Download or read book The Desiring Modes of Being Black written by Jean-Paul Rocchi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-08-24 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critique of theory through literature that celebrates the diversity of black being, The Desiring Modes of Being Black explores how literature unearths theoretical blind spots while reasserting the legitimacy of emotional turbulence in the controlled realm of reason that rationality claims to establish. This approach operates a critical shift by examining psychoanalytical texts from the literary perspective of black desiring subjectivities and experiences. This combination of psychoanalysis and the politics of literary interpretation of black texts helps determine how contemporary African American and black literature and queer texts come to defy and challenge the racial and sexual postulates of psychoanalysis or indeed any theoretical system that intends to define race, gender and sexualities. The Desiring Modes of Being Black includes essays on James Baldwin, Sigmund Freud, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, and Rozena Maart. The metacritical reading they unfold interweaves African American culture, Fanonian and Caribbean thought, South African black consciousness, French theory, psychoanalysis, and gender and queer studies.

Download or read book Critique of Black Reason written by Achille Mbembe and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Critique of Black Reason eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness—from the Atlantic slave trade to the present—to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future.

Download or read book Dear Science and Other Stories written by Katherine McKittrick and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-14 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness. Throughout, McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies, McKittrick imagines without totally disclosing the ways in which black intellectuals invent ways of living outside prevailing knowledge systems.

Download or read book Demonic Grounds written by Katherine McKittrick and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a long overdue contribution to geography and social theory, Katherine McKittrick offers a new and powerful interpretation of black women’s geographic thought. In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material geographies, McKittrick reveals how human geographies are a result of racialized connections, and how spaces that are fraught with limitation are underacknowledged but meaningful sites of political opposition. Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, the author addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs’s attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s philosophies. Central to McKittrick’s argument are the ways in which black women are not passive recipients of their surroundings and how a sense of place relates to the struggle against domination. Ultimately, McKittrick argues, these complex black geographies are alterable and may provide the opportunity for social and cultural change. Katherine McKittrick is assistant professor of women’s studies at Queen’s University.

Download or read book Black Fatigue written by Mary-Frances Winters and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to define and explore Black fatigue, the intergenerational impact of systemic racism on the physical and psychological health of Black people—and explain why and how society needs to collectively do more to combat its pernicious effects. Black people, young and old, are fatigued, says award-winning diversity and inclusion leader Mary-Frances Winters. It is physically, mentally, and emotionally draining to continue to experience inequities and even atrocities, day after day, when justice is a God-given and legislated right. And it is exhausting to have to constantly explain this to white people, even—and especially—well-meaning white people, who fall prey to white fragility and too often are unwittingly complicit in upholding the very systems they say they want dismantled. This book, designed to illuminate the myriad dire consequences of “living while Black,” came at the urging of Winters's Black friends and colleagues. Winters describes how in every aspect of life—from economics to education, work, criminal justice, and, very importantly, health outcomes—for the most part, the trajectory for Black people is not improving. It is paradoxical that, with all the attention focused over the last fifty years on social justice and diversity and inclusion, little progress has been made in actualizing the vision of an equitable society. Black people are quite literally sickand tired of being sick and tired. Winters writes that “my hope for this book is that it will provide a comprehensive summary of the consequences of Black fatigue, and awaken activism in those who care about equity and justice—those who care that intergenerational fatigue is tearing at the very core of a whole race of people who are simply asking for what they deserve.”

Download or read book Decrypting Power written by Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decrypting Power aims to reach a unifying concept that allows the connection of the fundamental theses stemming from critical legal studies, Subaltern studies, decolonization, law and society, global political economy, critical geopolitics and theories of de-coloniality. This volume proposes that this concept is the ‘encryption of power’, a category of analysis that reveals the weakness of political liberalism when it takes the place of the legitimate fundament of democracy, as well as its consummate capacity to conceal new mechanisms of global power. The theory of encryption of power understands that there is only a world where difference exists as the fundamental and sole order, but also that such a possibility is heavily obstructed by the concentration of power in forms of oppression. The world hangs on the thread of this entangled reality, made up of difference and its denial, of democracy and its simulations, of truth and its codifications. The decryption of power is then, above all, a theory of justice essential to radical democracy, which comes fully-equipped to prevail over the conditions that deny the possibility of an egalitarian world.

Download or read book Black Queer Freedom written by GerShun Avilez and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomical injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists’ work throughout the black diaspora. GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces—specifically prisons and hospitals—and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.

Download or read book Black on White written by David R. Roediger and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2010-03-31 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thought-provoking volume, David R. Roediger has brought together some of the most important black writers throughout history to explore the question: What does it really mean to be white in America? From folktales and slave narratives to contemporary essays, poetry, and fiction, black writers have long been among America's keenest students of white consciousness and white behavior, but until now much of this writing has been ignored. Black on White reverses this trend by presenting the work of more than fifty major figures, including James Baldwin, Derrick Bell, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker to take a closer look at the many meanings of whiteness in our society. Rich in irony, artistry, passion, and common sense, these reflections on what Langston Hughes called "the ways of white folks" illustrate how whiteness as a racial identity derives its meaning not as a biological category but as a social construct designed to uphold racial inequality. Powerful and compelling, Black on White provides a much-needed perspective that is sure to have a major impact on the study of race and race relations in America.

Download or read book Sensual Excess written by Amber Jamilla Musser and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reimagines black and brown sensuality to develop new modes of knowledge production In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser imagines epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. To do so, she works against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, and offers multiple ways of thinking with and through sensation and aesthetics. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must always negotiate. Though these technologies differ according to the nature of their encounters with white supremacy, together they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters. To do so, Sensual Excess analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These ruptures illuminate multiple epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that offer frameworks for minoritarian knowledge production which is designed to enable one to sit with uncertainty. Through examinations of installations and performances like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, Patty Chang’s In Love and Nao Bustamante’s Neapolitan, Musser unpacks the relationships between racialized sexuality and consumption to interrogate foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory, critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. In so doing, Sensual Excess offers a project of knowledge production focused not on mastery, but on sensing and imagining otherwise, whatever and wherever that might be.

Download or read book Once You Go Black written by Robert Reid-Pharr and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2007-07 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once You Go Black is first and foremost a study of a group of black American intellectuals, primarily male, who came to prominence after World War II. At the same time, it is an endeavor to reconsider black Americans as agents, and not simply products, of history. Following the existentialist maxim that experience precedes essence, Robert Reid-Pharr contends that our current notions of black American identity are not inevitable, nor have they been forced on the black community. Instead, he argues, black American intellectuals have actively chosen the identity schemes that seem to us so natural or "God-given" today. In Once You Go Black, Reid-Pharr turns first to the late and relatively unknown novels of the three most prominent Black American writers of the mid-twentieth century-Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. He suggests that each of these authors rejects the idea of the black as innocent, insisting instead upon responsibility within modern society. Reid-Pharr then examines a number of responses to this presumed erosion of black innocence, paying particular attention to articulations of black masculinity by Huey Newton, one of the two founders of the Black Panther Party, and Melvin Van Peebles, director of the classic film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.Shuttling between queer theory, intellectual history, literary close readings, and autobiography, Once You Go Black is a bold, eloquent, and impassioned call to bring the language of choice into the study of black American literature and culture.

Download or read book Fire and Desire written by Jane M. Gaines and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-12-29 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the silent era, American cinema was defined by two separate and parallel industries, with white and black companies producing films for their respective, segregated audiences. Jane Gaines's highly anticipated new book reconsiders the race films of this era with an ambitious historical and theoretical agenda. Fire and Desire offers a penetrating look at the black independent film movement during the silent period. Gaines traces the profound influence that D. W. Griffith's racist epic The Birth of a Nation exerted on black filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux, the director of the newly recovered Within Our Gates. Beginning with What Happened in the Tunnel, a movie that played with race and sex taboos by featuring the first interracial kiss in film, Gaines also explores the cinematic constitution of self and other through surprise encounters: James Baldwin sees himself in the face of Bette Davis, family resemblance is read in Richard S. Robert's portrait of an interracial family, and black film pioneer George P. Johnson looks back on Micheaux. Given the impossibility of purity and the co-implication of white and black, Fire and Desire ultimately questions the category of "race movies" itself.

Download or read book Animals and Desire in South African Fiction written by Jason D. Price and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-07-15 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the political potential of affective experiences of desire as reflected in contemporary South African literature. Jason Price argues that definitions of desire deployed by capitalist and colonial culture maintain social inequality by managing relations to ensure a steady flow of capital and pleasure for the dominant classes, whereas affective encounters with animals reveal the nonhuman nature of desire, a biopower that, in its unpredictability, can frustrate regimes of management and control. Price wonders how animals’ different desires might enable new modes of thought to positively transform and resist the status quo. This book contends that South African literary works employ nonhuman desire and certain indigenous notions of desire to imagine a South Africa that can be markedly different from the past.

Download or read book Lean In written by Sheryl Sandberg and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-03-11 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A landmark manifesto" (The New York Times) that's a revelatory, inspiring call to action and a blueprint for individual growth that will empower women around the world to achieve their full potential. In her famed TED talk, Sheryl Sandberg described how women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers. Her talk, which has been viewed more than eleven million times, encouraged women to “sit at the table,” seek challenges, take risks, and pursue their goals with gusto. Lean In continues that conversation, combining personal anecdotes, hard data, and compelling research to change the conversation from what women can’t do to what they can. Sandberg, COO of Meta (previously called Facebook) from 2008-2022, provides practical advice on negotiation techniques, mentorship, and building a satisfying career. She describes specific steps women can take to combine professional achievement with personal fulfillment, and demonstrates how men can benefit by supporting women both in the workplace and at home.

Download or read book Dangerous Desire written by Pamela Barnett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-15 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dangerous Desire is an important work that calls attention to how post-1960s literary representations of rape have shaped the ways in which both sexual and social freedoms are imagined in American culture. Exploring key post-sixties texts including Cleaver's Soul on Ice , Brownmiller's Against Our Will , French's The Women's Room , Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place , Walker's Meridian , and Dickey's Deliverance , Barnett finds that the widespread literary explorations of rape were almost always conjoined with one or more of the radical social movements of the sixties: civil rights, black nationalism, women's liberation and black feminism. Sexual violence emerges in these texts when the transformative possibilities articulated by sixties-era liberation movements trigger and intensify imbalances of power and cultural difference-for example, Eldridge Cleaver's claim that he lashed out against the white power structure by raping white women. This book should be of considerable interest to students and scholars of 20th century American literature, as well as American Studies and African American Studies scholars interested broadly in issues of sexuality, race, and violenc

Download or read book Field Study written by Chet'la Sebree and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study is a genre-bending exploration of black womanhood and desire, written as a lyrical, surprisingly humorous, and startlingly vulnerable prose poem I am society’s eraser shards—bits used to fix other people’s sh*t, then discarded. Somehow still a wet nurse, from actual babes to Alabama special elections. Seeking to understand the fallout of her relationship with a white man, the poet Chet’la Sebree attempts a field study of herself. Scientifically, field studies are objective collections of raw data, devoid of emotion. But during the course of a stunning lyric poem, Sebree’s control over her own field study unravels as she attempts to understand the depth of her feelings in response to the data of her life. The result is a singular and provocative piece of writing, one that is formally inventive, playfully candid, and soul-piercingly sharp. Interspersing her reflections with Tweets, quips from TV characters, and excerpts from the Black thinkers—Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Tressie McMillan Cottom—that inspire her, Sebree analyzes herself through the lens of a society that seems uneasy, at best, with her very presence. She grapples with her attraction to, and rejection of, whiteness and white men; probes the malicious manifestation of colorism and misogynoir throughout American history and media; and struggles with, judges, and forgives herself when she has more questions than answers. “Even as I accrue these notes,” Sebree writes, “I’m still not sure I’ve found the pulse.” A poem of love, heartbreak, womanhood, art, sex, Blackness, and America—sometimes all at once—Field Study throbs with feeling, searing and tender. With uncommon sensitivity and precise storytelling, Sebree makes meaning out of messiness and malaise, breathing life into a scientific study like no other.

Download or read book Black Pride and Black Prejudice written by Paul M. Sniderman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do "black pride" and "black prejudice" come hand in hand? Does taking pride in being black encourage the rejection of a common bond with other Americans? In this groundbreaking study, two leading social scientists mount a challenge to those who would answer "yes." Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza probe these questions in the only way possible--asking black Americans themselves to share their thoughts about each other, America, and other Americans. Writing in a strikingly transparent style, they open a new window on the ideas and values of real individuals who make up the black community in America today. Contrary to the rhetoric of some black leaders, Sniderman and Piazza show that African Americans overwhelmingly reject racial separatism and embrace a common framework, culture, and identity with other Americans. Although the authors find that levels of anti-Semitism are notably higher among black Americans than among white Americans, they demonstrate that taking pride in being black does not encourage blacks to be more suspicious or intolerant of others who are not black. The higher levels of anti-Semitism are instead associated with a gallery of oversimplified and accusatory ideas, including a popularized Afrocentrism and charges of vast conspiracies, that have won substantial support in the black community. Readers of this book will come away with an understanding of how African Americans, while insistent on winning racial justice, are deeply committed to the values of the American ethos and their identity as Americans.

Download or read book Me and White Supremacy written by Layla F. Saad and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times and USA Today bestseller! This eye-opening book challenges you to do the essential work of unpacking your biases, and helps white people take action and dismantle the privilege within themselves so that you can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too. "Layla Saad is one of the most important and valuable teachers we have right now on the subject of white supremacy and racial injustice."—New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert Based on the viral Instagram challenge that captivated participants worldwide, Me and White Supremacy takes readers on a 28-day journey, complete with journal prompts, to do the necessary and vital work that can ultimately lead to improving race relations. Updated and expanded from the original workbook (downloaded by nearly 100,000 people), this critical text helps you take the work deeper by adding more historical and cultural contexts, sharing moving stories and anecdotes, and including expanded definitions, examples, and further resources, giving you the language to understand racism, and to dismantle your own biases, whether you are using the book on your own, with a book club, or looking to start family activism in your own home. This book will walk you step-by-step through the work of examining: Examining your own white privilege What allyship really means Anti-blackness, racial stereotypes, and cultural appropriation Changing the way that you view and respond to race How to continue the work to create social change Awareness leads to action, and action leads to change. For readers of White Fragility, White Rage, So You Want To Talk About Race, The New Jim Crow, How to Be an Anti-Racist and more who are ready to closely examine their own beliefs and biases and do the work it will take to create social change. "Layla Saad moves her readers from their heads into their hearts, and ultimately, into their practice. We won't end white supremacy through an intellectual understanding alone; we must put that understanding into action."—Robin DiAngelo, author of New York Times bestseller White Fragility