Download or read book Black on White written by David R. Roediger and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2010-03-31 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thought-provoking volume, David R. Roediger has brought together some of the most important black writers throughout history to explore the question: What does it really mean to be white in America? From folktales and slave narratives to contemporary essays, poetry, and fiction, black writers have long been among America's keenest students of white consciousness and white behavior, but until now much of this writing has been ignored. Black on White reverses this trend by presenting the work of more than fifty major figures, including James Baldwin, Derrick Bell, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker to take a closer look at the many meanings of whiteness in our society. Rich in irony, artistry, passion, and common sense, these reflections on what Langston Hughes called "the ways of white folks" illustrate how whiteness as a racial identity derives its meaning not as a biological category but as a social construct designed to uphold racial inequality. Powerful and compelling, Black on White provides a much-needed perspective that is sure to have a major impact on the study of race and race relations in America.
Download or read book Bad Men written by Howard Rambsy II. and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have African American writers drawn on "bad" black men and black boys as creative touchstones for their evocative and vibrant art? This is the question posed by Howard Rambsy’s new book, which explores bad men as a central, recurring, and understudied figure in African American literature and music. By focusing on how various iterations of the bad black man figure serve as creative muse and inspiration for literary production, Rambsy puts a wide variety of contemporary African American literary and cultural works in conversation with creativity research for the first time. Employing concepts such as playfulness, productivity, divergent thinking, and problem finding, Rambsy examines the works of a wide range of writers—including Elizabeth Alexander, Amiri Baraka, Paul Beatty, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tyehimba Jess, Trymaine Lee, Adrian Matejka, Aaron McGruder, Evie Shockley, and Kevin Young—who have drawn on notions of bad black men and boys to create innovative and challenging works in a variety of genres. Through groundbreaking readings, Rambsy demonstrates the fruitfulness of viewing black literary art through the lens of creativity research.
Download or read book The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms written by N. K. Jemisin and published by Orbit. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After her mother's mysterious death, a young woman is summoned to the floating city of Sky in order to claim a royal inheritance she never knew existed in the first book in this award-winning fantasy trilogy from the NYT bestselling author of The Fifth Season. Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history. With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate -- and gods and mortals -- are bound inseparably together.
Download or read book New Bones written by Kevin Everod Quashie and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 1160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inclusive multi-genre anthology of late 20th century African-American literature.
Download or read book Black Writers Black Baseball written by Jim Reisler and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2007-05-15 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revised edition is an anthology of 10 African American sportswriters who covered baseball's Negro Leagues in the first part of the 20th century. The writers include Sam Lacy, Wendell Smith, Frank A. Young, Joe Bostic, Chester L. Washington, W. Rollo Wilson, Dan Burley, Ed Harris, A.S. "Doc" Young and Romeo Dougherty. The men represented here were pioneers in their own right. Writing for black weekly newspapers, they faced the same conditions as the leagues' players, from discrimination to endless travel. Yet it was through their writings that the public, both black and white were given an up-close, inside look at the day-to-day happenings of Negro League baseball.
Download or read book Children of the Night written by Gloria Naylor and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 1997-02-01 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1969, Little, Brown and Company published The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, edited by Langston Hughes - the classic compendium of African-American short fiction from 1897 to 1967. Now, a quarter of a century later, Gloria Naylor has compiled an encore volume, Children of the Night, bringing this extraordinary series up to date. Gathering together the most gifted black writers of our time - from 1967 to the present - Naylor has assembled a rich and varied collection of stories. The portrait that emerges of the African-American experience in the post-Civil Rights era is stirring, compelling, sometimes disturbing, and certainly provocative. Naylor has arranged the stories thematically so the reader focuses on a particular subject - slavery, for example, or the family. In the hands of different writers, these themes provide a wealth and variety of human experience. The stories are more than testimonies of the long battle for survival. From a young woman's struggles with her barren faith in Alice Walker's lyrical "The Diary of an African Nun" to an innocent man's involvement in a horrifying act of violence in Ann Petry's "The Witness", they are, as Naylor states in her introduction, "examples of affirmation: of memory, of history, of family, of being". They are stories for all of us "at the beginning: of mankind as a species; of America as a nation; of the African-American as a full citizen".
Download or read book Black Women Writers at Work written by Claudia Tate and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Black women writers and critics are acting on the old adage that one must speak for oneself if one wishes to be heard.” —Claudia Tate, from the introduction Long out-of-print, Black Women Writers At Work is a vital contribution to Black literature in the 20th century. Through candid interviews with Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks. Alexis Deveaux, Nikki Giovanni, Kristin Hunter, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olson, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Margret Walker, and Shirley Anne Williams, the book highlights the practices and critical linkages between the work and lived experiences of Black women writers whose work laid the foundation for many who have come after. Responding to questions about why and for whom they write, and how they perceive their responsibility to their work, to others, and to society, the featured playwrights, poets, novelists, and essayists provide a window into the connections between their lives and their art. Finally available for a new generation, this classic work has an urgent message for readers and writers today.
Download or read book Playing in the White written by Stephanie Li and published by Oxford Studies in American Lit. This book was released on 2015 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels--that is, texts by African American writers focused almost exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth century black writer, including Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry and James Baldwin, published one of these anomalous texts. Controversial since their publication in the 1940s and 50s, these novels have since fallen into obscurity given the challenges they pose to traditional conceptions of the African American literary canon. Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects aims to bring these neglected novels back into conversations about the nature of African American literature and the unique expectations imposed upon black texts. In a series of nuanced readings, Li demonstrates how postwar black novelists were at the forefront of what is now commonly understood as whiteness studies. Novels like Hurston'sSeraph on the Suwanee and Wright's Savage Holiday, once read as abdications of the political imperative of African American literature, are revisited with an awareness of how whiteness signifies in multivalent ways that critique America's abiding racial hierarchies. These novels explore how this particular racial construction is freighted with social power and narrative meaning. Whiteness repeatedly figures in these texts as a set of expectations that are nearly impossible to fulfill. By describing characters who continually fail at whiteness, white life novels ask readers to reassess what race means for all Americans. Along with its close analysis of key white life novels, Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects also provides important historical context to understand how these texts represented the hopes and anxieties of a newly integrated nation.
Download or read book The Best Short Stories by Black Writers written by Langston Hughes and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 1969-02-28 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects short stories by African American writers such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, and Alice Walker
Download or read book African American Writers Classical Tradition written by William W. Cook and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constraints on freedom, education, and individual dignity have always been fundamental in determining who is able to write, when, and where. Considering the singular experience of the African American writer, William W. Cook and James Tatum here argue that African American literature did not develop apart from canonical Western literary traditions but instead grew out of those literatures, even as it adapted and transformed the cultural traditions and religions of Africa and the African diaspora along the way.Tracing the interaction between African American writers and the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome, from the time of slavery and its aftermath to the civil rights era and on into the present, the authors offer a sustained and lively discussion of the life and work of Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Rita Dove, among other highly acclaimed poets, novelists, and scholars. Assembling this brilliant and diverse group of African American writers at a moment when our understanding of classical literature is ripe for change, the authors paint an unforgettable portrait of our own reception of “classic” writing, especially as it was inflected by American racial politics.
Download or read book Interviews with Black Writers written by John O'Brien and published by . This book was released on 1973-10-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Color and Culture written by Ross Posnock and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The coining of the term “intellectuals” in 1898 coincided with W. E. B. Du Bois’s effort to disseminate values and ideals unbounded by the color line. Du Bois’s ideal of a “higher and broader and more varied human culture” is at the heart of a cosmopolitan tradition that Color and Culture identifies as a missing chapter in American literary and cultural history. The book offers a much needed and startlingly new historical perspective on “black intellectuals” as a social category, ranging over a century—from Frederick Douglass to Patricia Williams, from Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chesnutt to Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke, from Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin to Samuel Delany and Adrienne Kennedy. These writers challenge two durable assumptions: that high culture is “white culture” and that racial uplift is the sole concern of the black intellectual. The remarkable tradition that this book recaptures, culminating in a cosmopolitan disregard for demands for racial “authenticity” and group solidarity, is strikingly at odds with the identity politics and multicultural movements of our day. In the Du Boisian tradition Ross Posnock identifies a universalism inseparable from the particular and open to ethnicity—an approach with the power to take us beyond the provincialism of postmodern tribalism.
Download or read book Black Writers of America written by Richard Kenneth Barksdale and published by Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers. This book was released on 1972 with total page 952 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive collection of Afro-American literature - from its beginnings to the 1970s - provides a generous selection of autobiographies, essays, speeches, letters, political pamphlets, histories, journals, and folk literature as well as poems, plays, and stories - all chosen for their artistic and social significance. A carefully structured organization and the scope and diversity of selections make the anthology suitable to a variety of approaches - chronological, by topic, by theme, or by genre.
Download or read book Beloved written by Toni Morrison and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2006-10-17 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present. Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.
Download or read book African American Writers written by Lynda Koolish and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2001 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of photos of African-American authors highlights the diversity within African American literature and celebrates the many genres it explores. 59 photos.
Download or read book Black Writers Abroad written by Robert Coles and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-26 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1999 Black Writers Abroad puts forward the theory that African American literature was born, partially within the context of a people and its writers who lived, for the most part, in slavery and bondage prior to the Civil War. It is an in-depth study of black American writers who, left the United States as expatriates. The book discusses the people that left, where they went, why they left and why they did or did not return, from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. It seeks to explain the impact exile had upon these authors’ literary work and careers, as well as upon African American literary history.
Download or read book Black Powerful written by Natasha Marin and published by McSweeney's. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning viral curator and poet Natasha Marin follows-up her acclaimed Black Imagination with a brilliant new collection of sharply-rendered, breathtaking reflections from more than two dozen Black voices. What does it sound like when you claim yourself? When do you feel most at home in yourself? What is your relationship to Africa, real or imagined? Black Powerful examines Black Americans' relationship with Africa and intersperses their reflections with Continental Africans' thoughts on Black Folx raised elsewhere in a monumental chorus of authentic joy, tragedy, and imagination. Black Powerful is one sacred act of witnessing.
