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Cornel West: A Critical Reader is a political act; it is a book engaged in textual and existential combat, for it honors and recognizes the complexity, critical subjectivity, humanity, intellectual productivity, and fecundity of this prominent Black scholar. This comprehensive text offers a systematic and thematic approach to West's philosophical work. It moves the reader through his distinctive form of prophetic pragmatism, his historicist and improvisational philosophy of religion, his sociali...

The groundbreaking and best-selling anthology, including eleven complete major works and fully representing the vernacular tradition with forms including blues, gospel, folk tales, and sermons.

As a chronicler of the African American experience in fiction and as an incisive cultural commentator in her essays and lectures, Toni Morrison (b. 1931) is regarded as one of the nation's most distinguished novelists and intellectuals. Her novels are richly layered narratives that explore the meanings of tragedy and myth in individual lives. Morrison's perspectives on American life and culture, rendered with a deep understanding of the consequences of history and the power of art, are always co...

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 in her works helps explode this critical binary opposition. Specifically, the carnivalesque and the heteroglossia often subvert essentialist notions of (Black) identity. Jonah's Gourd Vine's protag...

This title presents literary responses to questions of U.S. racial nationalism and imperialism.American literary nationalism is traditionally understood as a cohesive literary tradition developed in the newly independent United States that emphasized the unique features of America and consciously differentiated American literature from British literature. Robert Levine challenges this assessment by exploring the conflicted, multi-racial, and contingent dimensions present in the works of late eig...

Examines the decline of Baldwin's reputation after the middle 1960s, his tepid reception in mainstream and academic venues, and the ways in which critics have often mis-represented and undervalued his work. Scott develops readings of Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Just Above My Head that explore the interconnected themes in Baldwin's work: the role of the family in sustaining the arts, the price of success in American society, and the struggle of black ar...

Winner of the Elizabeth Agee Prize in American Literature In Bound to Respect: Antebellum Narratives of Black Imprisonment, Servitude, and Bondage, 1816-1861, Keith Michael Green examines key texts that illuminate forms of black bondage and captivity that existed within and alongside slavery. In doing so, he restores to antebellum African American autobiographical writing the fascinating heterogeneity lost if the historical experiences of African Americans are attributed to slavery alone. The...

One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. McKay’s life and writing were defined by his class consciousness and anticolonialism, shaped by his experiences growing up in colonial Jamaica as well as his early career as a writer in Harlem and then London. Dedicated to confronting both racism and capitalist exploitation, he was a critical observer of th...

Tomeiko Ashford Carter offers insight into the writings of a black female preacher in nineteenth-century America and shows how she helped start a revolution of "spirit-writing". Spirit-writing offered black, female authors a sanctuary where they could create powerful leading female characters who live by their own brands of Christian theology. In Powers Divine, Carter calls attention to subsequent black female writers whose fiction demonstrates the legacies of life and spirit-writing by combinin...

The original CliffsNotes study guides offer a look into critical elements and ideas within classic works of literature. In CliffsNotes on The Contender, you look into a moral tale that emphasizes the importance of the fight over the prize, the quality of the struggle over the outcome. Following the development of the novel's protagonist, this study guide's in-depth character analysis covers the coming-of-age of a high school dropout who literally fights young boxers and figuratively braves the...

Although James Baldwin today holds a secure position in the canon of twentieth-century literature, more than twenty years after his death he still remains one of America's most illusive authors. An eloquent writer who wanted to be more than just "a Negro novelist," he nevertheless became one of the country's most prominent African American leaders when Time magazine emblazoned his image across its cover in 1963. The body of his work-six novels, a handful of short stories, and five major essay co...

Winner of the 2018 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in Textual Studies, presented by the American Academy of Religion 2018 Outstanding Academic Title, given by Choice Magazine A new perspective on the role of religion in the work of Langston Hughes Langston's Salvation offers a fascinating exploration into the religious thought of Langston Hughes. Known for his poetry, plays, and social activism, the importance of religion in Hughes' work has historically been ignored or dismissed...

"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 liberation impulses in Bambara's writing, which is concerned with practices that advance the material value of the African American experience and exploring the introspection between artist production and social justice. This is the first monogr...

This brutally gripping novel about the African-American Great Migration follows the three Moss brothers, who flee the rural South to work in industries up North. Delivered by day into the searing inferno of the steel mills, by night they encounter a world of surreal devastation, crowded with dogfighters, whores, cripples, strikers, and scabs. Keenly sensitive to character, prophetic in its depiction of environmental degradation and globalized labor, Attaway's novel is an unprecedneted confr...

The story of an ex-Confederate officer who, after the end of the Civil War, seeks his fortune in New York. Twenty years later he returns to the South to put into practice some of the business methods he learned in the North.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an African American civil rights activist, leader, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet, and scholar. The importance of his work to the success of the Civil Rights movement cannot be overestimated. "In the course of his long, turbulent career, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism-- scholarship, propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights...

Unlike any text to date, this revolutionary study surveys Black research and literature to determine the processes formal education uses to dehumanize Black students. This is a socio-historical analysis of the Black Flame trilogy (BFT), W. E. B. Du Bois's unparalleled, thirty-year study of Atlanta, Georgia from Black Reconstruction (1860 - 1880) to 1956. W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the most prescient sociologists of the twentieth century in his research of Black people in America. These ground-brea...