African Studies

At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac - here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of Margo Jefferson's rarefied upbringing and education among a Black elite concerned with distancing itself from Whites and the Black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both.

In Gullah Spirituals musicologist Eric Crawford traces Gullah Geechee songs from their beginnings in West Africa to their height as songs for social change and Black identity in the 20th-century American South. While much has been done to study, preserve, and interpret Gullah culture in the Low Country and sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia, some traditions like the shouting and rowing songs have been all but forgotten.

Leonard Moore has been teaching Black history for 25 years, mostly to White people. Drawing on decades of experience in the classroom and on college campuses throughout the South, as well as on his own personal history, Moore illustrates how an understanding of Black history is necessary for everyone. With Teaching Black History to White People, which is “part memoir, part Black history, part pedagogy, and part how-to guide”, Moore delivers an accessible and engaging primer on the Black experience in America.

Genesis Walker has spent years trying to live up to the expectations of her faith, her family, and the kind of woman she believes she’s supposed to be. But despite her devotion to God and her dedication to doing things the right way, she’s still haunted by old desires and the memory of the bad boys who once owned her heart. Safe, stable, and perfectly predictable Algernon should be everything she wants—everything she’s prayed for. But her heart refuses to follow logic. Then there’s Preston Nash.

Here in his own words are the revolutionary ideas that made Malcolm X one of the most charismatic and influential African-American leaders of the 1960s. These speeches document Malcolm's progression from Black nationalism to internationalism, and are key to both understanding his extraordinary life and illuminating his angry yet uplifting cause.

In Jezebel Unhinged Tamura Lomax traces the use of the jezebel trope in the Black church and in Black popular culture, showing how it is pivotal to reinforcing men's cultural and institutional power to discipline and define Black girlhood and womanhood. Drawing on writing by medieval thinkers and travelers, Enlightenment theories of race, the commodification of women's bodies under slavery, and the work of Tyler Perry and Bishop T. D. Jakes, Lomax shows how Black women are written into religious and cultural history as sites of sexual deviation.

This national best-seller chronicles the true story of two brothers coming of age in the Henry Horner public housing complex in Chicago. Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers are 11 and nine years old when the story begins in the summer of 1987. Living with their mother and six siblings, they struggle against grinding poverty, gun violence, gang influences, overzealous police officers, and overburdened and neglectful bureaucracies. Immersed in their lives for two years, Kotlowitz brings us this classic rendering of growing up poor in America’s cities.

Across Africa we are witnessing an intensifying competition between old colonial powers and emerging economic powers. What these foreign nations are competing against is a predicted future wherein over 2 billion Blacks will ultimately develop our own immense natural resources toward an historic opportunity to enrich, empower and secure ourselves.Not all foreign involvement with African nations is contrary to sovereign development. All great nations trade with other nations. Our challenge is to re-examine each of these relationships and to assure that these business arrangements are fair and...

In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal - an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea - as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways.

In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake". Activating multiple registers of "wake" - the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness - Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation.

In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how Black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds - the intertwinement of the mental and the physical - in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging Black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations.

For top blogger, Ty Alexander, the grieving process is one that she lives with day-to-day. Learning from the pain of losing her mother, Alexander connects with her listeners on a deeply emotional level in this debut audiobook. From grief counseling to sharing insightful true stories, Alexander offers comfort, reassurance, and hope in the face of sorrow. The pain of loss is universal; yet, we all grieve differently.

The groundbreaking work on American racism and the struggle for racial justice “Eerily prophetic, almost haunting, and yet at the same time oddly reassuring.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow In Faces at the Bottom of the Well, civil rights activist and legal scholar Derrick...

The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together 19 essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on Black gender and sexuality. Building on the foundations laid by the earlier volume, this collection's contributors speak new truths about the Black queer experience while exemplifying the codification of Black queer studies as a rigorous and important field of study.

We have all heard stories of demigods and their epic battles or ultimate demise. But which parts are true and what is fabricated? If you want to discover the superhumans from Greek, Norse, Celtic, African, Egyptian, Japanese, and Hindu mythology, then this is the book you need.

Across America, the pure love and popularity of barbecue cookery have gone through the roof. Prepared in one regional style or another, in the South and beyond, barbecue is one of the nation's most distinctive culinary arts. And people aren't just eating it; they're also reading books and articles and watching TV shows about it. But why is it, asks Adrian Miller - admitted 'cuehead and longtime certified barbecue judge - that in today's barbecue culture, African Americans don't get much love?

In this book, Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. Working against conventional scholarship, Hazzard-Donald argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions she calls "regional Hoodoo clusters" and that after the turn of the 19th century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile.

In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: the Great Migration of six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970.

Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the West and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the repercussions of European colonialism in Africa remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

A sacred feminine initiation of self-love and soul care rituals, tools, and exercises.Spiritual teacher, intuitive coach, and award-winning author Abiola Abrams invites you to activate African goddess magic to transmute your fears and limiting beliefs so that you can create more happiness...