Bestsellers
- King: The Complete Edition: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
King: The Complete Edition: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Ho Che Anderson
$29.99A landmark graphic novel about the civil rights leader, complete in one volume. This groundbreaking body of comics journalism collects Anderson's entire biography of the renowned civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Over a decade in the making, the saga has been praised for its vivid recreation of one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history and for its accuracy in depicting the personal and public lives of King, from his birth to his assassination. King probes the life story of one of America's greatest public figures with an unflinchingly critical eye, casting King as an ambitious, dichotomous figure deserving of his place in history but not above moral sacrifice to get there. Anderson's expressionistic visual style is wrought with dramatic energy; panels evoke a painterly attention to detail but juxtapose with one another in such a way as to propel King's story with cinematic momentum. Anderson's successful use of the graphic novel to tell a major work of nonfiction has drawn favorable comparisons to Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale, Joe Sacco's Palestine, and Osamu Tezuka's Adolph.
King not only recreates the major events in King's public life, but chronicles the daily, rough-and-tumble, behind-the-scenes political maneuverings and strategic compromises that were required to mobilize millions of people toward a common goal. His internal debates with Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson and his hardball negotiations with John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson are dramatized. Anderson's achievement is not merely a political biography filled with names and dates, but a fully rounded portrait of a fallible human engaged in a superhuman effort his fears, his doubts, his relationship with his wife Coretta King, and his children are compassionately and truthfully rendered.
Anderson's visual approach includes the use of photographs, realistic portraiture, and expressionistic imagery alternating between stark black and white chiaroscuro and painterly full color. The dialogue is unflinchingly naturalistic and accurately reflects the moral urgency and labyrinthine political and practical complexities that King was navigating, from his deeply felt, personal commitment to a public cause to the wider political eruptions the country was experiencing. This is a respectful, unsparing, truthful biography of a man and his times that captures the moral and political gravitas of the cause as well as its human dimension. A major work of comics, depicting a major work of history.
- Devour
Devour
by Jazmine Joyner
Sold outIn this horror graphic novel from award-winning writer Jazmine Joyner and illustrator Anthony Pugh, American Gods meets Get Out in a dark retelling of the West African legend of Anansi the Spider.
In the Deep South, something evil waits in the darkness . . .
Devour tells the story of the Turner family, who move to Alabama to care for their ailing matriarch, Vassie, when she begins suffering from dementia. But Vassie isn’t just any old lady; she’s the last of a line of powerful root women who have been caring for the community since her ancestors were first captured and enslaved by white plantation owners. Patsy, the eldest daughter in the family, is immediately suspicious; the locals’ fear and superstition of her grandmother leads Patsy to take a closer look at the Turner family home, and what she finds is beyond her wildest nightmares.
In a magical room beneath the house, Patsy discovers the source of her family’s legendary skills: the Ghanaian spider god Anansi. Driven mad by the suffering of the enslaved Africans who worshipped him, Anansi was eventually captured and contained by Patsy’s ancestors. As Patsy learns about her family’s culture and dark past, she also realizes what’s really happening to Vassie; Anansi is eating Vassie’s memories. With their legacy and the god’s imprisonment in the balance, Patsy and her brother, Demetrius, will have to take up their grandmother’s mantle—while she can still remember who they are.
Devour is a terrifying new fable that delivers thrills and chills in equal measure. - Peaches
Peaches
by Gabriele Davis
Sold outIn Peaches, a hopeful multigenerational story of love and healing from author Gabriele Davis and illustrator Kim Holt, a girl holds her mother’s memory close while carrying on an important family tradition: making peach cobbler together.
Summer Sundays begin with picking.
Rosy-ripe peaches dipping low to the ground,
Sun-warmed and soft like Grandma’s lap.
Side by side with Daddy and Grandma, a young girl is determined to take part in her family’s tradition of baking the perfect peach cobbler—just like her mama used to. From picking fruit to stirring and mixing to kneading the dough, it’s a little bit messy. But with sure hands to guide the girl step-by-step—and her mother’s memory hanging sweet in the air—she has the recipe for making Mama proud.
This warmhearted and ultimately hopeful picture book shows that with a house full of love, everything can feel peach-perfect. - Jim Crow's Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership
Jim Crow's Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership
by Leslie T. Fenwick
Sold outJim Crow’s Pink Slip exposes the decades-long repercussions of a too-little-known result of resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education decision: the systematic dismissal of Black educators from public schools.
In 1954, the Supreme Court’s Brown decision ended segregated schooling in the United States, but regrettably, as documented in congressional testimony and transcripts, it also ended the careers of a generation of highly qualified and credentialed Black teachers and principals. In the Deep South and northern border states over the decades following Brown, Black schools were illegally closed and Black educators were displaced en masse. As educational policy and leadership expert Leslie T. Fenwick deftly demonstrates, the effects of these changes stand contrary to the democratic ideals of an integrated society and equal educational opportunity for all students.
Jim Crow’s Pink Slip provides a trenchant account of how tremendous the loss to the US educational system was and continues to be. Despite efforts of the NAACP and other civil rights organizations, congressional hearings during the Nixon administration, and antiracist activism of the 21st century, the problems fomented after Brown persist. The book draws the line from the past injustices to problems that the educational system grapples with today: not simply the underrepresentation of Black teachers and principals, but also salary reductions, teacher shortages, and systemic inequality.
By engaging with the complicated legacy of the Brown decision, Fenwick illuminates a crucial chapter in education history. She also offers policy prescriptions aimed at correcting the course of US education, supporting educators, and improving workforce quality and diversity. - Safe in a Midwife's Hands: Birthing Traditions from Africa to the American South
Safe in a Midwife's Hands: Birthing Traditions from Africa to the American South
by Linda Janet Holmes
Sold outInterviews Black midwives in Africa and the US to detail birthing and postpartum traditions as vital cultural practices that counterbalance racism within medical systems.
A Ms. Magazine “Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2023”
After a less-than-positive experience giving birth as a Black woman in the 1970s, Linda Janet Holmes launched a lifetime of work as an activist dedicated to learning about and honoring alternative birth traditions and the Black women behind them. Safe in a Midwife’s Hands brings together what Holmes has gleaned from the countless midwives who have shared with her their experiences, at a time when their knowledge and holistic approaches are essential counterbalances to a medical system that routinely fails Black mothers and babies. Building on work she began in the 1980s, when she interviewed traditional Black midwives in Alabama and Virginia, Holmes traveled to Ghana, Ethiopia, and Kenya to visit midwives there. In detailing their work, from massage to the uses of medicinal plants to naming ceremonies, she links their voices to those of midwives and doulas in the US. She thus illuminates parallels between birthing traditions that have survived hundreds of years of colonialism, enslavement, Jim Crow, and ongoing medical racism to persist as vital cultural practices that promote healthy outcomes for mothers and babies during pregnancy, birth, and beyond. - The Myth of Black Capitalism: New Edition
The Myth of Black Capitalism: New Edition
by Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Sold outDeciphers the history of “Black capitalist” rhetoric— and how it serves to enrich a minuscule few at the expense of the many
In his 1970 book The Myth of Black Capitalism, Earl Ofari Hutchinson laid out a rigorous challenge to the presumption that capitalism, in any shape or form, has the potential to rectify the stark injustices endured by Black people in America. Ofari engaged in a diligent historical review of the participation of African Americans in commercial activity in this capitalist country, demonstrating conclusively that the creation of a class of Black capitalists failed to ameliorate the extreme inequity faced by African Americans. Even “Buy Black” campaigns which aimed to “keep resources in the community,” he showed, reinforced a Black bourgeoisie which often enough exploited the Black underclass to increase their own wealth. Whether Black capitalists dared to go up against, or merely tried to find their place amongst, giant monopoly corporations, Ofari argued they would make little substantive progress in the lives of Black people. And whether calls for “Black capitalism” came from within the Black Power movement for Black economic autonomy, or were appropriated by the old-line Black elite, in the end the promotion of the myth of “Black capitalism” was a project of the Black elite which solely served the interests of the capitalist managerial class.
It was Richard Nixon who first introduced the notion of “Black capitalism” into mainstream American discourse, coopting the term at a time when African Americans comprised only 3% of the nation’s employers. That number dwindled thereafter, and yet the term only gained cachet following the election of Barack Obama and the increased visibility of the Black elite. Thankfully, just as the rhetoric of ‘Black capitalism” is being resuscitated, it is being confronted once more. In this second edition of Earl Ofari’s pathbreaking book, a Monthly Review Press classic, the author adds a new Introduction, which shows both the enduring strength of the ideology of Black capitalism and its continued inability to change the nature of what has always been a racialized system of production and distribution. Ofari reveals “Black capitalism" for what it really is: a diversion from the struggle for liberation that works at cross purposes with the fight against exploitation, and a fantasy which enriches a minuscule few at the expense of the many. The Myth of Black Capitalism argues definitively that only a direct assault on the oppression of Black people and the capitalist system itself can bring this exploitation to an end. - Adrienne Kennedy: Collected Plays & Other Writing
Adrienne Kennedy: Collected Plays & Other Writing
edited by Marc Robinson
$45.00Library of America presents the definitive edition of an essential figure in Black and American theater, spanning from the 1960s to the 2010s and including several works published for the first time
Adrienne Kennedy has been a force on the American stage since the premiere of her groundbreaking, Obie Award–winning Funnyhouse of a Negro in 1964. Politically engaged, formally daring, and making provocative use of material from contemporary history and popular culture, Kennedy’s haunting stage works dramatize and project interior realities that are often marked by disappointment and trauma, madness and terror. Her understanding of the inner lives of African American women expresses a powerfully insightful feminism that has come to influence generations of playwrights and writers.
Now, the Library of America presents, for the first time, a collected edition of Kennedy’s extraordinary and wide-ranging writings, spanning six decades and including ten unpublished works. Here are the early surrealistic one-acts A Lesson in Dead Language and A Rat’s Mass; works like A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White and Film Festival: The Day Jean Seberg Died that reveal Kennedy’s longstanding fascination with Hollywood and film culture; and Ohio State Murders, one of several plays featuring her protagonist Suzanne Alexander and the first of her plays to be staged—belatedly, in 2022—on Broadway. Sleep Deprivation Chamber is a searing indictment of racially motivated police violence based on real-life incidents involving her son, who co-wrote the play. Also included here are Kennedy’s adaptations of works by Euripides, Flaubert, and John Lennon, all brilliantly reimagined.
Outside of playwriting Kennedy has made her mark as a fiction writer and memoirist, providing a rich portrait of her life and experience especially in her book People Who Led to My Plays but also in works from her later life such as the essay “Almost Eighty.” Taken together, the work gathered in Collected Plays & Other Writings is a celebration of Kennedy’s indispensable achievement on the stage and on the page alike. - Passed on: African American Mourning Stories, a Memorial
Passed on: African American Mourning Stories, a Memorial
Sold outPassed On is a portrait of death and dying in twentieth-century African America. Through poignant reflection and thorough investigation of the myths, rituals, economics, and politics of African American mourning and burial practices, Karla FC Holloway finds that ways of dying are just as much a part of black identity as ways of living. Gracefully interweaving interviews, archival research, and analyses of literature, film, and music, Holloway shows how the vulnerability of African Americans to untimely death is inextricably linked to how black culture represents itself and is represented.
With a focus on the “death-care” industry—black funeral homes and morticians, the history of the profession and its practices—Holloway examines all facets of the burial business, from physicians, hospital chaplains, and hospice administrators, to embalming- chemical salesmen, casket makers, and funeral directors, to grieving relatives. She uses narrative, photographs, and images to summon a painful history of lynchings, white rage and riot, medical malpractice and neglect, executions, and neighborhood violence. Specialized caskets sold to African Americans, formal burial photos of infants, and deathbed stories, unveil a glimpse of the graveyards and burial sites of African America, along with burial rituals and funeral ceremonies.
Revealing both unexpected humor and anticipated tragedy, Holloway tells a story of the experiences of black folk in the funeral profession and its clientele. She also reluctantly shares the story of her son and the way his death moved her research from page to person.
In the conclusion, which follows a sermon delivered by Maurice O. Wallace at the funeral for the author’s son, Bem, Holloway strives to commemorate—through observation, ceremony, and the calling of others to remembrance and celebration. - Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France
Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France
by Robin Mitchell
$38.95The black female body as a site of cultural meaning Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution.
Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman.
Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present. - To Make Negro Literature : Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship
To Make Negro Literature : Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship
by Elizabeth McHenry
$28.95Elizabeth McHenry locates a hidden chapter in the history of Black literature at the turn of the twentieth century, revising concepts of Black authorship and offering a fresh account of the development of “Negro literature” focused on the never published, the barely read, and the unconventional.
In To Make Negro Literature Elizabeth McHenry traces African American authorship in the decade following the 1896 legalization of segregation. She shifts critical focus from the published texts of acclaimed writers to unfamiliar practitioners whose works reflect the unsettledness of African American letters in this period. Analyzing literary projects that were unpublished, unsuccessful, or only partially achieved, McHenry recovers a hidden genealogy of Black literature as having emerged tentatively, laboriously, and unevenly. She locates this history in books sold by subscription, in lists and bibliographies of African American authors and books assembled at the turn of the century, in the act of ghostwriting, and in manuscripts submitted to publishers for consideration and the letters of introduction that accompanied them. By attending to these sites and prioritizing overlooked archives, McHenry reveals a radically different literary landscape, revising concepts of Black authorship and offering a fresh account of the development of “Negro literature” focused on the never published, the barely read, and the unconventional. - Ain't But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story
Ain't But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story
edited by Willard Jenkins
$27.95Ain’t But a Few of Us presents over two dozen candid dialogues with Black jazz critics and journalists who discuss the barriers to access for Black jazz critics and how they contend with the world of jazz writing dominated by white men.
Despite the fact that most of jazz’s major innovators and performers have been African American, the overwhelming majority of jazz journalists, critics, and authors have been and continue to be white men. No major mainstream jazz publication has ever had a black editor or publisher. Ain’t But a Few of Us presents over two dozen candid dialogues with black jazz critics and journalists ranging from Greg Tate, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Robin D. G. Kelley to Tammy Kernodle, Ron Welburn, and John Murph. They discuss the obstacles to access for black jazz journalists, outline how they contend with the world of jazz writing dominated by white men, and point out that these racial disparities are not confined to jazz but hamper their efforts at writing about other music genres as well. Ain’t But a Few of Us also includes an anthology section, which reprints classic essays and articles from black writers and musicians such as LeRoi Jones, Archie Shepp, A. B. Spellman, and Herbie Nichols.
Contributors
Eric Arnold, Bridget Arnwine, Angelika Beener, Playthell Benjamin, Herb Boyd, Bill Brower, Jo Ann Cheatham, Karen Chilton, Janine Coveney, Marc Crawford, Stanley Crouch, Anthony Dean-Harris, Jordannah Elizabeth, Lofton Emenari III, Bill Francis, Barbara Gardner, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Jim Harrison, Eugene Holley Jr., Haybert Houston, Robin James, Willard Jenkins, Martin Johnson, LeRoi Jones, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tammy Kernodle, Steve Monroe, Rahsaan Clark Morris, John Murph, Herbie Nichols, Don Palmer, Bill Quinn, Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., Ron Scott, Gene Seymour, Archie Shepp, Wayne Shorter, A. B. Spellman, Rex Stewart, Greg Tate, Billy Taylor, Greg Thomas, Robin Washington, Ron Welburn, Hollie West, K. Leander Williams, Ron Wynn - Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity
Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity
by E. Patrick Johnson
Sold outPerformance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson’s provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performed—toward widely divergent ends—both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity—avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and ethnographic fieldwork, Johnson describes how diverse constituencies persistently try to prescribe the boundaries of "authentic" blackness and how performance highlights the futility of such enterprises. Johnson looks at various sites of performed blackness, including Marlon Riggs’s influential documentary Black Is . . . Black Ain’t and comedic routines by Eddie Murphy, David Alan Grier, and Damon Wayans. He analyzes nationalist writings by Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver, the vernacular of black gay culture, an oral history of his grandmother’s experience as a domestic worker in the South, gospel music as performed by a white Australian choir, and pedagogy in a performance studies classroom. By exploring the divergent aims and effects of these performances—ranging from resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia to excluding sexual dissidents from the black community—Johnson deftly analyzes the multiple significations of blackness and their myriad political implications. His reflexive account considers his own complicity, as ethnographer and teacher, in authenticating narratives of blackness.
- So to Speak
So to Speak
by Terrance Hayes
$20.00A powerful, timely, dazzling new collection of poems from the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead
The three sections of Terrance Hayes’ seventh collection explore how we see ourselves and our world, mapping the strange and lyrical grammar of thinking and feeling. In “Watch Your Mouth,” a tree frog sings to overcome its fear of birds; in “Watch Your Step: The Kafka Virus,” a talking cat tells jokes in the Jim Crow South; in “Watch Your Head,“ green beans bling in the mouth of Lil Wayne, and Bob Ross paints your portrait. On the one hand, these fabulous fables, American sonnets, quarantine quatrains, and ekphrastic do-it-yourself sestinas animate what Toni Morrison called “the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s own race.” On the other hand, these urgent, personal poems contemplate fatherhood, history, and longing with remarkable openness and humanity. So To Speak is the mature, restless work of one of contemporary poetry’s leading voices. - A Year of Black Joy: 52 Black Voices Share Their Life Passions
A Year of Black Joy: 52 Black Voices Share Their Life Passions
by Jamia Wilson
$22.99An uplifting and empowering anthology of joyful contributions from 52 contemporary Black voices, including chess grandmaster Maurice Ashley, scientist Dr. Raven the Science Maven, and award-winning author Patrice Lawrence
Curated by award-winning author Jamia Wilson, A Year of Black Joy celebrates the joy, talent, and contributions of 52 Black people from around the world. By sharing the many layers and dimensions of Black life and contributions that exist outside of trauma, readers of all backgrounds will be empowered to share their joy too. Each contributor is an expert in their own field, and the book covers a multitude of topics, from astrology and astronomy to beekeeping and baking. The collection includes an entry for every week of the year, and each contribution is tied to a particular season, event, or celebration. An illustrated, nonfiction component to each entry—such as a guide to healing plants or a tour of the night sky—lets readers dive further into the activity. Presented in a beautiful hardcover format and featuring stunning full-color illustrations from Jade Orlando, this is a book to be treasured for years to come. - Black Boy
Black Boy
by Richard Wright
$17.9960th anniversary edition: Richard Wright’s eloquent autobiography about growing up in the Jim Crow South that gives unique voice to being Southern, black, and male in early 20th century America Black Boy is a classic of American autobiography, a subtly crafted narrative of Richard Wright’s journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. An enduring story of one young man’s coming of age during a particular time and place, Black Boy remains a seminal text in our history about what it means to be a man, black, and Southern in America.
When Black Boy was first published in 1945, it soared to the top of the bestseller lists, became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and Ralph Ellison discerned it belonged to the tradition of the blues, an elegant gesture of testifying, “both to the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit.” Sixty years later and now a classic, Black Boy is an eloquent and deeply moving document of a young boy’s struggle for survival.
- Maxwell Alexandre: Pardo é Papel: The Glorious Victory and New Power
Maxwell Alexandre: Pardo é Papel: The Glorious Victory and New Power
edited by Alessandra Gómez
Sold outOn Alexandre’s politically nuanced painting cycle affirming Black iconicity
Published for his first North American solo exhibition, this catalog presents Brazilian artist Maxwell Alexandre’s (born 1990) ongoing series Pardo é Papel. Suspended from the ceiling, Alexandre’s large-scale paintings portray striking scenes of communal leisure interspersed with religious and art-historical imagery. Pop-cultural symbols appear alongside these images, including depictions of Black cultural icons such as Beyoncé, Nina Simone and Elza Soares, and commercial products from his childhood such as popular plastic blue Capri pools, Danone yogurt and the chocolate drink Toddynho. Alexandre paints his Black subjects on brown craft paper—pardo, in Portuguese. Although the main series title translates directly as “brown is paper” to reference the pardo paper itself, historically the term holds double significance as an ambiguous racial category in Brazil. Alexandre uses pardo paper to affirm and empower Blackness.
- The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
by James Weldon Johnson
$24.00A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of the groundbreaking classic novel of the Black experience in America that is still remarkably relevant more than a century later.
First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standards—and double consciousness—experienced by Black people in modern America. Republished in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man became a pioneering document of African-American culture and an eloquent model for later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.
Narrated by a man whose light skin enables him to "pass" for white, the novel describes a journey through the strata of Black society at the turn of the century—from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out the rhythms of ragtime. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a complex and moving examination of the question of race and an unsparing look at what it meant to forge an identity as a man in a culture that recognized nothing but color.
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times. - Possessing the Secret of Joy: A Novel
Possessing the Secret of Joy: A Novel
by Alice Walker
$16.95From the author the New York Times Book Review calls "a lavishly gifted writer," this is the searing story of Tashi, a tribal African woman first glimpsed in The Color Purple whose fateful decision to submit to the tsunga's knife and be genitally mutilated leads to a trauma that informs her life and fatefully alters her existence. Possessing the Secret of Joy, out of print for a number of years, was the first novel to deal with this controversial topic and managed to do so in a manner that Cosmopolitan called "masterful, honorable, and unforgettable storytelling." The New Press is proud to bring the book back into print with a new preface by the author addressing the book's initial reception and the changed attitudes toward female genital mutilation that have come about in part because of this book. - Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader
Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader
by Greg Tate
Sold outFlyboy 2 provides a panoramic view of the last thirty years of Greg Tate's influential cultural criticism of contemporary Black music, art, literature, film, and politics. These essays, interviews, and reviews cover everything from Miles Davis, Ice Cube, and Suzan Lori Parks to Afro-futurism, Kara Walker, and Amiri Baraka.
Since launching his career at the Village Voice in the early 1980s Greg Tate has been one of the premiere critical voices on contemporary Black music, art, literature, film, and politics. Flyboy 2 provides a panoramic view of the past thirty years of Tate's influential work. Whether interviewing Miles Davis or Ice Cube, reviewing an Azealia Banks mixtape or Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, discussing visual artist Kara Walker or writer Clarence Major, or analyzing the ties between Afro-futurism, Black feminism, and social movements, Tate's resounding critical insights illustrate how race, gender, and class become manifest in American popular culture. Above all, Tate demonstrates through his signature mix of vernacular poetics and cultural theory and criticism why visionary Black artists, intellectuals, aesthetics, philosophies, and politics matter to twenty-first-century America. - Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights (International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art) by Derek Conrad Murray
Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights (International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art) by Derek Conrad Murray
$29.95What impact do sexual politics and queer identities have on the understanding of 'blackness' as a set of visual, cultural and intellectual concerns? In Queering Post-Black Art, Derek Conrad Murray argues that the rise of female, gay and lesbian artists as legitimate African-American creative voices is essential to the development of black art. He considers iconic works by artists including Glenn Ligon, Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas and Kalup Linzy, which question whether it is possible for blackness to evade its ideologically over-determined cultural legibility. In their own unique, often satirical way, a new generation of contemporary African American artists represent the ever-evolving sexual and gender politics that have come to define the highly controversial notion of 'post-black' art. First coined in 2001, the term 'post-black' resonated because it articulated the frustrations of young African-American artists around notions of identity and belonging that they perceived to be stifling, reductive and exclusionary. Since then, these artists have begun to conceive an idea of blackness that is beyond marginalization and sexual discrimination. - Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology
Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology
by Monica A. Coleman
$21.00In her new book, Monica A. Coleman articulates the African American expression of "making a way out of no way" for today's context of globalization, religious pluralism, and sexual diversity. Drawing on womanist religious scholarship and process thought, Coleman describes the symbiotic relationship among God, the ancestors, and humanity that helps to change the world into the just society it ought to be. Making a Way Out of No Way shows us a way of living for justice with God and proposes a communal theology that presents a dynamic way forward for black churches, African traditional religions and grassroots organizations. - Coach (5) (Track)
Coach (5) (Track)
$17.99In this companion to Jason Reynolds’s award-winning and New York Times bestselling Track series, meet Coach as a boy striving to come into his own as a track star while facing upheaval at home.
Before Coach was the man who gave caring yet firm-handed guidance to Ghost, Lu, Patina, and Sunny on the Defenders track team, he was little Otie Brody, who was obsessed with Mr. 9.99 (a.k.a. Carl Lewis) and Marty McFly from Back to the Future. Like Mr. 9.99—and his own dad—Otie is a sprinter. Sprint free or die is practically his motto.
Then his dad, who is always away on business trips, comes home with a pair of Jordans. JORDANS. Fine as fine can be. Otie puts them on and feels like he can leap to the moon…maybe even leap like Mr. 9.99 when he won the Olympic gold medal in the long jump. But one morning he wakes up to find his brand-new secret weapon kicks are missing—right off his feet! And Otie just might have a fuzzy memory of his dad easing them off as Otie was sleeping, but that can’t be right, can it?
Unless all the reasons for his dad’s “gone’s” are very different from what he’s been told… Because now, not only are the Jordans missing, but so is his father.
- Black Studies in the University: A Symposium
Black Studies in the University: A Symposium
Sold outA founding document of African American Studies, reissued for today’s students and scholars
In a landmark 1968 conference at Yale University, students, faculty, and community activists helped establish “Afro‑American Studies” as a major, and then a thriving department, at Yale. In these conference proceedings, participants argue for the necessity of Black Studies as a field, start to delineate its central debates, discuss its relationship to the broader community, and plot a course of study. Bristling with implied action and the power of an idea whose time has come, this classic reissue will serve as a resource for new generations of scholars and activists.
Contributors to the proceedings include McGeorge Bundy, Lawrence W. Chisolm, Harold Cruse, David Brion Davis, Nathan Hare, Maulana Ron Karenga, Martin Kilson, Jr., Gerald A. McWorter, Sidney W. Mintz, Boniface Obichere, Alvin Poussaint, Edwin S. Redkey, Charles H. Taylor, Jr., and Robert Farris Thompson.
In a new introduction, Farah Jasmine Griffin reflects on the legacy of this book and the trajectory of the field over the decades; forewords by Ralph C. Dawson and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recall the pioneering moment at Yale and all that it made possible. - The Malcolm Bookmark
The Malcolm Bookmark
$4.00The Malcolm Bookmark is part of The Seasonal Page's collection of bookmarks. This product is a high quality bookmark with a special design and sized 2x7 inches. When you purchase the design, it will be sent to you by mail. The colors of the design can vary based on the computer screen.
- The Great Birthday Surprise! (Hairiette of Harlem, 1)
The Great Birthday Surprise! (Hairiette of Harlem, 1)
$8.99Hip, hip, hooray! It's Hairiette's Birthday!
With her glowy hair done and the perfect dress picked out, Hairiette is ready for her special seventh birthday present. But on the big day, there is no bike in sight! All she gets is a stinking barrette and comb. It looks like it isn't going to be a hip hip hooray day after all…until a class unit on imagination changes everything!
i + magi + nation = My Magic Nation!
Using the power of her imagination, Hairiette turns her boring birthday gifts into charmed objects that whisk her off to an enchanted place called Magic Nation where she can have hip hip hooray days every day! All she needs is a little creativity and the magic words, "Razzle, Dazzle, Diddly, Do!" and soon the adventures begin!
- Lies about Black People: How to Combat Racist Stereotypes and Why It Matters
Lies about Black People: How to Combat Racist Stereotypes and Why It Matters
Sold outBold, unflinching, and urgent—a pioneering guide to dismantling racist stereotypes and creating real change.
From Black Lives Matter to the stark inequities exposed by COVID-19, America's history of racial bias demands a new approach to understanding and action. Award-winning diversity expert Dr. Omekongo Dibinga reveals how even seemingly "innocent" stereotypes are rooted in hatred and continue to harm Black communities today.
In Lies About Black People: How to Combat Racist Stereotypes and Why It Matters, Dr. Dibinga combines powerful personal narratives, historical context, and contemporary analysis to expose the real-world impact of racist myths. Through intimate interviews, compelling research, and interactive exercises, readers will:
* Identify and confront their own hidden biases
* Master essential vocabulary for meaningful discussions about race
* Learn concrete ways to use privilege as a force for positive change
* Understand how common stereotypes—from "natural athletic ability" to "can't swim"—perpetuate systemic racismThis transformative guide goes beyond theory to provide practical tools for lasting change. Whether you're beginning your journey in anti-racism work or seeking deeper insights for advocacy, Dr. Dibinga offers a clear path forward.
"Dr. Dibinga is his generation's Dr. Carter G. Woodson... [it] rises above the banalities of lies and racist platitudes that have existed for centuries. I predict it will be read and studied for generations to come." —Joe Madison, "The Black Eagle" on SiriusXM Urban View
Perfect for:
- Educators and diversity professionals
- Corporate leaders and team managers
- Anyone committed to creating a more equitable society
- Book clubs and community discussion groups - Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women's Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation (Minoritarian Aesthetics)
Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women's Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation (Minoritarian Aesthetics)
Sold outHow Black women’s visual work functions in an era of new racial and gender meaning
In the wake of contemporary art’s post-Black turn and the mainstreaming of intersectionality, Undesirability and Her Sisters charts a new genealogy of Black women’s art that exposes the unfinished project of racial and gender empowerment in the twenty-first century. Tiffany Barber argues that Black women’s social positions at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class are inherently queer, thus spurring unexpected aesthetic strategies that throw into high relief the ethical terrain of what it means to be Black and a woman now.
Undesirability and Her Sisters collates what Barber terms “undesirable” representations of Black female bodies in recent American sculpture, collage, photography, and dance-based performance art by Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, Xaviera Simmons, and Narcissister. These works not only engage the visual senses but also incorporate olfactory, haptic, and sonic experiences that challenge traditional interpretations of Blackness and womanhood in art history, Black Studies, feminist and gender studies, dance and performance studies, and queer studies. Instead of transcendental beauty, wholeness, and individual and collective becoming, the perverse Black female figures profiled here eschew sublimation and synthesis as necessary responses to racial and gender subjugation in the past, present, and future.
Through its unique, groundbreaking analysis, this book contributes to the ongoing discussions on the ethics of representation―the capacity to speak and act for oneself, to have significance and impact, and ultimately, to reject acknowledgment.
- Perfect Victims: And The Politics Of Appeal
Perfect Victims: And The Politics Of Appeal
Sold outPerfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.
Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured―the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.
Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.
How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.
- Blackass: A Novel
Blackass: A Novel
$16.00Furo Wariboko, a young Nigerian, awakes the morning before a job interview to find that he's been transformed into a white man. In this condition he plunges into the bustle of Lagos to make his fortune. With his red hair, green eyes, and pale skin, it seems he's been completely changed. Well, almost. There is the matter of his family, his accent, his name. Oh, and his black ass. Furo must quickly learn to navigate a world made unfamiliar and deal with those who would use him for their own purposes. Taken in by a young woman called Syreeta and pursued by a writer named Igoni, Furo lands his first-ever job, adopts a new name, and soon finds himself evolving in unanticipated ways.
A. Igoni Barrett's Blackass is a fierce comic satire that touches on everything from race to social media while at the same time questioning the values society places on us simply by virtue of the way we look. As he did in Love Is Power, or Something Like That, Barrett brilliantly depicts life in contemporary Nigeria and details the double-dealing and code-switching that are implicit in everyday business. But it's Furo's search for an identity--one deeper than skin--that leads to the final unraveling of his own carefully constructed story.
- Santeria: the Religion: Faith, Rites, Magic (World Religion and Magic)
Santeria: the Religion: Faith, Rites, Magic (World Religion and Magic)
$21.99Brought to Cuba as slaves, the Yoruba people of West Africa preserved their religion's heritage by disguising their gods as Catholic saints and worshipping them in secret. The resulting religion is known as Santeria, a blend of primitive magic and Catholicism now practiced by an estimated five million Americans.
Santeria: The Religion is an informative and insightful examination of an African religion's survival in the New World. No one could write this book better than Migene Gonzalez-Wippler. Combining her informed study as an anthropologist and personal experience as a Santerian initiate results in a thrilling book that reveals some of Santeria's most spellbinding elements:
* The orishas: the deities of Santeria. Who they are. What they represent. How they may be contacted.
* The santeros: the priests of Santeria. What they are like. What they do. Initiations into the priesthood.
* The diloggun: shells used in divination. How they are used. Methods to consult the gods with the shells.
* Ewe: the magic of Santeria. Includes herbal potions prepared as medicinal cures.Santeria: The Religion covers every aspect of this religion, including its rites and ceremonies. Some of these ceremonies may be considered bizarre or controversial―but, if you want to know the truth, get this book.
Santeria: The Religion contains over 65 remarkable photographs that will take you right into Santeria traditions. Interviews with practitioners reveal aspects of the religion rarely disclosed to non-believers.
The time has come to reveal the growing spiritual practice that continues to gain ground worldwide, and to remove the fear and distrust from people who do not understand. Here is the truth about the religion.
- Haitian Vodou: An Introduction to Haiti's Indigenous Spiritual Tradition
Haitian Vodou: An Introduction to Haiti's Indigenous Spiritual Tradition
Sold outHaitian Vodou is a fascinating spiritual tradition rich with ceremonies and magic, songs and prayers, dances and fellowship. Yet outside of Haiti, next to no one understands this joyous and profound way of life. ln Haitian Vodou, Mambo Chita Tann explores the historical roots and contemporary practices of this unique tradition, including discussions of:
* Customs, beliefs, sacred spaces, and ritual objects
* Characteristics and behaviors of the Lwa, the spirits served by Vodou practitioners
* Common misconceptions such as "voodoo dolls" and the zombie phenomenon
* Questions and answers for attending ceremonies and getting involved in a sosyete (Vodou house)
* Correspondence tables, Kreyol glossary, supplemental prayer texts, and an extensive list of reference books and online resourcesWell-researched, comprehensive, and engaging, Haitian Vodou will be a welcome addition for people new to Haitian spirituality as well as for students, practitioners, and academics.
- Hoodoo Medicine: Gullah Herbal Remedies
Hoodoo Medicine: Gullah Herbal Remedies
$18.75Hoodoo Medicine is a unique record of nearly lost African-American folk culture. It documents herbal medicines used for centuries, from the 1600s until recent decades, by the slaves and later their freed descendants, in the South Carolina Sea Islands. The Sea Island people, also called the Gullah, were unusually isolated from other slave groups by the creeks and marshes of the Low Country. They maintained strong African influences on their speech, social customs, and beliefs, long after other American blacks had lost this connection. Likewise, their folk medicine mixed medicines that originated in Africa with cures learned from the American Indians and European settlers. Hoodoo Medicine is a window into Gullah traditions, which in recent years have been threatened by the migration of families, the invasion of the Sea Islands by suburban developers, and the gradual death of the elder generation. More than that, it captures folk practices that lasted longer in the Sea Islands than elsewhere, but were once widespread throughout African-American communities of the South.
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