This volume examines the use of Black popular culture to engage, reflect, and parse social justice, arguing that Black popular culture is more than merely entertainment. Moving beyond a focus on identifying and categorizing cultural forms, the authors examine Black popular culture to understand how it engages social justice, with attention to anti-Black racism. Black Popular Culture and Social Justice takes a systematic look at the role of music, comic books, literature, film, television, and public art in shaping attitudes and fighting oppression. Examining the ways in which artists, scholars, and activists have engaged, discussed, promoted, or supported social justice - on issues of criminal justice reform, racism, sexism, LGBTQIA rights, voting rights, and human rights - the book offers unique insights into the use of Black popular culture as an agent for change. This timely and insightful book will be of interest to students and scholars of race and media, popular culture, gender studies, sociology, political science, and social justice.

Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive-the second book in a planned experimental triptych-is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story "Evidence," M Archive is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics.

Now a major Netflix film starring Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga and Alexander Skarsgard Childhood friends Clare and Irene are both light-skinned enough to pass as white, but only one of them has chosen to cross the colour line and live with the secret hanging over her. Clare believes she had successfully cut herself off from any connection to her past. Married to a racist white man who is oblivious to her African-American heritage, it is vital to her that the truth remains hidden. Irene is living as a middle-class Black woman with her husband and children in Harlem, taking on an important role in her community and embracing her origins. Both women are forced to re-examine their relationships with each other, with their husbands and with the truth, confronting their most closely guarded fears. Nella Larsen's powerful, tragic and acutely observant writing established her as a lodestar of America's Harlem Renaissance. Almost a century later, Passing and its nuanced exploration of the many fraught ways in which we seek to survive remains as timely as ever

"Existence in Black" is the first collective statement on the subject of Africana Philosophy of Existence. Drawing upon resources in Africana philosophy and literature, the contributors explore some of the central themes of Existentialism as posed by the context of what Frantz Fanon has identified as "the lived-experience of the black."
Among questions posed and explored in the volume are: What is to be done in a world of near universal sense of superiority to, if not universal hatred of, black folk?; What is black suffering?; What is the meaning (if any) of black existence? The introduction argues that a response to these questions requires a journey through the resources of identity questions in critical race theory and the teleological dimensions of liberation theory.
The contributors address these questions through an analysis of nearly every dimension of Africana phiosophy. In the first half of the book, they address Black Philosophies of Existence in terms of Traditional African Philosophy, the Harlem Renaissance, Du Boisian Double-Consciousness, and Fanonian and Sartrean Philosophies of Existence. In the second half of the book, contributors consider racial identity through examinations of such concepts as equality, death, mimesis, property, embodiment, technology, disappointment, and dread. Part II is an exploration of postmodern challenges to "black existence" through discussions of postmodern conservatism, Nietzsche's thoughts on blacks, Richard Wright and fragmented consciousness, and feminist critiques of race. And Part IV is an examination of problems of historical responsibility and constructing black liberation theories.
Contributors are: Ernest Allen, Jr., Robert Birt, Bernard Boxill, George Carew, Bobby Dixon, G.M. James Gonzales, Lewis R. Gordon, Leonard Harris, Floyd Hayes, III, Paget Henry, Patricia Huntington, Joy Ann James, Clarence Shole Johnson, Bill E. Lawson, Howard McGary, Roy D. Morrison, William Preston, Jean-Paul Sartre, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Gary Schwartz, Robert Westley, and Naomi Zack.

Get to know the inhabitants of a tiny Japanese island--and their unusual stories and secrets--through this fascinating, intimate collection of portraits. When American journalist Amy Chavez moved to the tiny island of Shiraishi (population 430), she rented a house from an elderly woman named Eiko, who left many of her most cherished possessions in the house--including a portrait of Emperor Hirohito and a family altar bearing the spirit tablet of her late husband. Why did she abandon these things? And why did her tombstone later bear the name of a daughter no one knew? These are just some of the mysteries Amy pursues as she explores the lives of Shiraishi's elusive residents. The 31 revealing accounts in this book include: The story of 40-year-old fisherman Hiro, one of two octopus hunters left on the island, who moved back to his home island to fill a void left by his brother who died in a boating accident. A Buddhist priest, eighty-eight, who reflects on his childhood during the war years, witnessing fighter pilots hiding in bunkers on the back side of the island. A "pufferfish widow," so named because her husband died after accidentally eating a poisonous pufferfish. The ex-postmaster who talks about hiking over the mountains at night to deliver telegrams at a time when there were only 17 telephone numbers on the island. Interspersed with the author's reflections on her own life on the island, these stories paint an evocative picture of the dramatic changes which have taken place in Japanese society across nearly a century. Fascinating insights into local superstitions and folklore, memories of the war and the bombing of nearby Hiroshima, and of Shiraishi's heyday as a resort in the 1960s and 70s are interspersed with accounts of common modern-day problems like the collapse of the local economy and a rapidly-aging community which has fewer residents each year.

Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle and searing episodes of memoir, On Juneteenth recounts the origins of the holiday that celebrates the emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States. A descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, Annette Gordon-Reed, explores the legacies of the holiday. From the earliest presence of black people in Texas-in the 1500s, well before enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown-to the day in Galveston on 19 June 1865, when General Gordon Granger announced the end of slavery, Gordon-Reed's insightful and inspiring essays present the saga of a "frontier" peopled by Native Americans, Anglos, Tejanos and Blacks that became a slaveholder's republic. Reworking the "Alamo" framework, Gordon-Reed shows that the slave-and race-based economy not only defined this fractious era of Texas independence, but precipitated the Mexican-American War and the resulting Civil War. A commemoration of Juneteenth and the fraught legacies of slavery that still persist, On Juneteenth is a stark reminder that the fight for equality is on-going.

This is the first book to deploy the methods and ensemble of questions from Afro-pessimism to engage and interrogate the methods of Early Modern English studies. Using contemporary Afro-pessimist theories to provide a foundation for structural analyses of race in the Early Modern Period, it engages the arguments for race as a fluid construction of human identity by addressing how race in Early Modern England functioned not only as a marker of human identity, but also as an a priori constituent of human subjectivity. Chapman argues that Blackness is the marker of social death that allows for constructions of human identity to become transmutable based on the impossibility of recognition and incorporation for Blackness into humanity. Using dramatic texts such as Othello, Titus Andronicus, and other Early Modern English plays both popular and lesser known, the book shifts the binary away from the currently accepted standard of white/non-white that defines "otherness" in the period and examines race in Early Modern England from the prospective of a non-black/black antagonism. The volume corrects the Afro-pessimist assumption that the Triangle Slave Trade caused a rupture between Blackness and humanity. By locating notions of Black inhumanity in England prior to chattel slavery, the book positions the Triangle Trade as a result of, rather than the cause of, Black inhumanity. It also challenges the common scholarly assumption that all varying types of human identity in Early Modern England were equally fluid by arguing that Blackness functioned as an immutable constant. Through the use of structural analysis, this volume works to simplify and demystify notions of race in Renaissance England by arguing that race is not only a marker of human identity, but a structural antagonism between those engaged in human civil society opposed to those who are socially dead. It will be an essential volume for those with interest in Renaissance Literature and Culture, Shakespeare, Contemporary Performance Theory, Black Studies, and Ethnic Studies.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Winner of the 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East. In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant--the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.

Originally published in 1999 The Foremother Figure in Early Black Women's Literature looks at how stereotypical foremother figure exists in nineteenth century American literature. The book argues that older black woman portrayed in early black women's works differs significantly from the older black women portrayed in early white women's works. The foremother figure, then emerging in early black women's fiction revises the stereotypical mother figure in early white women's fiction. In the context of the mulatta heroine the foremother produces minimal language that, through an Afrocentric rhetoric, distinguishes her from the stereotypical mother and thus links her peripheral role and unusual behaviour to cultural continuity and radical uplift.

The book is a biographical study establishing Ernie McClintock as a leading figure of the Black Theatre Movement In this contemporary moment in education and political consciousness, McClintock's biography and the impact on the Black Arts Movement will resonate with undergraduate students and serve as a powerful case study for theatre professors to integrate into their course curriculum. Contributes to the growing discourse of Black Arts Movement scholarship, Black acting theory, and queer studies.

New York Times bestselling authors Ashley and JaQuavis are back with the second installment in the epic Murderville series--love, murder, loyalty, and money fill this gritty, urban tale as they continue this international street saga.With Samad's target on her back, Liberty must survive the harsh streets alone. But when a chance encounter pushes her into the arms of a new friend, Po, the two take on the California king pin and step full force into the game. As bullets and sparks fly, the unlikely pair embark on a serendipitous journey back to where it all started, Sierra Leone. With a new overseas connection, Po sees an opportunity that is too good to pass up. But when his pursuit of the American dream conflicts with Liberty's past, are forced to confront their relationship and their future together. Will they be able to survive? Or will the drug empire that they've built together come crashing down?

From the author of the award-winning bestseller The Content of Our Character comes a new essay collection that tells the untold story behind the polarized racial politics in America today. In A Dream Deferred Shelby Steele argues that a second betrayal of black freedom in the United States--the first one being segregation--emerged from the civil rights era when the country was overtaken by a powerful impulse to redeem itself from racial shame. According to Steele,1960s liberalism had as its first and all-consuming goal the expiation of America guilt rather than the careful development of true equality between the races. This "culture of preference" betrayed America's best principles in order to give whites and America institutions an iconography of racial virtue they could use against the stigma of racial shame. In four densely argued essays, Steele takes on the familiar questions of affirmative action, multiculturalism, diversity, Afro-centrism, group preferences, victimization--and what he deems to be the atavistic powers of race, ethnicity, and gender, the original causes of oppression. A Dream Deferred is an honest, courageous look at the perplexing dilemma of race and democracy in the United States--and what we might do to resolve it.

The national bestseller by the author of Defending the Spirit.

In this powerful and controversial book, distinguished African-American political leader and thinker Randall Robinson argues for the restoration of the rich history that slavery and segregation severed. Drawing from research and personal experience, he shows that only by reclaiming their lost past and proud heritage can blacks lay the foundation for their future. And white Americans can make reparations for slavery and the century of racial discrimination that followed with monetary restitution, educational programs, and the kinds of equal opportunities that will ensure the social and economic success of all its citizens.

In a book that is both an unflinching indictment of past wrongs and an impassioned call to our nation to educate all Americans about the history of Africa and its people, Robinson makes a persuasive case for the debt white America owes blacks, and the debt blacks owe themselves.

Farah Jasmine Griffin has taken to her heart the phrase "read until you understand," a line her father, who died when she was nine, wrote in a note to her. She has made it central to this book about love of the majestic power of words and love of the magnificence of Black life. Griffin has spent years rooted in the culture of Black genius and the legacy of books that her father left her. A beloved professor, she has devoted herself to passing these works and their wisdom on to generations of students. Here, she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that inspired the stunning oratory of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the inventive artistry of Romare Bearden and many more. Exploring these works through such themes as justice, rage, self-determination, beauty, joy and mercy allows her to move from her aunt's love of yellow roses to Gil Scott-Heron's "Winter in America". Griffin entwines memoir, history and art while she keeps her finger on the pulse of the present, asking us to grapple with the continuing struggle for Black freedom and the ongoing project that is American democracy. She challenges us to reckon with our commitment to all the nation's inhabitants and our responsibilities to all humanity.

The slave, Saidiya Hartman observes, is a stranger torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. There are no known survivors of Hartman's lineage, no relatives to find. She is a stranger in search of strangers, and this fact leads her into intimate engagements with the people she encounters along the way, and with figures from the past, vividly dramatising the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and American history.

Practical Social Justice brings together the mentorship experiences of a diverse group of leaders across business, academia, and the public sector. They relay the lessons they learned from Dr. Joseph L. White through personal narratives, providing a critical analysis of their experience, and share their best practices and recommendations for those who want to truly live up to their potential as leaders and mentors. As one of the founding members of the Association of Black Psychologists, the Equal Opportunity Program, and the 'Freedom Train' this book focuses on celebrating Dr. White's legacy, and translating real world experience in promoting social justice change. Experiential narratives from contributors offer a framework for both the mentee and the mentor, and readers will learn how to develop people and infrastructure strategically to build a sustainable legacy of social justice change. They will be presented with ways to pragmatically focus social justice efforts, favoring results over ego. This is a unique and highly accessible book that will be useful across disciplines and generations, in which the authors illustrate how to build relationships, inspire buy-in, and develop mutually beneficial partnerships that move people and systems towards a more equitable, inclusive, and just future. Providing a personal guide to developing an infrastructure for institutional change, Practical Social Justice is based on over half a century of triumph, translated through the lenses of leaders who have used these lessons to measurable and repeatable success. This book will be essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of Psychology, Social Work, Ethnic Studies, Sociology, Public Policy, Leadership, Communications, Business, and Educational Administration. It is also important reading for professionals including leaders and policy makers in organisations dealing with issues around diversity, equity, and inclusion, and anyone interested in promoting social justice.

This book considers the ways in which Black directors, screenwriters, and showrunners contend with the figure of the would-be White ally in contemporary film and television. White Lies and Allies in Contemporary Black Media examines the ways in which prominent figures such as Issa Rae, Spike Lee, Justin Simien, Jordan Peele, and Donald Glover centralize complex Black protagonists in their work while also training a Black gaze on would-be White allies. Emily R. Rutter highlights how these Black creators represent both performative White allyship and the potential for true White antiracist allyship, while also examining the reasons why Black creators utilize the white ally trope in the wider context of the film and television industries. During an era in which concerns with White liberal complicity in anti-Black racism are of paramount importance, Rutter explores how these films and televisions shows, and their creators, contribute to the wider project of dismantling internal, interpersonal, ideological, and institutional White hegemony. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Film and Media Studies, Television Studies, American Studies, African American Studies, and Popular Culture.

Literary Black Power in the Caribbean focuses on the Black Power movement in the anglophone Caribbean as represented and critically debated in literary texts, music and film. This volume is groundbreaking in its focus on the creative arts and artists in their evaluations of, and insights on, the relevance of the Black Power message across the region. The author takes a cultural studies approach to bring together the political with the aesthetic, enriching an already fertile debate on the era and the subject of Black Power in the Caribbean region. The chapters discuss various aspects of Black Power in the Caribbean: on the pages of journals and magazines, at contemporary conferences that radicalized academia to join forces with communities, in fiction and essays by writers and intellectuals, in calypso and reggae music, and in the first films produced in the Caribbean. Produced at the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Black Power Revolution in Port of Spain, Trinidad, this timely book will be of interest to students and academics focusing on Black Power, Caribbean literary and cultural studies, African diaspora, and Global South radical political and cultural theory.

First published in 2004. Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914. He was one of the first black leaders to encourage black people to discover their cultural traditions and history, and to seek common cause in the struggle for true liberty and political recognition. This book discusses his philosophy and opinions.This series comprises reprints as well as original works covering various aspects of African life- history, institutions, culture, political and social thought, and eminent African personalities. The reprints for the most part are landmarks in African writing and each contains a new introduction placing the author's life, ideas and activities in perspective. The documents are selected and edited by scholars working in the particular field. It is hoped that these documents will not only provide scholars with source materials but also stimulate further research on the topics with which they deal.

This book explores the relationship between multiplicity and representation of non-European and European-American cultures, with a focus on comics and superheroes. The author employs a combination of research methodologies, including close reading of transmedia texts and interviews with transmedia storytellers and audiences, to better understand the way in which diverse cultures are employed as agents of multiplicity in transmedia narratives. The book addresses both commercial franchises such as superhero narratives, as well as smaller indie projects, in an attempt to elucidate the way in which key cultural symbols and concepts are utilized by writers, designers, and producers, and how these narrative choices affect audiences - both those who identify as members of the culture being represented and those who do not. Case studies include fan fiction based on Marvel's Black Panther (2018), fan fiction and art created for the Moana (2016) and Mulan (2020) films, and creations by both U.S.-based and international indie comics artists and writers. This book will appeal to scholars and students of new media, narrative theory, cultural studies, sociocultural anthropology, folkloristics, English/literary studies, and popular culture, transmedia storytelling researchers, and both creators and fans of superhero comics.

Question Bridge assembles a series of questions posed to black men, by and for other black men, along with the corresponding responses and portraits of the participants. The questions range from the comic to the sublimely philosophical: from "Am I the only one who has problems eating chicken, watermelon, and bananas in front of white people?" to "Why is it so difficult for black American men in this culture to be themselves, their essential selves, and remain who they truly are?" The answers tackle the issues that continue to surround black male identity today in a uniquely honest, no-holds-barred manner. While the ostensible subject is black men, the conversation that evolves in these pages is ultimately about the nature of living in a post-Obama, post-Ferguson, post-Voting Rights Act America. Question Bridge is about who we are and what we mean to one another. Most critically, it asks: how can we start to dismantle the myths and misconceptions that have evolved around race and gender in America-how can we reset the narrative about ourselves? The founding artists, along with contributions from Andrew Young, Jesse Williams, Rashid Shabazz, and Delroy Lindo, will introduce and contextualize the body of the work and provide closing remarks on our current and future social climate. The Question Bridge Project is an innovative, transmedia project that uses video to facilitate a conversation among black men from diverse backgrounds. Originally created by Chris Johnson in 1996, the project was revived by Hank Willis Thomas, Kamal Sinclair, and Bayete Ross Smith in filming over 160 black men in nine American cities, each of whom asked and answered questions posed by other black men. This content was used to create a five-screen video installation that has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum; Oakland Museum of California; Birmingham Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Museum; Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture, Charlotte, NC; San Diego African American Museum of Art; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; Rochester Contemporary Arts Center, Rochester, NY; and Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah. The Question Bridge Project includes various platforms, an interactive website and mobile app, as well as community roundtable conversations and a curriculum designed for high school learners.