A new edition of a landmark work on Black women’s intellectual traditions.
 
An astonishing wealth of literary and intellectual work by nineteenth-century Black women is being rediscovered and restored to print in scholarly and popular editions. In Kristin Waters’s and Carol B. Conaway’s landmark edited collection, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, sophisticated commentary on this rich body of work chronicles a powerful and interwoven legacy of activism based in social and political theories that helped shape the history of North America. The book meticulously reclaims this American legacy, providing a collection of critical analyses of the primary sources and their vital traditions. Written by leading scholars, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions is particularly powerful in its exploration of the pioneering thought and action of the nineteenth-century Black woman lecturer and essayist Maria W. Stewart, abolitionist Sojourner Truth, novelist and poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, educator Anna Julia Cooper, newspaper editor Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and activist Ida B. Wells. The distinguished contributors are Hazel V. Carby, Patricia Hill Collins, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Kristin Waters, R. Dianne Bartlow, Carol B. Conaway, Olga Idriss Davis, Vanessa Holford Diana, Evelyn Simien, Janice W. Fernheimer, Michelle N. Garfield, Joy James, Valerie Palmer-Mehta, Carla L. Peterson, Marilyn Richardson, Evelyn M. Simien, Ebony A. Utley, Mary Helen Washington, Melina Abdullah, and Lena Ampadu. The volume will interest scholars and readers of African-American and women’s studies, history, rhetoric, literature, poetry, sociology, political science, and philosophy. This updated edition features a new preface by the editors in the light of new developments in current scholarship.

“I am completely indebted to Jimmy Baldwin’s prose. It liberated me as a writer.”—Toni Morrison

This collectible edition celebrates James Baldwin’s 100th-year anniversary, probing the shortcomings of the American protest novel and the harmful representations of Black identity in film and fiction

Originally published in Notes of a Native Son, the essays “Autobiographical Notes,” “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” “Many Thousands Gone,” and “Carmen Jones: The Dark is Light Enough,” showcase Baldwin’s incisive voice as a social and literary critic.

“Autobiographical Notes” outlines Baldwin’s journey as a Black writer and his hesitant transition from fiction to nonfiction. In the following essays, Baldwin explores the Black experience through the lens of popular media, critiquing the ways in which Black characters—in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, and the 1950s film Carmen Jones—are reduced to digestible caricatures.

Everybody’s Protest Novel: Essays is the first of 3 special editions in the James Baldwin centennial anniversary series. Through this collection, Baldwin examines the façade of progress present in the novels of Black oppression. These essays showcase Baldwin’s profound ability to reveal the truth of the Black experience, exposing the failure of the protest novel, and the state of racial reckoning at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement.

An anthology of original essays that examine white supremacy around the globe through the lens of anthropology

White supremacy, an entrenched global system that emerged alongside European colonialism, is based on presumed biological and cultural differences, racist practices, the hypervaluation of whiteness, and the devaluation of nonwhites. Anthropology has been shaped by—and has helped to shape—white supremacy, yet the discipline also offers powerful tools for understanding this system at a global scale. The Anthropology of White Supremacy gathers original essays from a diverse, international group of anthropologists to explore how this phenomenon works both within anthropology and in cultural and political structures around the world.

The book features historical and ethnographic analysis about Brazil, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Palestine, Senegal, South Africa, and the United States, and addresses the ways white supremacy impacts a broad range of issues, including finance, advertising and media representations, militarism, police training, migration, and development.

The Anthropology of White Supremacy demonstrates not only how anthropology can help us to better comprehend white supremacy, but also how the discipline can help us begin to dismantle it.

The contributors include Omolade Adunbi, Samar Al-Bulushi, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Michael Blakey, Mitzi Uehara Carter, Subhadra Mitra Channa, Celina de Sa, Vanessa Diaz, Britt Halvorson, Faye Harrison, Sarah Ihmoud, Anthony R. Jerry, Darryl Li, Kristín Loftsdóttir, Christopher Loperena, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Jemima Pierre, Jean Muteba Rahier, Laurence Ralph, Renya K. Ramirez, Junaid Rana, Joshua Reno, Jonathan Rosa, Shalini Shankar, and Maria Styve.

A revealing look at the covert and institutionalized racism lurking in the congressional workplace

Racism continues to infuse Congress’s daily practice of lawmaking and shape who obtains congressional employment. In this timely and provocative book, James Jones reveals how and why many who work in Congress call it the “Last Plantation.” He shows that even as the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s and antidiscrimination laws were implemented across the nation, Congress remained exempt from federal workplace protections for decades. These exemptions institutionalized inequality in the congressional workplace well into the twenty-first century.

Combining groundbreaking research and compelling firsthand accounts from scores of congressional staffers, Jones uncovers the hidden dynamics of power, privilege, and resistance in Congress. He reveals how failures of racial representation among congressional staffers reverberate throughout the American political system and demonstrates how the absence of diverse perspectives hampers the creation of just legislation. Centering the experiences of Black workers within this complex landscape, he provides valuable insights into the problems they face, the barriers that hinder their progress, and the ways they contest entrenched inequality.

A must-read for anyone concerned about social justice and the future of our democracy, The Last Plantation exposes the mechanisms that perpetuate racial inequality in the halls of Congress and challenges us to confront and transform this unequal workplace that shapes our politics and society.

An innovative analysis that traces the continuity of the state’s custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion in the Middle East and North Africa

In The Making of the Modern Muslim State, Malika Zeghal reframes the role of Islam in modern Middle East governance. Challenging other accounts that claim that Middle Eastern states turned secular in modern times, Zeghal shows instead the continuity of the state’s custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion. Drawing on intellectual, political, and economic history, she traces this custodianship from early forms of constitutional governance in the nineteenth century through post–Arab Spring experiments in democracy. Zeghal argues that the intense debates around the implementation and meaning of state support for Islam led to a political cleavage between conservatives and their opponents that long predated the polarization of the twentieth century that accompanied the emergence of mass politics and Islamist movements.

Examining constitutional projects, public spending, school enrollments, and curricula, Zeghal shows that although modern Muslim-majority polities have imported Western techniques of governance, the state has continued to protect and support the religion, community, and institutions of Islam. She finds that even as Middle Eastern states have expanded their nonreligious undertakings, they have dramatically increased their per capita supply of public religious provisions, especially Islamic education—further feeding the political schism between Islamists and their adversaries. Zeghal illuminates the tensions inherent in the partnerships between states and the body of Muslim scholars known as the ulama, whose normative power has endured through a variety of political regimes. Her detailed and groundbreaking analysis, which spans Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, makes clear the deep historical roots of current political divisions over Islam in governance.

New York Times-bestselling author adrienne maree brown knows we need each other more than ever, and offers “loving corrections”: a roadmap towards collective power, righting wrongs, and true belonging 

This selection of prescient, compassionate essays explores patterns we engage in that are rooted in limited thinking. Through a lens of “loving correction” rather than mere critique, author adrienne maree brown helps us reimagine how to hold ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities accountable by setting clear boundaries, engaging in reflection, and nurturing honest relationships.

Loving Corrections is divided into two sections, with the first portion featuring new essays including “A Word for White People” and “Relinquishing the Patriarchy” and writing on topics like moving from fragility to fortitude, disability, and navigating critique within activist communities. The second section expands and updates pieces from brown's popular monthly column “Murmurations” in YES! Magazine that explore accountability—within oneself and community—with depth, inventiveness, and empathy.

Along with allowing us more authentic access to ourselves and to each other, the “corrections” in the book’s title are intended to explore and break identity-based patterns including white supremacy, fragility, patriarchy, and ableism. brown also offers practical guidance on how to apologize and be accountable from our nuanced positions of power, history, and resources.

Building on her previous work—especially Holding Change and We Will Not Cancel Us—brown reminds us how much we need each other: "It is only through relationship that we learn how to be, understand our impact on others and explore small shifts that may yield remarkable collective change."

Our Stories: Black Families in Early Dallas enlarges upon two publications by the late Dr. Mamie McKnight’s organization, Black Dallas Remembered—First African American Families of Dallas (1987) and African American Families and Settlements of Dallas (1990). Our Stories is the history of Black citizens of Dallas going about their lives in freedom, as described by the late Eva Partee McMillan: “The ex-slaves purchased land, built homes, raised their children, erected their educational and religious facilities, educated their children, and profited from their labor.”

Our Stories brings together memoirs from many of Dallas’s earliest Black families, as handed down over the generations to their twentieth-century descendants. The period covered begins in the 1850s and goes through the 1930s. Included are detailed descriptions of more than thirty early Dallas communities formed by free African Americans, along with the histories of fifty-seven early Black families, and brief biographies of many of the early leaders of these Black communities.

The stories reveal hardships endured and struggles overcome, but the storytellers focus on the triumphs over adversity and the successes achieved against the odds. The histories include the founding of churches, schools, newspapers, hospitals, grocery stores, businesses, and other institutions established to nourish and enrich the lives of the earliest Black families in Dallas.

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This celebration of Black resistance, from protests to art to sermons to joy, offers a blueprint for the fight for freedom and justice -- and ideas for how each of us can contribute

Many of us are facing unprecedented attacks on our democracy, our privacy, and our hard-won civil rights. If you're Black in the US, this is not new. As Colorlines editors Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin show, Black Americans subvert and resist life-threatening forces as a matter of course. In these pages, leading organizers, artists, journalists, comedians, and filmmakers offer wisdom on how they fight White supremacy. It's a must-read for anyone new to resistance work, and for the next generation of leaders building a better future.

Featuring contributions from:

• Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Tarana Burke
• Harry Belafonte
• Adrienne Maree brown
• Alicia Garza
• Patrisse Khan-Cullors
• Reverend Dr. Valerie Bridgeman
• Kiese Laymon
• Jamilah Lemieux
• Robin DG Kelley
• Damon Young
• Michael Arceneaux
• Hanif Abdurraqib
  
• Dr. Yaba Blay
  
• Diamond Stingily
  
• Amanda Seales
• Imani Perry
  
• Denene Millner
  
• Kierna Mayo
  
• John Jennings
  
• Dr. Joy Harden Bradford
  
• Tongo Eisen-Martin

From one of the most important figures in American journalism -- acclaimed historian, Pulitzer finalist, staff writer at the New Yorker, and dean of Columbia Journalism School--a devastatingly insightful collection of published and original work that paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of our last turbulent decade.

What just happened?

From the moment Trayvon Martin's senseless murder initiated the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, America has been convulsed by the new social movements--around guns, gender violence, sexual harrassment, race, policing, and on and on--and an equally powerful backlash. Jelani Cobb has been reporting and commenting on these changes--sometimes from the frontlines of places like Ferguson and Charleston, other times from a more studied remove, where he applies his gifts as a critic and background as a historian to penetrate the meaning of it all. He has written profiles of some of the key figures of the era--from directors and comedians to activists and politicians--and written on some of great cultural artifacts--film, television, and music. Through this shifting lens, he's captured the crises, the movements, and absurdity of an era--and helped readers understand what might be coming next.

As in this country's other great moments of turbulence, this has been an era of democratic expansion and contraction, the latest in a series of battles over what it means to be an American. Cobb strings this collection together with original work--the original pieces provide the connective tissue that helps readers see these powerful short dispatches as a cohesive, epic narrative of one of the most consequential, but hard to understand, eras in American history.

A groundbreaking history that puts early and medieval West Africa in a global context

Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book, the first on this period of the region’s history in a generation, tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, including Arabic manuscripts, oral histories, and recent archaeological findings, Michael Gomez unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history more generally. Scholars have long held that such distinctions arose during the colonial period, but Gomez shows they developed much earlier.

Focusing on the Savannah and Sahel region, Gomez traces the exchange of ideas and influences with North Africa and the Central Islamic Lands by way of merchants, scholars, and pilgrims. Islam’s growth in West Africa, in tandem with intensifying commerce that included slaves, resulted in a series of political experiments unique to the region, culminating in the rise of empire. A major preoccupation was the question of who could be legally enslaved, which together with other factors led to the construction of new ideas about ethnicity, race, gender, and caste―long before colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

Telling a radically new story about early Africa in global history, African Dominion is set to be the standard work on the subject for many years to come.

The Houston Chinatown’s dramatic transformation from a Chinese enclave decades ago to a continually expanding multiethnic boomtown today contrasts development stagnation in many other traditional American Chinatowns. This pioneer study delineates the evolution of Houston’s two Chinatowns, from the emergence and decline of Old Chinatown to the subsequent development and vibrant growth of New Chinatown – spanning nearly a century.

Zheng and Zou delve into the distinctive character of New Chinatown, underscoring its innovative progress that sets it apart from the nation’s oldest major Chinatowns, a quintessentially Houston story. They also probe the immigrant experience, political landscape, and socioeconomic dynamics that influenced the Chinatowns’ metamorphoses. Scanning the community’s collective response to the dire impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on New Chinatown, the chapters examine the latest development trends in the New Chinatown areas, shedding light on the extent to which they are upholding, or deviating from, traditional practices. Furthermore, the book explores the significance of these trends to the local community and beyond, alongside their wider implications.

Amidst the growth challenges encountered by numerous Chinatowns across America, this timely work offers insightful perspectives on a sustainable model for urban and community development, as demonstrated by the transformative journey of Houston’s New Chinatown.

Juxtaposing the world-building of afrofuturism and the world-negating of afropessimism to show how both movements have offered us critical resources of hope.
 
Science fiction imagines aliens and global crises as world-unifying events, both a threat and promise for the future. Black Apocalypse is an introduction to the past and present of black engagement with speculative futures. From Octavia Butler to W.E.B. Du Bois to Sun Ra, Tavia Nyong’o shows that the end of the world is crucial to afrofuturism and reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore their similarities.
 
Interweaving black trans, queer, and feminist theories, Nyong'o examines the social, technological, and existential threats facing our species and reflects on shifting anxieties and hopes for the future. Exploring the apocalypse in movies, art, literature, and music, this book considers the endless afterlives of slavery and inequality and revives the radical black imagination to envision the future of blackness. Black Apocalypse argues that black aesthetics take us to the edge of this world and into the next.

Tommy J. Curry’s provocative book The Man-Not is a justification for Black Male Studies. He posits that we should conceptualize the Black male as a victim, oppressed by his sex. The Man-Not, therefore,is a corrective of sorts, offering a concept of Black males that could challenge the existing accounts of Black men and boys desiring the power of white men who oppress them that has been proliferated throughout academic research across disciplines.

Curry argues that Black men struggle with death and suicide, as well as abuse and rape, and their genred existence deserves study and theorization. This book offers intellectual, historical, sociological, and psychological evidence that the analysis of patriarchy offered by mainstream feminism (including Black feminism) does not yet fully understand the role that homoeroticism, sexual violence, and vulnerability play in the deaths and lives of Black males. Curry challenges how we think of and perceive the conditions that actually affect all Black males.

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A stirring memoir of growing up Black in a town at the epicenter of the fight for freedom, equality, and human rights.

Combining family stories of the everyday and the extraordinary as seen through the eyes of her twelve-year-old self, Willie Mae Brown gives readers an unforgettable portrayal of her coming-of-age in a fractured town at the crossroads of history. Selma's pivotal role in the civil rights movement forms an inescapable backdrop in this collection of stories. In one, Willie Mae takes it upon herself to offer summer babysitting services to a glamorous single white mother—a secret she keeps from her father that unravels with shocking results. In another, Willie Mae reluctantly joins her mother at a church rally, and is forever changed after hearing Martin Luther King Jr. deliver a defiant speech. My Selma! captures the voice and vision of a perspicacious, impetuous, resourceful young person who gives us a loving portrayal of her hometown while also delivering a no-holds-barred indictment of the time and place.

A major anthology that illuminates historical and contemporary solidarities between Black and Asian feminists.

A collaborative project between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, We Are Each Other's Liberation envisions a cross-racial and internationalist politics that explicitly addresses solidarity between Black and Asian feminists. Bringing together organizers, artists, journalists, poets, novelists, and more, this collection introduces readers to new ways of understanding and reflecting on race and feminism.

Drawing out lessons from the revolutionary work of movement forebearers―including the Combahee River Collective, Claudia Jones, Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, and Third World Women’s Alliance as well as struggles today―We Are Each Other’s Liberation offers an urgent call for the just future we might build together.

In a current era marked by carceral logics, authoritarianism, and white supremacy, there has never been a greater need for the tools and inspiration that radical feminism provides. In Insurgent Visions, Chandra Talpade Mohanty explores methods of anticapitalist resistance to radically transform everyday life. She presents insurgent feminism—a theory and praxis with which to contest and replace the practices of violence grounded in racialized gender relations. Insurgent feminism unsettles existing power structures in order to enact new relationships and forge new subjectivities, epistemologies, and communities. Drawing on organizing efforts in the US-Mexico borderlands, Palestine/Israel, and Kashmir, as well as on abolitionist and Dalit feminisms, Mohanty contends that the knowledge that emerges from the experiences of marginalized groups who are struggling for economic, racial, and social justice is key for imagining feminist futures. She also turns to the neoliberal landscape of higher education in the United States and the difficulties of instituting transformative antiracist and anti-imperialist feminist knowledge building. Mapping new challenges for radical praxis, Mohanty reconfigures feminist studies while offering a model for decolonial cross-border organizing and solidarity.

The politics and music of the sixties and early seventies have been the subject of scholarship for many years, but it is only very recently that attention has turned to the cultural production of African American poets. 

In "After Mecca," Cheryl Clarke explores the relationship between the Black Arts Movement and black women writers of the period. Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Alice Walker, and others chart the emergence of a new and distinct black poetry and its relationship to the black community's struggle for rights and liberation. Clarke also traces the contributions of these poets to the development of feminism and lesbian-feminism, and the legacy they left for others to build on. 

She argues that whether black women poets of the time were writing from within the movement or writing against it, virtually all were responding to it. Using the trope of "Mecca," she explores the ways in which these writers were turning away from white, western society to create a new literacy of blackness.
 

Provocatively written, this book is an important contribution to the fields of African American literary studies and feminist theory.

A radical new treatise on time, quantum physics, and racial justice from world-renowned artist and advocate Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism.

Why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues writer Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations.

Phillips unfolds the history of time and its legacy of racial oppression, from colonial exploration and the plantation system to the establishment of Daylight Savings. Yet Black communities have long subverted space-time through such tools of resistance as Juneteenth, tenant organizing, ritual, and time travel. What could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future?

Drawing on philosophy, archival research, quantum physics, and Phillips’s own art practice and work on housing policy, Dismantling the Master’s Clock expands the horizons of what can be imagined and, ultimately, achieved.

The Return of Black Nationalism and the Death of White Supremacy delves into the dynamic history and powerful future of Black Nationalism in the United States. From the dark days of slavery to today's fight for equality, this compelling book uncovers the relentless struggle of African Americans against systemic white supremacy, a legacy embedded in the very foundation of the country.

Professor Vincent Adejumo takes readers on a fascinating journey through time, unraveling the rich history of Black Nationalism and its role as a steadfast defense against white supremacy. He shines a light on the remarkable individuals and leaders who have shaped Black American identity from the 1700s to the present, bringing their stories to life with vivid detail and insightful analysis.

Discover a different America through Adejumo's eyes, where the concept of 'Separate but Equal' is reinterpreted and the essence of Blackness is celebrated. This book not only explores the past but also connects it to today's economic and political landscape, revealing the lasting influence of Black Nationalism.

Whether you're a history enthusiast or a curious reader, The Return of Black Nationalism and the Death of White Supremacy offers a fresh perspective on American history, uncovering the unsung heroes and unexpected villains who have shaped the nation's journey. This is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the profound impact of Black Nationalism on America's past, present, and future.

A compelling foreword by Dr. Adeyami Dossintroduces the book. Dozens of historical images complement this important story.

In The Disturbing Profane, Joseph R. Winters explores how hip hop's religiosity is found in qualities associated with the dark sacred. Rather than purity and wholeness, this expression of the sacred signifies death and pleasure, opacity and contamination, exorbitance and anguish. Winters brings religious studies, black studies, black feminist thought, and critical theory to bear on hip hop to trouble distinctions between the sacred and the profane. He shows how artists like Notorious B.I.G., Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, Lupe Fiasco, and Nicki Manaj undermine stable meanings of the sacred to reveal listeners' investments in unpleasant realities. Hip hop opens its audience to a volatile notion of the sacred and the unruly qualities of blackness. Moreover, Winters demonstrates that hip hop's dark sacrality makes it inseparable from its expression of, participation in, and resistance to the antiblack and black gendered violence that organizes the social world.

A liberatory anthology of twenty-six writers—a community in book form—charting paths ahead for action and care in the face of political uncertainty, curated by Maggie Smith and Saeed Jones.

Inspired by Saeed Jones and Maggie Smith’s conversations in the wake of the 2024 election, this is a collection of poems, essays, and visual art on what we—individually and collectively—can hold onto, and what we can work towards.

In times of difficulty, with a government working against its own people, we must turn to our friends and loved ones to provide context, language, energy, and hope. The People’s Project offers a range of perspectives, drawing wisdom from their communities and histories: from know-your-place aggression to crip time as a way forward, from finding strength in nature to how trans people provide a guide for the future, and how hope has everything to do with survival.

We hope these meditations and strategies will provide you with inspiration and fortitude for the years ahead.

Featuring original and selected work from Alexander Chee, Chase Strangio, Tiana Clark, Hala Alyan, Aubrey Hirsch, Imani Perry, Abi Maxwell, Victoria Chang, Koritha Mitchell, Jason Silverstein, Alice Wong, Mira Jacob, Aruni Kashyap, Sam Sax, Ashley C. Ford, Marlon James, Eula Biss, Randall Mann, Danez Smith, Ada Limon, Kiese Laymon, Joy Harjo, Jill Damatac, and Patricia Smith.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author, rapper, and activist--Sister Souljah uses her passionate voice to deliver what is at once a fiercely candid autobiography and a survival manual for any Black woman determined to keep her heart open and her integrity intact in modern America.

Each chapter of No Disrespect is devoted to someone who made a difference in Sister Souljah's life--from the mother who raised her to the men who educated (and mis-educated) her about love--and each bares a controversial truth about the Black condition in America: the disintegration of families; the unremitting combat between the sexes; and the thousand and one ways in which racism continues to circumscribe how Black people see themselves and treat one another.

The result is an outspoken and often courageous rejoinder to the pieties of race, class, and gender by a writer who is at once wise, bawdy, brutally funny, and as sensitive a lightning rod in a thunderstorm.

The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state.

As this 25th anniversary edition—featuring a foreword by Tommy Shelbie and a new preface by the author—makes clear, the still-urgent The Racial Contract continues to inspire, provoke, and influence thinking about the intersection of the racist underpinnings of political philosophy.

From Mariame Kaba, New York Times-bestselling author of We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, and social worker Jane Ball comes a powerful book showing the harm that prisons cause and exploring alternatives, gorgeously illustrated by Olly Costello.

Prisons, they do no good.
They do not help. 
They do not teach.

On a moonlit road, tucked away from prying eyes, a child sees a prison complex―cinder blocks, watch towers, barbed wire. Page by page, we come to see the prison as a child sees it. 

Prisons hurt people and leave them lonely, without loved ones to comfort them or lend a listening ear.

As dandelion stars float up in the air, this dreamscape becomes a hope-scape, where love transcends the prison walls. All the families and friends of the people in the prison march and protest in beautiful song, march together to a new way and a new dawn―in this case a cooperative housing and community center, next to a neighborhood greenhouse for restoration and healing. A new world, where connection and repair are fundamental, and even tangible, as people around a table quilt messages, “I hear you. I’m sorry for what I did. How can I make it better?”

In Prisons Must Fall, Mariame Kaba, a longtime activist, together with co-author Jane Ball, present solutions that do not involve incarceration, such as meeting people’s basic needs, restorative justice, and community support―seeds for a safe world. Illustrator Olly Costello provides textured images of a global majority community and a grey, monotone backdrop that is overtaken by joyful colors. A gentle but effective addition to all social justice bookshelves and libraries. Discussion questions included.

Perfect for:

* Parents, teachers, and librarians looking for books on the prison industrial complex and prison reform
* Kids who are interested in fairness and social justice
* Readers who love exceptional and sophisticated illustration

The classic memoir that shocked, outraged, and ultimately changed the way America looked at the civil rights movement and the black experience.
 
With a preface by Ishmael Reed • “As with Malcolm X, Cleaver’s book is a spiritual autobiography. An odyssey of a soul in search of itself, groping toward a personal humanism which will give meaning to life.”—The Progressive
 
By turns shocking and lyrical, unblinking and raw, the searingly honest memoirs of Eldridge Cleaver are a testament to his unique place in American history. Cleaver writes in Soul on Ice, “I’m perfectly aware that I’m in prison, that I’m a Negro, that I’ve been a rapist, and that I have a Higher Uneducation.” What Cleaver shows us, on the pages of this classic autobiography, is how much he was a man.

The first complete and balanced history of the Black Panther Party--powerful and provocative

"Until The Shadow of the Panther there have been no serious book-length attempts to examine the Panthers' history and to evaluate their significance. . . . A Notable Book of the Year."--New York Times Book Review (front page)

"A keenly observed, often brilliant, Panther-busting book. . . . Pearson nevertheless portrays the Panthers' rise as an understandable reaction against . . . white chauvinism."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"This book will awaken profound misgivings--about gun-barrel rhetoric, about armed rebellion, about the ambiguities of justice."--The New Yorker

"A bracing experience . . . Pearson has been able to present enough hard evidence to draw a chilling portrait of Murder Incorporated in revolutionary dress."--New York Newsday

"Pearson . . . set out to write a very different book about his boyhood hero [Huey Newton] but didn't blink at the truth . . . honest and compelling judgment."--Detroit News

PROSE Award- Music and Performing Arts Category Winner

A framework for understanding the deep archive of Black performance in the digital era

In an era of Big Data and algorithms, our easy access to the archive of contemporary and historical Blackness is unprecedented. That iterations of Black visual art, such as Bert Williams’s 1916 silent film short “A Natural Born Gambler” or the performances of Josephine Baker from the 1920s, are merely a quick YouTube search away has transformed how scholars teach and research Black performance.

While Black Ephemera celebrates this new access, it also questions the crisis and the challenge of the Black musical archive in a moment when Black American culture has become a global export. Using music and sound as its primary texts, Black Ephemera argues that the cultural DNA of Black America has become obscured in the transformation from analog to digital. Through a cross-reading of the relationship between the digital era and culture produced in the pre-digital era, Neal argues that Black music has itself been reduced to ephemera, at best, and at worst to the background sounds of the continued exploitation and commodification of Black culture. The crisis and challenges of Black archives are not simply questions of knowledge, but of how knowledge moves and manifests itself within Blackness that is obscure, ephemeral, fugitive, precarious, fluid, and increasingly digital.

Black Ephemera is a reminder that for every great leap forward there is a necessary return to the archive. Through this work, Neal offers a new framework for thinking about Black culture in the digital world.

A scholar and activist’s brilliant socio-political examination of Asian Americans who refuse to assimilate and instead build their own belonging on their own terms outside of mainstream American institutions.

In this hard-hitting and deeply personal book, a combination of manifesto and memoir, scholar, sociologist, and activist Bianca Mabute-Louie transforms the ways we understand race, class, citizenship, and the concept of assimilation and its impact on Asian American communities from the nineteenth century to present day.

UNASSIMILABLE opens with a focus on the San Gabriel Valley (SGV), the first Asian ethnoburb in Los Angeles County and in the nation, where she grew up. A suburban neighborhood with a conspicuous Asian immigrant population, SGV thrives not because of its assimilation into Whiteness, but because of its unapologetic catering to its immigrant community.

Mabute-Louie then examines “Predominantly White Institutions With A lot of Asians” and how these institutions shape the racial politics of Asian Americans and Asian internationals, including the fight against affirmative action and the fight for ethnic studies. She moves on to interrogate the role of the religion, showing how the immigrant church is a sanctuary even as it is an extension of colonialism and the American Empire. In the book’s conclusion, Bianca looks to the future, boldly proposing a reconsideration of the term Asian American for a new label that better clarifies who Asians in America are today.

UNASSIMILABLE offers a radical vision of Asian American political identity informed by a refusal of Whiteness and collective care for each other. It is a forthright declaration against assimilation and in service of cross-racial, anti-imperialist solidarity and revolutionary politics. Scholarly yet accessible, informative and informed, this book is a major addition to Ethnic Studies and American Studies.

*ships or ready for pick up in 7-10 business days*

Black people, and especially Black women, suffer and die from diseases at much higher rates than their white counterparts. The vast majority of these health disparities are not attributed to behavioral differences or biology, but to the pervasive devaluation of Black bodies.

Womanist Bioethics addresses this crisis from a bioethical standpoint. It offers a critique of mainstream bioethics as having embraced the perspective of its mainly white, male progenitors, limiting the extent to which it is positioned to engage the issues that particularly affect vulnerable populations. This book makes the provocative but essential case that because African American women– across almost every health indicator– fare worse than others. We must not only include, but center, Black women’s experiences and voices in bioethics discourse and practice.

To this end, Womanist Bioethics develops the first specifically womanist form of bioethics, focused on the diverse vulnerabilities and multiple oppressions that women of color face. This innovative womanist bioethics is grounded in the Black Christian prophetic tradition, based on the ideas that God does not condone oppression and that it is imperative to defend those who are vulnerable. It also draws on womanist theology and Black liberation theology, which take similar stances. At its core, the volume offers a new, broad-based approach to bioethics that is meant as a corrective to mainstream bioethics’ privileging of white, particularly male, experiences, and it outlines ways in which hospitals, churches, and the larger community can better respond to the healthcare needs of Black women.

A groundbreaking new vision for public safety that overturns more than 200 years of fear-based discrimination, othering, and punishment

As the effects of aggressive policing and mass incarceration harm historically marginalized communities and tear families apart, how do we define safety? In a time when the most powerful institutions in the United States are embracing the repressive and racist systems that keep many communities struggling and in fear, we need to reimagine what safety means. Community leader and lawyer Zach Norris lays out a radical way to shift the conversation about public safety away from fear and punishment and toward growth and support systems for our families and communities. In order to truly be safe, we are going to have to dismantle our mentality of Us vs. Them. By bridging the divides and building relationships with one another, we can dedicate ourselves to strategic, smart investments—meaning resources directed toward our stability and well-being, like healthcare and housing, education and living-wage jobs. This is where real safety begins.

In this book Zach Norris provides a blueprint of how to hold people accountable while still holding them in community. The result reinstates full humanity and agency for everyone who has been dehumanized and traumatized, so they can participate fully in life, in society, and in the fabric of our democracy.