Hot chicken is on the list of "must-try" Southern foods in countless publications and websites. Restaurants in New York, Detroit, Cambridge, and even Australia advertise that they fry their chicken 'Nashville-style.' More than twelve thousand people showed up for the 2014 Fourth of July Music City Hot Chicken Festival. The James Beard Foundation recently gave Prince's Chicken Shack an American Classic Award for inventing the dish. But for almost seventy years, hot chicken was made and sold primarily in Nashville's black neighborhoods-and the story of hot chicken says something powerful about race relations in Nashville, especially as the city tries to figure out what it will be in the future. Hot, Hot Chicken recounts the history of Nashville's black communities through the story of its hot chicken scene from the Civil War, when Nashville became a segregated city, through the tornado that ripped through North Nashville in March 2020.

A critique of theory through literature that celebrates the diversity of black being, The Desiring Modes of Being Black explores how literature unearths theoretical blind spots while reasserting the legitimacy of emotional turbulence in the controlled realm of reason that rationality claims to establish. This approach operates a critical shift by examining psychoanalytical texts from the literary perspective of black desiring subjectivities and experiences. This combination of psychoanalysis and the politics of literary interpretation of black texts helps determine how contemporary African American and black literature and queer texts come to defy and challenge the racial and sexual postulates of psychoanalysis or indeed any theoretical system that intends to define race, gender and sexualities. The Desiring Modes of Being Black includes essays on James Baldwin, Sigmund Freud, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, and Rozena Maart. The metacritical reading they unfold interweaves African American Culture, Fanonian and Caribbean Thought, South African Black Consciousness, French Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Gender and Queer Studies.

The diversity and Inclusion movement in corporations and higher education has mostly fallen short of its most authentic goals. This is because it relies upon the dominant worldview that created and creates the problems it attempts to address. Rediscovering and applying our original Indigenous worldview offers a remedy that can bring forth a deeper and broader respect for diversity, and a different way to understand and honor it. This book offers a transformative learning opportunity for preserving diverse environments at every level, one that may be a matter of human survival.

Provides an illuminating look at the diverse world of Black religious life in North America, focusing particularly outside of mainstream Christian churches From the Moorish Science Temple to the Peace Mission Movement of Father Divine to the Commandment Keepers sect of Black Judaism, myriad Black new religious movements developed during the time of the Great Migration. Many of these stood outside of Christianity, but some remained at least partially within the Christian fold. The Black Coptic Church is one of these. Black Coptics combined elements of Black Protestant and Black Hebrew traditions with Ethiopianism as a way of constructing a divine racial identity that embraced the idea of a royal Egyptian heritage for its African American followers, a heroic identity that was in stark contrast to the racial identity imposed on African Americans by the white dominant culture. This embrace of a royal Blackness—what McKinnis calls an act of “fugitive spirituality”—illuminates how the Black Coptic tradition in Chicago and beyond uniquely employs a religio-performative imagination. McKinnis asks, ‘What does it mean to imagine Blackness?’ Drawing on ten years of archival research and interviews with current members of the church, The Black Coptic Church offers a look at a group that insisted on its own understanding of its divine Blackness. In the process, it provides a more complex look at the diverse world of Black religious life in North America, particularly within non-mainstream Christian churches.

Pioneering African-American families, spanning generations from slavery to freedom, enrich Savannah's collective history. Men and women such as Andrew Bryan, founder of the nation's oldest continuous black Baptist church; the Rev. Ralph Mark Gilbert, who revitalized the NAACP in Savannah; and Rebecca Stiles Taylor, founder of the Federation of Colored Women Club, are among those lauded in this retrospective. Savannah's black residents have made immeasurable contributions to the city and are duly celebrated and remembered in this volume.