Black category: 406 books
Love & Theft
Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
Language: English
Release Date: July 10, 2013
For over two centuries, America has celebrated the same African-American culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show appropriated...
by Albert Murray
Language: English
Release Date: September 19, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: September 19, 2012
In this visionary book, Murray takes an audacious new look at black music and, in the process, succeeds in changing the way one reads literature. Murray's subject is the previously unacknowledged kinship between fiction and the blues. Both, he argues, are virtuoso performances that impart information,...
The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry
A Novel
Language: English
Release Date: June 3, 2013
In his in-depth analysis of the works of Ann Petry (1908--1997), Keith Clark moves beyond assessments of Petry as a major mid-twentieth-century African American author and the sole female member of the "Wright School of Social Protest." He focuses on her innovative approaches to gender performance,...
Martin R. Delany
A Documentary Reader
Language: English
Release Date: November 20, 2003
Martin R. Delany (1812-85) has been called the "Father of Black Nationalism," but his extraordinary career also encompassed the roles of abolitionist, physician, editor, explorer, politician, army officer, novelist, and political theorist. Despite his enormous influence in the nineteenth...
Hitting A Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick
Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston
Language: English
Release Date: July 25, 2015
Zora Neale Hurston is a controversial figure, equally praised and criticized for her representation of African-Americans; while some critics emphasize her ebullience and celebration of Black culture, others call her fiction stereotypical and essentialist. Observing the workings of the recurrent humor...
"Who Set You Flowin'?"
The African-American Migration Narrative
Language: English
Release Date: September 26, 1996
Twentieth-century America has witnessed the most widespread and sustained movement of African-Americans from the South to urban centers in the North. Who Set You Flowin'? examines the impact of this dislocation and urbanization, identifying the resulting Migration Narratives as a major genre in African-American...
Liberation Memories
The Rhetoric and Poetics of John Oliver Killens
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2003
No serious history of the development of the African American novel from the 1950s onward can be written without reference to John Oliver Killens. A two-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize and founding chairman of the legendary Harlem Writers Guild, Killens was regarded by many as a spiritual father...
Race Matters, Animal Matters
Fugitive Humanism in African America, 1840-1930
Language: English
Release Date: November 8, 2017
Race Matters, Animal Matters challenges one of the grand narratives of African American studies: that African Americans rejected racist associations of blackness and animality through a disassociation from animality. Analyzing canonical texts written by Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B....
by Gloria Rose
Language: English
Release Date: August 13, 2007
Language: English
Release Date: August 13, 2007
The original CliffsNotes study guides offer expert commentary on major themes, plots, characters, literary devices, and historical background.
In CliffsNotes on The Color Purple, you follow the beautiful and difficult story of a shy and abused Southern black woman's struggle to create an identity,...
by Vaughn Rasberry
Language: English
Release Date: October 3, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: October 3, 2016
Vaughn Rasberry turns to black culture and politics for an alternative history of the totalitarian century. He shows how black writers reimagined the standard anti-fascist, anti-communist narrative through the lens of racial injustice, with the U.S. as a tyrannical force in the Third World but also an agent of Asian and African independence.
by David Ikard
Language: English
Release Date: October 19, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: October 19, 2017
In this incredibly timely book, David Ikard dismantles popular white supremacist tropes, which effectively devalue black life and trivialize black oppression. Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs investigates the tenacity and cultural capital of white redemption narratives in literature...
Inventing the New Negro
Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2013
It is no coincidence, Daphne Lamothe writes, that so many black writers and intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century either trained formally as ethnographers or worked as amateur collectors of folklore and folk culture. In Inventing the New Negro Lamothe explores the process by which...
Freedom Narratives of African American Women
A Study of 19th Century Writings
Language: English
Release Date: November 2, 2017
Stories of liberation from enslavement or oppression have become central to African American women’s literature. Beginning with a discussion of black women freedom narratives as a literary genre, the author argues that these texts represent a discourse on civil rights that emerged earlier than the...
Odysseys Home
Mapping African-Canadian Literature
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2002
Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature is a pioneering study of African-Canadian literary creativity, laying the groundwork for future scholarly work in the field. Based on extensive excavations of archives and texts, this challenging passage through twelve essays presents a history of...