Laughing. Grieving. Being a kid. Even the purest expression of pleasure, the most human display of sorrow, or the simplest delight of childhood is an act of resistance if you happen to be Black. This immersive hardcover book features forty defiantly joyful illustrations by artist and educator Ajuan Mance, each artwork depicting a person of African descent going about their everyday business. Begun as Mance's personal response to the groundswell of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, LIVING WHILE BLACK denounces the excessive surveillance, harassment, and violence aimed at Black folks engaged in the activities of everyday life-and celebrates the courage and resilience of the Black community. Fittingly, the book also features a foreword from Alicia Garza, BLM founder and principal at the Black Futures Lab. Mance's thoughtful meditation on what it's like to be Black in America makes a wonderful tool for teachers, students, activists, and parents navigating conversations about racism and resistance.

Inspired by Richard Scarry's What Do People Do All Day?, these joyous portraits of real Black men provide both mirrors and windows. Have you ever wondered . . . What do brothas do all day? Brothas drive. Brothas dance. Brothas work. Brothas listen. And brothas love. This joyous reflection of Black men and boys engaged in everyday life celebrates the deep roots and rich cultures of African American communities. From grocery shopping and waiting for a trim at the barbershop to singing, dancing, and laughing with friends, author and illustrator Ajuan Mance captures the beauty in the ordinary, affirming the enduring strength of the Black community.

When you’re the only Black kid in the honors program or (any program) at your mostly white high school, or one of a handful of Black graduate students in your PhD program, or one of two African American women on the faculty at your Pac-10 employer, it’s not your gender non-conformity that sets you apart from your peers. In those environments, your Blackness is the first thing people notice about you. Still, there are other ways of being different--and feeling different--that can’t be attributed to race, especially if you’re one of the people whose awareness of the unwritten rules of what it means to be a boy or a girl (or a man or a woman) is tempered by the fact that most of those rules don’t feel quite right. In Gender Studies: True Confessions of an Accidental Outlaw, Ajuan Mance gives comic treatment to the challenges, complexities, and occasional absurdity of life at the crossroads of race, gender, and geekiness. This graphic memoir answers important questions like: How many preschoolers have to mistake you for your dad before you actually start to forget your own name; if a Black girl is awful at double-dutch jump rope is it a reflection on her gender identity, racial identity, or both; and is viola player a gender or just a sexual orientation? Ajuan Mance’s comic Gender Confessions take up each of these questions and more, as it invites to share in those moments that mark the path of a gender explorer.

"Ajuan Mance's original and provocative study fills a gap in the scholarship on African American women poets. The historical sweep of her analysis of these poets' efforts at self-representation is as impressive as the depth of her analysis of individual poems. Students and scholars of African American poetry or of African American women writers will find Professor Mance's study a rich, invaluable resource. Inventing Black Women incisively delineates the historical contexts that shaped the intricate and troubled relationships among gender, race, and poetry."--Virginia C. Fowler, Virginia Tech University Inventing Black Women fills important gaps in our understanding of how African American women poets have resisted those conventional notions of gender and race that limit the visibility of Black female subjects. The first historical and thematic survey of African American women's poetry, this book examines the key developments that have shaped the growing body of poems by and about Black women over the nearly 125 years since the end of slavery and Reconstruction, as it offers incisive readings of individual works by important poets such as Alice B. Neal, Maggie Pogue Johnson, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, and many others. Ajuan Maria Mance establishes that the history of African American women's poetry revolves around the struggle of the Black female poet against two marginalizing forces: the widespread association of womanhood with the figure of the middle-class, white female; and the similar association of Blackness with the figure of the African American male. In so doing, she looks closely at the major trends in Black women's poetry during each of four critical moments in African American literary history: the post- Reconstruction era from 1877 to 1910; the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; the Black Arts Movement from 1965 to 1975; and the late twentieth century from 1975 to 2000. Inventing Black Women will prove an invaluable resource for scholars and students of American literature, African American studies, and women's studies.

"Although feminists have studied the social construction of the female body for many decades, few have focused on black women. In Recovering the Black Female Body, the editors present a pioneering collection of original writings by academics and artists on 'how African-American women, from slavery to the present, have represented their physical selves in opposition to the distorted vision of the dominant culture.'"-Publishers Weekly "A collection of essays that examine the complex workings of race, gender and the body. Editors Bennett and Dickerson explain that it seeks to 'amplify' African American women writers' attempts to 'take back their selves and reappropriate and reconstitute a body that has often been hyperoticized or exoticized and made a site of impropriety and crime.'"-The Women's Review of Books "By examining African American women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book not only makes a significant contribution to a body of scholarly work but also attempts to 'recover' a more accurate representation of the African American female body."-DePauw Magazine "A highly original and very informative collection of essays that theorizes the complicated intersection of the black female body and its Western symbolic meanings. The collection is essential for anyone interested in the tensions between post-structuralist and humanist understandings of subject formation, social agency, and performative identity."-Claudia Tate, Princeton University Despite the recent flood of scholarly work investigating race, gender, and representation, little has been written about black women's depictions of their own bodies. Both past and present-day American cultural discourse has attempted to either hypereroticize the black female body or make it a site of impropriety and crime. The essays in this volume focus on how African American women, from the nineteenth century to the present, have represented their physical selves in opposition to the distorted vision of others. Contributors attempt to "recover" the black female body in two ways: they explore how dominant historical images have mediated black female identity, and they analyze how black women have resisted often demeaning popular cultural perceptions in favor of more diverse, subtle presentations of self. The pieces in this book-all of them published here for the first time-address a wide range of topics, from antebellum American poetry to nineteenth-century African American actors and twentieth-century pulp fiction. Recovering the Black Female Body recognizes the pressing need to highlight the vibrant energy of African American women's attempts to wrest control of the physical and symbolic construction of their bodies away from the distortions of others. Michael Bennett is an associate professor of English at Long Island University and coeditor of The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments. Vanessa D. Dickerson is an associate professor of English at DePauw University. She is the author of Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural, and editor of Keeping the Victorian House.