Showing titles in African American Studies

Since its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it. Our History Has Always Been Contraband was born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to remove content from an AP African American Studies course being piloted in high schools across the United States.

Black men desperately need care and restoration. But what does that restoration look like when you’re a Black man in today’s world? How do you take care of your mental health when men who look like you die at the hands of police? How do you find peace and refuge when you’re not sure how to keep up with your partner? Or navigate a challenging workplace? While scrolling through social media feeds, you may feel like you don’t have access to wellness like women do. But Black men need a space for self-care too. In Self-Care for Black Men, you will find practical answers to your questions.

Black Country Music tells the story of how Black musicians have changed the country music landscape and brought light to Black creativity and innovation. After a century of racist whitewashing, country music is finally reckoning with its relationship to Black people. In this timely work—the first book on Black country music by a Black writer—Francesca Royster uncovers the Black performers and fans, including herself, who are exploring the pleasures and possibilities of the genre.

In her debut book, Everybody Come Alive, Marcie Alvis Walker invites listeners into a deeply intimate and illuminating memoir comprising lyrical essays and remembrances of being a curious child of the seventies and eighties, raised under the critical and watchful eye of Jim Crow matriarchs who struggled to integrate their lives and remain whole. This is a coming-of-age journey touching on the bittersweet pain and joy of what it takes to become a person who embraces being Black, a woman, and holy in America.

The story of Christine Jorgensen, America's first prominent transsexual, narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives. Their erasure from trans history masks the ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-19th century to present-day anti-Black and anti-trans legislation and violence.

Romantic love has been one of the most essential elements of storytelling for centuries. But for Black people in the United States and across the diaspora, it hasn't often been easy to find Black romance joyfully showcased in entertainment media. In this collection, revered authors and sparkling newcomers, librarians and academicians, and avid fans and reviewers consider the mirrors and windows into Black love as it is depicted in the novels, television shows, and films that have shaped their own stories.

In this classic account, historian Philip Foner traces the radical history of black workers’ contribution to the American labor movement.

The first comprehensive collection of writings by the Black Panther Party founder and revolutionary icon of the Black liberation era, The Huey P. Newton Reader combines now-classic texts ranging in topic from the formation of the Black Panthers, African Americans and armed self-defense, and FBI infiltration of civil rights groups with never-before-published writings from the Black Panther Party archives and Newton’s private collection, including articles on President Nixon, prison martyr George Jackson, Pan-Africanism, affirmative action, Cuba, and more.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has always been vitally important in American history. This is the autobiographical account of the creation of the boycott by one of its principal organizers. With the publication of this book, the boycott becomes a milestone in the history of American women as well.

First published in 1997,

Little X chronicles the multigenerational experience of Tate's family, who broke from the traditional Black church in the 1950s to join the radical Nation of Islam, then struggled to remain intact through disillusionment, shifting loyalties, and forays into Orthodox Islam.

Little X offers a rare glimpse into the everyday experience of the Nation of Islam and into a little-understood part of America's history and heritage.

A 2006 report commissioned by Brown University revealed that institution's complex and contested involvement in slavery - setting off a controversy that leapt from the ivory tower to make headlines across the country. But Brown's troubling past was far from unique. In Ebony and Ivy, Craig Steven Wilder, a rising star in the profession of history, lays bare uncomfortable truths about race, slavery, and the American academy.

A profound new rendering of the struggle by African Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counterrevolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind.

A High Price for Freedom has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

Folk music of the 1960s and 1970s was a genre that was always shifting and expanding, yet somehow never found room for so many. In the sounds of soul-folk, Black artists like Terry Callier and Linda Lewis began to reclaim their space in the genre, and use it to bring their own traditions to light— the jazz, the blues, the field hollers, the spirituals— and creating something wholly new, wholly theirs, wholly ours.

Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates Jr's legendary Harvard course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, these writers used words to create a liveable world – a “home” – for Black people destined to live in a bitterly racist society.

Corporate America continues to struggle with racial equity in a post-George Floyd world. As the United States becomes more diverse and the public consciousness continues to shift, successful racial equity efforts in the workplace are needed now more than ever. Decentering Whiteness in the Workplace exposes the ways that white culture and expectations are centered in the modern American workplace and the fears within corporate spaces about talking candidly, openly, and honestly about whiteness, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness.

For bell hooks, the best cultural criticism sees no need to separate politics from the pleasure of reading. Yearning collects together some of hooks's classic and early pieces of cultural criticism from the '80s. Addressing topics like pedagogy, postmodernism, and politics, hooks examines a variety of cultural artifacts, from Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing and Wim Wenders's film Wings of Desire to the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison.

The spaces revealed through the practice of time manipulation in Black cultures lend themselves to storytelling, a time-hopping process that integrates memory and community. Drawing on disparate philosophies and science behind electronic beat-making, lyricism, dance, memory, myth, and cosmology in the African and African Disaporic traditions, this book seeks to demonstrate relationships between rhythm, space, and ways of being as an articulation of futures and alternate realities made present.

In Black History Is for Everyone, award-winning educator and scholar Brian Jones offers a meditation on the power of Black history, using his own experiences as a life-long learner and classroom teacher to question everything from the meaning of race and nation to the radicalism of the American Revolution.

In this final magisterial volume, fifteen years in the research and writing, David Levering Lewis stunningly recreates the second half of W.E.B. Du Bois’s charged and brilliant career.