Black category: 406 books
James Baldwin's Turkish Decade
Erotics of Exile
Language: English
Release Date: January 16, 2009
Between 1961 and 1971 James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. In this first in-depth exploration of Baldwin’s “Turkish decade,” Magdalena J. Zaborowska reveals the significant role that Turkish locales, cultures, and friends...
Representing the Race
A New Political History of African American Literature
Language: English
Release Date: August 8, 2011
The political value of African American literature has long been a topic of great debate among American writers, both black and white, from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. In his compelling new book, Representing the Race, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the genealogy of this topic in order to develop...
by Matthew Wilson
Language: English
Release Date: September 13, 2004
Language: English
Release Date: September 13, 2004
Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), critically acclaimed for his novels, short stories, and essays, was one of the most ambitious and influential African American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today recognized as a major innovator of American fiction, Chesnutt is an important...
by John Lennard
Language: English
Release Date: October 4, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: October 4, 2012
Octavia Butler's premature and sudden death in 2006 has been very widely lamented, unhappily confirming her influence as a vital African-American and female pioneer in SF. Xenogenesis (retitled Lilith's Brood in 2000) is one of Butler's most important works, and comprises the novels Dawn (1987), Adulthood...
The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison
Speaking the Unspeakable
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2000
A traditional yet fresh approach to grasping the power of Morrison's writing With essays by Yvonne Atkinson, Marc C. Conner, Susan Corey, Maria DiBattista, Barbara Johnson, Cheryl Lester, Katherine Stern, and Michael Wood Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's novels have almost exclusively been examined...
Unbecoming Americans
Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945-1960
Language: English
Release Date: January 10, 2013
During the Cold War, Ellis Island no longer served as the largest port of entry for immigrants, but as a prison for holding aliens the state wished to deport. The government criminalized those it considered un-assimilable (from left-wing intellectuals and black radicals to racialized migrant laborers)...
Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition
The Invention of an Aesthetic
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2013
Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014
Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition explores Toni Morrison's construction of alternative and oppositional narratives of history and places her work as central to the imagining and re-imagining of American and diasporic identities. Covering the Nobel Prize-winning...
by Roark Bradford
Language: English
Release Date: October 23, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: October 23, 2008
Roark Bradford's 1931 novel and 1939 play dealing with the legendary folk-hero John Henry (both titled John Henry) were extremely influential in their own time, but have since then been nearly forgotten. Steven C. Tracy has united these hard-to-find works in a single critical edition that helps contextualize-and...
Which Sin to Bear?
Authenticity and Compromise in Langston Hughes
Language: English
Release Date: February 14, 2013
Langston Hughes survived as a writer for over forty years under conditions that made survival virtually heroic. Determined on a literary career at a time when no African American had yet been able to live off his or her writing, Hughes not only faced poverty and racism but found himself pressed by...
We Wear the Mask
Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Politics of Representative Reality
Language: English
Release Date: August 10, 2010
An anthology of the best scholarship on the celebrated African American writer
A prolific nineteenth-century author, Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first African American poet to gain national recognition. Praised by Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and Frederick Douglass, who called him...
Toni Morrison
Memory and Meaning
Language: English
Release Date: August 12, 2014
Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author’s literary production and including her very latest works—the theatrical production Desdemona and her tenth and latest novel, Home. These original contributions are among the first scholarly...
Condition Red
Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries
Language: English
Release Date: April 17, 2017
Condition Red collects writing by one of America’s most gifted and revered poets, Yusef Komunyakaa. While themes from his earlier prose collection, Blue Notes, run through Condition Red, this volume expresses a greater sense of urgency about the human condition and the role of the artist. Condition...
by Bill Harris
Language: English
Release Date: May 15, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: May 15, 2010
A critical look at black identity in American history and popular culture as told from a performative African American perspective.
by Noelle Morrissette
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2013
James Weldon Johnson’s Modern Soundscapes provides an evocative and meticulously researched study of one of the best known and yet least understood authors of the New Negro Renaissance era. Johnson, familiar to many as an early civil rights leader active in the National Association for the Advancement...