward honesty as he explores his struggles and privileges as a Black and biracial man. “Digging for everything I have to write into my flesh,” Crowder works to witness the harm done to himself and others who are competing for recognition. Seeking to understand these internal and external struggles, he embodies characters, including benched quarterbacks and Jimmy Fallon, while reckoning with fractured subjects like greedy pastors and alternate universes.

In wrestling with despair, Crowder neither refuses reality nor surrenders to nihilism. The speaker of “I’m Not Always Sulking, Resting My Elbow on a Well” admits to the temptation to surrender, saying, “I can’t trick my anxious ass into thinking that things aren’t better than this,” but the elaboration of “this” becomes a litany that contradicts the insufficiency of this life: “My corgi, Eden. My parents’ garden of beans, collard greens, and spicy peppers. Reacting to heat: it’s actually got good flavor to it. So do the worst days.” Crowder has a signature gift for distilling the bizarre beauty of this existential maelstrom, the succor beside the suffering. He achieves an astonishing inverse transmogrification that shows man capable of God’s metamorphosis: not the body into bread, but the abyss into being. “Before I had skin, I hated it. / The idea.” But, though our nakedness terrifies us, the mortification of the flesh is its capacity to feel every excruciating and ecstatic thing. “Lord, // you asked me what sense / could you not bear / to lose? My answer, now, is touch.”

Investigating Mary Ellen Pleasant's convoluted legacy

Mary Ellen Pleasant arrived in Gold Rush-era San Francisco a free black woman with abolitionist convictions and a predilection for entrepreneurial success. Behind the convenient and trusted disguise of "Mammy," she transformed domestic labor into enterprise, amassed remarkable real estate, wealth, and power, and gained notoriety for her work in fighting Jim Crow.

Pleasant's legacy is steeped in scandals and lore. Was she a voodoo queen who traded in sexual secrets? A madam? A murderer? In The Making of "Mammy Pleasant," Lynn M. Hudson examines the folklore of Pleasant's real and imagined powers. Emphasizing the significance of her life in the context of how it has been interpreted or ignored in the larger trends of American history, Hudson integrates fact and speculation culled from periodicals, court cases, diaries, letters, Pleasant's interviews with the San Francisco press, and various biographical and fictional accounts.

Addressing the lack of a historical record of black women's lives, the author argues that the silences and mysteries of Pleasant's past, whether never recorded or intentionally omitted, reveal as much about her life as what has been documented. Through Pleasant's life, Hudson also interrogates the constructions of race, gender, and sexuality during the formative years of California's economy and challenges popular mythology about the liberatory sexual culture of the American West.

Eugene Gordon (1891–1974) was a major writer involved in the development of the burgeoning Black literary scene in Boston in the 1920s, an active player in the Harlem Renaissance, and a longtime member of the Communist Party. Despite his credentials as a reporter, editor, fiction writer, and political activist, he is rarely mentioned in studies of the Harlem Renaissance or Marxist politics. Here, Louis J. Parascandola has pulled together Gordon’s journalism, autobiographical writing, and fiction. This new collection, featuring both previously published pieces from a wide variety of publications as well as material that has never before been published, demonstrates his range and his skill while establishing his importance as a critical voice of his time.

Gordon was born and raised in the South but made his way north at a young age. In Boston, he founded the Saturday Evening Quill Club, an African American literary group that included other notable writers such as Helene Johnson and Dorothy West. He later became editor of and contributor to two major publications coming out of the era: the Messenger and Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. As he grew more political, he joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and became editor of and contributor to the New Masses. Scholars looking to research him have struggled to find disparate writings to get a fuller sense of his literary stylings as well as his political commitments. This welcome new volume establishes Gordon as a significant, understudied figure.

How a culture of violence legitimized lynching among ordinary people

On May 15, 1916, a crowd of fifteen thousand witnessed the lynching of an eighteen-year-old black farm worker named Jesse Washington. Most central Texans of the time failed to call for the punishment of the mob’s leaders. In The Making of a Lynching Culture, now in paperback, William D. Carrigan seeks to explain not how a fiendish mob could lynch one man but how a culture of violence that nourished this practice could form and endure for so long among ordinary people.

Beginning with the 1836 independence of Texas, The Making of a Lynching Culture reexamines traditional explanations of lynching, including the role of the frontier, economic tensions, and political conflicts. Using a voluminous body of court records, newspaper accounts, oral histories, and other sources, Carrigan shows how notions of justice and historical memory were shaped to glorify violence and foster a culture that legitimized lynching.

Prescient in its analysis and rich in detail, The Mark of Slavery is a powerful addition to the intertwined histories of disability, slavery, and race.

Some folks think Brian the mouse is too small. He may be a tough little fella, but they are not sure Brian has what it takes. The Mouse Who Played Football, by former Philadelphia Eagles running back Brian Westbrook Sr. and sports reporter Lesley Van Arsdall, shows how Brian the mouse proves everyone wrong with unyielding confidence that his small size can be his strength.

This charming children’s book, featuring appealing and dynamic illustrations by Mr. Tom, demonstrates how Brian the mouse overcomes what others see as a “big problem.” His determination—as well as speed and toughness on the gridiron—helps him become a star player in high school, college, and eventually, the MFL, the Mouse Football League.

The Mouse Who Played Football, based on Westbrook’s own experiences,is an inspiring story that encourages young readers to believe in themselves and make their unique differences their strengths.

In the United States, the fight to secure full civil rights for African American people has endured for centuries. The movement has included many voices, among them, working people, charismatic activists, musicians and artists, the LGBTQIA community, veterans, suburbanites, and elected officials. Moving from the labor struggles of the 1930s to the sit-ins and boycotts of midcentury, and the Black Lives Matter protests of today, this expansive volume brings together first-person accounts, political documents and speeches, and historical photographs from each region of the country.

Designed for use in courses and engaging for general readers, this new compilation is the most diverse, most inclusive, and most comprehensive resource available for teaching and learning about the civil rights movement. With chronological and geographical depth, The New Civil Rights Movement Reader addresses a range of key topics, including youth activism, regional and local freedom struggles, voting rights, economic inequality, gender, sexuality, and culture, and the movement’s global reach.

Recovering the stage work of one of America's finest black female writers

This volume collects twelve of Georgia Douglas Johnson's one-act plays, including two never-before-published scripts found in the Library of Congress.  As an integral part of Washington, D.C.'s, thriving turn-of-the-century literary scene, Johnson hosted regular meetings with Harlem Renaissance writers and other artists, including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, May Miller, and Jean Toomer, and was herself considered among the finest writers of the time.  Johnson also worked for U.S. government agencies and actively supported women's and minorities' rights.

As a leading authority on Johnson, Judith L. Stephens provides a brief overview of Johnson's career and significance as a playwright; sections on the creative environment in which she worked; her S Street Salon; "The Saturday Nighters," and its significance to the New Negro Theatre; selected photographs; and a discussion of Johnson's genres, themes, and artistic techniques.

There is a long history of sororities such as Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) and Delta Sigma Theta (Delta) participating in activism and social justice efforts—from the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s to Kamala Harris’s recent political campaigns. But radical movements like Black Lives Matter have posed more challenging questions for these organizations.

In The Power We Need Right Now, Aisha Upton Azzam investigates the legacies of AKA and Delta to understand the considerations that weigh on their engagement with present day Black movements. These organizations wield a significant amount of political power to mobilize in support of their causes. The response each sorority has had to movements fifty years apart is strikingly similar—even if their approaches are quite different.

Using a Black feminist theoretical framework, Upton Azzam brings context and meaning to the interactions of these sororities with Black radical movements. She highlights the costs communities bear from sororities’ adherence to respectability and racial uplift ideologies by tracing each sorority’s history and response to emerging Black feminist and Black Power movements during the tumultuous 1970s.

The Power We Need Right Now emphasizes that Black communities still have the ability to wield their political power and influence to further the struggle for Black liberation.

In 1842, Black Rhode Islanders secured a stunning victory, a success rarely seen in antebellum America: they won the right to vote. Amid heightened public discourse around shifting ideas of race, citizenship, and political rights, they methodically deconstructed the arguments against their enfranchisement, exposing the arbitrariness of the color line in delineating citizenship rights and choosing the perfect moments in which to act forcefully. At the head of this movement, a cohort of prominent business and community members formed an early example of a Black leadership class in the US.

CJ Martin draws upon a wealth of sources—including personal correspondences, government and organizational documents, tax records, and petitions—to argue that Black leaders employed a unique combination of agitation and accommodation to ensure the success of the movement. By investigating their tactics, Martin deepens the story of how race played a crucial role in American citizenship, and by focusing on Black leadership, he relates this history through the people who lived it—who thought, debated, petitioned, and enacted their own liberation. Telling the story of a fight that was as important to the pioneers of interracial democracy as it was for the civil rights activists of the twentieth century, The Precious Birthright provides new insight into the larger story of Black freedom. 

A powerful account of the claims made by victims of the 1863 Draft Riots reveals how Americans’ emotional and legal responses to loss informed the development of contemporary capitalism.

The right to property has been central to America’s history, but for Joanna Cohen, loss of property has been powerful, too, not as a right but as an emotion. In The Properties of Loss, Cohen focuses on the aftermath of Manhattan’s infamous Draft Riots in July 1863, where Civil War draft protests fomented anti-Black terrorism that set the city aflame. In the wake of this destruction, nearly 2,000 people filed claims against the city, seeking reparation. But they found that the city chose not to value their property or imagine their losses as they did. Beyond the individual stories of suffering and struggle, these claims serve as a nexus for understanding how the conception of loss, the value of property, and the obligations of restitution changed in the nineteenth century. Charting these changes by focusing closely on emotions, Cohen shows how these changes shaped contemporary capitalism and underpin a surprising array of today’s discriminatory forces.

Stacks’s analysis shifts the focus of attention from genre--freedom song--to process and practice--freedom singing. As he shows, freedom singing after 1968 generates multilayered meanings. It can reinforce, or resist, consensus memories or dominant narratives. Stacks illuminates freedom singing’s diversity by examining it in three contexts: performance, protest, and within documentary sound recording/film.

Insightful and vividly detailed, The Resounding Revolution examines sixty years of Black music to challenge and reshape the entrenched story of the Civil Rights Movement.