African American & Black

The figure of the violent man in the African American imagination has a long history. He can be found in 19th-century bad man ballads like "Stagolee" and "John Hardy," as well as in the black convict recitations that influenced...

This study of what Brian Norman terms a neo-segregation narrative tradition examines literary depictions of life under Jim Crow that were written well after the civil rights movement.From Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, to bestselling black...

"Black People Are My Business": Toni Cade Bambara's Practices of Liberation studies the works of Bambara (1939-1995), an author, documentary filmmaker, social activist, and professor. Thabiti Lewis's analysis serves as a cultural biography,...

"Black People Are My Business": Toni Cade Bambara's Practices of Liberation studies the works of Bambara (1939-1995), an author, documentary filmmaker, social activist, and professor. Thabiti Lewis's analysis serves as a cultural biography, examining the...

The extensive influence of the creative traditions derived from slave culture, particularly black folklore, in the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black authors, such as Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, has become a hallmark of African American...

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859-1930), African American novelist, editor, journalist, playwright, historian, and public intellectual, used fiction to explore and intervene in the social, racial, and political challenges of her era. Her particular form of...

Anne Spencer between Worlds provides an indispensable reassessment of a critically neglected figure. Looking beyond the poetry she published during the Harlem Renaissance, Noelle Morrissette provides a new critical lens for interpreting Spencer's...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780820359021Author Anna PochmaraFormat PaperbackPage Count 256Imprint University of Georgia PressPublisher University of Georgia PressWeight(grams) 152g

Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination examines the future-oriented visions of black subjectivity in works by contemporary black women writers, filmmakers, and musicians, including Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Julie Dash, and Janelle...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780813069463Author Tuire ValkeakariFormat PaperbackPage Count 344Imprint University Press of FloridaPublisher University Press of FloridaWeight(grams) 156g

In Haiti, Papa Legba is the spirit whose permission must be sought to communicate with the spirit world. He stands at and for the crossroads of language, interpretation, and form and is considered to be like the voice of a god. In Legba's Crossing,...

In Inkface, Miles P. Grier traces productions of Shakespeare's Othello from seventeenth-century London to the Metropolitan Opera in twenty-first-century New York. Grier shows how the painted stage Moor and the wife whom he theatrically stains became...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781087870700Author Khefa NosakhereFormat HardbackPage Count 238Imprint Indy PubPublisher Indy PubWeight(grams) 712g

Some of the best known African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay's ""If We Must Die,"" Countee Cullen's ""Yet Do I Marvel,"" Gwendolyn Brooks's ""First fight. Then fiddle."" Yet few...

Critics in this volume reassess the prescient nature of Richard Wright's mind as well as his life and body of writings, especially those directly concerned with America and its racial dynamics. This edited collection offers new readings and...

In All Stories Are True, Tracie Church Guzzio provides the first full-length study of John Edgar Wideman's entire oeuvre to date. Specifically, Guzzio examines the ways in which Wideman (b. 1941) engages with three crucial themes--history, myth, and...

From 30 Americans to Angry White Boy, from Bamboozled to The Boondocks, from Chappelle's Show to The Colored Museum, this collection of twenty-one essays takes an interdisciplinary look at the flowering of satire and its influence in defining new roles...

The publication of Sanyika Shakur's Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member in 1993 generated a huge amount of excitement in literary circles--New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani deemed it a ""shocking and galvanic book""--and set off a...

In See Justice Done: The Problem of Law in the African American Literary Tradition, author Christopher Brown argues that African American literature has profound and deliberate legal roots. Tracing this throughline from the eighteenth century to the...

Anne Spencer's identity as an artist grew from her relationship to the natural world. During the New Negro Renaissance with which she is primarily associated, critics dismissed her writings on nature as apolitical and deracinated. Do Not Separate Her...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781952271267Author Zilpha ElawFormat HardbackPage Count 264Imprint West Virginia University PressPublisher West Virginia University PressWeight(grams) 152g

Paule Marshall (b. 1929) is a major contributor to the canons of African American and Caribbean American literature. In 1959, she published her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, and was quickly recognized as a writer of great talent and insight on...

At the heart of America's slave system was the legal definition of people as property. While property ownership is a cornerstone of the American dream, the status of enslaved people supplies a contrasting American nightmare. Sarah Gilbreath Ford...

The late Toni Morrison was the first African-American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. A powerful writer, she wove stories depicting the largely overlooked Black experience in America and exploring the intersection of gender and race...

In ""The Hammers of Creation"", Eric J. Sundquist analyzes the powerful role played by folk culture in three major African American novels of the early twentieth century: James Weldon Johnson's ""The Autobiography of an...

Contributions by Robert J. Butler, Ginevra Geraci, Yoshinobu Hakutani, Floyd W. Hayes III, Joseph Keith, Toru Kiuchi, John Lowe, Sachi Nakachi, Virginia Whatley Smith, and John Zheng. Critics in this volume reassess the prescient nature of Richard...

While narratives of enslavement have become more central to conversations about African American women's writing, this book first discusses the genre of narratives of freedom and then examines women's relationships to the community as they seek to...

From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In AfroA -Realisms and the Romances of Race,...

What would it mean for American and African American literary studies if readers took the spirituality and travel of Black women seriously? With Spirit Deep: Recovering the Sacred in Black Women's Travel, Tisha Brooks addresses this question by focusing...

Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks features sparkling interviews with one of America's most valued poets. Throughout this book, which spans three decades, Brooks (1917-2000) speaks with simplicity, depth, candor, and passion about the making of a poem...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780890967614Author Cary D. WintzFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint Texas A & M University PressPublisher Texas A & M University Press

In Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels, Jean Wyatt explores the interaction among ideas of love, narrative innovation, and reader response in Toni Morrison's seven later novels. Love comes in a new and surprising shape in each of the...

In Race, Theft, and Ethics, Lovalerie King examines African American literature's critique of American law concerning matters of property, paying particular attention to the stereotypical image of the black thief. She draws on two centuries of African...

In this theory-rich study, Shelby Johnson analyzes the works of Black and Indigenous writers in the Atlantic World, examining how their literary production informs "modes of being" that confronted violent colonial times. Johnson particularly assesses how...

Christopher Freeburg's Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life offers a crucial new reading of a neglected aspect of African American literature and art across the long twentieth century. Rejecting the idea that the most dehumanizing of black experiences,...

A provocative testimony of the personal and professional development of the roles and responsibilities of a revisionist African American scholar and activist.Book InformationISBN 9780814337141Author Bernard BellFormat PaperbackPage Count 360Imprint Wayne...

In Approximate Gestures, Anthony Stewart argues that the writing of Percival Everett, the acclaimed author of Erasure and more than twenty other works of fiction, compels readers to retrain their thinking habits and to value uncertainty. Stewart...

Southern literature is often celebrated for its "told," rather than "written," qualities. Drawing on her own experiences of front-porch storytelling among family, friends, and neighbors, Trudier Harris looks across the generations of...

Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about - or witnessing - trauma in order to overcome it. To this critical conversation, Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature treats reader response...

In the Name of the Mother examines the cultural relationship between African American intellectuals and Italian American writers and artists, and how it relates to American blackness in the twentieth century. Samuele Pardini links African American...