Non-fiction
- The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s
The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s
by Emily J. Lordi
$26.95Examining the work of Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Solange Knowles, Flying Lotus, and others, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of soul, showing how it came to signify a belief in black resilience enacted through musical practices.
In The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of this famously elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a cultural belief in black resilience, which was enacted through musical practices—inventive cover versions, falsetto vocals, ad-libs, and false endings. Through these soul techniques, artists such as Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, and Minnie Riperton performed virtuosic survivorship and thus helped to galvanize black communities in an era of peril and promise. Their soul legacies were later reanimated by such stars as Prince, Solange Knowles, and Flying Lotus. Breaking with prior understandings of soul as a vague masculinist political formation tethered to the Black Power movement, Lordi offers a vision of soul that foregrounds the intricacies of musical craft, the complex personal and social meanings of the music, the dynamic movement of soul across time, and the leading role played by black women in this musical-intellectual tradition. - Afrofuturisms: Ecology, Humanity, and Francophone Cultural Expressions
Afrofuturisms: Ecology, Humanity, and Francophone Cultural Expressions
by Isaac Vincent Joslin
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An exploration of Francophone African literary imaginations and expressions through the lens of AfrofuturismGenerally attributed to the Western imagination, science fiction is a literary genre that has expressed projected technological progress since the Industrial Revolution. However, certain fantastical elements in African literary expressions lend themselves to science fiction interpretations, both utopian and dystopian. When the concept of science is divorced from its Western, rationalist, materialist, positivist underpinnings, science fiction represents a broad imaginative space that supersedes the limits of this world. Whether it be on the moon, under the sea, or elsewhere within the imaginative universe, Afrofuturist readings of select films, novels, short stories, plays, and poems reveal a similarly emancipatory African future that is firmly rooted in its own cultural mythologies, cosmologies, and philosophies. Isaac Joslin identifies the contours and modalities of a speculative, futurist science fiction rooted in the sociocultural and geopolitical context of continental African imaginaries. Constructing an arc that begins with gender identity and cultural plurality as the bases for an inherently multicultural society, this project traces the essential role of language and narrativity in processing traumas that stem from the violence of colonial and neocolonial interventions in African societies. Joslin then outlines the influential role of discursive media that construct divisions and create illusions about societal success, belonging, and exclusion, while also identifying alternative critical existential mythologies that promote commonality and social solidarity. The trajectory proceeds with a critical analysis of the role of education in affirming collective identity in the era of globalization; the book also assesses the market-driven violence that undermines efforts to instill and promote cultural and social autonomy. Last, this work proposes an egalitarian and ecological ethos of communal engagement with and respect for the diversity of the human and natural worlds. - The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color
The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color
by Natalie Y. Gutiérrez
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This groundbreaking work illuminates the phenomena of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) as it is uniquely experienced by people of color, and provides a much-needed path to reclaiming health and wholeness despite the heavy burden of systemic, intergenerational, and attachment trauma resulting from racism in our country. Readers of color will find affirmation of their experience of C-PTSD from both a social justice and psychological lens, and learn techniques for reclaiming wholeness.
It’s time to heal the invisible wounds of complex trauma and reclaim your mind, body, and spirit.
If you are a person of color who has experienced repeated trauma—such as discrimination, race-related verbal assault, racial stigmatization, poverty, sexual trauma, or interpersonal violence—you may struggle with intense feelings of anger, mistrust, or shame. You may feel unsafe or uncomfortable in your own body, or struggle with building and keeping close relationships. Sometimes you may feel very alone in your pain. But you are not alone. This groundbreaking work illuminates the phenomena of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) as it is uniquely experienced by people of color, and provides a much-needed path to health and wholeness.
In The Pain We Carry, you’ll find powerful tools to help you understand and begin healing from repeated trauma. You’ll discover ways to feel safer in your body, build self-compassion and resilience, and reclaim your health and wellness by reconnecting with your sense of self and your ancestral wisdom. You’ll learn how trauma is connected to grief, how it can affect both the mind and the body, and how it can persist from one generation to the next. Most importantly, you’ll find the validation you need to begin mending your heart, and the skills you need to live a life of intention—even in the midst of an oppressive system.
It’s time to find relief from the trauma and burdens you have been carrying and start celebrating and rediscovering who you are. With this guide, you will uncover your own strength in order to work toward healing C-PTSD within the external constraints you face to live a life of resilience, empowerment, reflection, and perseverance.
- The Dead are Gods
The Dead are Gods
by Eirinie Carson
$27.99An Oprah Daily Spring 2023 Reading List Pick
From an exciting new literary voice: a memoir that explores grief, Blackness, and recovery after the death of a dear friend.
After an unexpected phone call on an early morning in 2018, writer and model Eirinie Carson learned of her best friend Larissa’s death. In the wake of her shock, Eirinie attempts to make sense of the events leading up to Larissa’s death and uncovers startling secrets about her life in the process.
THE DEAD ARE GODS is Eirinie’s striking, intimate, and profoundly moving depiction of life after a sudden loss. Amid navigating moments of intense grief, Eirinie is overwhelmed by her love for Larissa. She finds power in pulling moments of joy from the depths of her emotion. Eirinie’s portrayal of what love feels like after death bursts from the page alongside a timely, honest, and personal exploration of Black love and Black life.
Perhaps, Eirinie proposes, “The only way out is through.” - Monsters in Love: Why Your Partner Sometimes Drives You Crazy—and What You Can Do About It (New edition)
Monsters in Love: Why Your Partner Sometimes Drives You Crazy—and What You Can Do About It (New edition)
by Resmaa Menakem
$18.95A gritty, down-to-earth guide for real-life couples
Conflict is a natural part of any intimate relationship. Yet most couples either avoid it or try to smooth over their differences. This often results in at least one partner compromising their integrity—and stunting their own growth.
Monsters in Love challenges the idea that conflict between partners is unhealthy or something to avoid. Instead, it encourages both people to stand by what they need and who they are—but to do so with compassion rather than competitiveness or vengefulness.
This book is about the reality of committed, intimate relationships, which are designed to inspire both people to grow up. It challenges some common misperceptions about what makes for a successful partnership. It also rocks the boat of psychotherapy, calling out therapists who don't bring their best to their clients.
Instead of comforting fantasies or false promises, Monsters in Love offers you and your partner a chance to make your relationship—and your lives—much bigger and more emergent.
- The Whiskey of our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent edited by Quraysh Ali Lansana & Georgia A. Popoff
The Whiskey of our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent edited by Quraysh Ali Lansana & Georgia A. Popoff
$18.00*ship in 7-10 business daysReflections on the profound influence of poet, educator, and social activist Gwendolyn Brooks through examinations of her life and work.
Winner of the 2017 Central New York Book Award for nonfiction
Finalist for the 2017 Chicago Review of Books AwardThe first black woman to be named United States poet laureate, Brook’s poetry, fiction, and social commentary shed light on the beauty of humanity, the distinct qualities of black life and community, and the destructive effects of racism, sexism, and class inequality.A collection of thirty essays combining critical analysis and personal reflection, The Whiskey of Our Discontent, presents essential elements of Brooks' oeuvre—on race, gender, class, community, and poetic craft, while also examining her life as poet, reporter, mentor, sage, activist, and educator. - The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being by Ramon Amaro
The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being by Ramon Amaro
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On the abstruse nature of machine learning, mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy.
To impair the racial ordering of the world, The Black Technical Object introduces the history of statistical analysis and “scientific” racism into research on machine learning. Computer programming designed for taxonomic patterning, machine learning offers useful insights into racism and racist behavior, but its connection to the racial history of science and the Black lived experience has yet to be developed. In this book, Ramon Amaro explores how the history of data and statistical analysis informs the complex relationship between race and machine learning. He juxtaposes a practical analysis of this type of computerized learning with a theory of Black alienation in order to inspire alternative approaches to contemporary algorithmic practice. In doing so, Amaro contemplates the abstruse nature of programming and mathematics, as well as the deep incursion of racial hierarchies.
Series Overview: In the decades that followed the demise of decolonial struggles and the end of the USSR, a great deal of intellectual effort was devoted to conceptualizing political emancipation as freedom from the masses rather than freedom for the masses. Focusing on connectivity rather than on collectivity, these modalities of political action led to depoliticizing effects and to a certain counter-political ethos expressed in terms such as parapolitics, psychopolitics, or micropolitics, all which this series terms “antipolitical.” Rather than counter the arguments that each term puts forth, On the Antipolitical, edited by Ana Teixeira Pinto, suggests historizing this disposition, situating it within the neocolonial continuum that animates the digital frontier as the new locus of settler becoming. - Ratchetdemic: Reimagining Academic Success
Ratchetdemic: Reimagining Academic Success
by Christopher Emdin
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A revolutionary new educational model that encourages educators to provide spaces for students to display their academic brilliance without sacrificing their identities
Building on the ideas introduced in his New York Times best-selling book, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, Christopher Emdin introduces an alternative educational model that will help students (and teachers) celebrate ratchet identity in the classroom. Ratchetdemic advocates for a new kind of student identity—one that bridges the seemingly disparate worlds of the ivory tower and the urban classroom.
Because modern schooling often centers whiteness, Emdin argues, it dismisses ratchet identity (the embodying of “negative” characteristics associated with lowbrow culture, often thought to be possessed by people of a particular ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic status) as anti-intellectual and punishes young people for straying from these alleged “academic norms,” leaving young people in classrooms frustrated and uninspired. These deviations, Emdin explains, include so-called “disruptive behavior” and a celebration of hip-hop music and culture.
Emdin argues that being “ratchetdemic,” or both ratchet and academic (like having rap battles about science, for example), can empower students to embrace themselves, their backgrounds, and their education as parts of a whole, not disparate identities. This means celebrating protest, disrupting the status quo, and reclaiming the genius of youth in the classroom. - Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender
Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender
by Marquis Bey
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Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender, showing that as a category, cisgender cannot capture how people depart from gender alignment and its coding as white.
In Cistem Failure Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender. Bey asks, What does it mean to have a gender that “matches” one’s sex---that is, to be cisgender---when decades of feminist theory have destroyed the belief that there is some natural way to be a sex? Moving from the The Powerpuff Girls to the greeting “How ya mama’n’em?” to their own gender identity, Bey finds that cisgender is too flat as a category to hold the myriad ways that people who may or may not have undergone gender-affirmative interventions depart from gender alignment. At the same time, blackness, they contend, strikes at the heart of cisgender’s invariable coding as white: just as transness names a non-cis space, blackness implies a non-cis space. By showing how blackness opens up a way to subvert the hegemonic power of the gender binary, Bey makes a case for an antiracist gender abolition project that rejects cisgender as a regulatory apparatus. - By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners
By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners
by Margaret A. Burnham
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A paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow–era violence, the legal apparatus that sustained it, and its enduring legacy, from a renowned legal scholar.
If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn’t lynching the law?
In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of this period?and through to today.
Drawing on an extensive database, collected over more than a decade and exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, she reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow, and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been heard.
- You Can Have a Better Period: A Practical Guide to Pain-free and Calmer Periods
You Can Have a Better Period: A Practical Guide to Pain-free and Calmer Periods
by Le'Nise Brothers
$18.95A practical guide to understanding your cycle and balancing your hormones with nutrition and yoga, for a calm and pain-free period. Written by Le’Nise Brothers, a nutritional therapist, yoga teacher and popular women’s health, hormone and wellbeing coach.
You Can Have A Better Period is a straight-talking resource to help women understand their menstrual cycles and finally get answers to questions such as: “why am I so moody right before my period?”, “are periods supposed to be so painful?”, “why is my period so heavy?”, “is it normal to get headaches right before my period?”
Le'Nise Brothers takes us through each phase of our cycle, including a clear programme of nutrition and lifestyle changes. The book explains which supplements work and the key stress management habits we can implement, to bring long-lasting and sustainable changes to our hormonal balance and menstrual health.
In Western society, we have accepted a cultural narrative that periods are supposed to be painful, emotional and messy. This book will be a practical guide that helps women change the way they look at their period, and finally harness the power of the fifth vital sign. - Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
by Carolyn Finney
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Why are African Americans so underrepresented when it comes to interest in nature, outdoor recreation, and environmentalism? In this thought-provoking study, Carolyn Finney looks beyond the discourse of the environmental justice movement to examine how the natural environment has been understood, commodified, and represented by both white and black Americans. Bridging the fields of environmental history, cultural studies, critical race studies, and geography, Finney argues that the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial violence have shaped cultural understandings of the "great outdoors" and determined who should and can have access to natural spaces.
Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
Why are African Americans so underrepresented when it comes to interest in nature, outdoor recreation, and environmentalism? In this thought-provoking study, Carolyn Finney looks beyond the discourse of the environmental justice movement to examine how the natural environment has been understood, commodified, and represented by both white and black Americans. Bridging the fields of environmental history, cultural studies, critical race studies, and geography, Finney argues that the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial violence have shaped cultural understandings of the "great outdoors" and determined who should and can have access to natural spaces.
Drawing on a variety of sources from film, literature, and popular culture, and analyzing different historical moments, including the establishment of the Wilderness Act in 1964 and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Finney reveals the perceived and real ways in which nature and the environment are racialized in America. Looking toward the future, she also highlights the work of African Americans who are opening doors to greater participation in environmental and conservation concerns. - Police Brutality and White Supremacy: The Fight Against American Traditions
Police Brutality and White Supremacy: The Fight Against American Traditions
by Etan Thomas
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ETAN THOMAS, an eleven-year NBA veteran and lifelong advocate for social justice, weaves together his personal experiences with police violence and white supremacy with multiple interviews of family members of victims of police brutality like exonerated Central Park Five survivor Raymond Santana and Rodney King’s daughter Lora Dene King; as well as activist athletes and other public figures such as Steph Curry, Chuck D, Isiah Thomas, Sue Bird, Jake Tapper, Jemele Hill, Stan Van Gundy, Kyle Korver, Mark Cuban, Rick Strom, and many more.
Thomas speaks with retired police officers about their efforts to change policing, and white allies about their experiences with privilege and their ability to influence other white people. Thomas also examines the history of racism, white supremacy, and the prevalence of both in the current moment. He looks at the origins of white supremacy in the US, dating back to the country’s inception, and explores how it was interwoven into Christianity--interviewing leading voices both in and outside of the church. Finally, with prominent voices in the media and education, Thomas discusses the continued cultivation of these injustices in American society.
Police Brutality and White Supremacy demands accountability and justice for those responsible for and impacted by police violence and terror. It offers practical solutions to work against the promotion of white supremacy in law enforcement, Christianity, early education, and across the public sphere.
Featuring original interviews with: Steph Curry, Chuck D, Yamiche Alcindor, Isiah Thomas, Jemele Hill, Craig Hodges, Stan Van Gundy, Mark Cuban, Jake Tapper, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, Sue Bird, Kyle Korver, Rick Strom, Cenk Uygur, Tim Wise, Chris Broussard, Breanna Stewart, Rex Chapman, Stephen Jackson, Kori Mccoy, Lora Dene King, Chikesia Clemons, Raymond Santana, Alissa Findley, Amber And Ashley Carr, Michelle And Ashley Monterrosa, Chairman Fred Hampton Jr., Abiodun Oyewole, Marc Lamont Hill, Officer Carlton Berkley, Pastor John K. Jenkins Sr., Officer Joe Ested, Captain Sonia Pruitt, and Bishop Talbert Swan.
- Punch Me Up To The Gods: A Memoir
Punch Me Up To The Gods: A Memoir
by Brian Broome
$17.99A raw, poetic, coming-of-age “masterwork” (The New York Times) about Blackness, masculinity and addiction
Punch Me Up to the Gods introduces a powerful new talent in Brian Broome, whose early years growing up in Ohio as a dark-skinned Black boy harboring crushes on other boys propel forward this gorgeous, aching, and unforgettable debut. Brian’s recounting of his experiences—in all their cringeworthy, hilarious, and heartbreaking glory—reveal a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. Indiscriminate sex and escalating drug use help to soothe his hurt, young psyche, usually to uproarious and devastating effect. A no-nonsense mother and broken father play crucial roles in our misfit’s origin story. But it is Brian’s voice in the retelling that shows the true depth of vulnerability for young Black boys that is often quietly near-to-bursting at the seams.
Cleverly framed around Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool,” the iconic and loving ode to Black boyhood, Punch Me Up to the Gods is at once playful, poignant, and wholly original. Broome’s writing brims with swagger and sensitivity, bringing an exquisite and fresh voice to ongoing cultural conversations about Blackness in America. - Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man
Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man
by Joshua Bennett
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For much of American history, Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. In Being Property Once Myself, prize-winning poet Joshua Bennett shows that Blackness has long acted as the caesura between human and nonhuman and delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal―the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, the shark―in the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people―all place Black and animal life in fraught proximity.
Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene. - The Bold World: A Memoir of Family and Transformation by Jodie Patterson
The Bold World: A Memoir of Family and Transformation by Jodie Patterson
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In 2009, Jodie Patterson, mother of five and beauty entrepreneur, has her world turned upside down when her determined toddler, Penelope, reveals, “Mama, I’m not a girl. I am a boy.” The Pattersons are a tribe of unapologetic Black matriarchs, scholars, financiers, Southern activists, artists, musicians, and disruptors, but with Penelope’s revelation, Jodie realizes her existing definition of family isn’t wide enough for her child’s needs.
In The Bold World, we witness Patterson reshaping her own attitudes, beliefs, and biases, learning from her children, and a whole new community, how to meet the needs of her transgender son. In doing so, she opens the minds of those who raised and fortified her, all the while challenging cultural norms and gender expectations. Patterson finds that the fight for racial equality in which her ancestors were so prominent helped pave the way for the current gender revolution.
From Georgia to South Carolina, Ghana to Brooklyn, Patterson learns to remove the division between me and you, us and them, straight and queer—and she reminds us to celebrate her uncle Gil Scott Heron’s prophecy that the revolution will not be televised. It will happen deeply, unequivocally, inside each and every one of us. Transition, we learn, doesn’t just belong to the transgender person. Transition, for the sake of knowing more and becoming more, is the responsibility of and gift to all.
The Bold World is the result, an intimate and exquisite story of authenticity, courage, and love. - My Face Is Black Is True by Mary Frances Berry
My Face Is Black Is True by Mary Frances Berry
Sold outAcclaimed historian Mary Frances Berry resurrects the remarkable story of ex-slave Callie House who, seventy years before the civil-rights movement, demanded reparations for ex-slaves. A widowed Nashville washerwoman and mother of five, House (1861-1928) went on to fight for African American pensions based on those offered to Union soldiers, brilliantly targeting $68 million in taxes on seized rebel cotton and demanding it as repayment for centuries of unpaid labor. Here is the fascinating story of a forgotten civil rights crusader: a woman who emerges as a courageous pioneering activist, a forerunner of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
- The Black Presidency
The Black Presidency
by Michael Eric Dyson
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Michael Eric Dyson dives deep into the true meaning of Barack Obama’s historic presidency and its effects on the changing landscape of race and blackness in America. How has race shaped Obama’s identity, career, and presidency? What can we learn from his major race speeches about his approach to racial conflict and the black criticism it provokes?
Dyson was granted an exclusive interview with the president for this book, and Obama’s own voice shines through. Along with interviews with Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, and others, this intimate access provides a unique depth to this engrossing analysis of the nation’s first black president, and how race shapes and will shape our understanding of his achievements and failures alike. - Vanguard
Vanguard
by Martha S. Jones
$18.99“An elegant and expansive history” (New York Times) of African American women’s pursuit of political power—and how it transformed America
In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women’s political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of Black women—Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more—who were the vanguard of women’s rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.
Now revised to discuss the election of Vice President Kamala Harris and the vital contributions of Black women in the 2020 elections, Vanguard isessential reading for anyone who cares about the past and future of American democracy. - Mobilizing Black Germany
Mobilizing Black Germany
by Tiffany N. Florvil
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Tiffany N. Florvil examines the role of queer and straight women in shaping the contours of the modern Black German movement as part of the Black internationalist opposition to racial and gender oppression. Florvil shows the multifaceted contributions of women to movement making, including Audre Lorde’s role in influencing their activism; the activists who inspired Afro-German women to curate their own identities and histories; and the evolution of the activist groups Initiative of Black Germans and Afro-German Women. These practices and strategies became a rallying point for isolated and marginalized women (and men) and shaped the roots of contemporary Black German activism. Richly researched and multidimensional in scope, Mobilizing Black Germany offers a rare in-depth look at the emergence of the modern Black German movement and Black feminists’ politics, intellectualism, and internationalism. - Black Opera
Black Opera
by Naomi Andre
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Throughout Africa, artists use hip-hop both to describe their lives and to create shared spaces for uncensored social commentary, feminist challenges to patriarchy, and resistance against state institutions, while at the same time engaging with the global hip-hop community. In Hip-Hop in Africa, Msia Kibona Clark examines some of Africa’s biggest hip-hop scenes and shows how hip-hop helps us understand specifically African narratives of social, political, and economic realities.
Clark looks at the use of hip-hop in protest, both as a means of articulating social problems and as a tool for mobilizing listeners around those problems. She also details the spread of hip-hop culture in Africa following its emergence in the United States, assessing the impact of urbanization and demographics on the spread of hip-hop culture. Hip-Hop in Africa is a tribute to a genre and its artists as well as a timely examination that pushes the study of music and diaspora in critical new directions. Accessibly written by one of the foremost experts on African hip-hop, this book will easily find its place in the classroom. - Drug Use for Grown Ups
Drug Use for Grown Ups
by Dr. Carl L Hart
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From one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject, a powerful argument that the greatest damage from drugs flows from their being illegal, and a hopeful reckoning with the possibility of their use as part of a responsible and happy life
Dr. Carl L. Hart, Ziff Professor at Columbia University and former chair of the Department of Psychology, is one of the world’s preeminent experts on the effects of so-called recreational drugs on the human mind and body. Dr. Hart is open about the fact that he uses drugs himself, in a happy balance with the rest of his full and productive life as a colleague, husband, father, and friend. In Drug Use for Grown-Ups, he draws on decades of research and his own personal experience to argue definitively that the criminalization and demonization of drug use—not drugs themselves—have been a tremendous scourge on America, not least in reinforcing this country’s enduring structural racism.
Dr. Hart did not always have this view. He came of age in one of Miami’s most troubled neighborhoods at a time when many ills were being laid at the door of crack cocaine. His initial work as a researcher was aimed at proving that drug use caused bad outcomes. But one problem kept cropping up: the evidence from his research did not support his hypothesis. From inside the massively well-funded research arm of the American war on drugs, he saw how the facts did not support the ideology. The truth was dismissed and distorted in order to keep fear and outrage stoked, the funds rolling in, and black and brown bodies behind bars.
Drug Use for Grown-Ups will be controversial, to be sure: the propaganda war, Dr. Hart argues, has been tremendously effective. Imagine if the only subject of any discussion about driving automobiles was fatal car crashes. Drug Use for Grown-Ups offers a radically different vision: when used responsibly, drugs can enrich and enhance our lives. We have a long way to go, but the vital conversation this book will generate is an extraordinarily important step. - Stakes Is High
Stakes Is High
by Mychal Denzel Smith
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Brave, clear-eyed, and passionate, Stakes Is High is the book we need to guide us past crisis mode and through an uncertain future.
The events of the past decade have forced us to reckon with who we are and who we want to be. We have been invested in a set of beliefs about our American identity: our exceptionalism, the inevitable rightness of our path, the promise that hard work and determination will carry us to freedom. But in Stakes Is High, Mychal Denzel Smith confronts the shortcomings of these stories -- and with the American Dream itself -- and calls on us to live up to the principles we profess but fail to realize.In a series of incisive essays, Smith exposes the stark contradictions at the heart of American life, holding all of us, individually and as a nation, to account. We've gotten used to looking away, but the fissures and casual violence of institutional oppression are ever-present.There is a future that is not as grim as our past. In this profound work, Smith helps us envision it with care, honesty, and imagination. - Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?: Essays
Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?: Essays
by Jesse McCarthy
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Ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparations to Toni Morrison’s revolutionary humanism to D’Angelo’s simmering blend of R&B and racial justice, Jesse McCarthy’s bracing essays investigate with virtuosic intensity the art, music, literature, and political stances that have defined the twenty-first century. Even as our world has suffered through successive upheavals, McCarthy contends, “something was happening in the world of culture: a surging and unprecedented visibility at every level of black art making.” Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? reckons with this resurgence, arguing for the central role of art and intellectual culture in an age of widening inequality and moral crisis.
- Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya
Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya
By Jamaica Kincaid
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If you could go anywhere in the world and do one thing you love, what would you choose? When given that opportunity, the acclaimed writer Jamaica Kincaid decided to trek through Nepal collecting seeds to plant in her garden at home in Vermont. Among Flowers is the story of that journey through the Himalayan landscape, as Kincaid and her companions navigate not only the perilous physical terrain but also Maoist guerrillas and fields of leeches that stand in their way. The vertiginous peaks and exotic plants come alive in Kincaid’s masterful prose. She also ruminates on the wonders of the natural world that can only be discovered when one leaves the comfort of home for the disorienting thrill of the unknown, and self-reflects on the limitations of the body and the privileges that come with chartering a trip through the Himalaya. Rich in detail and engrossingly told, Among Flowers is a classic travel memoir.
- Why Bushwick Bill Matters
Why Bushwick Bill Matters
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In 1989 the Geto Boys released a blistering track, “Size Ain’t Shit,” that paid tribute to the group’s member Bushwick Bill. Born with dwarfism, Bill was one of the few visibly disabled musicians to achieve widespread fame and one of the even fewer to address disability in a direct, sustained manner. Initially hired as a dancer, Bill became central to the Geto Boys as the Houston crew became one of hip-hop’s most important groups.
Why Bushwick Bill Matters chronicles this crucial artist and explores what he reveals about the relationships among race, sex, and disability in pop music. Charles L. Hughes examines Bill's recordings and videos (both with the Geto Boys and solo), from the horror-comic persona of “Chuckie” to vulnerable verses in songs such as “Mind Playing Tricks On Me,” to discuss his portrayals of dwarfism, addiction, and mental illness. Hughes also explores Bill’s importance to his era and to the longer history of disability in music. A complex figure, Bill exposed the truths of a racist and ableist society even as his violent and provocative lyrics put him in the middle of debates over censorship and misogyny. Confrontational and controversial, Bushwick Bill left a massive legacy as he rhymed and swaggered through an often-inaccessible world.
- What a Dream Can Do: Building a Collection, Preserving a Legacy
What a Dream Can Do: Building a Collection, Preserving a Legacy
$60.00Discover the most significant museum collection chronicling African American life, history, and culture, revealing centuries of creativity, resistance, determination, and joy.
At the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s dedication ceremony in 2016, civil rights activist and venerated congressman John Lewis proclaimed, “Oh, say! What a dream can do!” This volume, published to celebrate the Museum’s tenth anniversary, captures that vision through stories told by those collecting and caring for the objects. From the historically profound, such as the miraculous recovery and resurrection of a WWII–era plane used to train Tuskegee Airmen; to the searingly poignant personal keepsakes belonging to the famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman, whose family carefully preserved them for generations.
The breadth of the collection is extraordinary, spanning visual art, photography, film, and historical artifacts from the seventeenth century to the present. Each object carries its own story and distinctive journey, reflecting the collaboration, care, and commitment required to bring this national museum to life. Other incredible highlights include the Johnson Publishing Company’s famed Ebony Test Kitchen, Chuck Berry’s red Cadillac, and Radio Raheem’s iconic boombox from Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing.
These powerful stories of community, connection, resilience, and remembrance reflect the nation’s story and demonstrate, in enduring and profound ways, what a dream can do.
- Bianco: Pizza, Pasta and Other Food I Like―Delicious Italian Recipes from Chris Bianco's Kitchen
Bianco: Pizza, Pasta and Other Food I Like―Delicious Italian Recipes from Chris Bianco's Kitchen
Sold outFeatured in Netflix’s Chef’s Table: Pizza
Finalist for the Gourmand Awards (Italian category)
"The road to pizza Nirvana goes through Phoenix...it just might be the best pizza in America." -Ed Levine, New York Times
When Chris Bianco started Pizzeria Bianco inside the back corner of a neighborhood grocery store in 1988, he had no idea that he would be a driving force in the artisanal pizza movement. All he knew was that his food would be the result of his relationships with farmers, local producers, customers, and staff, reflecting the respect and sincere intention that he brings to each of his recipes.
Now the owner of a legendary pizza mecca and a James Beard award-winning chef, Chris Bianco brings us a full-color, fully illustrated homemade pizza cookbook illuminating the fundamentals of pizza making, from the basics of flour and water to the philosophy behind Bianco’s cooking. This essential Italian cook book features recipes for his signature pies as well as strategies and techniques for translating chef’s methods to the home kitchen.
Bianco celebrates both the simple and the nuanced, revealing the methods that lead to the perfect crust, the sweetest tomato sauce, the creamiest mozzarella, and the most expertly balanced flavor combinations. It also features recipes for market salads, tasting plates, and dessert options, as well as the staff meals that are cooked behind the scenes and a new array of main courses showcased at Chris’s wildly popular restaurants. With its attention to detail and tips for making unforgettable, flavorful pies, this book is an essential companion for any serious pizza maker.
With stories and guidance from a celebrated pizza chef, this cookbook is an essential companion for any serious home baker, revealing the secrets to creating unforgettable pies:
* Perfect Pizza Dough: Master the four-ingredient dough that started a movement, with detailed instructions and Chris’s philosophy on proofing for the ultimate flavor and chew.
* Signature Pizza Recipes: Go beyond the ordinary with step-by-step guides to Pizzeria Bianco’s legendary pies, from the classic Margherita to the inventive Rosa and Wiseguy.
* More Than Just Pizza: Expand your repertoire with recipes for market-fresh salads, flavorful tasting plates, rustic focaccia, and even the staff meals cooked behind the scenes.
* From His Kitchen to Yours: Learn the fundamental strategies and techniques for translating a professional chef’s methods to your home kitchen and pizza oven. - It's Always Freezer Season: How to Freeze Like a Chef with 100 Make-Ahead Recipes [A Cookbook]
It's Always Freezer Season: How to Freeze Like a Chef with 100 Make-Ahead Recipes [A Cookbook]
Sold outTransform the way you use your freezer with 100 flavorful meal prep recipes from two-time James Beard Award–winning Southern chef Ashley Christensen and cookbook author Kaitlyn Goalen.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TASTE OF HOME • “Ingenious . . . Ashley and Kaitlyn are leading us in the right direction to making life in the kitchen a little bit easier.”—Emeril Lagasse, chef and restaurateur
In It’s Always Freezer Season, Ashley Christensen and Kaitlyn Goalen reveal how the freezer can easily become the single most important tool in your kitchen. By turning your freezer into a fully provisioned pantry stocked with an array of homemade staples, you’ll save time and energy.
Even on a tight schedule you can now put together delicious, complex dishes such as Cornbread Panzanella with Watermelon, Cucumber, and Za’atar Vinaigrette; Potato Pierogi; Pan-Roasted Chicken Breast with Preserved Lemon–Garlic Butter; Braised Short Ribs with Cauliflower Fonduta; and Provençal Onion Tart (Pissaladière) with Tomato-Olive Relish. Christensen and Goalen also share fully prepared make-ahead dishes for every meal of the day to keep in your freezer, like Pistachio Croissant French Toast with Orange Blossom Soft Cream, Chicken and Kale Tortilla Soup, Pimento Mac and Cheese Custard, and Deviled Crab Rigatoni, plus snacks, sweets, and drinks ready to be enjoyed at a moment’s notice.
With innovative recipes, helpful technical information, and tips on stocking your new “pantry,” this book will allow you to make more delicious meals with a lot less effort.
- State Bird Provisions: A Cookbook
State Bird Provisions: A Cookbook
Sold outFinalist for the 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Awards for "Restaurant and Professional" category
The debut cookbook from one of the country's most celebrated and pioneering restaurants, Michelin-starred State Bird Provisions in San Francisco.
Few restaurants have taken the nation by storm in the way that State Bird Provisions has. Inspired by their years catering parties, chefs Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski use dim sum style carts to offer guests small but finely crafted dishes ranging from Potato Chips with Crème Fraiche and Cured Trout Roe, to Black Butter-Balsamic Figs with Wagon Wheel Cheese Fondue, to their famous savory pancakes (such as Chanterelle Pancakes with Lardo and Maple Vinegar), along with a menu of more substantial dishes such as their signature fried quail with stewed onions.
Their singular and original approach to cooking, which expertly blends seemingly disparate influences, flavors, and textures, is a style that has influenced other restaurants throughout the country and is beloved by diners, chefs, and critics alike. In the debut cookbook from this acclaimed restaurant, Brioza and Krasinski share recipes for their most popular dishes along with stunning photography, and inspire readers to craft an unforgettable meal of textures, temperatures, aromas, and colors that excite all of the senses.
- Mister Jiu's in Chinatown: Recipes and Stories from the Birthplace of Chinese American Food [A Cookbook]
Mister Jiu's in Chinatown: Recipes and Stories from the Birthplace of Chinese American Food [A Cookbook]
Sold outJAMES BEARD AWARD WINNER • The acclaimed chef behind the Michelin-starred Mister Jiu’s restaurant shares the past, present, and future of Chinese cooking in America through 90 mouthwatering recipes.
ONE OF THE TEN BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle • ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: Glamour • “Brandon Jew’s affection for San Francisco’s Chinatown and his own Chinese heritage is palpable in this cookbook, which is both a recipe collection and a portrait of a district rich in history.”—Fuchsia Dunlop, James Beard Award-winning author of The Food of Sichuan
Brandon Jew trained in the kitchens of California cuisine pioneers and Michelin-starred Italian institutions before finding his way back to Chinatown and the food of his childhood. Through deeply personal recipes and stories about the neighborhood that often inspires them, this groundbreaking cookbook is an intimate account of how Chinese food became American food and the making of a Chinese American chef.
Jew takes inspiration from classic Chinatown recipes to create innovative spins like Sizzling Rice Soup, Squid Ink Wontons, Orange Chicken Wings, Liberty Roast Duck, Mushroom Mu Shu, and Banana Black Sesame Pie. From the fundamentals of Chinese cooking to master class recipes, he interweaves recipes and techniques with stories about their origins in Chinatown and in his own family history. And he connects his classical training and American roots to Chinese traditions in chapters celebrating dim sum, dumplings, and banquet-style parties.
With more than a hundred photographs of finished dishes as well as moving and evocative atmospheric shots of Chinatown, this book is also an intimate portrait—a look down the alleyways, above the tourist shops, and into the kitchens—of the neighborhood that changed the flavor of America. - Vitamina T: Your Daily Dose of Tacos, Tortas, Tamales, and More Mexican Street Food Classics
Vitamina T: Your Daily Dose of Tacos, Tortas, Tamales, and More Mexican Street Food Classics
Sold outGet your daily dose of vitamin T—the unofficial Mexican food group that celebrates tacos, tortas, tamales, and more—with over 100 delicious recipes that add a fun twist to these classic street foods.
Tacos, tostadas, tamales, and other vitamin T favorites represent the culinary experience of street foods across Mexican foodways. In Vitamina T, celebrated chef Fermín Núñez and masa-purveyor-to-the-stars Jorge Gaviria take us on a journey through the sizzling streets of Mexico to show us how we can capture some of the magic of this cuisine in our home kitchens. Explore the beautiful sights and bold flavors of a late-night taqueria, a charcoal-burning clay comal teeming with hoja-santa-wrapped tetelas, and all of the tamales at all of the times. Vitamina T features over 100 mouthwatering Mexican staples as well as contemporary twists:
* Tacos: Al Pastor, Barbacoa, and Carnitas Tacos
* Tamales: Bean and Cheese, Duck Confit Tamales (with a delicious Mole Negro)
* Tostadas: Tinga, Beet-Avocado, and Red Snapper Ceviche Tostadas
* Tortas: Butternut Squash in Chile Colorado, Brisket "de la Barda," and Cubana Tortas
* Todo Lo Demás: Sopes, Gorditas, Flautas, Chilaquiles, and moreThese dishes are emblematic of what makes Mexico a culinary cornerstone, and Vitamina T translates them into approachable recipes for home cooks. Through traditional techniques, practices developed by Fermín and Jorge, and recipes for any occasion, this book has everything you need to bring an all-day Mexico City street food crawl into your own home.
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