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 272 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. 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? Passions run high as the Jacobs try desperately to untangle themselves from a web of deceit and learn how tragedy can move toward truth and the strongest of all ties.

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 Mamas Drama written by Nanette Marie and published by . This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a true story, Mamas' Drama takes place from 1929 to 2004. It shares the experiences of four generations as they move through the "mama's baby, daddy's maybe" condition, which occurs when the identity of the father is questionable. This story begins in Harriman, Tennessee when main character, Josephine Stewart, is almost 8 years old. Josephine loves and cherishes her daddy, Thomas Sr. Her Mama, Millie, reveals to her that Thomas is not her biological father, and that she is born from an extramarital affair Millie had with the mayor of the small town. This revelation turns Josephine's world upside down, and she struggles with feelings that her daddy will not love her the same. The Stewart family migrates to Columbus, Ohio in 1934. Three years later, Josephine meets and eventually marries the love of her life; an older man named George Price. Their marriage is challenged by extramarital affairs. There are nine Price children in George and Josephine's family, including children born as a result of Josephine's indiscretions. Josephine chooses to keep their fathers' identities secret. Suzette, one of her daughters, feels she is a product of her mother's indiscretions, and seeks to find the truth about her biological father. Suzette's siblings taunt her about the identity of her father, and others tell her that she is not George's child. Suzette later determines to break the generational "mama's baby, daddy's maybe" condition. She marries and has a son, Devon, who becomes a single dad while in college. Mamas' Drama is a universal story, and is realistic historical fiction at its best. Compelling and inspiring, it weaves the actions and consequences of guilt and shame. Emotions are unbridled as this poignant, yet sometimes humorous book cries out stories most people only whisper. Healing, forgiveness, love and redemption lie within these pages, and those who are directly or indirectly affected by the "mama's baby, daddy's maybe" condition can relate to the words written in this book.

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 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 Oh Sis You re Pregnant written by Shanicia Boswell and published by Mango Media Inc.. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What to Expect When Black, Pregnant, and Expecting “This book stands as the modern-day guide to birthing while Black.” ―Angelina Ruffin-Alexander, certified nurse midwife 2021 International Book Awards finalist in Health: Women’s Health #1 New Release in Pregnancy & Childbirth and Minority Demographic Studies, Medical Ethics, and Women's Health Nursing Written with lighthearted humor and cultural context, Oh Sis, You’re Pregnant! discusses the stages of pregnancy, labor, and motherhood as they pertain to pregnant Black women today. Tailored to today’s pregnant Black woman. In the age of social media, how do pregnant women communicate their big announcement? What are the best protective hairstyles for labor? Most importantly, how many pregnancy guides focus on issues like Black maternal birth rates and what it really looks like to be Black, pregnant, and single today? Written for the modern pregnant Black woman, Oh Sis, You’re Pregnant! is the essential what to expect when you're expecting guide to understanding pregnancy from a millennial Black mom’s point of view. Interviews, stories, and advice for pregnant women. Written by Black Moms Blog founder, the book tackles hard topics in a way that truly resonate with modern Black moms. With stories from her experiences through pregnancy, labor, and motherhood, and lessons learned as a mother at twenty-two, Oh Sis, You’re Pregnant! focuses on the common knowledge Black pregnant mothers should consider when having their first baby. It also shares topics beneficial to pregnant Black women on their second, third, or fourth born. Find answers to questions: Do I financially plan for my birth? Can I maintain my relationship and friendships during motherhood? Will I self-advocate for my rights in a world that already views me as less than? If you enjoyed books like Medical Apartheid, 50 Things To Do Before You Deliver, The Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy, or Birthing Justice, then you’ll love Oh Sis, You’re Pregnant!

Download or read book Jazz Baby written by Lisa Wheeler and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2007 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baby and his family make some jazzy music.

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 Pushing Up Daisies written by Jamise L. Dames and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-05-24 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After hitting it big with Momma's Baby, Daddy's Maybe, national bestselling author Jamise L. Dames is back with another hip, sensual, and compelling novel. A Tragic Past... Daisy Parker's boyfriend has strayed one too many times and she's no longer sitting pretty. Having sacrificed seven years of her life to being his faithful woman and raising his nine-year-old son, the only thing that will calm her now is to hurl his beloved wardrobe out their second-story window. Single life may scare Daisy, but her mind is made up -- when the good-for-nothing returns, she'll serve him his walking papers. Only he isn't up to his old tricks that night, and what goes down strips Daisy of the option to choose. She's on her own. ...A Hopeful Future Left penniless, homeless, and jobless, Daisy struggles to make a home for herself and her son. Just when she seems poised to take control and put the baggage of her past behind her, complications arise when the towering frame of Daisy's deliciously handsome college crush strolls into town. His unexpected attention makes her feel alive, yet she's been burned by love once and isn't sure she can take the heat. As undeniable passions rise, so do the stakes, and Daisy can't stand to lose another round.... A compelling tale of life, love, and hope.

Download or read book Mommy Loves Her Baby Daddy Loves His Baby written by Tara Jaye Morrow and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2003-03-25 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compares the love Mommy and Daddy have for their baby to the things that various animals love to do.

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 Birth of a Baby Daddy written by Piper Rayne and published by Piper Rayne, Inc.. This book was released on 2018-11-14 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Best small town romance series I've ever read and every book just gets better and better!" - Angie, Angie's Dreamy Reads ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ If you’re having fun living your bachelor life in your Alaskan hometown and out of nowhere a woman shows up holding a baby she insists is yours, you need a plan—a birth plan. BP Step #1 – Lift your jaw off the floor. BP Step #2 – Figure out the baby’s age—do the math. BP Step #3 – Try to remember the woman and with any luck, her name. BP Step #4 – Double check that she’s not confusing you with your twin brother. BP Step #5 – Ignore your five sister’s scowls as your entire family watches the drama unfold. There’s only one thing you shouldn’t do. BP Step #6 – Don’t assume she’s there because she wants your daughter to call you Daddy. You’ll only end up disappointed. Time to figure out a new plan—one that changes her mind.

Download or read book Mama s Child written by Joan Steinau Lester and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A novel about deeply entrenched conflicts between a white mother and her biracial daughter"--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book Llama Llama Time to Share written by Anna Dewdney and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Llama has a sharing drama! Build a tower. Make a moat. Nelly's dolly sails a boat. What can Llama Llama add? Maybe sharing's not so bad. Llama Llama has new neighbors! Nelly Gnu and her mama stop by for a play date, but Llama's not so sure it's time to share all his toys. Maybe just his blocks? It could be fun to make a castle with Nelly . . . But wait--Nelly has Llama's little Fuzzy Llama! The fun turns to tears when Fuzzy Llama is ripped in two, "all because of Nelly Gnu!" Mama comes to the rescue and fixes Fuzzy, but she makes it clear: "I'll put Fuzzy on the stairs, until you're sure that you can share." Fun to read aloud and helpful to children and parents alike, Llama Llama Time to Share is for any child who needs a little encouragement in sharing.

Download or read book Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe written by Jo Watson Hackl and published by Yearling. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 11 days. 13 clues. And one kid who won't give up. Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe is "part treasure hunt, part wilderness adventure, and all heart" (Alan Gratz, New York Times bestselling author of Refugee). How far would you go to find something that might not even exist? All her life, Cricket's mama has told her stories about a secret room painted by a mysterious artist. Now Mama's run off, and Cricket thinks the room might be the answer to getting her to come back. If it exists. And if she can find it. Cricket's first clue is a coin from a grown-over ghost town in the woods. So with her daddy's old guidebook and a coat full of snacks stolen from the Cash 'n' Carry, Cricket runs away to find the room. Surviving in the woods isn't easy. While Cricket camps out in an old tree house and looks for clues, she meets the last resident of the ghost town, encounters a poetry-loving dog (who just might hold a key to part of the puzzle), and discovers that sometimes you have to get a little lost . . . to really find your way. 2020 Mississippi Library Association Children's Author Award 2019 Southern Book Award Winner--Children's Category "A tale of adventure, full of mystery." --Robert Beatty, New York Times bestselling author of Serafina and the Black Cloak "An unforgettable story about a gutsy girl who will steal your heart." --Kathleen Glasgow, New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces "Lyrical and endearing, this debut is a genuine adventure tale." --Kirkus Reviews, Starred

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.

Download or read book A Good Kind of Trouble written by Lisa Moore Ramée and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From debut author Lisa Moore Ramée comes this funny and big-hearted debut middle grade novel about friendship, family, and standing up for what’s right, perfect for fans of Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give and the novels of Renée Watson and Jason Reynolds. Twelve-year-old Shayla is allergic to trouble. All she wants to do is to follow the rules. (Oh, and she’d also like to make it through seventh grade with her best friendships intact, learn to run track, and have a cute boy see past her giant forehead.) But in junior high, it’s like all the rules have changed. Now she’s suddenly questioning who her best friends are and some people at school are saying she’s not black enough. Wait, what? Shay’s sister, Hana, is involved in Black Lives Matter, but Shay doesn't think that's for her. After experiencing a powerful protest, though, Shay decides some rules are worth breaking. She starts wearing an armband to school in support of the Black Lives movement. Soon everyone is taking sides. And she is given an ultimatum. Shay is scared to do the wrong thing (and even more scared to do the right thing), but if she doesn't face her fear, she'll be forever tripping over the next hurdle. Now that’s trouble, for real. "Tensions are high over the trial of a police officer who shot an unarmed Black man. When the officer is set free, and Shay goes with her family to a silent protest, she starts to see that some trouble is worth making." (Publishers Weekly, "An Anti-Racist Children's and YA Reading List")