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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.
"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.
"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.
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