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In Mastering Slavery, Fleischner draws upon a range of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, African-American studies, literary theory, social history, and gender studies, to analyze how the slave narratives--in their engagement with one another and with white women's antislavery fiction--yield a far more amplified and complicated notion of familial dynamics and identity than they have generally been thought to reveal. Her study exposes the impact of the entangled relations among master, mistre...

Demonstrating the extraordinary versatility of African-American men's writing since the 1970s, this forceful collection illustrates how African-American male novelists and playwrights have absorbed, challenged, and expanded the conventions of black American writing and, with it, black male identity. From the "John Henry Syndrome"--a definition of black masculinity based on brute strength or violence--to the submersion of black gay identity under equations of gay with white and black with straig...

On the heels of the prize-winning Understand This and the bestselling Dead Above Ground, Tervalon delivers his most ambitious novel yet, chronicling the divided life of a young black college professor searching for love.

Adored by many, appalling to some, baffling still to others, few authors defy any single critical narrative to the confounding extent that James Baldwin manages. Was he a black or queer writer? Was he a religious or secular writer? Was he a spokesman for the civil rights movement or a champion of the individual? His critics, as disparate as his readership, endlessly wrestle with paradoxes, not just in his work but also in the life of a man who described himself as "all those strangers called Jim...

Winner of the 2014 Will Eisner Award for Best Scholarly/Academic Work Bringing together contributors from a wide-range of critical perspectives, Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation is an analytic history of the diverse contributions of Black artists to the medium of comics. Covering comic books, superhero comics, graphic novels and cartoon strips from the early 20th century to the present, the book explores the ways in which Black comic artists have grappled with such themes as th...

This is the story of a man who lived several distinct chapters of a great American life. From petty criminal to defiant race rights fighter to leader of the Black Muslim movement, his life story is provocative and engrossing.

By exploring the breadth of Jamaica Kincaid's writings, this book reveals her work's transmutations of genre, specifically those of autobiography, biography, and history in relation to the forces of creation and destruction in the Caribbean. Jana Evans Braziel examines Kincaid's preoccupation with genealogy, genesis, and genocide in the Caribbean; her adaptations of biblical texts for her literary oeuvre; and her authorial deployments of the diabolic as frames for both rethinking the boundaries...

Harlem symbolized the urbanization of black America in the 1920s and 1930s. Home to the largest concentration of African Americans who settled outside the South, it spawned the literary and artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Its writers were in the vanguard of an attempt to come to terms with black urbanization. They lived it and wrote about it. First published in 1988, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance examines the relationship between the community and its literature. A...

Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry is an anthology of poems by more than a hundred award-winning poets, including Jericho Brown, Tracy K. Smith, and Justin Philip Reed, combined with themed essays on poetics from celebrated scholars such as Kwame Dawes, Evie Shockley, and Meta DuEwa Jones. The Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation’s first academic center for Black poetry. In this eponymous collection, editors Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne bring together...

Frances Foster's classic study of pre-Civil War American slave autobiography is now issued in an accessible paperback edition. The first book to represent these slave narratives as literary in the complete sense of the word, and the first study to call attention to the significance of gender in the narratives, Witnessing Slavery will be welcomed by both general readers and students of the American south, slavery, the Civil War, and race issues.

Many of the authors in this collection have never been assembled together before. They represent both black and white voices of different cultural backgrounds. Important new views are gained through the lens of Faith Berry's narratives on such well-known figures as Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, and many others. These pages unfold a multifaceted and unflinching literary history of race relations in the United States.

A brilliant literary memoir of chosen family and chosen heritage, told against the backdrop of Chicago’s North and South SidesAs a multiracial household in Chicago’s North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca Royster and her family's world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife Annie, who's white; and Cec...

It has been said that ""Invisible Man"" by Ralph Ellison is the greatest African-American literary achievement to date. Along with a collection of excerpts of some of the best criticism available on the work, this new volume in the ""Bloom's Guides"" series includes a brief biography of the author, detailed character profiles, structural and thematic analysis, an annotated bibliography, and more.

American Performance Poetry is the first book to trace a comprehensive history of performance poetry in America from Whitman through the rap-meets-poetry scene and to show how the performance of poetry is bound up with the performance of identity and nationality in the modern period. This book will be a meaningful contribution both to the field of American poetry studies and to the fields of cultural and performance studies, as it focuses on poetry that refuses the status of fixed aesthetic obje...

This is an intriguing interdisciplinary examination of hip hop aesthetics.What is the relationship between hip hop and African American culture in the post-Civil Rights era? Does hip hop level a criticism of American culture or stand as an isolated and unique phenomena? How have African American texts responded to the increasing role intellectual property law plays in regulating images, sounds, words, and logos?""Parodies of Ownership"" examines how contemporary African American writers, artists...

Among the most influential poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes is perhaps best remembered for the innovative use of jazz rhythms in his writing. While his poetry and essays received much public acclaim and scholarly attention, Hughes' dramas are relatively unknown. Only five of the sixty-three plays Hughes scripted alone or collaboratively have been published (in 1963). Published here, for the first time, are four of Hughes' most poignant, poetic, and political dramas, Scottsboro L...

Race and Ideology reveals how various strands of racial thinking and behavior are crucial for maintaining the unequal distribution of wealth that is more pronounced in the U.S. than in any other advanced industrial country. Though primarily concerned with the U.S., this collection contains chapters on other societies in order to highlight commonalties and the global nature of the race/color problem.This book proposes a new understanding of racism by examining a variety of issues that show how ra...

Beyond Blaxploitation, the first book-length anthology of scholarly work on blaxploitation films, sustains the momentum that blaxploitation scholarship has recently gained, giving the films an even more prominent place in cinema history. This volume is made up of eleven essays employing historical and theoretical methodologies in the examination of spectatorship, marketing, melodrama, the transition of novel to screenplay, and racial politics and identity, among other significant topics. In doin...

As she washes her laundry in the Rio Minho, Kelithe is startled from her daydreams by women's screams. It is not until she sees a small body in the shallow water that she realizes what has happened. Her young son has drowned. The Women of Standfast, Jamaica, whisper that she let Timothy die so that she could seize her chance to join her mother in America. Numb with grief, Kelithe lacks the strength to confront them. She can only wait for the funeral. And for her mother to come stand by her at la...