All Books
- PRE-ORDER: From Hate to Hallows: Reframing Black Church Arson$29.95
From Hate to Hallows intervenes in the public discourse surrounding the burning of Black churches in the United States—conversations largely dominated by white, conservative political imaginaries—to provide a critical account of the anti-Black racism and economic exploitation animating these acts of violence. Todne Thomas centers an ethnographic examination of a Knoxville, Tennessee church that was burned in 2015 as the primary case study of this intervention. By exploring the congregants’ experiences and perspectives on the event, Thomas privileges Black meaning-making as a primary source of social and political analysis. She draws on their explanations for the arson to explore the social, historical, and religious contexts of white supremacy, vandalism, gentrification and urban redevelopment, and the End Times as each relate to church burning. From Hate to Hallows challenges the dominant picture of Black church arson as episodic and aberrant events and instead foregrounds them as central moments in the construction of a twenty-first-century United States steeped in racial and economic domination.
- PRE-ORDER: Sonorous Passages: Black Maternal Soundings and the Liberation Imaginary$29.95
In Sonorous Passages, Meina Yates-Richard demonstrates how, within Black Atlantic literary and cultural productions, the sounds of Black maternal figures function as mediators of liberatory thought. Under the press of chattel slavery, Black mothers were discursively rendered as points of passage between freedom and unfreedom in the political imaginary, creating a paradigm wherein Black male subjects came to be imagined as the appropriate heirs and subjects of freedom. Sonorous Passages offers the methodology of “double-listening” as a Black feminist interpretive heuristic through which we are to hear and assess the Black maternal sonority within Black Atlantic textual and sonic objects. Through works ranging from Frederick Douglass’s nineteenth-century writings to twenty-first-century literary and sonic art, Sonorous Passages traces how Black maternal figures are conceptually excised from the imaginative realms of Black political freedom, even as the soundings of Black mothers provide protective and generative sites for developing liberatory thought. As Yates-Richard shows, by listening closely to Black maternal sonority, we can access, resound, and reproduce resonant maternal inheritances of freedom.
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