Download or read book Daddy s Baby Mama s Maybe written by Come LaMore and published by Mynd Matters Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daddy's Baby, Mama's Maybe sheds light on the complexities of sexual assault, mother-daughter relationships, sibling rivalry, generational cycles, grief, and the determination to overcome. Journey through the reality of the consequences rendered from destructive family secrets that too often, take on a life of their own. Witness the impact and effects of how bad decisions can corrupt innocence and linger through generations. Find insight and inspiration from one woman's quest to rise above the ashes, regardless of the heat, and against all odds, find the strength, power, and hope to face another day.

Download or read book Momma s Baby Daddy s Maybe written by Jamise L. Dames and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tale of love, lust, and mistrust, Momma's Baby, Daddy's Maybe reveals the secrets that break homes as well as hearts. The Jacobs's siblings have done a good job of masking their secrets behind finely wrought facades, hidden agendas, and questionable paternity...until the day it all starts to unravel. Faced at last with the truth, Kennedy, Simone, and Derrick Jacobs find themselves vulnerable and exposed, determined to salvage the lives they have made for themselves. Passions run high in this debut novel by Jamise L. Dames, and as the Jacobs try desperately to untangle themselves from a web of deceit, they learn how tragedy can move toward truth, and the strongest of all ties. Three women. Three men. One truth. Kennedy Jacobs has it all: beauty, brains, and the confidence to match. She also has the man that sister Simone has officially declared off-limits. With sass, class, and strength to spare, Kennedy takes the world by storm -- until tragedy jumps up and slaps her in the face. Simone Jacobs wants it all. She has the expensive home, the VP position at a top accounting firm, and a new man who tickles more than her fancy. But something is missing. Just when it seems that this something is within reach and her life is coming together, someone starts to tear it apart at the seams. Derrick Jacobs is a handsome Wall Street exec, a fully equipped ladies' man who can't be tied down by any woman. With charming good looks, a chiseled body, and a very healthy bank account, Derrick Jacobs can move mountains...but will his secrets cause them to crumble? A stunning novel of family ties and family lies.

Download or read book Daddy s Baby Mamas Maybe written by Tracee Boyd and published by . This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daddy's Baby, Mamas Maybe flips the script on the DEADBEAT DAD title.. You may have heard of baby mama drama but Joy has to deal with Baby Daddy Drama! Her sister on the other hand is competing with her husband's mom who is the mother-in-law from hell for her husband's love and attention. Family secrets and lies will be revealed and lots of scheming surrounding the lives of these two sisters will surface. Once the drama ensues and lies are uncovered, you won't be able to handle what happens at each turning corner. Show more Show less

Download or read book Dad s Maybe Book written by Tim O'Brien and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2019 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2003, as an older father, O'Brien resolved to give his young sons what he wished his own father had given to him: a few scraps of paper signed "Love, Dad." Maybe a word of advice. Maybe a sentence or two about some long-ago Christmas Eve. Maybe some scattered glimpses of their aging father, a man they might never really know. In this book, O'Brien moves from soccer games to warfare to risqué lullabies, from alcoholism to magic shows to history lessons to bittersweet bedtime stories, but always returning to a father's soul-saving love for his sons. -- adapted from jacket

Download or read book Foster written by Claire Keegan and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An international bestseller and one of The Times’ “Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century,” Claire Keegan’s piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas’ house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end. Winner of the prestigious Davy Byrnes Award and published in an abridged version in the New Yorker, this internationally bestselling contemporary classic is now available for the first time in the US in a full, standalone edition. A story of astonishing emotional depth, Foster showcases Claire Keegan’s great talent and secures her reputation as one of our most important storytellers.

Download or read book Mama s Lies Daddy s Pain written by Brian W. Smith and published by Hollygrove Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jamal Simms is the loving father of Jada Simms. He struggles to raise Jada with her mother (Tracy) whom he can't seem to get along with. Shortly before Jada's 18th birthday, a DNA test reveals that Jamal isn't Jada's biological father. Feelings are hurt, lies are told, loyalties are tested, and lives are forever changed.

Download or read book Mama s Baby Daddy s Maybe written by Johnnie Griffin and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Comparative American Identities written by Hortense J. Spillers and published by New York : Routledge. This book was released on 1991 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maps out the different cultural identities that have emerged in the New World and also deals with related questions and problems that have arisen.

Download or read book Mama s Baby Daddy s Maybe written by Qualo Lowery and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Hush Little Baby written by Sylvia Long and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hush little baby, don't say a word, Mama's going to show you a hummingbird. If that hummingbird should fly, Mama's going to show you the evening sky. From award-winning artist Sylvia Long comes a touching version of the well-known lullaby, Hush Little Baby. Each spread reveals a tender scene as a mama bunny lulls her baby bunny to sleep by enlisting a parade of bedtime wonders—the beauty of a hummingbird in flight; the magic of a harvest moon; the reassurance of a parent's hug, all these and more combine to create a classic volume sure to be treasured for generations to come.

Download or read book Mama and Daddy Bear s Divorce written by Cornelia Maude Spelman and published by Albert Whitman & Company. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Mama and Daddy Bear tell Dinah that they are getting a divorce, Dinah is very sad and scared. Where will Daddy go? Will she see him again? Over time, though, Dinah learns that while Daddy isn't living with them anymore, many of the best things stay the same: Mama will always be her mama, Daddy will always be her daddy, and they love her very much. A brief note for parents is included.

Download or read book Black White and in Color written by Hortense J. Spillers and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-04-28 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black, White, and in Color offers a long-awaited collection of major essays by Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential and inspiring black critics of the past twenty years. Spanning her work from the early 1980s, in which she pioneered a broadly poststructuralist approach to African American literature, and extending through her turn to cultural studies in the 1990s, these essays display her passionate commitment to reading as a fundamentally political act-one pivotal to rewriting the humanist project. Spillers is best known for her race-centered revision of psychoanalytic theory and for her subtle account of the relationships between race and gender. She has also given literary criticism some of its most powerful readings of individual authors, represented here in seminal essays on Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the essays collected in Black, White, and in Color all share Spillers's signature style: heady, eclectic, and astonishingly productive of new ideas. Anyone interested in African American culture and literature will want to read them.

Download or read book Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight written by Dan Bucatinsky and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From actor/writer/producer Dan Bucatinsky, executive producer of NBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?, a collection of snort-milk-through-your-nose funny stories of parenthood that will obliterate the boundaries of gender and sexual orientation, and sweep readers up on a journey into fatherhood—warts and all. In 2005, Dan Bucatinsky and his partner, Don Roos, found themselves in an LA delivery room, decked out in disposable scrubs from shower cap to booties, to welcome their adopted baby girl—launching their frantic yet memorable adventures into fatherhood. Two and a half years later, the same birth mother—a heroically generous, pack-a-day teen with a passion for Bridezilla marathons and Mountain Dew—delivered a son into the couple’s arms. In Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight? Bucatinsky moves deftly from sidesplitting stories about where kids put their fingers to the realization that his athletic son might just grow up to be straight and finally to a reflection on losing his own father just as he’s becoming one. Bucatinsky’s soul-baring and honest stories tap into that all-encompassing, and very human, hunger to be a parent—and the life-changing and often ridiculous road to getting there.

Download or read book The Last Thing He Told Me written by Laura Dave and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don’t miss the #1 New York Times bestselling blockbuster and Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick that’s sold 3 million copies strong—now an Apple TV+ limited series starring Jennifer Garner! The “page-turning, exhilarating” (PopSugar) and “heartfelt thriller” (Real Simple) about a woman who thinks she’s found the love of her life—until he disappears. Before Owen Michaels disappears, he smuggles a note to his beloved wife of one year: Protect her. Despite her confusion and fear, Hannah Hall knows exactly to whom the note refers—Owen’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey. Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. Bailey, who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother. As Hannah’s increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered, as the FBI arrests Owen’s boss, as a US marshal and federal agents arrive at her Sausalito home unannounced, Hannah quickly realizes her husband isn’t who he said he was. And that Bailey just may hold the key to figuring out Owen’s true identity—and why he really disappeared. Hannah and Bailey set out to discover the truth. But as they start putting together the pieces of Owen’s past, they soon realize they’re also building a new future—one neither of them could have anticipated. With its breakneck pacing, dizzying plot twists, and evocative family drama, The Last Thing He Told Me is a “page-turning, exhilarating, and unforgettable” (PopSugar) suspense novel.

Download or read book The Sense of an Ending written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

Download or read book Motherhood written by Sheila Heti and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”—Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children. In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation. In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home. Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.

Download or read book The Idea of Black Culture written by Hortense Spillers and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2021-08-02 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Main blurb (for internal use only - CHECK BEFORE USING IN PRINTED PUBLICITY): Hortense Spillers's THE IDEA OF BLACK CULTURE will consist of six chapters, described below, in some detail (she has supplied more detail than I give here). Her book exploits Eagleton's successful title, and like Eagleton's book, grounds its subject (but more thoroughly) in its history. The engagement here - the controversy, as to what can be meant by the term 'Black Culture' and the necessity to bear witness to history - will run through her several strands of argument. More obviously in her sights, in her concluding chapter, are those people (treasonable clerks), like Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, Cornel West, who, in her view - have used African-American/Black Studies to their own financial ends, usurping and exploiting their history in a cult of personality. Spillers is an eminent and adversarial figure, acquainted personally with many of the greats of African-American culture. Her work bears steady witness to the plight of African-Americans, to the full history of slavery, North (she has written in her latest book on the horrific breeding farms in Massachusetts) and South. 1) Black culture as a discursive field-in fact, of intersecting discursive fields-self-consciously pursues the question of origins, either explicitly or implicitly. Because the motive idea of black culture is advanced as an oppositional form, its theoreticians have had to decide not only what it excludes (is the logic of choice already decided in this case?), but what it must exclude, relative to an absolute "beginning," often embodied in a wide array of symbolic and figurative devices summed up as "Africa." It is important to insist on a distinction here between the massive geopolitical complex of the African continent, with particular reference to Subsaharan Africa, and the plethora of poetics attendant upon literary notions of "Africa," which frequencies are not only not synonymous and commensurate, but describe different orders of cases entirely; often enough, these realms of attention are elided as if they were twina. The question of genesis is by far the most prestigious problematic of scholarship and writing on the culture of black life-worlds, inasmuch as any given moment of social and political practice is predicated, even when implicitly emergent, on where the culture comes from; the current Afrocentric fashion in the United States, for example, is not new, though many of its tenets and tonalities have been redrafted as a contemporary response to the mid-century movements in Civil Rights and the Black Nationalist resurgence subsequent to it. Afrocentric theory has never dominated the field of cultural explanation, but it is fair to say that it has always been a contender, solidly poised against "integrationist/assimilationist" appeals on the one hand and "nationalist/separatist/essentialist" claims on the other. Much of the writing about the black culture problematic tends to poach on the ground of its nearest textual and contextual neighbors-history, politics, and economics-and can hardly be imagined without reference to "race" as theory, as interlinked material practices, as the bane or boon of public policy and address. In (more or less) monolingual communities, as in the United States and Great Britain, "culture" and "race" attend the same school, whereas the lines are drawn quite otherwise in multi- or bi-lingual national formations, as in the complicated instance of Canada, or in bilateral religious spheres, as in the case of Ireland. To say so is not to suggest that "race" does not appear in various interarticulations (with religious, linguistic, and national/nationalistic cartographies), neither is it to say that monolingual systems of language do not engender what Hazel Carby has called "differently oriented social interests within one and the same sign community." But juxtaposing "race/culture" does show how one of the lines of force might be described through a stage of heterogeneously poised cultural valences. While "race" for the most part marks the battleground in Diasporic African communities, it is the "it" that means different things in different black cultural regions; in certain Caribbean communities, for example, one is not black in Kingston, or Basse Terre, or Fort de France for the same reasons that she might be in St. Louis, or Atlanta, USA. In the former instance, "race" loses some of its pernicious evaluative force since the community operates by the social logic of the "same," while in the latter, the confrontation of heterogeneous subjects, contending for status, for superior talisman, designates "race" as an absolutely reified property, negatively weighted, in marked and unmarked positionings. Not too clearly, the taxonomies of marking, of stigmatizing, might be as ingeniously derived as a given situation demands, but the unseen trick is that the mark always follows an arbitrary path; "blackness," for instance, is not inherently remarkable as we can think of certain contexts in which it actually "disappears" as a strategy of discrimination. Conventionally, however, it is one of the master signs of difference. Where "race" pressures are aligned in binaristic display, Afrocentric theories of culture arise as the most impassioned counterclaim. But after all, Afrocentric views of culture and their competing conceptual narratives are situated within rhetorical systems of address that may be said to constitute the discursive field of black culture. In the opening chapter, then, we will attempt to lay out a conceptual scheme of instances of black culture's discursive field according to fours stress points: a) the hagiographical tendency, which posits black heroes in a mimetic tradition of writing and celebration that traces back to the lives of the Saints; decisively marked as an intellectual technology that replicates and re-enforces the mythic cult of the "leader," the hagiographical figure is manifest in divergent textual venues, form Negritude, to the "New Negro" of the Harlem Renaissance, to certain contemporary critical paradigms, even, to coeval Aftocentric postures; b) the teleological tendency, while related to a), projects a closural motive that opposes it: along this axis, black culture, liberated from the constraints that have paradoxically hemmed it in and defined it simultaneously, would sit, primus inter pares, at the great feast of world cultures. Whereas in the hagiographical outline, black culture follows a retroversive path, in the teleological, its coronation lies ahead. One points toward the past, the other toward an already fulfilled future; c) the sociological-historiographical figure, with its secular emphases, takes its name less from specific disciplinary interests within the social sciences than the general disposition to account for the cultural phenomena before it by way of the checks and measures of "reality" as well as the impact of historical cause and effect; this particular view places black culture squarely in the world of change and of the contingent. Perhaps it could be said in this case that there is "black culture" only insofar as it elaborates a "measurable" politics, a viable economics, and a soundly rationalized historical progression, often comparatively framed; d) the metacritical-theoretical figure shows little of a) and b), makes frequent raids on c), and might be thought of as the most "self-conscious" of these routes of rhetorical procedure. Its aim, refracting a gamut of post-modernist writing practices, is to bring "black culture" in communication, as a writing, with a "hermeneutics of suspicion"-in other words, with the ironical and paronomasic play of signs; much of the work in this discursive field is inhabited by academic critical projects on the arts, e.g., literature, music, dancing, and the plastic arts, as well as a newly concatenated cluster of objects (unspecified) that go by the collective name of "cultural studies." "Culture" here is not delimited as a fairly well defined category of alignments, but stretching out in amoebic unruliness, occupies the whole of the life-world, much like history and politics were perceived to do in the post-Second World War period. These lines of conduct, which I am designating here as kinds of rhetorical attitudes, may exist in combination, as well as discrete patterns of address, but each is advanced in the interest of attempting to penetrate its claim to the how of it, for running beneath the press of any rhetorical system, which either excludes or elides what would challenge it, lest its systematicity fall apart, is the key, I believe, to the modalities of cultural self-perception that play back over and over again. What all of these dispositions have in common is advocacy; perhaps we might put it down as a rule-in order to survive as a narrative about "black culture"-conceptual or otherwise-the maker must tell a good story, even when it is a critical one. To that degree, and the fabulists of black culture are not alone in this, culture, as discursive economy enacts defensive ends. It is warfare at the level of the scriptive. 2) As a field of material practices, black culture(s) makes a cut in Western time, creates its pockets and fissures, disabuses it of the illusion of "wholeness." We may be well justified in claiming that black culture gives the West its identity, or in short, a way to know what it is for in recognition of what it imagines it is against. In certain details of a binaristic staging,, opposition disappears as these forces in agonism become mutually framed and entangled. In a demonstration of this principle, I should like to examine in the work's second chapter various artistic and other cultural phenomena deployed on six cityscapes, anchored to a comparative reading: 1) Detroit, with Motown and the black church; 2) London with the Caribbean Artists' Movement (CAM); 3) Paris with Negritude and "Presence Africaine"; 4) Manhattan with black dance and jazz; 5) "Today": the moment in which we are located in Toronto with West Indian writing, and 6) Kingston at the table (or making Jamaican fried chicken in Berlin when you have to leave off the "poppin John" because you cannot find the black or red beans). These cuts across the times of representative spaces of the Western city are made in order to put flesh on the bones of an abstraction, but the sites themselves offer a rich vantage on developments in the unfolding saga of diasporic African peoples. Unsatisfactory because of its necessarily severe statistical limits and because it is confined to our just-closed "si?cle de fer," this repertory of choices, if successfully maneuvered, will permit permutation and addition (for example, the annual carnivals in Brazil and Trinidad, as well as black New Orleans' "Mardi Gras," or the "negrismo" movements of Cuban modernism) and will argue forcefully that "culture" is "movement" through a material scene (in that regard, "culture" is "acting"), and unlike the tree felled in the forest, but no one heard it, only becomes the stuff of culture through witnesses. Culture is, therefore, a participatory forum, one way or another, "high," "low," "middle," and it proceeds by social contagion-the more, the merrier! By definition "popular," culture must eventually account for the relay of arrangements by which a given community of subjects translates the things of its ecosystem, the "supports" that "nature" provides, including the range of social precedents, into the tasks and devices of the spirit; culture in that regard perhaps renders a quintessential demonstration of the transmuted substance-from the seen, or the more-or-less ready-at-hand implement, to the unseen "building" not made by human hands, though it was. Culture, on this analogy, instantiates a paradox: that an ensemble of subjects, for example, in a coordinated banging on a flat surface, or a rhythmic scratching on one, or, yet a precisely choreographed leap across it, might effect alterations in another's coronary patterns, or caloric count, or even induce a confirmed bachelor to change his mind. 3) An "imagined community," which is inhabited by a grammar of attitudes and feelings, black culture is profoundly personal; in this light, it would not be wrong to say that its grammars properly belong to the psychoanalytic sphere; thinkers about the culture have been trying to name this dimension of it for quite a while now, but without exhausting the possibilities. In his study of the U.S. poetry movement of the black sixties, Stephen Henderson redirected the meaning of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's "mascon" to explain this marked saturation of elements that break over the cultural participants in a wash of recognition. Henderson argued that these cultural signatures, benchmarks, if you will, could be captured by the poet and that his doing so formalized an instance of black cultural protocol. Whatever we might nominate this "something within," we would have to acknowledge that "it" belongs to the imaginary, or that ensemble of objects of desire that appear only in symbolic displacement and significant misrecognition. Right away, one sees the problem: To talk about "black culture" as a community of belonging that transcends particularities of time, generation, space/place, is to slip quietly onto psychoanalytic ground, in which event we are talking about a composite person on the model of the "one." But can we speak about the culture without this "one"? This perfectly shaped, ideal actor/actant who is the same for my parents' generation of the great nonegenarians as for my own of the quintegenarians and my nieces and nephews of the quartegenarians? Not finding her/him/it is the equivalent of waiting for God/ot, whose failure to turn up (often enough) is translated as the disappointed revolutionary change; it is the lament that black folk ought to do some things better because they are "black" and "know" by dint of the suffering that their culture opens a special window onto. But what is it that "we" agelessly "know"? The third chapter here will be devoted to a reading of the fictional character of Langston Hughes's ageless "Jesse B. Simple" as a way to approach the undecidable "it's a black thang." Running across the decades as a feature of the old "Pittsburgh Courier," where I first encountered this priceless treasure as a beribboned school girl, the tales of "Simple" offer a perspective on black culture as a system of values and beliefs that are imagined to make up its bed-rock. 4) As one of the sites of creolization, black culture, like the West, establishes itself as an autochthonous regime, an unassimilable, an undivided alternative. But by way of that very logic, it shows itself everywhere porous to intervention. Processes of creolization most often refer to linguistic systems evolved in the Atlantic Slave Trade and to the genetic ensemble of elements parented by African-European conjunction; but if we could slide the scale of reference just a bit, we might be able to apply the concept to varied artistic phenomena, as in the impact of certain modernisms and post-modernisms on black cultural production, i.e., Elizabeth Catlett's sculptures, Romare Bearden's paintings, Keith Jarrett's exquisite noises, poised somewhere between J. S. Bach and A. Copland, but somehow neither, or even the influence of classical flamenco guitar on middle Miles Davis; in the fourth chapter, then, we will examine traffic in the "contact zone," firstly by rereading one of its most salient theoretical formulations, mounted in Ralph Ellison's "Little Man at Chehaw Station," then in an attempt to scrutinizing elements of a ritualistic syncretism as displayed in the public profile of the Nation of Islam, especially its 1996 "Million Man March." That this well publicized event was "mediated" by the "devil's" technological means shows the boomerang effect: That in its most strident oppositional stances, instances of black culture display must conjure with its putative Other. Whether or not, a million black men actually marched on the nation's capital became , predictably, a matter of dispute , and in a certain sense, the only thing that mattered was the powerful symbolic import of such a number, but for sure, thousands upon thousands were captured by cameras at the Washington Monument, as, moreover, thousands of others quite likely monitored U.S. television outlets that were, at least for a day, "all Farakhan." Narrated as the nation's latest avatar of the "Apostle of Hate," Minister Farakhan knows very well how media play the mythemes, those bits and bytes of image-message, interstitial with the commercial break, that rivet the public imagination. The "imagined community" never actually "sees" itself as its own empirical evidence, but the massive sociability of television enables the idea of the gathering. Precisely imitative of the "perceptual apparatus," the televisual means in this case metaphorized the notion in one's mind of what the "imagined community" might actually look like if it were possible to convoke it in a single unbroken sequence The picture that the subject carries in his brain experiences little moments of the realization of a massive ensemble that never appears when his eye pierces the surface of a well attended rally, or mass meeting. In that moment, "everyone" is present and accounted for, as television here gives the effect of a proliferating "presence" that throws an ideal image. 5) Because it is not possible to contemplate black culture without placing it squarely within the development narratives of the West, the fifth chapter will take up the question of the role of money-specifically its modern appearance-in the advancement of the African slave trade. The question here is how the progressive displacements of meaning and value, captured in the notion of the fetish, so dissembled the human and social desecration of African humanity in this case that the logic of property was made to prevail at all costs. How two key thinkers of the late nineteenth century-Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud-converged on the same object is a profoundly puzzling intellectual detail, but read in tandem on the fetish, this pairing might well show the psychoanalytic dimension of "home economics." But in any case, the problem is to "speak" this semiosis across the body of prototypical black culture formation. 6) The Black Studies Movement in the United States was never actually called a "movement," but in hindsight those earliest formations, arising, in part, by accident and contingency, seem to have been inducing movement, insofar as they appeared on predominantly white campuses like falling dominoes, or in tune with a spate of popular lyrics of the times, like a rolling stone. By the early to mid nineteen-seventies, what had been stumbled upon in a continuation of black political struggle by other means was becoming increasingly instaurated as a curricular object, a bureaucratic unit in a radically revisionist setting for the new Humanities, a thorn in the side of the Faculties, and the heaviest arm?r in the arsenal of the new University subject. The sixth and final chapter of Discriminations is devoted to an analysis of that moment which awaits theorization: when a political mandate, ordained by history, translates its objectives into its object. To this day, "Black Studies," mostly under other names-"African-American Studies" (from "Afro-American Studies"), "Africana Studies," "Pan-African Studies," and perhaps in the near future, African Diasporic Studies-shows the ambivalence of its historical moment. I believe that it is possible to situate the idea of "black culture" within this epistemological engagement and to suggest that as a cluster of critical inquiries, "black culture" now belongs to the academy in the West. This quite remarkable eventuality, for all its unevenness of development and for all the misfortune that might attend it in certain of its settings and manifestations, gives us the unusual occasion to witness the university itself as a living organism rather than a museum piece.