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Blackballed is Darryl Pinckney's meditation on a century and a half
of participation by blacks in US electoral politics. In this
combination of memoir, historical narrative, and contemporary
political and social analysis, he investigates the struggle for
black voting rights from Reconstruction through the civil rights
movement to Barack Obama's two presidential campaigns. Drawing on
the work of scholars, the memoirs of civil rights workers, and the
speeches and writings of black leaders like Martin Luther King and
Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young and John Lewis, Pinckney traces
the disagreements among blacks about the best strategies for
achieving equality in American society as well as the ways in which
they gradually came to create the Democratic voting bloc that
contributed to the election of the first black president.
Interspersed through the narrative are Pinckney's own memories of
growing up during the civil rights era and the reactions of his
parents to the changes taking place in American society. He
concludes with an examination of ongoing efforts by Republicans to
suppress the black vote, with particular attention to the Supreme
Court's recent decision striking down part of the Voting Rights Act
of 1965. Also included here is Pinckney's essay "What Black Means
Now," on the history of the black middle class, stereotypes about
blacks and crime, and contemporary debates about "post-blackness."
A Times Best Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year Shortlisted for
the James Tait Black Memorial Prize Critic and writer Darryl
Pinckney recalls his friendship and apprenticeship with Elizabeth
Hardwick and Barbara Epstein and the introduction they offered him
to the New York literary world. At the start of the 1970s, Darryl
Pinckney arrived in New York City and at Columbia University and
enrolled in Elizabeth Hardwick's writing class at Barnard. After he
graduated, he was welcomed into her home as a friend and mentee,
and he became close with Hardwick and her best friend, neighbor,
and fellow founder of The New York Review of Books, Barbara
Epstein. Pinckney found himself at the heart of the New York
literary world. He was surrounded by the great writers of the time,
like Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, and Mary McCarthy, as well as the
overlapping cultural revolutions and communities that swept New
York: the New Wave in film, rock, and writing; the art of Felice
Rosser, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lucy Sante, Howard Brookner, and Nan
Goldin; the influence of feminism on American culture and
literature; the black arts movement confronted by black feminism;
and New Negro veterans experiencing the return of their youth as
history. Pinckney filtered the avant-garde life he was exposed to
downtown and the radical intellectual tradition of The Review
through the moral values he inherited and adapted from abolitionist
and Reconstruction black culture. In Come Back in September,
Pinckney recalls his introduction to New York and the writing life.
The critic and novelist intimately captures this revolutionary,
brilliant, and troubled period in American letters. Elizabeth
Hardwick was not only the link to the intellectual heart of New
York, but also a source of continual support and inspiration-the
way she worked, her artistry, and the beauty of her voice. Through
his memories of the city and of Hardwick, we see the emergence and
evolution of Pinckney himself: as a young man, as a New Yorker, and
as one of the essential intellectuals of our time.
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Blood on the Forge (Paperback)
William Attaway; Introduction by Darryl Pinckney
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R549
R444
Discovery Miles 4 440
Save R105 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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This brutally gripping novel about the African-American Great
Migration follows the three Moss brothers, who flee the rural South
to work in industries up North. Delivered by day into the searing
inferno of the steel mills, by night they encounter a world of
surreal devastation, crowded with dogfighters, whores, cripples,
strikers, and scabs. Keenly sensitive to character, prophetic in
its depiction of environmental degradation and globalized labor,
Attaway's novel is an unprecedneted confrontation with the
realities of American life, offering an apocalyptic vision of the
melting pot not as an icon of hope but as an instrument of
destruction.
Blood on the Forge was first published in 1941, when it attracted
the admiring attention of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. It is
an indispensable account of a major turning point in black history,
as well as a triumph of individual style, charged with the
concentrated power and poignance of the blues.
A Times Best Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year Critic and
writer Darryl Pinckney recalls his friendship and apprenticeship
with Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein and the introduction
they offered him to the New York literary world. At the start of
the 1970s, Darryl Pinckney arrived in New York City and at Columbia
University and enrolled in Elizabeth Hardwick's writing class at
Barnard. After he graduated, he was welcomed into her home as a
friend and mentee, and he became close with Hardwick and her best
friend, neighbor, and fellow founder of The New York Review of
Books, Barbara Epstein. Pinckney found himself at the heart of the
New York literary world. He was surrounded by the great writers of
the time, like Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, and Mary McCarthy, as
well as the overlapping cultural revolutions and communities that
swept New York: the New Wave in film, rock, and writing; the art of
Felice Rosser, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lucy Sante, Howard Brookner,
and Nan Goldin; the influence of feminism on American culture and
literature; the black arts movement confronted by black feminism;
and New Negro veterans experiencing the return of their youth as
history. Pinckney filtered the avant-garde life he was exposed to
downtown and the radical intellectual tradition of The Review
through the moral values he inherited and adapted from abolitionist
and Reconstruction black culture. In Come Back in September,
Pinckney recalls his introduction to New York and the writing life.
The critic and novelist intimately captures this revolutionary,
brilliant, and troubled period in American letters. Elizabeth
Hardwick was not only the link to the intellectual heart of New
York, but also a source of continual support and inspiration-the
way she worked, her artistry, and the beauty of her voice. Through
his memories of the city and of Hardwick, we see the emergence and
evolution of Pinckney himself: as a young man, as a New Yorker, and
as one of the essential intellectuals of our time.
The Library of America completes its edition of the collected
fiction of the literary voice of the Civil Rights era with this
volume gathering three revealing later works of the 1960s and 70s.
With such landmark novels as Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni s
Room, and the essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire
Next Time, James Baldwin established himself as the indispensable
voice of the Civil Rights era, a figure whose prophetic exploration
of the racial and sexual fissures in American society raised the
consciousness of American readers. But by the late 1960s and 70s
many regarded Baldwin as being out of sync with the political and
social currents transforming America: too integrationist for Black
Arts Movement writers and others on the Left, yet too pessimistic
for many white readers, and as a result his later novels have never
received the consideration given his earlier fiction. Sober in
outlook but ambitious in scope, these works show Baldwin responding
with his signature passion for music, for justice, for life and
searching intelligence to the new realities of a rapidly changing
cultural landscape, as the Movement era gives way to the age of
identity politics that we still live in today. This culminating
volume in the Library of America edition of his fiction illustrates
how Baldwin continues to be relevant in twenty-first-century
America, especially in his dramatizing of the unequal treatment of
black men by the police and the justice system, his nuanced
depictions of the black family, and his explorations of sexuality."
An elegant, insightful novel that evokes the world of upper middle
class blacks, following an unnamed narrator from a safe childhood
in conservative Indianapolis, to a brief tenure as minister of
information for a local radical organisation, to the life of an
expatriate in Paris. Through it all, his imagination is
increasingly dominated by his elderly relations and the lessons of
their experiences in the "Old Country" of the South.
'[Pinckney] reveals himself to be a skilful chronicler of black
experience in literary criticism, reportage and biography' The New
York Times In these twenty-five essays, Darryl Pinckney has given
us a view of our recent racial history that blends the social and
the personal and wonders how we arrived at our current moment.
Pinckney reminds us that "white supremacy isn't back; it never went
away." It is this impulse to see historically that is at the core
of Busted in New York and Other Essays, which traces the lineage of
black intellectual history from Booker T. Washington through the
Harlem Renaissance, to the Black Panther Party and the turbulent
sixties, to today's Afro-pessimists, and celebrated and neglected
thinkers in between. These are capacious essays whose topics range
from the grassroots of protest in Ferguson, Missouri, to the
eighteenth-century Guadeloupian composer Joseph Bologne, from an
unsparing portrait of Louis Farrakhan to the enduring legacy of
James Baldwin, the unexpected story of Black people experiencing
Russia, Barry Jenkins's Moonlight, and the painter Kara Walker. The
essays themselves are a kind of record, many of them written in
real-time, as Pinckney witnesses the Million Man March, feels and
experiences the highs and lows of Obama's first presidential
campaign, explores the literary Black diaspora, and reflects on the
surprising and severe lesson he learned firsthand about the
changing urban fabric of New York. As Zadie Smith writes in her
introduction to the book: "How lucky we are to have Darryl Pinckney
who, without rancor, without insult, has, all these years, been
taking down our various songs, examining them with love and care,
and bringing them back from the past, like a Sankofa bird, for our
present examination. These days Sankofas like Darryl are rare.
Treasure him!
Newly sober and nostalgic for the Weimar days of Isherwood and
Auden, Jed arrives to chase boys and to escape from what it means
to be a black male in America. But history, both personal and
political, can't be avoided with time or distance. Whether it's the
judgment of the cousin he grew up with and her husband's bourgeois
German family, the lure of white wine in a down-and-out bar, a gang
of racists looking for a brawl, or the ravaged visage of Rock
Hudson flashing behind the face of every white boy Jed desperately
longs for, the past never stays past, even in faraway Berlin. An
intoxicating, provocative novel of appetite, identity, and
self-construction, Darryl Pinckney's Black Deutschland tells the
story of an outsider searching for an obscure home in Europe's
brightest and darkest city. Named one of the most anticipated books
of the year by The Millions, Flavorwire, The Boston Globe, and The
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel; For readers of Teju Cole. From the
author of High Cotton comes the story of a young African American
man in divided Berlin: "The novel is full of wondrous things"
(James Wood, The New Yorker).
With this appreciation of three very different black writers,
novelist Darryl Pinckney reminds us that marginal or neglected
literary figures have a lot to tell us about the history of a
people who are always "outsiders." Born in Jamaica in 1883, J. A.
Rogers was an early member of the Harlem Renaissance--a newspaper
columnist, historian of Negro achievement, polemicist against white
supremacy, and amateur sociologist of interracial sex as evidenced
in his massive three-volume work Sex and Race. Vincent O. Carter,
who came of age in 1920's Kansas City, wrote The Bern Book, an
exploration of being black in a Swiss rather than an American
setting. Caryl Phillips, a son of the generation of black
Caribbeans who returned to Great Britain after the Second World
War, has explored the psychology of migration in fiction and
nonfiction that include The Final Passage, Higher Ground, and The
Nature of Blood. Pinckney's essays on these writers, drawn from his
Alain Locke Lectures at Harvard University, give us a rich
understanding of what it has meant to be "children of the diaspora"
over the past century.
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