Mixing cultural criticism, literary history, biography, and memoir in an exploration of Alice Walker’s critically acclaimed and controversial novel, The Color Purple Alice Walker made history in 1982 when she became the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, both for The Color Purple. Published in the Reagan Era amid a severe backlash to civil rights, the jazz age novel tells the story of an African-American woman haunted by domestic and sexual violence. Prominent academic and activist Salamishah Tillet combines cultural criticism, history, and memoir to explore Walker’s epistolary novel, and shows how it has influenced and been informed by the zeitgeist of the time. The Color Purple received both praise and criticism upon publication, and the conversation it sparked around race and gender still continues today. It has been adapted for an Oscar-nominated film and a hit Broadway musical. Through interviews with Walker, Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, and others, as well as archival research, Tillet studies Walker’s life and the origins of her subjects, including violence, sexuality, gender, and politics. Reading The Color Purple at age 15 was a groundbreaking experience for Tillet. It continues to resonate with her—as a sexual violence survivor, as a teacher of the novel, and as an accomplished academic. Provocative and personal, In Search of the Color Purple is a bold work from an important public intellectual.

Radical Justice brings together two bodies of socially-engaged photographic portraiture by Accra Shepp, who has documented New York City’s Occupy Wall Street movement starting in 2011 and its racial justice/BLM protests since 2020.   Working in the style of August Sander with a large format camera and black and white film, Shepp pictures fellow New Yorkers on their city’s streets in acts of sit-ins and active protest, both unplanned and highly organized, both independent and unified, to address notions of the 99% and 1%, which have become part of the American political vernacular.  Bearing witness to defining events of the last decade that echo the United States’ longer historical arch, Shepp’s empathetic depictions of fellow citizens standing up for the fair protection of the Constitution provide a prophetic mirror of current events, which reflects back centuries to where the American experiment began, to suggest where we’ll find ourselves in the years to come.

From a superstar academic and cultural critic, an exploration of Alice Walker's critically acclaimed and controversial novel The Color PurpleIn 1982, Alice Walker made history when she became the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Color Purple. But Walker's novel, which tells the story of a young girl in Jazz Age Georgia, received as much criticism as praise. It launched heated conversations about race, gender, language, and sexual violence that echo to today.In this gem-like examination of the novel, the film by Steven Spielberg, and the hit Broadway musical, prominent academic and activist Salamishah Tillet combines cultural criticism, history, and memoir to explore Walker's work and its lasting importance. Based on archival research and interviews with Walker, Oprah Winfrey, and Quincy Jones, among others, In Search of The Color Purple is a provocative and personal book, a bold debut from an important public intellectual.

More than forty years after the major victories of the civil rights movement, African Americans have a vexed relation to the civic myth of the United States as the land of equal opportunity and justice for all. In "Sites of Slavery" Salamishah Tillet examines how contemporary African American artists and intellectuals--including Annette Gordon-Reed, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Bill T. Jones, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kara Walker--turn to the subject of slavery in order to understand and challenge the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from the founding narratives of the United States. She explains how they reconstruct "sites of slavery"--contested figures, events, memories, locations, and experiences related to chattel slavery--such as the allegations of a sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the characters Uncle Tom and Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin," African American tourism to slave forts in Ghana and Senegal, and the legal challenges posed by reparations movements. By claiming and recasting these sites of slavery, contemporary artists and intellectuals provide slaves with an interiority and subjectivity denied them in American history, register the civic estrangement experienced by African Americans in the post-civil rights era, and envision a more fully realized American democracy.