Download or read book Black Bodies White Gold written by Anna Arabindan-Kesson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-22 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Black Bodies, White Gold Anna Arabindan-Kesson uses cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade and colonialism, as a focus for new interpretations of the way art, commerce, and colonialism were intertwined in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In doing so, Arabindan-Kesson models an art historical approach that makes the histories of the Black diaspora central to nineteenth-century cultural production. She traces the emergence of a speculative vision that informs perceptions of Blackness in which artistic renderings of cotton—as both commodity and material—became inexorably tied to the monetary value of Black bodies. From the production and representation of “negro cloth”—the textile worn by enslaved plantation workers—to depictions of Black sharecroppers in photographs and paintings, Arabindan-Kesson demonstrates that visuality was the mechanism through which Blackness and cotton became equated as resources for extraction. In addition to interrogating the work of nineteenth-century artists, she engages with contemporary artists such as Hank Willis Thomas, Lubaina Himid, and Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, who contend with the commercial and imperial processes shaping constructions of Blackness and meanings of labor.

Download or read book African Americans and Africa written by Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the complex relationship between African Americans and the African continent What is an “African American” and how does this identity relate to the African continent? Rising immigration levels, globalization, and the United States’ first African American president have all sparked new dialogue around the question. This book provides an introduction to the relationship between African Americans and Africa from the era of slavery to the present, mapping several overlapping diasporas. The diversity of African American identities through relationships with region, ethnicity, slavery, and immigration are all examined to investigate questions fundamental to the study of African American history and culture.

Download or read book Fearing the Black Body written by Sabrina Strings and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2020 Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award, given by the American Sociological Association Honorable Mention, 2020 Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association How the female body has been racialized for over two hundred years There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor Black women are particularly stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat Black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago. Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals—where fat bodies were once praised—showing that fat phobia, as it relates to Black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority. The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

Download or read book Between the World and Me written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by One World. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

Download or read book Black Skin White Masks written by Frantz Fanon and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Skin, White Masks is a classic, devastating account of the dehumanising effects of colonisation experienced by black subjects living in a white world. First published in English in 1967, this book provides an unsurpassed study of the psychology of racism using scientific analysis and poetic grace.Franz Fanon identifies a devastating pathology at the heart of Western culture, a denial of difference, that persists to this day. A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, his writings speak to all who continue the struggle for political and cultural liberation.With an introduction by Paul Gilroy, author of There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack.

Download or read book Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities written by Melvin G. Hill and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-08-02 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities: Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture makes a series of valuable contributions to ongoing dialogues surrounding posthuman blackness and Afro-transhumanism. The collection explores the Black body (self) in the context of transhuman realities from a variety of literary and artistic perspectives. These points of view convey the cultural, political, social, and historical implications that frame the space of Black embodiment, functioning as sites of potentiality and pointing toward the possibility of a transcendental Black subjectivity. In this book, many questions concerning the transformation of the Black body are presented as parallels to philosophical and religious inquiries that have traditionally been addressed from a hegemonic viewpoint. The chapters demonstrate how literature, based on its historical and social contexts, contributes to broader thought about Black transcendence of subjectivity in a posthuman framework, exploring interpretations of the “old” and visions of the “new” human.

Download or read book White Fragility written by Dr. Robin DiAngelo and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

Download or read book Born in Blackness Africa Africans and the Making of the Modern World 1471 to the Second World War written by Howard W. French and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history. Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity? In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa. Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history. While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day. “Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.

Download or read book Decolonize Museums written by Shimrit Lee and published by . This book was released on 2023-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behold the sleazy logic of museums: plunder dressed up as charity, conservation, and care.

Download or read book V nus Noire written by Robin Mitchell and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2020-02-15 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.

Download or read book The Wages of Whiteness written by David R. Roediger and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger’s widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply with reference to economic advantage; rather, white working-class racism is underpinned by a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks.

Download or read book The Story of Little Black Sambo written by Helen Bannerman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1923-01-01 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The jolly and exciting tale of the little boy who lost his red coat and his blue trousers and his purple shoes but who was saved from the tigers to eat 169 pancakes for his supper, has been universally loved by generations of children. First written in 1899, the story has become a childhood classic and the authorized American edition with the original drawings by the author has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Little Black Sambo is a book that speaks the common language of all nations, and has added more to the joy of little children than perhaps any other story. They love to hear it again and again; to read it to themselves; to act it out in their play.

Download or read book David Hammons Body Prints 1968 1979 written by David Hammons and published by Drawing Center. This book was released on 2021-02-05 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Hammons' seminal series that ingeniously merged print and performance, celebration and critique The first book dedicated to these pivotal early works on paper, David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968-1979 brings together the monoprints and collages in which the artist used the body as both a drawing tool and printing plate to explore performative, unconventional forms of image making. Hammons created the body prints by greasing his own body--or that of another person--with substances including margarine and baby oil, pressing or rolling body parts against paper, and sprinkling the surface with charcoal and powdered pigment. The resulting impressions are intimately direct indexes of faces, skin, and hair that exist somewhere between spectral portraits and physical traces. Hammons' body prints represent the origin of his artistic language, one that has developed over a long and continuing career and that emphasizes both the artifacts and subjects of contemporary Black life in the United States. More than a half century after they were made, these early works on paper exemplify Hammons' celebration of the sacredness of objects touched or made by the Black body, and his biting critique of racial oppression. The 32 body prints highlighted in this volume introduce the major themes of a 50-year career that has become central to the history of postwar American art. The book features a conversation between curator and activist Linda Goode Bryant and artist Senga Nengudi, as well as a photo essay by photographer Bruce W. Talamon, who documented Hammons at work in his Los Angeles studio in 1974. Born in 1943 in Springfield, Illinois, David Hammons moved to Los Angeles in 1963 at the age of 20 and began making his body prints several years later. He studied at Otis Art Institute with Charles White and became part of a younger generation of Black avant-garde artists loosely associated with the Black Arts Movement. He moved to New York in 1978.

Download or read book Body Lengths written by Leisel Jones and published by Black Inc.. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the moment I am born, I am like no-one else around me. I am a fish out of water. Even in the pool. Leisel Jones is rightly regarded as one of the greatest breaststrokers ever. At just fifteen, she won two silver medals at the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000; she went on to win gold at Athens and Beijing, and at London 2012 became the first Australian swimmer to compete at four Olympics. For the first time, Leisel candidly describes what it’s like to be thrust into the limelight so young. She reveals the constant pressure she was under – from coaches, from the media and from herself – to be perfect. Despite the highs of her swimming stardom, she suffered depression, and at one time planned to take her own life. In London, criticised in the media for her weight, and appalled by the bullying and dysfunction in the Australian swim team, Leisel nevertheless handled herself with great composure. She has emerged with maturity and good humour, having finally learnt how to be herself and live with confidence. Body Lengths is the inspiring story of an Australian sporting hero, told with humour, optimism and style. Longlisted, 2016 Australian Book Industry Awards ‘There were times when it wasn’t easy for Leisel, but she came through as one of the greatest swimmers of all time.’ —Ray Warren ‘Swimming, success and sadness - all wrapped up in the bio of one of our greatest athletes.’ —Cosmopolitan ‘Gripping, confronting and important, Body Lengths is a masterfully told story that will leave you with a disturbing new look at elite sport and at life. If you are not afraid of dark places – of seeing the flaws that exist in us all – you won’t be able to put the book down.’ —Crossing the Line ‘Gold, silver and blues’ —Herald Sun ‘Many autobiographies claim to be no holds barred, but we’re pressed to think of many that are as searingly honest as Leisel Jones’ account of her struggles with isolation and suicidal anguish. One of Australia’s greatest Olympic swimmers is known to the world for her sunny public persona and athletic grit, but outside of the pool and limelight, her path hasn’t been easy. Body Lengths exposes some of the darker aspects of competitive sport, but what stuck with us was Jones’ courage to speak her truth – as well as her disarming humility and passion.’ —iBooks, Best Books of October ‘A compelling and thought-provoking story, Leisel’s honesty is remarkably heroic and poignant.’ —Layne Beachley AO ‘Lethal Leisel was an incredible role model and an inspiration for my generation. She epitomises the Olympic dream!’ —Sally Fitzgibbons ‘Leisel gives a fascinating and candid account of her time as an elite swimmer and what it was like to be thrust into the limelight at such a young age She writes engagingly of the personal high and low points, the relationships and friendships, and the huge demands of maintaining her fitness and training over the years.’ —The City Leisel Jones retired from swimming in 2012 as the winner of three Olympic gold medals, and many Commonwealth and world championship medals. She was a commentator at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, and in 2015 was inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame. Felicity McLean is the author of several books. She has written for the Daily Telegraph, the Courier Mail, the Big Issue and more.

Download or read book Heavy written by Kiese Laymon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times* *Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, BuzzFeed (Nonfiction), The Undefeated, Library Journal (Biography/Memoirs), The Washington Post (Nonfiction), Southern Living (Southern), Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times Critics* In this powerful, provocative, and universally lauded memoir—winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and finalist for the Kirkus Prize—genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon “provocatively meditates on his trauma growing up as a black man, and in turn crafts an essential polemic against American moral rot” (Entertainment Weekly). In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to time in New York as a college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. Heavy is a “gorgeous, gutting…generous” (The New York Times) memoir that combines personal stories with piercing intellect to reflect both on the strife of American society and on Laymon’s experiences with abuse. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, he asks us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free. “A book for people who appreciated Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family through years of haunting implosions and long reverberations. “You won’t be able to put [this memoir] down…It is packed with reminders of how black dreams get skewed and deferred, yet are also pregnant with the possibility that a kind of redemption may lie in intimate grappling with black realities” (The Atlantic).

Download or read book The Mulatta Concubine written by Lisa Ze Winters and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and thus they offer evidence of the means to and dimensions of their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. In The Mulatta Concubine, Lisa Ze Winters contends that the uniformity of these representations conceals the figure’s centrality to the practices and production of diaspora. Beginning with a meditation on what captive black subjects may have seen and remembered when encountering free women of color living in slave ports, the book traces the echo of the free mulatta concubine across the physical and imaginative landscapes of three Atlantic sites: Gorée Island, New Orleans, and Saint Domingue (Haiti). Ze Winters mines an archive that includes a 1789 political petition by free men of color, a 1737 letter by a free black mother on behalf of her daughter, antebellum newspaper reports, travelers’ narratives, ethnographies, and Haitian Vodou iconography. Attentive to the tenuousness of freedom, Ze Winters argues that the concubine figure’s manifestation as both historical subject and African diasporic goddess indicates her centrality to understanding how free and enslaved black subjects performed gender, theorized race and freedom, and produced their own diasporic identities.

Download or read book Ancient Egyptian Jewelry written by Ambrose Lansing and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2015-02-04 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This picture book features images of Ancient Egyptian Jewelry covering works from Pre-dynastic shell necklaces to intricately designed gold earrings of the Roman period. A brief introductory essay discusses the history of jewelry and the evolution of Ancient Egyptian jewelry craftsmanship.