A Map to Black Studies Collection

Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize "This trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways...African American authors have written about animals. In Bennett's analysis, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and others subvert the racist comparisons that have 'been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration.'...An intense and illuminating reevaluation of black literature and Western thought." --Ron Charles, Washington Post For much of American history, Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. In Being Property Once Myself, prize-winning poet Joshua Bennett shows that Blackness has long acted as the caesura between human and nonhuman and delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal--the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, the shark--in the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people--all place Black and animal life in fraught proximity. Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene. "A gripping work...Bennett's lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read." --LSE Review of Books "These absorbing, deeply moving pages bring to life a newly reclaimed ethics." --Colin Dayan, author of The Law Is a White Dog "Tremendously illuminating...Refreshing and field-defining." --Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery

**The 2022 Lammy Award Winner in Transgender Nonfiction** Exploring the intersections of Blackness, gender, fatness, health, and the violence of policing. To live in a body both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to sociopolitically sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma. Da'Shaun Harrison--a fat, Black, disabled, and nonbinary trans writer--offers an incisive, fresh, and precise exploration of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness, foregrounding the state-sanctioned murders of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people in historical analysis. Policing, disenfranchisement, and invisibilizing of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people are pervasive, insidious ways that anti-fat anti-Blackness shows up in everyday life. Fat people can be legally fired in 49 states for being fat; they're more likely to be houseless. Fat people die at higher rates from misdiagnosis or nontreatment; fat women are more likely to be sexually assaulted. And at the intersections of fatness, Blackness, disability, and gender, these abuses are exacerbated. Taking on desirability politics, the limitations of gender, the connection between anti-fatness and carcerality, and the incongruity of "health" and "healthiness" for the Black fat, Harrison viscerally and vividly illustrates the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness. They offer strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural programming that tells us "fat is bad," and destroying the world as we know it, so the Black fat can inhabit a place not built on their subjugation.

HONORABLE MENTION, HARRY SHAW AND KATRINA HAZZARD-DONALD AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING WORK IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE STUDIES, GIVEN BY THE POP CULTURE ASSOCIATION A view of transatlantic slavery's afterlife and modern Blackness through the lens of age Although more than fifty years apart, the murders of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin share a commonality: Black children are not seen as children. Time and time again, excuses for police brutality and aggression--particularly against Black children-- concern the victim "appearing" as a threat. But why and how is the perceived "appearance" of Black persons so completely separated from common perceptions of age and time? Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life posits age, life stages, and lifespans as a central lens through which to view Blackness, particularly with regard to the history of transatlantic slavery. Focusing on Black literary culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Habiba Ibrahim examines how the history of transatlantic slavery and the constitution of modern Blackness has been reimagined through the embodiment of age. She argues that Black age--through nearly four centuries of subjugation-- has become contingent, malleable, and suited for the needs of enslavement. As a result, rather than the number of years lived or a developmental life stage, Black age came to signify exchange value, historical under-development, timelessness, and other fantasies borne out of Black exclusion from the human. Ibrahim asks: What constitutes a normative timeline of maturation for Black girls when "all the women"--all the canonically feminized adults--"are white"? How does a "slave" become a "man" when adulthood is foreclosed to Black subjects of any gender? Black Age tracks the struggle between the abuses of Black exclusion from Western humanism and the reclamation of non-normative Black life, arguing that, if some of us are brave, it is because we dare to live lives considered incomprehensible within a schema of "human time."

In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmaking conceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond the normative terms of recognition--Blackness as a condition of oneness. Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploring Black being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question "how to be." In this way, Quashie offers a Black feminist philosophy of being, which is nothing less than a philosophy of the becoming of the Black world.

Afrocentrism. Eurocentrism. Caribbean Studies. British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold hook sounds a liberating call. There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, The Black Atlantic also complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism. Debates about postmodernism have cast an unfashionable pall over questions of historical periodization. Gilroy bucks this trend by arguing that the development of black culture in the Americas arid Europe is a historical experience which can be called modern for a number of clear and specific reasons. For Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave was integral to modernity, and Gilroy considers the implications of this idea for a transatlantic culture. In search of a poetics reflecting the politics and history of this culture, he takes us on a transatlantic tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the "double consciousness" of W. E. B. Du Bois to the "double vision" of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison. In a final tour de force, Gilroy exposes the shared contours of black and Jewish concepts of diaspora in order both to establish a theoretical basis for healing rifts between blacks and Jews in contemporary culture and to further define the central theme of his book: that blacks have shaped a nationalism, if not a nation, within the shared culture of the black Atlantic.

The presence of Blacks in a number of European societies has drawn increasing interest from scholars, policymakers, and the general public. This interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary collection penetrates the multifaceted Black presence in Europe, and, in so doing, complicates the notions of race, belonging, desire, and identities assumed and presumed in revealing portraits of Black experiences in a European context. In focusing on contemporary intellectual currents and themes, the contributors theorize and re-imagine a range of historical and contemporary issues related to the broader questions of blackness, diaspora, hegemony, transnationalism, and "Black Europe" itself as lived and perceived realities. Contributors are Allison Blakely, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Tina Campt, Fred Constant, Alessandra Di Maio, Philomena Essed, Terri Francis, Barnor Hesse, Darlene Clark Hine, Dienke Hondius, Eileen Julien, Trica Danielle Keaton, Kwame Nimako, Tiffany Ruby Patterson, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Stephen Small, Tyler Stovall, Alexander G. Weheliye, Gloria Wekker, and Michelle M. Wright.

In Black Gathering Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological imagination that unsettles Western philosophical ideas of the earth as given to humans. In their aestheticization and conceptualization of gathering, these artists investigate the relationships among art, the environment, home, and forms of Black togetherness. Cervenak argues that by offering a formal and conceptual praxis of gathering, Black artists imagine liberation and alternative ways of being in the world that exist beyond those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and earth as given to enclosure and ownership.

The landmark book that established Robert Reid-Pharr as one of America's most exciting and challenging left intellectuals At turns autobiographical, political, literary, erotic, and humorous, Black Gay Man spoils our preconceived notions of not only what it means to be black, gay and male but also what it means to be a contemporary intellectual. Both a celebration of black gay male identity as well as a powerful critique of the structures that allow for the production of that identity, Black Gay Man introduced the eloquent voice of Robert Reid-Pharr in cultural criticism. At once erudite and readable, the range of topics and positions taken up in Black Gay Man reflect the complexity of American life itself. Treating subjects as diverse as the Million Man March, interracial sex, anti-Semitism, turn of the century American intellectualism as well as literary and cultural figures ranging from Essex Hemphill and Audre Lorde to W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin, Black Gay Man is a bold and nuanced attempt to question prevailing ideas about community, desire, politics and culture. Moving beyond critique, Reid-Pharr also pronounces upon the promises of a new America.

Examining the work of contemporary Black artists who are dismantling the white gaze and demanding that we see--and see Blackness in particular--anew. In A Black Gaze, Tina Campt examines Black contemporary artists who are shifting the very nature of our interactions with the visual through their creation and curation of a distinctively Black gaze. Their work--from Deana Lawson's disarmingly intimate portraits to Arthur Jafa's videos of the everyday beauty and grit of the Black experience, from Kahlil Joseph's films and Dawoud Bey's photographs to the embodied and multimedia artistic practice of Okwui Okpokwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson--requires viewers to do more than simply look; it solicits visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity. Campt shows that this new way of seeing shifts viewers from the passive optics of looking at to the active struggle of looking with, through, and alongside the suffering--and joy--of Black life in the present. The artists whose work Campt explores challenge the fundamental disparity that defines the dominant viewing practice- the notion that Blackness is the elsewhere (or nowhere) of whiteness. These artists create images that flow, that resuscitate and revalue the historical and contemporary archive of Black life in radical ways. Writing with rigor and passion, Campt describes the creativity, ingenuity, cunning, and courage that is the modus operandi of a Black gaze.

Examining the work of contemporary Black artists who are dismantling the white gaze and demanding that we see--and see Blackness in particular--anew. In A Black Gaze, Tina Campt examines Black contemporary artists who are shifting the very nature of our interactions with the visual through their creation and curation of a distinctively Black gaze. Their work--from Deana Lawson's disarmingly intimate portraits to Arthur Jafa's videos of the everyday beauty and grit of the Black experience, from Kahlil Joseph's films and Dawoud Bey's photographs to the embodied and multimedia artistic practice of Okwui Okpokwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson--requires viewers to do more than simply look; it solicits visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity. Campt shows that this new way of seeing shifts viewers from the passive optics of looking at to the active struggle of looking with, through, and alongside the suffering--and joy--of Black life in the present. The artists whose work Campt explores challenge the fundamental disparity that defines the dominant viewing practice- the notion that Blackness is the elsewhere (or nowhere) of whiteness. These artists create images that flow, that resuscitate and revalue the historical and contemporary archive of Black life in radical ways. Writing with rigor and passion, Campt describes the creativity, ingenuity, cunning, and courage that is the modus operandi of a Black gaze.

Taking its title from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, exhibition Black Is, Black Ain't (April 20 - June 8, 2008) explored a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and retained. Curated by the Renaissance Society's Associate Curator and Education Director Hamza Walker, the exhibition brought together works by twenty-seven black and non-black artists whose work collectively examines a moment where the cultural production of so-called "blackness" is concurrent with efforts to make race socially and politically irrelevant. The publication features essays by Huey Copeland, Darby English, Greg Foster-Rice, Amy M. Mooney, Kymberly N. Pinder, Krista Thompson, Hamza Walker, and Kenneth Warrren.

What does it mean in the era of Black Lives Matter to continue to ignore and deny the violence that is the foundation of the Canadian nation state? BlackLife discloses the ongoing destruction of Black people as enacted not simply by state structures, but beneath them in the foundational modernist ideology that underlies thinking around migration and movement, as Black erasure and death are unveiled as horrifically acceptable throughout western culture. With exactitude and celerity, Idil Abdillahi and Rinaldo Walcott pull from local history, literature, theory, music, and public policy around everything from arts funding, to crime and mental health--presenting a convincing call to challenge pervasive thought on dominant culture's conception of Black personhood. They argue that artists, theorists, activists, and scholars offer us the opportunity to rethink and expose flawed thought, providing us new avenues into potential new lives and a more livable reality of BlackLife.

Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics explores notions of Blackness in white institutional--particularly educational--spaces. In it, Louis M. Maraj theorizes how Black identity operates with/against ideas of difference in the age of #BlackLivesMatter. Centering Blackness in frameworks for antiracist agency through interdisciplinary Black feminist lenses, Black or Right asks how those racially signifying "diversity" in US higher education (and beyond) make meaning in the everyday. Offering four Black rhetorics as antiracist means for rhetorical reclamation--autoethnography, hashtagging, inter(con)textual reading, and reconceptualized disruption--the book uses Black feminist relationality via an African indigenous approach. Maraj examines fluid, quotidian ways Black folk engage anti/racism at historically white institutions in the United States in response to violent campus spaces, educational structures, protest movements, and policy practice. Black or Right's experimental, creative style strives to undiscipline knowledge from academic confinement. Exercising different vantage points in each chapter--autoethnographer, digital media scholar/pedagogue, cultural rhetorician, and critical discourse analyst--Maraj challenges readers to ecologically understand shifting, multiple meanings of Blackness in knowledge-making. Black or Right's expressive form, organization, narratives, and poetics intimately interweave with its argument that Black folk must continuously invent "otherwise" in reiterative escape from oppressive white spaces. In centering Black experiences, Black theory, and diasporic Blackness, Black or Right mobilizes generative approaches to destabilizing institutional whiteness, as opposed to reparative attempts to "fix racism," which often paradoxically center whiteness. It will be of interest to both academic and general readers and significant for specialists in cultural rhetorics, Black studies, and critical theory.

A profound book of essays from a celebrated master of the form. "Darkness is not empty," writes Teju Cole in Black Paper, a book that meditates on what it means to sustain our humanity--and witness the humanity of others--in a time of darkness. One of the most celebrated essayists of his generation, Cole here plays variations on the essay form, modeling ways to attend to experience--not just to take in but to think critically about what we sense and what we don't. Wide-ranging but thematically unified, the essays address ethical questions about what it means to be human and what it means to bear witness, recognizing how our individual present is informed by a collective past. Cole's writings in Black Paper approach the fractured moment of our history through a constellation of interrelated concerns: confrontation with unsettling art, elegies both public and private, the defense of writing in a time of political upheaval, the role of the color black in the visual arts, the use of shadow in photography, and the links between literature and activism. Throughout, Cole gives us intriguing new ways of thinking about blackness and its numerous connotations. As he describes the carbon-copy process in his epilogue: "Writing on the top white sheet would transfer the carbon from the black paper onto the bottom white sheet. Black transported the meaning."

Black Participatory Research explores research partnerships that disrupt inequality, create change, and empower racially marginalized communities. Through presenting a series of co-reflections from professional and community researchers in different locations, this book explores the conflicts and tensions that emerge when professional interests, class and socio-economic statuses, age, geography, and cultural and language differences emerge alongside racial identity as central ways of seeing and being ourselves. Through the investigations of black researchers who collaborated in participatory research projects in post-Katrina New Orleans, USA the greater Philadelphia-New Jersey-Delaware region in the northeastern USA, and Senegal, West Africa, this book offers candid reflections of how shared identity, experiences, and differences shape the nature and process of participatory research.

A 2008 cover of The New Yorker featured a much-discussed Black Power parody of Michelle and Barack Obama. The image put a spotlight on how easy it is to flatten the Black Power movement as we imagine new types of blackness. Margo Natalie Crawford argues that we have misread the Black Arts Movement's call for blackness. We have failed to see the movement's anticipation of the "new black" and "post-black." Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics. Crawford zooms in on the 1970s second wave of the Black Arts Movement and shows the connections between this final wave of the Black Arts movement and the early years of twenty-first century black aesthetics. She uncovers the circle of black post-blackness that pivots on the power of anticipation, abstraction, mixed media, the global South, satire, public interiority, and the fantastic.

In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal--an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea--as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. These interactions, which often foreground Black and Native discourses of conquest and critiques of humanism, offer alternative insights into understanding how slavery, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide structure white supremacy. Among texts and topics, King examines eighteenth-century British mappings of humanness, Nativeness, and Blackness; Black feminist depictions of Black and Native erotics; Black fungibility as a critique of discourses of labor exploitation; and Black art that rewrites conceptions of the human. In outlining the convergences and disjunctions between Black and Native thought and aesthetics, King identifies the potential to create new epistemologies, lines of critical inquiry, and creative practices.

In this analysis of social history, examine the complex lineage of America's oppression of Black companionship. According to the 2010 US census, more than seventy percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis. Dianne Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split up couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north, where the welfare system mandated that women remain single in order to receive government support. And no institution has forbidden Black love as effectively as the prison-industrial complex, which removes Black men en masse from the pool of marriageable partners. Prodigiously researched and deeply felt, Black Women, Black Love reveals how white supremacy has systematically broken the heart of Black America, and it proposes strategies for dismantling the structural forces that have plagued Black love and marriage for centuries.

Meditations on activism following the turbulent 1960s--back in print After the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, James and Grace Lee Boggs decided they should rethink what activism looks like. Pairing with trusted veteran activists Freddy and Lyman Paine, they ruminated on central questions emerging from their politics and activism, and they discussed the purpose and responsibilities human beings share for the future. The recorded dialogue among these four friends invites readers to consider the fundamentals of activism with tough, thought-provoking questions. Their conversations at the Paines' home on Sutton Island, Maine, not only function as political act but also present unsettling truths and develop connections between philosophy, music, art, gender difference, family structure, Marxism, and more. Conversations in Maine is a call to all citizens to work together and think deeply about the kind of future we can create.

Introducing this collection of essays, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih argue that looking back--investigating the historical, intellectual, and political entanglements of contemporary academic disciplines--offers a way for scholars in the humanities to move critical debates forward. They describe how disciplines or methodologies that seem distinct today emerged from overlapping intellectual and political currents in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the era of decolonization, the U.S. civil rights movement, and antiwar activism. While both American ethnic studies programs and "French theory" originated in decolonial impulses, over time, French theory became depoliticized in the American academy. Meanwhile, ethnic studies, and later also postcolonial studies, developed politically and historically grounded critiques of inequality. Suggesting that the abstract universalisms of Euro-American theory may ultimately be the source of its demise, Lionnet and Shih advocate the creolization of theory: the development of a reciprocal, relational, and intersectional critical approach attentive to the legacies of colonialism. This use of creolization as a theoretical and analytical rubric is placed in critical context by Dominique Chancé, who provides a genealogy of the concept of creolization. In their essays, leading figures in their fields explore the intellectual, disciplinary, and ethical implications of the creolized theory elaborated by Lionnet and Shih. Édouard Glisssant links the extremes of globalization to those of colonialism and imperialism in an interview appearing for the first time in English in this volume. The Creolization of Theory is a bold intervention in debates about the role of theory in the humanities. Contributors. Étienne Balibar, Dominique Chancé, Pheng Cheah, Leo Ching, Liz Constable, Anne Donadey, Fatima El-Tayeb, Julin Everett, Édouard Glissant, Barnor Hesse, Ping-hui Liao, Françoise Lionnet, Walter Mignolo, Andrea Schwieger Hiepko, Shu-mei Shih

Building on the intellectual and political momentum that established the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, this Reader inaugurates a radical response to the appropriations of liberal multiculturalism while building on the possibilities enlivened by the historical work of Ethnic Studies. It does not attempt to circumscribe the boundaries of Critical Ethnic Studies; rather, it offers a space to promote open dialogue, discussion, and debate regarding the field's expansive, politically complex, and intellectually rich concerns. Covering a wide range of topics, from multiculturalism, the neoliberal university, and the exploitation of bodies to empire, the militarized security state, and decolonialism, these twenty-five essays call attention to the urgency of articulating a Critical Ethnic Studies for the twenty-first century.

A new edition of a seminal text in Critical Race Theory Since the publication of the third edition of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction in 2017, the United States has experienced a dramatic increase in racially motivated mass shootings and a pandemic that revealed how deeply entrenched medical racism is and how public disasters disproportionately affect minority communities. We have also seen a sharp backlash against Critical Race Theory, and a president who deemed racism a thing of the past while he fanned the flames of racial intolerance and promoted nativist sentiments among his followers. Now more than ever, the racial disparities in all aspects of public life are glaringly obvious. Taking note of all these developments, this fourth edition covers a range of new topics and events and addresses the rise of a fierce wave of criticism from right-wing websites, think tanks, and foundations, some of which insist that America is now colorblind and has little use for racial analysis and study. Award-winning authors Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic also address the rise in legislative efforts to curtail K-12 teaching of racial history. Critical Race Theory, Fourth Edition, is essential for understanding developments in this burgeoning field, which has spread to other disciplines and countries. The new edition also covers the ways in which other societies and disciplines adapt its teachings and, for readers wanting to advance a progressive race agenda, includes new readings and questions for discussion aimed at outlining practical steps to achieve this objective.

Praise for the first edition "Ahmed's work contributes to cultural studies and rhetorical theory by elaborating a process through which we can approach everyday emotional practices as rich and complex sites interwoven in struggles for social change."--Rachel C. Riedner, JAC What do emotions do? How do emotions move us or get us stuck? In developing a theory of the cultural politics of emotion, Sara Ahmed focuses on the relationship between emotions, language, and bodies. She shows how emotions are named in speech acts, as well as how they involve sensations that can be felt not only emotionally, but physically. A new methodology for reading 'the emotionality of texts' is offered as are analyses of the role of emotions in debates on international terrorism, asylum and migration, and reconciliation and reparation. Attending to the intersections between race, gender, and sexuality, The Cultural Politics of Emotion is in dialogue with key trends in gender studies and cultural studies, the psychology and sociology of emotions, and phenomenology and psychoanalysis. It takes as its point of entry different emotions -- pain, hate, fear, disgust, shame, and love -- and reflects on the role of emotions in feminist and queer politics. In a special afterwordto this tenth anniversary edition, Ahmedexplains to readershow this classic book relates toother key works in the emergent field of affect studies and also reflects on the way the book has been part of her own intellectual trajectory.

In Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brooks, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and The Book of Negroes, to contemporary art, literature, biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm.

This vital addition to carceral, prison, and disability studies draws important new links between deinstitutionalization and decarceration Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system. Liat Ben-Moshe provides groundbreaking case studies that show how abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration--antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Ben-Moshe discusses a range of topics, including why deinstitutionalization is often wrongly blamed for the rise in incarceration; who resists decarceration and deinstitutionalization, and the coalitions opposing such resistance; and how understanding deinstitutionalization as a form of residential integration makes visible intersections with racial desegregation. By connecting deinstitutionalization with prison abolition, Decarcerating Disability also illuminates some of the limitations of disability rights and inclusion discourses, as well as tactics such as litigation, in securing freedom. Decarcerating Disability's rich analysis of lived experience, history, and culture helps to chart a way out of a failing system of incarceration.

On the surface, Riverview High School looks like the post-racial ideal. Serving an enviably affluent, diverse, and liberal district, the school is well-funded, its teachers are well-trained, and many of its students are high achieving. Yet Riverview has not escaped the same unrelentingquestion that plagues schools throughout America: why is it that even when all of the circumstances seem right, black and Latino students continue to lag behind their peers?Through five years' worth of interviews and data-gathering at Riverview, John Diamond and Amanda Lewis have created a rich and disturbing portrait of the achievement gap that persists more than fifty years after the formal dismantling of segregation. As students progress from elementary school tomiddle school to high school, their level of academic achievement increasingly tracks along racial lines, with white and Asian students maintaining higher GPAs and standardized testing scores, taking more advanced classes, and attaining better college admission results than their black and Latinocounterparts. Most research to date has focused on the role of poverty, family stability, and other external influences in explaining poor performance at school, especially in urban contexts. Diamond and Lewis instead situate their research in a suburban school, and look at what factors within theschool itself could be causing the disparity. Most crucially, they challenge many common explanations of the "racial achievement gap," exploring what race actually means in this situation, and why it matters.An in-depth study with far-reaching consequences, Despite the Best Intentions revolutionizes our understanding of both the knotty problem of academic disparities and the larger question of the color line in American society.

The word "dignity" is not typically used in education, yet it is at the core of strong pedagogy. This book names the concept and shows readers what education looks like when it is centered on students' dignity. By bringing together a collection of chapters written by authors with wide-ranging expertise, this volume presents a powerful approach to education that reminds people of their somebodiness--the premise that each person inherently possesses the intellectual acumen and creative resources to pursue development on their own terms. This timely book brings dignity into sharper focus, moving the field toward a language that captures what is required for oppressed communities to recognize their potential. It synthesizes research for educators, school leaders, and educational activists to help them make sense of what they are working for and against: dignity and the numerous affronts to it. Dignity-Affirming Education is important reading for anyone who works with students of any age, including nontraditional or adult learners, in formal and informal educational contexts. Book Features: Provides a clear picture of how educators can affirm students' dignity in their everyday practice. Outlines an approach to social-emotional learning (SEL) that takes social processes such as stigma, exclusion, and marginalization into account. Offers vivid portraits of what dignity-affirming education can be for a variety of settings. Contributes to a new vocabulary for seeing educational processes as students experience them. Presents rigorous research in a way that is digestible for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars alike. Provides a base for emerging study and sets the stage for additional inquiry and research.

After the "Black is Beautiful" movement of the 1960s, black body politics have been overdetermined by both the familiar fetishism of light skin as well as the counter-fetishism of dark skin. Moving beyond the longstanding focus on the tragic mulatta and making room for the study of the fetishism of both light-skinned and dark-skinned blackness, Margo Natalie Crawford analyzes depictions of colorism in the work of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Thurman, William Faulkner, Black Arts poets, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman. In Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus, Crawford adds images of skin color dilution as a type of castration to the field of race and psychoanalysis. An undercurrent of light-skinned blackness as a type of castration emerges within an ongoing story about the feminizing of light skin and the masculinizing of dark skin. Crawford confronts the web of beautified and eroticized brands and scars, created by colorism, crisscrossing race, gender, and sexuality. The depiction of the horror of these aestheticized brands and scars begins in the white-authored and black-authored modernist literature examined in the first chapters. A call for the end of the ongoing branding emerges with sheer force in the post-Black movement novels examined in the final chapters.

From the shutdown of Planned Parenthood clinics and rising rates of HIV to opposition to marriage equality and bathroom bills, the New South is the epicenter of the new sex wars. Antagonism toward reproductive freedom, partner rights, and transgender rights has revealed a new and unacknowledged era of southern reconstruction centered on gender and sexuality. In A Dirty South Manifesto, L.H. Stallings celebrates the roots of radical sexual resistance in the New South--a movement that is antiracist, decolonial, and transnational. For people within economically disenfranchised segments of society, those in sexually marginalized communities, and the racially oppressed, the South has been a sexual dystopia. Throughout this book, Stallings delivers hard-hitting manifestos for the new sex wars. With her focus on contemporary Black southern life, Stallings offers an invitation to anyone who has ever imagined a way of living beyond white supremacist heteropatriarchy.

Set against the media environment that saturates even our most intimate spaces, Dispatch attends to, revises, and thinks adjacent to the news of racial/gendered violence in the US, from the nineteenth century to the present day. These poems ask: What kind of revisions will make this a world/a story that is concerned with my people's flourishing? How ought I pay attention, how to register perpetual bad news without letting it fatally intrude? Cameron Awkward-Rich is among the most bracing voices to emerge in recent years, a dazzling exemplar of poetry's (and humanity's) possibilities.

Winner, 2021 Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, given by the Popular Culture Association Winner, 2021 Nancy Baym Annual Book Award, given by the Association of Internet Researchers An explanation of the digital practices of the Black Internet From BlackPlanet to #BlackGirlMagic, Distributed Blackness places Blackness at the very center of internet culture. André Brock Jr. claims issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how "Blackness" gets worked out in various technological domains. As Brock demonstrates, there's nothing niche or subcultural about expressions of Blackness on social media: internet use and practice now set the terms for what constitutes normative participation. Drawing on critical race theory, linguistics, rhetoric, information studies, and science and technology studies, Brock tabs between Black-dominated technologies, websites, and social media to build a set of Black beliefs about technology. In explaining Black relationships with and alongside technology, Brock centers the unique joy and sense of community in being Black online now.

"Identity politics" is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture--deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò's crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of "class" vs. "race." By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.

This study explores contemporary novels, films, performances, and reenactments that depict American slavery and its traumatic effects by invoking a time-travel paradigm to produce a representational strategy of "bodily epistemology." Disrupting the prevailing view of traumatic knowledge that claims that traumatic events are irretrievable and accessible only through oblique reference, these novels and films circumvent the notion of indirect reference by depicting a replaying of the past, forcing present-day protagonists to witness and participate in traumatic histories that for them are neither dead nor past. Further, live performances and reenactments of slavery also rely on the time-travel motif (and the requisite suspension of disbelief) as a strategy to confront contemporary audiences with such spectacles as slave ship captivity, slave auctions, or a slave's decision to escape to freedom. As Lisa Woolfork cogently reveals, these cultural expressions indicate a concern that the traumatic meanings and consequences of American slavery have been lost to those living in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Woolfork analyzes how these works deploy a representational strategy that challenges the divide between past and present, imparting to their re-creations of American slavery a physical and emotional energy to counter America's apathetic or amnesiac attitude about the trauma of the slave past.

In the tradition of Octavia Butler, radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help to shape the futures we want. Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist "spirituality" based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.

Following a history of racial oppression and segregation, Black Americans were able to move in greater numbers into previously all- or predominantly-White colleges and universities. However, they encountered normative structures that excluded or distorted the Black experience and denied Black perspectives. As a result, Black studies grew up reconstructing the humanity of a historically oppressed, devalued, and exploited group. Knowledge production in Black studies offers distinct insights into the strength and resiliency of the human spirit and poses exemplary models for enlightened social change. This book examines the foundational parameters and historical mission of the field of African-American Studies, which emerged from a broad-based Black intellectual tradition defined by the metaproblem of cultural hegemony. Semmes seeks to broaden our thinking about the scope and content of Black studies. The End of Black Studies identifies Afrocentric or Black-centered approaches to knowledge production that are distinctly different from, yet inclusive of, a historiographical emphasis on ancient Egypt, but alternative to the claim of a singular African worldview. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in the field of Black Studies, including African American studies, Africana studies, Africology, and Pan-African studies. It will be a source of critical discussion for graduate seminars examining theory building and/or knowledge production (research and writing) in Black studies. The End of Black Studies has received the 2017 Outstanding Book Award from the National Council for Black Studies. Read the Introduction for free onlineusingour eBook widget >>

A major intervention in the fields of critical race theory, black feminism, and queer theory, The Erotic Life of Racism contends that theoretical and political analyses of race have largely failed to understand and describe the profound ordinariness of racism and the ways that it operates as a quotidian practice. If racism has an everyday life, how does it remain so powerful and yet mask its very presence? To answer this question, Sharon Patricia Holland moves into the territory of the erotic, understanding racism's practice as constitutive to the practice of racial being and erotic choice. Reemphasizing the black/white binary, Holland reinvigorates critical engagement with race and racism. She argues that only by bringing critical race theory, queer theory, and black feminist thought into conversation with each other can we fully envision the relationship between racism and the personal and political dimensions of our desire. The Erotic Life of Racism provocatively redirects our attention to a desire no longer independent of racism but rather embedded within it.

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series 2011 Winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award presented by the Modern Language Association Challenging the conception of empowerment associated with the Black Power Movement and its political and intellectual legacies in the present, Darieck Scott contends that power can be found not only in martial resistance, but, surprisingly, where the black body has been inflicted with harm or humiliation. Theorizing the relation between blackness and abjection by foregrounding often neglected depictions of the sexual exploitation and humiliation of men in works by James Weldon Johnson, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Samuel R. Delany, Extravagant Abjection asks: If we're racialized through domination and abjection, what is the political, personal, and psychological potential in racialization-through-abjection? Using the figure of male rape as a lens through which to examine this question, Scott argues that blackness in relation to abjection endows its inheritors with a form of counter-intuitive power--indeed, what can be thought of as a revised notion of black power. This power is found at the point at which ego, identity, body, race, and nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary. Yet in Extravagant Abjection, "power" assumes an unexpected and paradoxical form. In arguing that blackness endows its inheritors with a surprising form of counter-intuitive power--as a resource for the political present--found at the very point of violation, Extravagant Abjection enriches our understanding of the construction of black male identity.

Lewis R. Gordon's Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking account of Black consciousness by a leading philosopher In this original and penetrating work, Lewis R. Gordon, one of the leading scholars of Black existentialism and anti-Blackness, takes the reader on a journey through the historical development of racialized Blackness, the problems this kind of consciousness produces, and the many creative responses from Black and non-Black communities in contemporary struggles for dignity and freedom. Skillfully navigating a difficult and traumatic terrain, Gordon cuts through the mist of white narcissism and the versions of consciousness it perpetuates. He exposes the bad faith at the heart of many discussions about race and racism not only in America but across the globe, including those who think of themselves as "color blind." As Gordon reveals, these lies offer many white people an inherited sense of being extraordinary, a license to do as they please. But for many if not most Blacks, to live an ordinary life in a white-dominated society is an extraordinary achievement. Informed by Gordon's life growing up in Jamaica and the Bronx, and taking as a touchstone the pandemic and the uprisings against police violence, Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking work that positions Black consciousness as a political commitment and creative practice, richly layered through art, love, and revolutionary action.

More than two million people are currently imprisoned in the United States, and the nation's incarceration rate is now the highest in the world. The dramatic rise and consolidation of America's prison system has devastated lives and communities. But it has also transformed prisons into primary sites of radical political discourse and resistance as they have become home to a growing number of writers, activists, poets, educators, and other intellectuals who offer radical critiques of American society both within and beyond the prison walls. In Forced Passages, Dylan Rodríguez argues that the cultural production of such imprisoned intellectuals as Mumia Abu-Jamal, Angela Davis, Leonard Peltier, George Jackson, José Solis Jordan, Ramsey Muniz, Viet Mike Ngo, and Marilyn Buck should be understood as a social and intellectual movement in and of itself, unique in context and substance. Rodríguez engages with a wide range of texts, including correspondence, memoirs, essays, poetry, communiqués, visual art, and legal writing, drawing on published works by widely recognized figures and by individuals outside the public's field of political vision or concern. Throughout, Rodríguez focuses on the conditions under which imprisoned intellectuals live and work, and he explores how incarceration shapes the ways in which insurgent knowledge is created, disseminated, and received. More than a series of close readings of prison literature, Forced Passages identifies and traces the discrete lineage of radical prison thought since the 1970s, one formed by the logic of state violence and by the endemic racism of the criminal justice system. Dylan Rodríguez is assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside.

The eminent scholar Lewis R. Gordon offers a probing meditation on freedom, justice, and decolonization. What is there to be understood and done when it is evident that the search for justice, which dominates social and political philosophy of the North, is an insufficient approach for the achievements of dignity, freedom, liberation, and revolution? Gordon takes the reader on a journey as he interrogates a trail from colonized philosophy to re-imagining liberation and revolution to critical challenges raised by Afropessimism, theodicy, and looming catastrophe. He offers not forecast and foreclosure but instead an urgent call for dignifying and urgent acts of political commitment. Such movements take the form of examining what philosophy means in Africana philosophy, liberation in decolonial thought, and the decolonization of justice and normative life. Gordon issues a critique of the obstacles to cultivating emancipatory politics, challenging reductionist forms of thought that proffer harm and suffering as conditions of political appearance and the valorization of nonhuman being. He asserts instead emancipatory considerations for occluded forms of life and the irreplaceability of existence in the face of catastrophe and ruin, and he concludes, through a discussion with the Circassian philosopher and decolonial theorist, Madina Tlostanova, with the project of shifting the geography of reason.

Funk. It is multisensory and multidimensional philosophy used in conjunction with the erotic, eroticism, and black erotica. It is the affect that shapes film, performance, sound, food, technology, drugs, energy, time, and the seeds of revolutionary ideas for black movements. But funk is also an experience to feel, to hear, to touch and taste, and in Funk the Erotic, L. H. Stallings uses funk in all its iterations as an innovation in black studies. Stallings uses funk to highlight the importance of the erotic and eroticism in Black cultural and political movements, debunking "the truth of sex" and its histories. Brandishing funk as a theoretical tool, Stallings argues that Western theories of the erotic fail as universally applicable terms or philosophies, and thus lack utility in discussions of black bodies, subjects, and culture. In considering the Victorian concept of freak in black funk, Stallings proposes that black artists across all media have fashioned a tradition that embraces the superfreak, sexual guerrilla, sexual magic, mama's porn, black trans narratives, and sex work in a post-human subject position. Their goal: to ensure survival and evolution in a world that exploits black bodies in capitalist endeavors, imperialism, and colonization. Revitalizing and wide-ranging, Funk the Erotic offers a needed examination of black sexual cultures, a discursive evolution of black ideas about eroticism, a critique of work society, a reexamination of love, and an articulation of the body in black movements.

A vivid portrait of African American life in today's urban South that uses food to explore the complex interactions of race and class Getting Something to Eat in Jackson uses food--what people eat and how--to explore the interaction of race and class in the lives of African Americans in the contemporary urban South. Joseph Ewoodzie Jr. examines how "foodways"--food availability, choice, and consumption--vary greatly between classes of African Americans in Jackson, Mississippi, and how this reflects and shapes their very different experiences of a shared racial identity. Ewoodzie spent more than a year following a group of socioeconomically diverse African Americans--from upper-middle-class patrons of the city's fine-dining restaurants to men experiencing homelessness who must organize their days around the schedules of soup kitchens. Ewoodzie goes food shopping, cooks, and eats with a young mother living in poverty and a grandmother working two jobs. He works in a Black-owned BBQ restaurant, and he meets a man who decides to become a vegan for health reasons but who must drive across town to get tofu and quinoa. Ewoodzie also learns about how soul food is changing and why it is no longer a staple survival food. Throughout, he shows how food choices influence, and are influenced by, the racial and class identities of Black Jacksonians. By tracing these contemporary African American foodways, Getting Something to Eat in Jackson offers new insights into the lives of Black Southerners and helps challenge the persistent homogenization of blackness in American life.

Contributors to this issue of Nka complicate the key paradigms that have shaped the theories and cultural productions of the African diaspora by offering a critical and nuanced analysis of global black consciousness. Literary scholars, historians, visual art critics, and diaspora theorists explore the confluence between theories of African diaspora and theories of decolonization. They examine the intersections of visual art, literature, film, and other cultural productions alongside the crosscurrents that shaped the transnational flow of black consciousness. The contributors revisit major black and Pan-African intellectual movements and festivals in the 1960s and 1970s, including the Dakar Festival of World Negro Arts held in Dakar in 1966, the Pan-African Cultural Festival in 1969 in Algiers, and FESTAC 1977 in Lagos, Nigeria. Throughout this issue, the contributors examine both the problem and promise of mobilizing "blackness" as a unifying concept. Contributors: Hisham Aidi, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Ahmed Bedjaoui, Margo Natalie Crawford, Romi Crawford, Lydie Diakhaté, Manthia Diawara, Amanda Gilvin, Salah M. Hassan, Shannen Hill, Tsitsi Jaji, Barbara Murray, Zita Nunes, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Richard J. Powell, Holiday Powers, Shana L. Redmond, Penny M. Von Eschen, Dagmawi Woubshet

In her new book, Valerie Kinloch investigates how the lives and literacies of youth in New York City's historic Harlem are affected by public attempts to gentrify the community. Kinloch draws connections between race, place, and students' literate identities through interviews with youth, teachers, longtime Black residents, and their new White neighbors. ""Harlem on Our Minds"" is a participatory action narrative that brings emerging theories of social ecology to life for the high school English classroom. Vividly drawn lessons show how teachers can engage urban youth in school-based literacy by linking canonical text, particularly of the Harlem Renaissance, to current events. Centered on the literacy stories of two African American youth and their peers, this book: showcases the multimodal literacy practices of urban youth through photographs, writing samples, student-designed research projects, and more; weaves in multiple voices and perspectives through response pieces by project participants, local teachers, a graduate student, and a community activist; and, features summaries of teaching strategies.

"Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly." So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as "rage," and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms. With care and verve, he explores the mad in the literature of Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange; in the jazz repertoires of Buddy Bolden, Sun Ra, and Charles Mingus; in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; in the protest music of Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick Lamar, and beyond. These artists activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition. Joining this tradition, Bruce mobilizes a set of interpretive practices, affective dispositions, political principles, and existential orientations that he calls "mad methodology." Ultimately, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind is both a study and an act of critical, ethical, radical madness.

Going beyond the 'blackness' of black art to examine the integrative and interdisciplinary practices of Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L-five contemporary black artists in whose work race plays anything but a defining role.Work by black artists today is almost uniformly understood in terms of its "blackness," with audiences often expecting or requiring it to "represent" the race. In How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, Darby English shows how severely such expectations limit the scope of our knowledge about this work and how different it looks when approached on its own terms. Refusing to grant racial blackness-his metaphorical "total darkness"-primacy over his subjects' other concerns and contexts, he brings to light problems and possibilities that arise when questions of artistic priority and freedom come into contact, or even conflict, with those of cultural obligation. English examines the integrative and interdisciplinary strategies of five contemporary artists-Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L-stressing the ways in which this work at once reflects and alters our view of its informing context- the advent of postmodernity in late twentieth-century American art and culture.The necessity for "black art" comes both from antiblack racism and resistances to it, from both segregation and efforts to imagine an autonomous domain of black culture. Yet to judge by the work of many contemporary practitioners, English writes, black art is increasingly less able-and black artists less willing-to maintain its standing as a realm apart. Through close examinations of Walker's controversial silhouettes' insubordinate reply to pictorial tradition, Wilson's and Julien's distinct approaches to institutional critique, Ligon's text paintings' struggle with modernisms, and Pope.L's vexing performance interventions, English grounds his contention that to understand this work is to displace race from its central location in our interpretation and to grant right of way to the work's historical, cultural, and aesthetic specificity.

In the history of black America, the image of the mortal, wounded, and dead black body has long been looked at by others from a safe distance. Courtney Baker questions the relationship between the spectator and victim and urges viewers to move beyond the safety of the "gaze" to cultivate a capacity for humane insight toward representations of human suffering. Utilizing the visual studies concept termed the "look," Baker interrogates how the notion of humanity was articulated and recognized in oft-referenced moments within the African American experience: the graphic brutality of the 1834 Lalaurie affair; the photographic exhibition of lynching, Without Sanctuary ; Emmett Till's murder and funeral; and the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Contemplating these and other episodes, Baker traces how proponents of black freedom and dignity used the visual display of violence against the black body to galvanize action against racial injustice. An innovative cultural study that connects visual theory to African American history, Humane Insight asserts the importance of ethics in our analysis of race and visual culture, and reveals how representations of pain can become the currency of black liberation from injustice.

This transformative collection advances new approaches to Black intellectual history by foregrounding the experiences and ideas of people who lacked access to more privileged mechanisms of public discourse and power. While the anthology highlights renowned intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, it also spotlights thinkers such as enslaved people in the antebellum United States, US Black expatriates in Guyana, and Black internationals in Liberia. The knowledge production of these men, women, and children has typically been situated outside the disciplinary and conceptual boundaries of intellectual history. The volume centers on the themes of slavery and sexuality; abolitionism; Black internationalism; Black protest, politics, and power; and the intersections of the digital humanities and Black intellectual history. The essays draw from diverse methodologies and fields to examine the ideas and actions of Black thinkers from the eighteenth century to the present, offering fresh insights while creating space for even more creative approaches within the field. Timely and incisive, Ideas in Unexpected Places encourages scholars to ask new questions through innovative interpretive lenses--and invites students, scholars, and other practitioners to push the boundaries of Black intellectual history even further.

The concept of intersectionality has become a central topic in academic and activist circles alike. But what exactly does it mean, and why has it emerged as such a vital lens through which to explore how social inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and ethnicity shape one another? In this fully revised and expanded second edition of their popular text, Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge provide a much-needed introduction to the field of intersectional knowledge and praxis. Analyzing the emergence, growth, and contours of the concept of intersectionality, the authors also consider its global reach through an array of new topics such as the rise of far-right populism, reproductive justice, climate change, and digital environments and cultures. Accessibly written and drawing on a plethora of lively examples to illustrate its arguments, the book highlights intersectionality's potential for understanding complex architecture of social and economic inequalities and bringing about social justice-oriented change. Intersectionalitywill be an invaluable resource for anyone grappling with the main ideas, debates, and new directions in this field.

Published for the artist's solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum, this new series of paintings by Brooklyn-based painter Kehinde Wiley (born 1977) reenvisions the museum's holdings as a starting point for succinct observations about representation throughout the history of art. Through a process of street casting starting in 2017, Wiley invited residents he met in the neighborhoods of north St. Louis and Ferguson to pose for his paintings. The artist then created portrait paintings inspired by carefully chosen artworks in the museum's permanent collection. Wiley specifically chose Ferguson, Missouri, after the city became a flashpoint for nationwide protests touching on much larger issues of race, injustice and police violence. This catalog features 11 new paintings by Kehinde Wiley and essays by Simon Kelly, Curator and Head of Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at Saint Louis Art Museum, and Hannah Klemm, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Saint Louis Art Museum.

This volume includes a selection of 22 new portrait paintings from Kehinde Wiley's multinational World Stage series, which has included Africa, China and India in the past and now moves on to Brazil. Immersing himself in the local culture of Rio de Janeiro, Wiley incorporates the people, history and aesthetic of the city in each of his monumental male portraits. His models, chosen from the favela slums, reflect historically significant public sculptures found within the city. Oversize tropical flowers in full bloom, appropriated from Brazilian textiles, inundate the work with saturated, brightly hued colors suggestive of Brazilian exoticism. Likening African-descended, young Brazilian males to canonical figures from Western art history as well as Brazilian public monuments, Wiley renders masculinity both august and noble. Text in English and Portuguese.

Over the past several years, scholars, activists, and analysts have begun to examine the growing divide between the wealthy and the rest of us, suggesting that the divide can be traced to the neoliberal turn. "I'm not a business man; I'm a business, man." Perhaps no better statement gets at the heart of this turn. Increasingly we're being forced to think of ourselves in entrepreneurial terms, forced to take more and more responsibility for developing our "human capital." Furthermore a range of institutions from churches to schools to entire cities have been remade, restructured to in order to perform like businesses. Finally, even political concepts like freedom, and democracy have been significantly altered. As a result we face higher levels of inequality than any other time over the last century. In Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, Lester K. Spence writes the first book length effort to chart the effects of this transformation on African American communities, in an attempt to revitalize the black political imagination. Rather than asking black men and women to "hustle harder" Spence criticizes the act of hustling itself as a tactic used to demobilize and disempower the communities most in need of empowerment.

A blazingly intelligent first book of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time *The Guardian* Harper's Bazaar * San Francisco Chronicle * The Atlantic * Financial Times * Kirkus Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and PEN/Jean Stein Book Award With this collection of more than fifty pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today's most powerful and original voices. On page after page, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram. Cole brings us new considerations of James Baldwin in the age of Black Lives Matter; the African American photographer Roy DeCarava, who, forced to shoot with film calibrated exclusively for white skin tones, found his way to a startling and true depiction of black subjects; and (in an essay that inspired both praise and pushbackwhen it first appeared) the White Savior Industrial Complex, the system by which African nations are sentimentally aided by an America "developed on pillage." Persuasive and provocative, erudite yet accessible, Known and Strange Things is an opportunity to live within Teju Cole's wide-ranging enthusiasms, curiosities, and passions, and a chance to see the world in surprising and affecting new frames. Praise for Known and Strange Things "On every level of engagement and critique,Known and Strange Thingsis an essential and scintillating journey."--Claudia Rankine,The New York Times Book Review(Editors' Choice) "A heady mix of wit, nostalgia, pathos, and a genuine desire to untangle the world, or at the least, to bask in its unending riddles."--The Atlantic "Brilliant . . . [Known and Strange Things] reveals Cole's extraordinary talent and his capacious mind."--Time "[Known and Strange Things] showcases the magnificent breadth of subjects [Cole] is able to plumb with . . . passion and eloquence."--Harper's Bazaar "[Cole is] one of the most vibrant voices in contemporary writing."--LA Times "Cole has fulfilled the dazzling promise of his novelsEvery Day Is for the ThiefandOpen City. He ranges over his interests with voracious keenness, laser-sharp prose, an open heart and a clear eye."--The Guardian "Remarkably probing essays . . . Cole is one of only a very few lavishing his focused attention on that most approachable (and perhaps therefore most overlooked) art form, photography."--Chicago Tribune "There's almost no subject Cole can't come at from a startling angle. . . . His [is a] prickly, eclectic, roaming mind."--The Boston Globe "[Cole] brings a subtle, layered perspective to all he encounters."--Vanity Fair "In page after page, Cole upholds the sterling virtue of good writing combined with emotional and intellectual engagement."--The New Statesman "[Known and Strange Thingspossesses] a passion for justice, a deep sympathy for the poor and the powerless around the world, and a fiery moral outrage."--Poets and Writers

In The Long Emancipation Rinaldo Walcott posits that Black people globally live in the time of emancipation and that emancipation is definitely not freedom. Taking examples from across the globe, he argues that wherever Black people have been emancipated from slavery and colonization, a potential freedom has been thwarted. Walcott names this condition the long emancipation--the ongoing interdiction of potential Black freedom and the continuation of the juridical and legislative status of Black nonbeing. Stating that Black people have yet to experience freedom, Walcott shows that being Black in the world is to exist in the time of emancipation in which Black people must constantly fashion alternate conceptions of freedom and reality through expressive culture. Given that Black unfreedom lies at the center of the making of the modern world, the attainment of freedom for Black people, Walcott contends, will transform the human experience worldwide. With The Long Emancipation, Walcott offers a new humanism that begins by acknowledging that present conceptions of what it means to be human do not currently include Black people.

In Mama's Gun: Black Maternal Figures and the Politics of Transgression, Marlo D. David identifies five bold, new archetypes of black motherhood for the post-civil rights generation in order to imagine new ways of thinking about pervasive maternal stereotypes of black women. Rather than avoiding "negative" images of black motherhood, such as welfare queens, teen mothers, and "baby mamas," Mama's Gun centralizes these dispossessed figures and renames them as the Young Mother, the Blues Mama, the Surrogate, Big Mama, and the Mothership. Taking inspiration from African American fiction, historical accounts of black life, Afrofuturism, and black popular culture in music and on screen, David turns her attention to Sapphire's Push, Octavia Butler's Dawn, and Suzan-Lori Parks's Getting Mother's Body as well as the performance art of Erykah Badu and the films of Tyler Perry. She draws out the implications of black maternal figures in these texts who balk at tradition and are far from "ideal." David's study shows how representations of blackness are deeply embedded in the neoliberal language of contemporary American politics and how black writers and performers resist such mainstream ideologies with their own transgressive black maternal figures.

Examining how turn-of-the-century Black cultural producers' experiments with new technologies of racial data produced experimental aesthetics. As the nineteenth century came to a close and questions concerning the future of African American life reached a fever pitch, many social scientists and reformers approached post-emancipation Black life as an empirical problem that could be systematically solved with the help of new technologies like the social survey, photography, and film. What ensued was nothing other than a "racial data revolution," one which rendered African American life an inanimate object of inquiry in the name of social order and racial regulation. At the very same time, African American cultural producers and intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston staged their own kind of revolution,un-discipliningracial data in ways that captured the dynamism of Black social life. The Matter of Black Living excavates the dynamic interplay between racial data and Black aesthetic production that shaped late nineteenth-century social, cultural, and literary atmosphere. Through assembling previously overlooked archives and seemingly familiar texts, Womack shows how these artists and writers recalibrated the relationship between data and Black life. The result isa fresh and nuanced take on the history ofdocumenting Blackness. The Matter of Black Living charts a new genealogy from which we can re-think the political and aesthetic work of racial data, a task that has never been more urgent.

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, InspiringAnchored in the principles of free-market economics, neoliberalism emerged in the 1990s as the world's most dominant economic paradigm. It has been associated with various political leaders from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Bill Clinton, to Tony Blair, Barack Obama, and Manmohan Singh.Neoliberalism even penetrated deeply into communist China's powerful economic system. However, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the related European Sovereign Debt Crisis triggered a decade of economic volatility and insecurity that boosted the fortunes of the 1 per cent while saddling the 99per cent with stagnant wages and precarious work. As a result of this Great Recession, neoliberalism fortunes have waned considerably. This downward trend further accelerated with the recent surge of national populism around the world that brought to power outspoken critics of neoliberalism likeDonald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, and Narendra Modi. Is neoliberalism doomed or will it regain its former glory? And what are the major types of neoliberalism, and how did they evolve over the decades?Responding to these crucial questions, this Very Short introduction explores the considerable variations of neoliberalism around the world, and discusses the origins, evolution, and core ideas of neoliberalism. This new edition brings the story of neoliberalism up to date, and asks whether newversions of neoliberalism might succeed in drowning out the rising tide of national populism and its nostalgic longing for a return to territorial sovereignty and national greatness.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, andenthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Never Meant to Survive present a historical, political, and social assessment of anti-Black genocide and liberatory struggles that arose to resist it. Based on fine-grained accounts of community life at the street level, Joo H. Costa Varga's work considers crucial examples of political resistance and community activism. The 1965 and 1992 riots in Los Angeles, the Black Panther Party and favela activists in Brazil, and police brutality in struggles between Black communities and state in both L.A. and Rio de Janeiro all figure importantly in this compelling account. Book jacket.

From Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, "natural hair" has been associated with the Black freedom struggle. In New Growth Jasmine Nichole Cobb traces the history of Afro-textured coiffure, exploring it as a visual material through which to reimagine the sensual experience of Blackness. Through close readings of slave narratives, scrapbooks, travel illustrations, documentary films, and photography as well as collage, craft, and sculpture, from the nineteenth century to the present, Cobb shows how the racial distinctions ascribed to people of African descent become simultaneously visible and tactile. Whether examining Soul Train's and Ebony's promotion of the Afro hairstyle alongside styling products or how artists such as Alison Saar and Lorna Simpson underscore the construction of Blackness through the representation of hair, Cobb foregrounds the inseparability of Black hair's look and feel. Demonstrating that Blackness is palpable through appearance and feeling, Cobb reveals the various ways that people of African descent forge new relationships to the body, public space, and visual culture through the embrace of Black hair.

From well-known intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass and Nella Larsen to often-obscured thinkers such as Amina Baraka and Bernardo Ruiz Suárez, black theorists across the globe have engaged in sustained efforts to create insurgent and resilient forms of thought. New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition is a collection of twelve essays that explores these and other theorists and their contributions to diverse strains of political, social, and cultural thought. The book examines four central themes within the black intellectual tradition: black internationalism, religion and spirituality, racial politics and struggles for social justice, and black radicalism. The essays identify the emergence of black thought within multiple communities internationally, analyze how black thinkers shaped and were shaped by the historical moment in which they lived, interrogate the ways in which activists and intellectuals connected their theoretical frameworks across time and space, and assess how these strains of thought bolstered black consciousness and resistance worldwide. Defying traditional temporal and geographical boundaries, New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition illuminates the origins of and conduits for black ideas, redefines the relationship between black thought and social action, and challenges long-held assumptions about black perspectives on religion, race, and radicalism. The intellectuals profiled in the volume reshape and redefine the contours and boundaries of black thought, further illuminating the depth and diversity of the black intellectual tradition.

Since the early 2000s, the phenomenon of the "down low"--black men who have sex with men as well as women and do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual--has exploded in news media and popular culture, from the Oprah Winfrey Show to R & B singer R. Kelly's hip hopera Trapped in the Closet. Most down-low stories are morality tales in which black men are either predators who risk infecting their unsuspecting female partners with HIV or victims of a pathological black culture that repudiates openly gay identities. In both cases, down-low narratives depict black men as sexually dangerous, duplicitous, promiscuous, and contaminated. In Nobody Is Supposed to Know, C. Riley Snorton traces the emergence and circulation of the down low in contemporary media and popular culture to show how these portrayals reinforce troubling perceptions of black sexuality. Reworking Eve Sedgwick's notion of the "glass closet," Snorton advances a new theory of such representations in which black sexuality is marked by hypervisibility and confinement, spectacle and speculation. Through close readings of news, music, movies, television, and gossip blogs, Nobody Is Supposed to Know explores the contemporary genealogy, meaning, and functions of the down low. Snorton examines how the down low links blackness and queerness in the popular imagination and how the down low is just one example of how media and popular culture surveil and police black sexuality. Looking at figures such as Ma Rainey, Bishop Eddie L. Long, J. L. King, and Will Smith, he ultimately contends that down-low narratives reveal the limits of current understandings of black sexuality.

An instant national best seller A persuasive primer on police abolition from two veteran organizers "One of the world's most prominent advocates, organizers and political educators of the [abolitionist] framework." --NBCNews.com on Mariame Kaba In this powerful call to action, New York Times bestselling author Mariame Kaba and attorney and organizer Andrea J. Ritchie detail why policing doesn't stop violence, instead perpetuating widespread harm; outline the many failures of contemporary police reforms; and explore demands to defund police, divest from policing, and invest in community resources to create greater safety through a Black feminist lens. Centering survivors of state, interpersonal, and community-based violence, and highlighting uprisings, campaigns, and community-based projects, No More Police makes a compelling case for a world where the tools required to prevent, interrupt, and transform violence in all its forms are abundant. Part handbook, part road map, No More Police calls on us to turn away from systems that perpetrate violence in the name of ending it toward a world where violence is the exception, and safe, well-resourced and thriving communities are the rule.

Whenever we envision a world without war, prisons, or capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought 20 of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. These visionary tales span genres--sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism--but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be. Also features essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a preface by Sheree Renée Thomas. "Those concerned with justice and liberation must always persuade the mass of people that a better world is possible. Our job begins with speculative fictions that fire society's imagination and its desire for change. In adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha's visionary conception, and by its activist-artists' often stunning acts of creative inception, Octavia's Brood makes for great thinking and damn good reading. The rest will be up to us." --Jeff Chang, Who We Be:The Colorization of America "Conventional exclamatory phrases don't come close to capturing the essence of what we have here in Octavia's Brood. One part sacred text, one part social movement manual, one part diary of our future selves telling us, 'It's going to be okay, keep working, keep loving.' Our radical imaginations are under siege and this text is the rescue mission. It is the new cornerstone of every class I teach on inequality, justice, and social change....This is the text we've been waiting for." --Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author ofPeople's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier "Octavia once told me that two things worried her about the future of humanity: The tendency to think hierarchically, and the tendency to place ourselves higher on the hierarchy than others. I think she would be humbled beyond words that the fine, thoughtful writers in this volume have honored her with their hearts and minds. And that in calling for us to consider that hierarchical structure, they are not walking in her shadow, nor standing on her shoulders, but marching at her side." --Steven Barnes, Lion's Blood "Never has one book so thoroughly realized the dream of its namesake.Octavia's Brood is the progeny of two lovers of Octavia Butler and their belief in her dream that science fiction is for everybody.... Butler could not wish for better evidence of her touch changing our literary and living landscapes. Play with these children, read these works, and find the children in you waiting to take root under the stars!" --Moya Bailey and Ayana Jamieson, Octavia E. Butler Legacy "Like [Octavia] Butler's fiction, this collection is cartography, a map to freedom." --dream hampton, filmmaker and Visiting Artist at Stanford University's Institute for Diversity in the Arts Walidah Imarisha is a writer, organizer, educator, and spoken word artist. She is the author of the poetry collectionScars/Stars and facilitates writing workshops at schools, community centers, youth detention facilities, and women's prisons. adrienne maree brown is a 2013 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow writing science fiction in Detroit, Michigan. She received a 2013 Detroit Knight Arts Challenge Award to run a series of Octavia Butler-based writing workshops.

What does diversity do? What are we doing when we use the language of diversity? Sara Ahmed offers an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as her own experience of doing diversity work. Diversity is an ordinary, even unremarkable, feature of institutional life. Yet diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the "brick wall." On Being Included offers an explanation of this apparent paradox. It explores the gap between symbolic commitments to diversity and the experience of those who embody diversity. Commitments to diversity are understood as "non-performatives" that do not bring about what they name. The book provides an account of institutional whiteness and shows how racism can be obscured by the institutionalization of diversity. Diversity is used as evidence that institutions do not have a problem with racism. On Being Included offers a critique of what happens when diversity is offered as a solution. It also shows how diversity workers generate knowledge of institutions in attempting to transform them.

Nominated for the Heritage Toronto Book Award * Longlisted for the Toronto Book Awards*A Globe and Mail Book of the Year*A CBC Books Best Canadian Nonfiction of 2021 From plantation rebellion to prison labour's super-exploitation, Walcott examines the relationship between policing and property. That a man can lose his life for passing a fake $20 bill when we know our economies are flush with fake money says something damning about the way we've organized society. Yet the intensity of the calls to abolish the police after George Floyd's death surprised almost everyone. What, exactly, does abolition mean? How did we get here? And what does property have to do with it? In On Property, Rinaldo Walcott explores the long shadow cast by slavery's afterlife and shows how present-day abolitionists continue the work of their forebears in service of an imaginative, creative philosophy that ensures freedom and equality for all. Thoughtful, wide-ranging, compassionate, and profound, On Property makes an urgent plea for a new ethics of care.

M. Jacqui Alexander is one of the most important theorists of transnational feminism working today. Pedagogies of Crossing brings together essays she has written over the past decade, uniting her incisive critiques, which have had such a profound impact on feminist, queer, and critical race theories, with some of her more recent work. In this landmark interdisciplinary volume, Alexander points to a number of critical imperatives made all the more urgent by contemporary manifestations of neoimperialism and neocolonialism. Among these are the need for North American feminism and queer studies to take up transnational frameworks that foreground questions of colonialism, political economy, and racial formation; for a thorough re-conceptualization of modernity to account for the heteronormative regulatory practices of modern state formations; and for feminists to wrestle with the spiritual dimensions of experience and the meaning of sacred subjectivity. In these meditations, Alexander deftly unites large, often contradictory, historical processes across time and space. She focuses on the criminalization of queer communities in both the United States and the Caribbean in ways that prompt us to rethink how modernity invents its own traditions; she juxtaposes the political organizing and consciousness of women workers in global factories in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada with the pressing need for those in the academic factory to teach for social justice; she reflects on the limits and failures of liberal pluralism; and she presents original and compelling arguments that show how and why transgenerational memory is an indispensable spiritual practice within differently constituted women-of-color communities as it operates as a powerful antidote to oppression. In this multifaceted, visionary book, Alexander maps the terrain of alternative histories and offers new forms of knowledge with which to mold alternative futures.

The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: "I just want you to be happy"; "I'm happy if you're happy." Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the "happiness duty," the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way. Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

This book is openly available in digital formats thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Many of today's insurgent Black movements call for an end to racial capitalism. They take aim at policing and mass incarceration, the racial partitioning of workplaces and residential communities, the expropriation and underdevelopment of Black populations at home and abroad. Scholars and activists increasingly regard these practices as essential technologies of capital accumulation, evidence that capitalist societies past and present enshrine racial inequality as a matter of course. In Prophet of Discontent, Andrew J. Douglas and Jared A. Loggins invoke contemporary discourse on racial capitalism in a powerful reassessment of Martin Luther King Jr.'s thinking and legacy. Like today's organizers, King was more than a dreamer. He knew that his call for a "radical revolution of values" was complicated by the production and circulation of value under capitalism. He knew that the movement to build the beloved community required sophisticated analyses of capitalist imperialism, state violence, and racial formations, as well as unflinching solidarity with the struggles of the Black working class. Shining new light on King's largely implicit economic and political theories, and expanding appreciation of the Black radical tradition to which he belonged, Douglas and Loggins reconstruct, develop, and carry forward King's strikingly prescient critique of capitalist society.

2021 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Winner of the 2021 Gregory Bateson Book Prize presented by the Society for Cultural Anthropology Winner of the 2020 Ruth Benedict Prize presented by the Association for Queer Anthropology Theoretically wide-ranging and deeply personal and poetic, Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty is based on more than three years of fieldwork in the Dominican Republic. Ana-Maurine Lara draws on her engagement in traditional ceremonies, observations of national Catholic celebrations, and interviews with activists from peasant, feminist, and LGBT communities to reframe contemporary conversations about queerness and blackness. The result is a rich ethnography of the ways criollo spiritual practices challenge gender and racial binaries and manifest what Lara characterizes as a shared desire for decolonization. Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty is also a ceremonial ofrenda, or offering, in its own right. At its heart is a fundamental question: How can we enable "queer : black" life in all its forms, and what would it mean to be "free : sovereign" in the twenty-first century? Calling on the reader to join her in exploring possible answers, Lara maintains that the analogy between these terms--queerness and blackness, freedom and sovereignty--is necessarily incomplete and unresolved, to be determined only by ongoing processes of embodied, relational knowledge production. Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty thus follows figures such as Sylvia Wynter, María Lugones, M. Jacqui Alexander, Édouard Glissant, Mark Rifkin, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde in working to theorize a potential roadmap to decolonization.

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the "orientation" aspect of "sexual orientation" and the "orient" in "orientalism," Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being "orientated" means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry. Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear--and those that do not--as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl's Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts--by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon--with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

Winner of the 2003 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Awards Winner of the 2003 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award Did affirmative action programs solve the problem of race on American college campuses, as several recent books would have us believe? If so, why does talking about race in anything more than a superficial way make so many students uncomfortable? Written by college instructors from many disciplines, this volume of essays takes a bold first step toward a nationwide conversation. Each of the twenty-nine contributors addresses one central question: what are the challenges facing a college professor who believes that teaching responsibly requires an honest and searching examination of race? Professors from the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and education consider topics such as how the classroom environment is structured by race; the temptation to retreat from challenging students when faced with possible reprisals in the form of complaints or negative evaluations; the implications of using standardized evaluations in faculty tenure and promotion when the course subject is intimately connected with race; and the varying ways in which white faculty and faculty of color are impacted by teaching about race.

The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence.The Racial Contractargues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. As this 25th anniversary edition--featuring a foreword by Tommy Shelbie and a new preface by the author--makes clear, the still-urgent The Racial Contract continues to inspire, provoke, and influence thinking about the intersection of the racist underpinnings of political philosophy.

This work is a collection of articles written over many years as well as unpublished new scholarship that explores the common themes of race and class in the Caribbean and overcoming social domination. The essays consider abstract political theory (Marxism and critical and race theory) and also focus on specific Caribbean issues and events such as the portrayals of the Jamaican left, the collapse of the Grenada Revolution and the significance of the affirmation of personhood in a racist society, but all share a concern with overcoming of social domination and are ?radically? oriented. The title has a double meaning insofar as it signifies both the application of radical theory to the Caribbean reality, and the way in which that reality has too often collided with the theory, revealing its inadequacies.As Mills explains, ?The overall aim is to elucidate some classic subjects and themes in radical theory, both generally and with local Caribbean application, and to map in the process a trajectory of intellectual development not peculiar to my own history but traced by many others of my generation also.?

Reparations for slavery have become a reinvigorated topic for public debate over the last decade. Most theorizing about reparations treats it as a social justice project - either rooted in reconciliatory justice focused on making amends in the present; or, they focus on the past, emphasizingrestitution for historical wrongs. Olufemi O. Taiwo argues that neither approach is optimal, and advances a different case for reparations - one rooted in a hopeful future that tackles the issue of climate change head on, with distributive justice at its core. This view, which he calls the"constructive" view of reparations, argues that reparations should be seen as a future-oriented project engaged in building a better social order; and that the costs of building a more equitable world should be distributed more to those who have inherited the moral liabilities of past injustices.This approach to reparations, as Taiwo shows, has deep and surprising roots in the thought of Black political thinkers such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr, and Nkechi Taifa, as well as mainstream political philosophers like John Rawls, Charles Mills, and Elizabeth Anderson. Taiwo's projecthas wide implications for our views of justice, racism, the legacy of colonialism, and climate change policy.

***INSTANTNEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLER*** Disrupt and push back against capitalism and white supremacy. In this book, Tricia Hersey, aka The Nap Bishop, encourages us to connect to the liberating power of rest, daydreaming, and naps as a foundation for healing and justice. What would it be like to live in a well-rested world? Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by capitalism, we subject our bodies and minds to work at an unrealistic, damaging, and machine‑level pace -- feeding into the same engine that enslaved millions into brutal labor for its own relentless benefit. InRest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey, aka the Nap Bishop, casts an illuminating light on our troubled relationship with rest and how to imagine and dream our way to a future where rest is exalted. Our worth does not reside in how much we produce, especially not for a system that exploits and dehumanizes us. Rest, in its simplest form, becomes an act of resistance and a reclaiming of power because it asserts our most basic humanity. We are enough. The systems cannot have us. Rest Is Resistanceis rooted in spiritual energy and centered in Black liberation, womanism, somatics, and Afrofuturism. With captivating storytelling and practical advice, all delivered in Hersey's lyrical voice and informed by her deep experience in theology, activism, and performance art,Rest Is Resistanceis a call to action, a battle cry, a field guide, and a manifesto for all of us who are sleep deprived, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of Grind Culture.

Saidiya Hartman has been praised as "one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers" (Claudia Rankine, New York Times Book Review) and "a lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy" (Alexis Okeowo, The New Yorker). In Scenes of Subjection--Hartman's first book, now revised and expanded--her singular talents and analytical framework turn away from the "terrible spectacle" and toward the forms of routine terror and quotidian violence characteristic of slavery, illuminating the intertwining of injury, subjugation, and selfhood even in abolitionist depictions of enslavement. By attending to the withheld and overlooked at the margins of the historical archive, Hartman radically reshapes our understanding of history, in a work as resonant today as it was on first publication, now for a new generation of readers. This 25th anniversary edition features a new preface by the author, a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an afterword by Marisa J. Fuentes and Sarah Haley, notations with Cameron Rowland, and compositions by Torkwase Dyson.

In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, editors Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore gather more than twenty essays by Stuart Hall that highlight his extensive and groundbreaking engagement with race, representation, identity, difference, and diaspora. Spanning the whole of his career, this collection includes classic theoretical essays such as "The Whites of Their Eyes" (1981) and "Race, the Floating Signifier" (1997). It also features public lectures, political articles, and popular pieces that circulated in periodicals and newspapers, which demonstrate the breadth and depth of Hall's contribution to public discourses of race. Foregrounding how and why the analysis of race and difference should be concrete and not merely descriptive, this collection gives organizers and students of social theory ways to approach the interconnections of race with culture and consciousness, state and society, policing and freedom.

In everyday language, masochism is usually understood as the desire to abdicate control in exchange for sensation--pleasure, pain, or a combination thereof. Yet at its core, masochism is a site where power, bodies, and society come together. Sensational Flesh uses masochism as a lens to examine how power structures race, gender, and embodiment in different contexts. Drawing on rich and varied sources--from 19th century sexology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory to literary texts and performance art--Amber Jamilla Musser employs masochism as a powerful diagnostic tool for probing relationships between power and subjectivity. Engaging with a range of debates about lesbian S&M, racialization, femininity, and disability, as well as key texts such as Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, Pauline Réage's The Story of O, and Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Musser renders legible the complex ways that masochism has been taken up by queer, feminist, and critical race theories. Furthering queer theory's investment in affect and materiality, she proposes "sensation" as an analytical tool for illustrating what it feels like to be embedded in structures of domination such as patriarchy, colonialism, and racism and what it means to embody femininity, blackness, and pain. Sensational Flesh is ultimately about the ways in which difference is made material through race, gender, and sexuality and how that materiality is experienced.

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.

Sight Unseen explores how racial identity guides the interpretation of the visual world. Through a nimble analysis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings, photographs, museums, and early motion pictures, Martin A. Berger illustrates how a shared investment in whiteness invisibly guides what Americans of European descent see, what they accept as true, and, ultimately, what legal, social, and economic policies they enact. Carefully reconstructing the racial and philosophical contexts of selected artworks that contain no narrative links to race, the author exposes the effects of racial thinking on our interpretation of the visual world. Bucolic genre paintings of white farmers, pristine landscape photographs of the western frontier, monumental civic architecture, and early action films provide case studies for investigating how European-American sight became inextricably bound to the racial values of American society. Berger shows how artworks are more significant for confirming internalized beliefs on race, than they are for selling us on racial values we do not yet own. A significant contribution to the growing field of whiteness studies, this accessible, provocative, and compelling book exposes how something as apparently natural as sight is conditioned by the racial values of society.

A number of arguments have been made to explain the relative weakness of the American Left. A preference for individualism, the effects of prosperity, and the miscalculations of different components of the Left, including the labor movement, have been cited, among other factors, as possible explanations for this puzzling aspect of American exceptionalism. But these arguments, says Richard Iton, overlook a crucial factor--the powerful influence of race upon American life. Iton argues that the failure of the American Left lies in its inability to come to grips with the centrality of race in the American experience. Placing the history of the American Left in an illuminating comparative context, he also broadens our definition of the Left to include not just political parties and labor unions but also public policy and popular culture--an important source for the kind of cultural consensus needed to sustain broad social and collectivist efforts, Iton says. In short, by exposing the impact of race on the development of the American Left, Iton offers a provocative new way of understanding the unique orientation of American politics.

The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness is the first study to consider the substantial body of African American writing that critiques whiteness as social construction and racial identity. Arguing against the prevailing approach to these texts that says African American writers retreated from issues of ""race"" when they wrote about whiteness, Veronica T. Watson instead identifies this body of literature as an African American intellectual and literary tradition that she names ""the literature of white estrangement.""In chapters that theorize white double consciousness (W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles Chesnutt), white womanhood and class identity (Zora Neale Hurston and Frank Yerby), and the socio-spatial subjectivity of southern whites during the civil rights era (Melba Patillo Beals), Watson explores the historically situated theories and analyses of whiteness provided by the literature of white estrangement from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. She argues that these texts are best understood as part of a multipronged approach by African American writers to challenge and dismantle white supremacy in the United States and demonstrates that these texts have an important place in the growing field of critical whiteness studies.

Sporting Blackness examines issues of race and representation in sports films, exploring what it means to embody, perform, play out, and contest blackness by representations of Black athletes on screen. By presenting new critical terms, Sheppard analyzes not only "skin in the game," or how racial representation shapes the genre's imagery, but also "skin in the genre," or the formal consequences of blackness on the sport film genre's modes, codes, and conventions. Through a rich interdisciplinary approach, Sheppard argues that representations of Black sporting bodies contain "critical muscle memories": embodied, kinesthetic, and cinematic histories that go beyond a film's plot to index, circulate, and reproduce broader narratives about Black sporting and non-sporting experiences in American society.

The deeply entrenched patterns of racial inequality in the United States simply do not square with the liberal notion of a nation-state of equal citizens. Uncovering the false promise of liberalism, State of White Supremacy reveals race to be a fundamental, if flexible, ruling logic that perpetually generates and legitimates racial hierarchy and privilege. Racial domination and violence in the United States are indelibly marked by its origin and ongoing development as an empire-state. The widespread misrecognition of the United States as a liberal nation-state hinges on the twin conditions of its approximation for the white majority and its impossibility for their racial others. The essays in this book incisively probe and critique the U.S. racial state through a broad range of topics, including citizenship, education, empire, gender, genocide, geography, incarceration, Islamophobia, migration and border enforcement, violence, and welfare.

Did American racism originate in the liberal North? An inquiry into the system of institutionalized racism created by Northern Jim Crow Jim Crow was not a regional sickness, it was a national cancer. Even at the high point of twentieth century liberalism in the North, Jim Crow racism hid in plain sight. Perpetuated by colorblind arguments about "cultures of poverty," policies focused more on black criminality than black equality. Procedures that diverted resources in education, housing, and jobs away from poor black people turned ghettos and prisons into social pandemics. Americans in the North made this history. They tried to unmake it, too. Liberalism, rather than lighting the way to vanquish the darkness of the Jim Crow North gave racism new and complex places to hide. The twelve original essays in this anthology unveil Jim Crow's many strange careers in the North. They accomplish two goals: first, they show how the Jim Crow North worked as a system to maintain social, economic, and political inequality in the nation's most liberal places; and second, they chronicle how activists worked to undo the legal, economic, and social inequities born of Northern Jim Crow policies, practices, and ideas. The book ultimately dispels the myth that the South was the birthplace of American racism, and presents a compelling argument that American racism actually originated in the North.

An incisive new look at the black diaspora, examining the true roots of antiblackness and its destructive effects on all of society Thanks to movements like Black Lives Matter, Western society's chronic discrimination against black individuals has become front-page news. Yet, there is little awareness of the systemic factors that make such a distinct form of dehumanization possible. In both the United States and Brazil--two leading nations of the black diaspora--a very necessary acknowledgment of black suffering is nonetheless undercut by denial of the pervasive antiblackness that still exists throughout these societies. In The Denial of Antiblackness, João H. Costa Vargas examines how antiblackness affects society as a whole through analyses of recent protests against police killings of black individuals in both the United States and Brazil, as well as the everyday dynamics of incarceration, residential segregation, and poverty. With multisite ethnography ranging from a juvenile prison in Austin, Texas, to grassroots organizing in Los Angeles and Black social movements in Brazil, Vargas finds the common factors that have perpetuated antiblackness, regardless of context. Ultimately, he asks why the denial of antiblackness persists, whom this narrative serves, and what political realities it makes possible.

Ten years ago, bell hooks astonished readers with Teachingto Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Now comes Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope- a powerful, visionary work that will enrich our teaching and our lives. Combining critical thinking about education with autobiographical narratives, hooks invites readers to extend the discourse of race, gender, class and nationality beyond the classroom into everyday situations of learning. bell hooks writes candidly about her own experiences. Teaching, she explains, can happen anywhere, any time - not just in college classrooms but in churches, in bookstores, in homes where people get together to share ideas that affect their daily lives. In Teaching Communitybell hooks seeks to theorize from the place of the positive, looking at what works. Writing about struggles to end racism and white supremacy, she makes the useful point that "No one is born a racist. Everyone makes a choice." Teaching Communitytells us how we can choose to end racism and create a beloved community. hooks looks at many issues-among them, spirituality in the classroom, white people looking to end racism, and erotic relationships between professors and students. Spirit, struggle, service, love, the ideals of shared knowledge and shared learning - these values motivate progressive social change. Teachers of vision know that democratic education can never be confined to a classroom. Teaching - so often undervalued in our society -- can be a joyous and inclusive activity. bell hooks shows the way. "When teachers teach with love, combining care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust, we are often able to enter the classroom and go straight to the heart of the matter, which is knowing what to do on any given day to create the best climate for learning."

Leon Forrest, acclaimed author of Divine Days, uses a remarkable verbal intensity to evoke human tragedy, injustice, and spirituality in his writing. As Toni Morrison has said, "All of Forrest's novels explore the complex legacy of Afro-Americans. Like an insistent tide this history . . . swells and recalls America's past. . . . Brooding, hilarious, acerbic and profoundly valued life has no more astute observer than Leon Forrest." All of that is on display here in two novels that give readers a breathtaking view of the human experience, filled with humor and pathos.

A Third University is Possible unravels the intimate relationship between the more than 200 US land grant institutions, American settler colonialism, and contemporary university expansion. Author la paperson cracks open uncanny connections between Indian boarding schools, Black education, and missionary schools in Kenya; and between the Department of Homeland Security and the University of California. Central to la paperson's discussion is the "scyborg," a decolonizing agent of technological subversion. Drawing parallels to Third Cinema and Black filmmaking assemblages, A Third University is Possible ultimately presents new ways of using language to develop a framework for hotwiring university "machines" to the practical work of decolonization. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Troubling Vision addresses American culture's fixation on black visibility, exploring how blackness is persistently seen as a problem in public culture and even in black scholarship that challenges racist discourse. Through trenchant analysis, Nicole R. Fleetwood reorients the problem of black visibility by turning attention to what it means to see blackness and to the performative codes that reinforce, resignify, and disrupt its meaning. Working across visual theory and performance studies, Fleetwood asks, How is the black body visualized as both familiar and disruptive? How might we investigate the black body as a troubling presence to the scopic regimes that define it as such? How is value assessed based on visible blackness? Fleetwood documents multiple forms of engagement with the visual, even as she meticulously underscores how the terms of engagement change in various performative contexts. Examining a range of practices from the documentary photography of Charles "Teenie" Harris to the "excess flesh" performances of black female artists and pop stars to the media art of Fatimah Tuggar to the iconicity of Michael Jackson, Fleetwood reveals and reconfigures the mechanics, codes, and metaphors of blackness in visual culture. "Troubling Vision is a path-breaking book that examines the problem of seeing blackness--the simultaneous hyper-visibility and invisibility of African Americans--in US visual culture in the last half century. Weaving together critical modes and methodologies from performance studies, art history, critical race studies, visual culture analysis, and gender theory, Fleetwood expands Du Bois's idea of double vision into a broad questioning of whether 'representation itself will resolve the problem of the black body in the field of vision.' With skilled attention to historical contexts, documentary practices, and media forms, she takes up the works of a broad variety of cultural producers, from photographers and playwrights to musicians and visual artists and examines black spectatorship as well as black spectacle. In chapters on the trope of 'non-iconicity' in the photographs of Charles (Teenie) Harris, the 'visible seams' in the digital images of the artist Fatimah Tuggar, and a coda on the un-dead Michael Jackson, Fleetwood's close analyses soar. Troubling Vision is a beautifully written, original, and important addition to the field of American Studies."--Announcement of the American Studies Association for the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize

In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control, from the proliferation of capitalist logistics through governance by credit and management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts.

The westernized university is a site where the production of knowledge is embedded in Eurocentric epistemologies that are posited as objective, disembodied and universal and in which non-Eurocentric knowledges, such as black and indigenous ones, are largely marginalized or dismissed. Consequently, it is an institution that produces racism, sexism and epistemic violence. While this is increasingly being challenged by student activists and some faculty, the westernized university continues to engage in diversity and internationalization initiatives that reproduce structural disadvantages and to work within neoliberal agendas that are incompatible with decolonization. This book draws on decolonial theory to explore the ways in which Eurocentrism in the westernized university is both reproduced and unsettled. It outlines some of the challenges that accompany the decolonization of teaching, learning, research and policy, as well as providing examples of successful decolonial moments and processes. It draws on examples from universities in Europe, New Zealand and the Americas. This book represents a highly timely contribution from both early career and established thinkers in the field. Its themes will be of interest to student activists and to academics and scholars who are seeking to decolonize their research and teaching. It constitutes a decolonizing intervention into the crisis in which the westernized university finds itself.

**LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 PEN/JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH AWARD FOR NONFICTION** **LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDALS FOR EXCELLENCE** **WINNER OF THE 2022 POZ AWARD FOR BEST IN LITERATURE** "An irresistibly readable and humane exploration of the barbarities of class...readers are gifted that most precious of things in these muddled times: a clear lens through which to see the world." --Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine From preeminent LGBTQ scholar, social critic, and journalist Steven W. Thrasher comes a powerful and crucial exploration of one of the most pressing issues of our times: how viruses expose the fault lines of society. Having spent a ground-breaking career studying the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV, Dr. Thrasher has come to understand a deeper truth at the heart of our society: that there are vast inequalities in who is able to survive viruses and that the ways in which viruses spread, kill, and take their toll are much more dependent on social structures than they are on biology alone. Told through the heart-rending stories of friends, activists, and teachers navigating the novel coronavirus, HIV, and other viruses, Dr. Thrasher brings the reader with him as he delves into the viral underclass and lays bare its inner workings. In the tradition of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste and Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, The Viral Underclass helps us understand the world more deeply by showing the fraught relationship between privilege and survival.

A landmark exhibition on display at the Brooklyn Museum from April 21 through September 17, 2017, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism. It showcases the work of black women artists such as Emma Amos, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O'Grady, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar, making it one of the first major exhibitions to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color. In so doing, it reorients conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period. The accompanying Sourcebook republishes an array of rare and little-known documents from the period by artists, writers, cultural critics, and art historians such as Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Lucy R. Lippard, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Lowery Stokes Sims, Alice Walker, and Michelle Wallace. These documents include articles, manifestos, and letters from significant publications as well as interviews, some of which are reproduced in facsimile form. The Sourcebook also includes archival materials, rare ephemera, and an art-historical overview essay. Helping readers to move beyond standard narratives of art history and feminism, this volume will ignite further scholarship while showing the true breadth and diversity of black women's engagement with art, the art world, and politics from the 1960s to the 1980s. We Wanted a Revolution will also be on display at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles from October 13, 2017 through January 14, 2018; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York from February 17, 2018 through May 27, 2018;and at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston from June 26, 2018 through September 30, 2018. Published by the Brooklyn Museum and distributed by Duke University Press

'Cancel' or 'call-out' culture is a source of much tension and debate in American society. The infamous 'Harper's Letter,' signed by public intellectuals of both the left and right, sought to settle the matter and only caused greater division. Originating as a way for marginalised and disempowered people to take down more powerful abusers, often with the help of social media, cancel culture is seen by some as having gone 'too far.' adrienne maree brown, a respected cultural voice and a professional mediator, reframes the discussion for us, in a way that points to possible ways beyond the impasse.

In What's the Use? Sara Ahmed continues the work she began in The Promise of Happiness and Willful Subjects by taking up a single word--in this case, use--and following it around. She shows how use became associated with life and strength in nineteenth-century biological and social thought and considers how utilitarianism offered a set of educational techniques for shaping individuals by directing them toward useful ends. Ahmed also explores how spaces become restricted to some uses and users, with specific reference to universities. She notes, however, the potential for queer use: how things can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended. Ahmed posits queer use as a way of reanimating the project of diversity work as the ordinary and painstaking task of opening up institutions to those who have historically been excluded.

Antiblack racism avows reason is white while emotion, and thus supposedly unreason, is black. Challenging academic adherence to this notion, Lewis R. Gordon offers a portrait of Martinican-turned-Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon as an exemplar of "living thought" against forms of reason marked by colonialism and racism. Working from his own translations of the original French texts, Gordon critically engages everything in Fanon from dialectics, ethics, existentialism, and humanism to philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and political theory as well as psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Gordon takes into account scholars from across the Global South to address controversies around Fanon's writings on gender and sexuality as well as political violence and the social underclass. In doing so, he confronts the replication of a colonial and racist geography of reason, allowing theorists from the Global South to emerge as interlocutors alongside northern ones in a move that exemplifies what, Gordon argues, Fanon represented in his plea to establish newer and healthier human relationships beyond colonial paradigms.

This inspirational book is about engaged pedagogies, an approach to teaching and learning that centers dialogue, listening, equity, and connection among stakeholders who understand the human and ecological cost of inequality. The authors share their story of working with students, teachers, teacher educators, families, community members, and union leaders to create transformative practices within and beyond public school classrooms. This collaborative work occurred within various spaces-inside school buildings, libraries, churches, community gardens, nonprofit organizations, etc.-and afforded opportunities to grapple with engaged pedagogies in times of political crisis. Featuring descriptions from a district-wide initiative, this book offers practical and theoretical resources for educators wanting to center justice in their work with students. Through question-posing, color images, empirical observations, and use of scholarly and practitioner-driven literature, readers will learn how to use these resources to reconfigure schools and classrooms as sites of engagement for equity, justice, and love. Book Features: Provides a sound approach to deeply taking up the work of justice and engaged pedagogies. Presents linguistic, cultural, theoretical, and practical ideas that can be used and implemented immediately. Includes reflective questions, found poetry, lesson ideas, storytelling as narrative, and examples of engaged pedagogies. Shares stories from a district-wide initiative that embedded engaged pedagogies within classrooms, counseling offices, and libraries. Showcases original artwork and images in full color by Grace D. Player, one of the coauthors.

Antiracist work in education has proceeded as if the only social relation at issue is the one between white people and people of color. But what if our antiracist efforts are being undermined by unexamined difficulties and struggles among white people? Whiteness at the Table examines whiteness in the lived experiences of young children, family members, students, teachers, and school administrators. It focuses on racism and antiracism within the context of relationships. Its authors argue that we cannot read or understand whiteness as a phenomenon without attending to the everyday complexities and conflicts of white people's lives. This edited volume is entitled Whiteness at the Table, then, for at least three reasons. First, the title evokes the origins of this book in the ongoing storytelling and theorizing of the Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective--a small collective of antiracist educators, scholars, and activists who have been gathering at its founders' dining room table for almost a decade. Second, the book's authors are theorizing whiteness not just in terms of structural aspects of white power, but in terms of how whiteness is reproduced and challenged in the day-to-day interactions and relationships of white people. In this sense, whiteness is always already at the table, and this book seeks to illuminate how and why this is so. Finally, one of the primary aims of Whiteness at the Table is to persuade white people of their moral and political responsibility to bring whiteness--as an explicit topic, as perhaps the most important problem to be solved at this historical moment--to the table. This responsibility to theorize and combat whiteness cannot and should not fall only to people of color.

Winner, The Frantz Fanon Award for an Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought We are in the fray of another signature moment in the long history of the United States as a project of anti Black and racial-colonial violence. Long before November 2016, white nationalism, white terrorism, and white fascist statecraft proliferated. Thinking across a variety of archival, testimonial, visual, and activist texts--from Freedmen's Bureau documents and the "Join LAPD" hiring campaign to Barry Goldwater's hidden tattoo and the Pelican Bay prison strike--Dylan Rodríguez counter-narrates the long "post-civil rights" half-century as a period of White Reconstruction, in which the struggle to reassemble the ascendancy of White Being permeates the political and institutional logics of diversity, inclusion, formal equality, and "multiculturalist white supremacy." Throughout White Reconstruction, Rodríguez considers how the creative, imaginative, speculative collective labor of abolitionist praxis can displace and potentially destroy the ascendancy of White Being and Civilization in order to create possibilities for insurgent thriving.

Reflections on the ways discriminatory hiring practices and racist ad campaigns seep into American life Why hate Abercrombie? In a world rife with human cruelty and oppression, why waste your scorn on a popular clothing retailer? The rationale, Dwight A. McBride argues, lies in "the banality of evil," or the quiet way discriminatory hiring practices and racist ad campaigns seep into and reflect malevolent undertones in American culture. McBride maintains that issues of race and sexuality are often subtle and always messy, and his compelling new book does not offer simple answers. Instead, in a collection of essays about such diverse topics as biased marketing strategies, black gay media representations, the role of African American studies in higher education, gay personal ads, and pornography, he offers the evolving insights of one black gay male scholar. As adept at analyzing affirmative action as dissecting Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, McBride employs a range of academic, journalistic, and autobiographical writing styles. Each chapter speaks a version of the truth about black gay male life, African American studies, and the black community. Original and astute, Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch is a powerful vision of a rapidly changing social landscape.

In Willful Subjects Sara Ahmed explores willfulness as a charge often made by some against others. One history of will is a history of attempts to eliminate willfulness from the will. Delving into philosophical and literary texts, Ahmed examines the relation between will and willfulness, ill will and good will, and the particular will and general will. Her reflections shed light on how will is embedded in a political and cultural landscape, how it is embodied, and how will and willfulness are socially mediated. Attentive to the wayward, the wandering, and the deviant, Ahmed considers how willfulness is taken up by those who have received its charge. Grounded in feminist, queer, and antiracist politics, her sui generis analysis of the willful subject, the figure who wills wrongly or wills too much, suggests that willfulness might be required to recover from the attempt at its elimination.