- Edith Garland Dupré Library
- Research Guides
- A Map to Black Studies Collection
- Black Diaspora, Afro-Latinx, and Caribbean Studies
A Map to Black Studies Collection
- Introduction
- Foundational Texts in Black Studies (19th C-2000)
- New Books in Black Studies (2015-2023)
- Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies
- Black Film, Performance, Media, and Music Criticism
- Black Gender and Sexuality Studies, Black Feminism and Black Trans Studies
- Black Critical Theory and Philosophy
- Black Geographies, Black Louisiana and U.S. South
- Black Education Studies
- Black Literary Criticism/Studies and Gaines Criticism
- Black Poetry, Short Stories, Comics, and Fiction
- Black History, Black Public History, and Historiography
- Black Diaspora, Afro-Latinx, and Caribbean Studies
- Black Politics, Political Science, and Sociology
- Black Civil Rights and Freedom Studies
- Black Visual Culture and Art History
- Black Religious Studies
- Questions? Ask Us!
Open Access Resources
- The Concept of the African Diaspora and the Notion of Difference -- JSTOR
- The Black Diaspora in Costa Rica: Upward Mobility and Ethnic Discrimination -- JSTOR
- Black Power in a Transnational Frame: Radical Populism and the Caribbean Artists Movement -- JSTOR
- Popular Culture, National Identity, and Race in the Caribbean -- JSTOR
- Caribbean Studies Association
Student/Faculty Resources
- African Atrocity, American Humanity: Slavery and Its Transnational Afterlives -- JSTOR
- The Whole is Greater: Calling Out Afro Latinx Identity -- JSTOR
- Black Latina Womanhood: From Latinx Fragility to Empowerment and Social Justice Praxis -- JSTOR
- Afro-Latinidad in the Smithsonian's African American Museum Spaces -- JSTOR
Black Diaspora, Afro-Latinx, and Caribbean Studies
The "Black Diaspora, Afro-Latinx, and Caribbean Studies" subsection collects materials that address the complex historical and cultural experiences related to the dispersal and migration of Black people from their original homelands. Afro-Latinx groups (individuals with both African and Latin American descent/origin) and Caribbean Studies (a region with dense colonial and diasporic history) are also included in this subsection. By connecting these regions and groups of people, we uncover a vast global history of Black identity.
Within this subsection, expect discussions on colonialism, diaspora, and global development. While a lot of discussions focus on Latin America and the Caribbean in particular, these conversations also happen on a global scale, often involving Europe, North America, Africa, and more.
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- African Dominion by Michael GomezCall Number: Gaines DT 476 .G66 2019ISBN: 9780691196824Publication Date: 2019-08-27A groundbreaking book that puts early and medieval West Africa on the map of global history Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, Michael Gomez unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history. Focusing on the Savannah and Sahel region, Gomez traces how Islam's growth in West Africa, along with intensifying commerce that included slaves, resulted in a series of political experiments unique to the region, culminating in the rise of empire. A radically new account of the importance of early Africa in global history, African Dominion will be the standard work on the subject for years to come.
- African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean by Herbert S. Klein; Ben Vinson; Ben VinsonCall Number: Gaines HT 1052.5 .K54 2007ISBN: 9780195189421Publication Date: 2007-09-06This is an original survey of the economic and social history of slavery of the Afro-American experience in Latin America and the Caribbean. The focus of the book is on the Portuguese, Spanish, and French-speaking regions of continental America and the Caribbean. It analyzes the latest research on urban and rural slavery and on the African and Afro-American experience under these regimes. It approaches these themes both historically and structurally. The historical section provides a detailed analysis of the evolution of slavery and forced labor systems in Europe, Africa, and America. The second half of the book looks at the type of life and culture which the salves experienced in these American regimes. The first part of the book describes the growth of the plantation and mining economies that absorbed African slave labor, how that labor was used, and how the changing international economic conditions affected the local use and distribution of the slave labor force. Particular emphasis is given to the evolution of the sugar plantation economy, which was the single largest user of African slave labor and which was established in almost all of the Latin American colonies. Once establishing the economic context in which slave labor was applied, the book shifts focus to the Africans and Afro-Americans themselves as they passed through this slave regime. The first part deals with the demographic history of the slaves, including their experience in the Atlantic slave trade and their expectations of life in the New World. The next part deals with the attempts of the African and American born slaves to create a viable and autonomous culture. This includes their adaptation of European languages, religions, and even kinship systems to their own needs. It also examines systems of cooptation and accommodation to the slave regime, as well as the type and intensity of slave resistances and rebellions. A separate chapter is devoted to the important and different role of the free colored under slavery in the various colonies. The unique importance of the Brazilian free labor class is stressed, just as is the very unusual mobility experienced by the free colored in the French West Indies. The final chapter deals with the differing history of total emancipation and how ex-slaves adjusted to free conditions in the post-abolition periods of their respective societies. The patterns of post-emancipation integration are studied along with the questions of the relative success of the ex-slaves in obtaining control over land and escape from the old plantation regimes.
- Africa Speaks, America Answers by Robin D. G. KelleyCall Number: Gaines ML 3508 .K44 2012ISBN: 9780674046245Publication Date: 2012-02-27In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950s and '60s who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world. Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa's struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation of modern jazz. The result was an abundance of conversation, collaboration, and tension between African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization. This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents. In a crucial moment when freedom electrified the African diaspora, these black artists sought one another out to create new modes of expression. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives us a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures.
- The Afro-Latin@ Reader by Miriam Jiménez Román (Editor); Juan Flores (Editor)Call Number: Gaines E 185.615 .A37 2010ISBN: 9780822345725Publication Date: 2010-07-07The Afro-Latin@ Reader focuses attention on a large, vibrant, yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean. The presence of Afro-Latin@s in the United States (and throughout the Americas) belies the notion that Blacks and Latin@s are two distinct categories or cultures. Afro-Latin@s are uniquely situated to bridge the widening social divide between Latin@s and African Americans; at the same time, their experiences reveal pervasive racism among Latin@s and ethnocentrism among African Americans. Offering insight into Afro-Latin@ life and new ways to understand culture, ethnicity, nation, identity, and antiracist politics, The Afro-Latin@ Reader presents a kaleidoscopic view of Black Latin@s in the United States. It addresses history, music, gender, class, and media representations in more than sixty selections, including scholarly essays, memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles, poetry, short stories, and interviews. While the selections cover centuries of Afro-Latin@ history, since the arrival of Spanish-speaking Africans in North America in the mid-sixteenth-century, most of them focus on the past fifty years. The central question of how Afro-Latin@s relate to and experience U.S. and Latin American racial ideologies is engaged throughout, in first-person accounts of growing up Afro-Latin@, a classic essay by a leader of the Young Lords, and analyses of U.S. census data on race and ethnicity, as well as in pieces on gender and sexuality, major-league baseball, and religion. The contributions that Afro-Latin@s have made to U.S. culture are highlighted in essays on the illustrious Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and music and dance genres from salsa to mambo, and from boogaloo to hip hop. Taken together, these and many more selections help to bring Afro-Latin@s in the United States into critical view. Contributors: Afro-Puerto Rican Testimonies Project, Josefina Baéz, Ejima Baker, Luis Barrios, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Adrian Burgos Jr., Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Adrián Castro, Jesús Colón, Marta I. Cruz-Janzen, William A. Darity Jr., Milca Esdaille, Sandra María Esteves, María Teresa Fernández (Mariposa), Carlos Flores, Juan Flores, Jack D. Forbes, David F. Garcia, Ruth Glasser, Virginia Meecham Gould, Susan D. Greenbaum, Evelio Grillo, Pablo "Yoruba" Guzmán, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Tanya K. Hernández, Victor Hernández Cruz, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Lisa Hoppenjans, Vielka Cecilia Hoy, Alan J. Hughes, María Rosario Jackson, James Jennings, Miriam Jiménez Román, Angela Jorge, David Lamb, Aida Lambert, Ana M. Lara, Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, Tato Laviera, John Logan, Antonio López, Felipe Luciano, Louis Pancho McFarland, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Wayne Marshall, Marianela Medrano, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Yvette Modestin, Ed Morales, Jairo Moreno, Marta Moreno Vega, Willie Perdomo, Graciela Pérez Gutiérrez, Sofia Quintero, Ted Richardson, Louis Reyes Rivera, Pedro R. Rivera , Raquel Z. Rivera, Yeidy Rivero, Mark Q. Sawyer, Piri Thomas, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Nilaja Sun, Sherezada "Chiqui" Vicioso, Peter H. Wood
- Afro-Latin@s in Movement by Petra R. Rivera-Rideau (Editor); Jennifer A. Jones (Editor); Tianna S. Paschel (Editor)Call Number: Gaines F 1419 .B55 A45 2016ISBN: 9781349934799Publication Date: 2019-09-26Through a collection of theoretically engaging and empirically grounded texts, this book examines African-descended populations in Latin America and Afro-Latin@s in the United States in order to explore questions of black identity and representation, transnationalism, and diaspora in the Americas.
- Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 by George Reid. AndrewsCall Number: Gaines F 1419 .N4 A63 2004ISBN: 9780195152333Publication Date: 2004-06-24While the rise and abolition of slavery and ongoing race relations are central themes of the history of the United States, the African diaspora actually had a far greater impact on Latin and Central America. More than ten times as many Africans came to Spanish and Portuguese America as theUnited States.In this, the first history of the African diaspora in Latin America from emancipation to the present, George Reid Andrews deftly synthesizes the history of people of African descent in every Latin American country from Mexico and the Caribbean to Argentina. He examines how African peooples andtheir descendants made their way from slavery to freedom and how they helped shape and responded to political, economic, and cultural changes in their societies. Individually and collectively they pursued the goals of freedom, equality, and citizenship through military service, political parties,civic organizations, labor unions, religious activity, and other avenues.Spanning two centuries, this tour de force should be read by anyone interested in Latin American history, the history of slavery, and the African diaspora, as well as the future of Latin America.
- Afro-Latin American Studies by Alejandro de la Fuente (Editor); George Reid. Andrews (Editor)Call Number: Gaines F 1419 .N4 A394 2018ISBN: 9781316630662Publication Date: 2018-04-26Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews offer the first systematic, book-length survey of humanities and social science scholarship on the exciting field of Afro-Latin American studies. Organized by topic, these essays synthesize and present the current state of knowledge on a broad variety of topics, including Afro-Latin American music, religions, literature, art history, political thought, social movements, legal history, environmental history, and ideologies of racial inclusion. This volume connects the region's long history of slavery to the major political, social, cultural, and economic developments of the last two centuries. Written by leading scholars in each of those topics, the volume provides an introduction to the field of Afro-Latin American studies that is not available from any other source and reflects the disciplinary and thematic richness of this emerging field.
- Afrodiasporic Forms by Raquel KennonCall Number: Gaines PN 56 .S5765 K46 2022ISBN: 9780807176818Publication Date: 2022-06-29Afrodiasporic Forms explores the epistemological possibilities of the "Black world" paradigm and traces a literary and cultural cartography of the monde noir and its constitutive African diasporas across multiple poetic, visual, and cultural permutations. Examining the transatlantic slave trade and modern racial slavery, Raquel Kennon challenges the US-centric focus of slavery studies and draws on a transnational, eclectic archive of materials from Lusophone, Hispanophone, and Anglophone sources in the Americas to inspect evolving, multitudinous, and disparate forms of Afrodiasporic cultural expression. Spanning the 1830s to the twenty-first century, Afrodiasporic Forms traverses national, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries as it investigates how cultural products of slavery's afterlife--including poetry, prose, painting, television, sculpture, and song--shape understandings of the African diaspora. Each chapter uncovers multidirectional pathways for exploring representations of slavery, considering works such as a Brazilian telenovela based on Bernardo Guimarães's novel A Escrava Isaura, Robert Hayden's poem "Middle Passage," Kara Walker's sculpture A Subtlety, and Juan Francisco Manzano's Autobiografía de un esclavo. Kennon's expansive method of comparative reading across the diaspora uses eclectic pairings of canonical and popular textual and artistic sources to stretch beyond disciplinary and national borders, promoting expansive diasporic literacies.
- Antiblackness by Moon-Kie Jung (Editor); João H. Costa Vargas (Editor)Call Number: Gaines HT 1523 .A585 2021ISBN: 9781478011811Publication Date: 2021-04-09Antiblackness investigates the ways in which the dehumanization of Black people has been foundational to the establishment of modernity. Drawing on Black feminism, Afropessimism, and critical race theory, the book's contributors trace forms of antiblackness across time and space, from nineteenth-century slavery to the categorization of Latinx in the 2020 census, from South Africa and Palestine to the Chickasaw homelands, from the White House to convict lease camps, prisons, and schools. Among other topics, they examine the centrality of antiblackness in the introduction of Carolina rice to colonial India, the presence of Black people and Native Americans in the public discourse of precolonial Korea, and the practices of denial that obscure antiblackness in contemporary France. Throughout, the contributors demonstrate that any analysis of white supremacy---indeed, of the world---that does not contend with antiblackness is incomplete. Contributors. Mohan Ambikaipaker, Jodi A. Byrd, Iyko Day, Anthony Paul Farley, Crystal Marie Fleming, Sarah Haley, Tanya Katerí Hernández, Sarah Ihmoud, Joy James, Moon-Kie Jung, Jae Kyun Kim, Charles W. Mills, Dylan Rodríguez, Zach Sell, João H. Costa Vargas, Frank B. Wilderson III, Connie Wun
- Becoming Black Political Subjects by Tianna S. PaschelCall Number: Gaines F 2299 .B55 P37 2016ISBN: 9780691180755Publication Date: 2018-04-03After decades of denying racism and underplaying cultural diversity, Latin American states began adopting transformative ethno-racial legislation in the late 1980s. In addition to symbolic recognition of indigenous peoples and black populations, governments in the region created a more pluralistic model of citizenship and made significant reforms in the areas of land, health, education, and development policy. Becoming Black Political Subjects explores this shift from color blindness to ethno-racial legislation in two of the most important cases in the region: Colombia and Brazil. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Tianna Paschel shows how, over a short period, black movements and their claims went from being marginalized to become institutionalized into the law, state bureaucracies, and mainstream politics. The strategic actions of a small group of black activists--working in the context of domestic unrest and the international community's growing interest in ethno-racial issues--successfully brought about change. Paschel also examines the consequences of these reforms, including the institutionalization of certain ideas of blackness, the reconfiguration of black movement organizations, and the unmaking of black rights in the face of reactionary movements. Becoming Black Political Subjects offers important insights into the changing landscape of race and Latin American politics and provokes readers to adopt a more transnational and flexible understanding of social movements.
- Becoming Free, Becoming Black by Alejandro de la Fuente; Ariela J. GrossCall Number: Gaines E 29 .N3 F84 2020ISBN: 9781108468145Publication Date: 2021-12-02How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders' efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies - Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana - Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom - not slavery - established the meaning of blackness in law. Contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims to citizenship would be tied to racial identity. Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people.
- Beyond a Boundary by C. L. R. JamesCall Number: Gaines GV 928 .W47 J35 2013ISBN: 9780822355632Publication Date: 2013-06-17This new edition of C. L. R. James's classic Beyond a Boundary celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of one of the greatest books on sport and culture ever written. Named one of the Top 50 Sports Books of All Time by Sports Illustrated "Beyond a Boundary . . . should find its place on the team with Izaak Walton, Ivan Turgenev, A. J. Liebling, and Ernest Hemingway."--Derek Walcott, The New York Times Book Review "As a player, James the writer was able to see in cricket a metaphor for art and politics, the collective experience providing a focus for group effort and individual performance. . . . [In] his scintillating memoir of his life in cricket, Beyond a Boundary (1963), James devoted some of his finest pages to this theme."--Edward Said, The Washington Post "A work of double reverence--for the resilient, elegant ritualism of cricket and for the black people of the world."--Whitney Balliett, The New Yorker "Beyond a Boundary is a book of remarkable richness and force, which vastly expands our understanding of sports as an element of popular culture in the Western and colonial world."--Mark Naison, The Nation "Everything James has done has had the mark of originality, of his own flexible, sensitive, and deeply cultured intelligence. He conveys not a rigid doctrine but a delight and curiosity in all the manifestations of life, and the clue to everything lies in his proper appreciation of the game of cricket."--E. P. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class "Beyond a Boundary is . . . first and foremost an autobiography of a living legend--probably the greatest social theorist of our times."--Manning Marable, Journal of Sport & Social Issues "The great triumph of Beyond a Boundary is its ability to rise above genre and in its very form explore the complex nature of colonial West Indian society."--Caryl Phillips, The New Republic
- Beyond Bondage by David Barry Gaspar (Editor); Darlene Clark Hine (Editor)Call Number: Gaines E 29 .N3 B49 2004ISBN: 9780252071942Publication Date: 2004-10-20Emancipation, manumission, and complex legalities surrounding slavery led to a number of women of color achieving a measure of freedom and prosperity from the 1600s through the 1800s. These black women held property in places like Suriname and New Orleans, headed households in Brazil, enjoyed religious freedom in Peru, and created new selves and new lives across the Caribbean.Beyond Bondageoutlines the restricted spheres within which free women of color, by virtue of gender and racial restrictions, carved out many kinds of existences. Although their freedom--represented by respectability, opportunity, and the acquisition of property--always remained precarious, the essayists support the surprising conclusion that women of color often sought and obtained these advantages more successfully than their male counterparts.
- Black Crescent by Michael A. GomezCall Number: Gaines E 185 .G615 2005ISBN: 9780521600798Publication Date: 2005-04-04Beginning with Latin America in the fifteenth century, this book, first published in 2005, is a social history of the experiences of African Muslims and their descendants throughout the Americas, including the Caribbean. The record under slavery is examined, as is the post-slavery period into the twentieth century. The experiences vary, arguably due to some extent to the Old World context. Muslim revolts in Brazil are also discussed, especially in 1835, by way of a nuanced analysis. The second part of the book looks at the emergence of Islam among the African-descended in the United States in the twentieth century, with successive chapters on Noble Drew Ali, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X, with a view to explaining how orthodoxy arose from varied unorthodox roots.
- Black Cultural Mythology by Christel TEMPLECall Number: Gaines PS 153 .N5 T43 2020ISBN: 9781438477886Publication Date: 2021-01-02Winner of the 2021 CLA Book Award presented by the College Language Association Black Cultural Mythology retrieves the concept of "mythology" from its Black Arts Movement origins and broadens its scope to illuminate the relationship between legacies of heroic survival, cultural memory, and creative production in the African diaspora. Christel N. Temple comprehensively surveys more than two hundred years of figures, moments, ideas, and canonical works by such visionaries as Maria Stewart, Richard Wright, Colson Whitehead, and Edwidge Danticat to map an expansive yet broadly overlooked intellectual tradition of Black cultural mythology and to provide a new conceptual framework for analyzing this tradition. In so doing, she at once reorients and stabilizes the emergent field of Africana cultural memory studies, while also staging a much broader intervention by challenging scholars across disciplines--from literary and cultural studies, history, sociology, and beyond--to embrace a more organic vocabulary to articulate the vitality of the inheritance of survival.
- Black Europe and the African Diaspora by Darlene Clark Hine (Editor, Contribution by); Trica Danielle Keaton (Editor, Contribution by); Stephen Small (Editor, Contribution by); Allison Blakely (Contribution by); Jacqueline Nassy Brown (Contribution by); Tina Campt (Contribution by); Fred Constant (Contribution by); Alessandra. Di Maio (Contribution by); Philomena Essed (Contribution by); Terri Francis (Contribution by); Barnor Hesse (Contribution by); Dienke Hondius (Contribution by); Eileen Julien (Contribution by); Kwame Nimako (Contribution by); Tiffany Ruby Patterson (Contribution by); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Contribution by); Tyler Stovall (Contribution by); Alexander G. Weheliye (Contribution by); Gloria Wekker (Contribution by); Michelle M. Wright (Contribution by); Darlene Clark Hine (Editor, Contribution by); Trica Danielle Keaton (Editor, Contribution by); Stephen Small (Editor, Contribution by); Allison Blakely (Contribution by); Jacqueline Nassy Brown (Contribution by); Tina Campt (Contribution by); Fred Constant (Contribution by); Alessandra. Di Maio (Contribution by); Philomena Essed (Contribution by); Terri Francis (Contribution by); Barnor Hesse (Contribution by); Dienke Hondius (Contribution by); Eileen Julien (Contribution by); Kwame Nimako (Contribution by); Tiffany Ruby Patterson (Contribution by); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Contribution by); Tyler Stovall (Contribution by); Alexander G. Weheliye (Contribution by); Gloria Wekker (Contribution by); Michelle M. Wright (Contribution by)Call Number: Gaines D 1056.2 .B55 H56 2009ISBN: 9780252076572Publication Date: 2009-09-10The 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.
- Black France- France Noire by Trica Danielle Keaton (Editor); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Editor); Tyler Stovall (Editor)Call Number: Gaines DC 34.5 .B55 B53 2012ISBN: 9780822352624Publication Date: 2012-06-26In Black France / France Noire, scholars, activists, and novelists from France and the United States address the untenable paradox at the heart of French society. France's constitutional and legal discourses do not recognize race as a meaningful category. Yet the lived realities of race and racism are ever-present in the nation's supposedly race-blind society. The vaunted universalist principles of the French Republic are far from realized. Any claim of color-blindness is belied by experiences of anti-black racism, which render blackness a real and consequential historical, social, and political formation. Contributors to this collection of essays demonstrate that blackness in France is less an identity than a response to and rejection of anti-black racism. Black France / France Noire is a distinctive and important contribution to the increasingly public debates on diversity, race, racialization, and multicultural intolerance in French society and beyond. Contributors. Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga, Allison Blakely, Jennifer Anne Boittin, Marcus Bruce, Fred Constant, Mamadou Diouf, Arlette Frund, Michel Giraud, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Trica Danielle Keaton, Jake Lamar, Patrick Lozès, Alain Mabanckou, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Tyler Stovall, Christiane Taubira, Dominic Thomas, Gary Wilder
- Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848-2016 by Félix Germain (Editor); Silyane Larcher (Editor); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Foreword by)Call Number: Gaines HQ 1236.5 .F8 B483 2018ISBN: 9781496201270Publication Date: 2018-10-01Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality,1848-2016exploreshow black women in France itself,the French Caribbean, Gorée, Dakar, Rufisque, and Saint-Louis experiencedand reacted toFrench colonialism and how gendered readings of colonization, decolonization, and social movements cast new light on the history of French colonizationand of black France. In addition to delineatingthe powerful contributionsof black French women in the struggle for equality,contributors also look at the experiences of African American women in Paris and in so doing integrate into colonial and postcolonial conversations the strategies black women have engaged in negotiating genderand race relations à la française. Drawing on research byscholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and countries, this collectionoffers a fresh, multidimensionalperspective on race, class, and gender relationsin Franceand its former colonies, exploring how black women have negotiated the boundaries of patriarchy and racism from their emancipation fromslavery to the second decade of the twenty-first century.
- Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name by Maboula Soumahoro; Kaiama Glover (Translator); Saidiya Hartman (Foreword by)Call Number: Gaines DC 34.5 .B55 S6813 2022ISBN: 9781509548330Publication Date: 2022-03-07In this highly original book, Maboula Soumahoro explores the cultural and political vastness of the Black Atlantic, where Africa, Europe, and the Americas were tied together by the brutal realities of the slave trade and colonialism. Each of these spaces has its own way of reading the Black body and the Black experience, and its own modes of visibility, invisibility, silence, and amplification of Black life. By weaving together her personal history with that of France and its abiding myth of color-blindness, Maboula Soumahoro highlights the banality and persistence of structural racism in France today, and shows that freedom will be found in the journey and movement between the sites of the Atlantic triangle. Africana is the name of that freedom. How can we build and reflect on a collective diasporic identity through a personal journey? What are the limits and possibilities of this endeavor, when the personal journey is that of oft-erased bodies and stories, de-humanized lives, and when Black populations in Africa, the Americas, and Europe identify and misidentify with each other, their sensibilities shaped by the particular locales in which their lives unfold? This book makes an important intellectual contribution to contemporary public conversations and theoretical inquiry into race, racism, blackness, and identity today, as it probes and questions the academic methodologies that have functioned as structures of exclusion.
- The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. JamesCall Number: Gaines F 1923 .T85 1963ISBN: 9780679724674Publication Date: 1989-10-23This powerful and impassioned history of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803 is the classic account of the largest successful revolt by enslaved people in history. "One of the seminal texts about the history of slavery and abolition. . . . Provocative and empowering." -The New York Times Book Review The Black Jacobins, by Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James, was the first major analysis of the uprising that began in the wake of the storming of the Bastille in France and became the model for liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of plantation owners toward enslaved people was horrifyingly severe. And it is the story of a charismatic and barely literate enslaved person named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who successfully led the Black people of San Domingo against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces--and in the process helped form the first independent post-colonial nation in the Caribbean.
- Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada by Rinaldo WalcottCall Number: Gaines F 1035 .N3 W325 2018ISBN: 1554832071Publication Date: 2003
- Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition by Cedric J. Robinson; Robin D. G. Kelley (Foreword by); Tiffany Willoughby-Herard (Preface by); Damien Sojoyner (Preface by)Call Number: Gaines HX 436.5 .R63 2020ISBN: 9781469663722Publication Date: 2021-02-01In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand Black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of Black people and Black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism, Robinson argues, must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of Blacks on Western continents, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this. To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by Blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century Black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright. This revised and updated third edition includes a new preface by Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, and a new foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley.
- Blackness in the Andes by J. RahierCall Number: Ref. Gaines F 3710 .R34 2014ISBN: 9781349444960Publication Date: 2014-01-23This book examines, in Andean national contexts, the impacts of the 'Latin American multicultural turn' of the past two decades on Afro Andean cultural politics, emphasizing both transformations and continuities.
- Blackness in the White Nation by George Reid AndrewsCall Number: Gaines F 2799 .N3 A53 2010ISBN: 0807871583Publication Date: 2010-10-18Uruguay is not conventionally thought of as part of the African diaspora, yet during the period of Spanish colonial rule, thousands of enslaved Africans arrived in the country. Afro-Uruguayans played important roles in Uruguay's national life, creating the second-largest black press in Latin America, a racially defined political party, and numerous social and civic organizations. Afro-Uruguayans were also central participants in the creation of Uruguayan popular culture and the country's principal musical forms, tango and candombe. Candombe, a style of African-inflected music, is one of the defining features of the nation's culture, embraced equally by white and black citizens. In Blackness in the White Nation, George Reid Andrews offers a comprehensive history of Afro-Uruguayans from the colonial period to the present. Showing how social and political mobilization is intertwined with candombe, he traces the development of Afro-Uruguayan racial discourse and argues that candombe's evolution as a central part of the nation's culture has not fundamentally helped the cause of racial equality. Incorporating lively descriptions of his own experiences as a member of a candombe drumming and performance group, Andrews consistently connects the struggles of Afro-Uruguayans to the broader issues of race, culture, gender, and politics throughout Latin America and the African diaspora generally.
- Black Queer Freedom by GerShun AvilezCall Number: Gaines HQ 76.27 .A37 A95 2020ISBN: 9780252085284Publication Date: 2020-10-20Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomical injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists' work throughout the black diaspora. GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces--specifically prisons and hospitals--and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.
- Black Refractions by Connie H. Choi; Thelma Golden; Kellie Jones; Pauline Willis (Foreword by)Call Number: Ref Gaines N 620 .S88 C46 2019ISBN: 9780847866380Publication Date: 2019-01-15The artists featured in Black Refractions, including Kerry James Marshall, Faith Ringgold, Nari Ward, Norman Lewis, Wangechi Mutu, and Lorna Simpson, are drawn from the renowned collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Through exhibitions, public programs, artist-in-resdiencies, and bold acquisitions, this pioneering institution has served as a nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally, and internationally since its founding in 1968. Rather than aim to construct a single history of "black art," Black Refractions emphasises a plurality of narratives and approaches, traced through 125 works in all media from the 1930s to the present. An essay by Connie Choi and entries by Eliza A. Butler, Akili Tommasino, Taylor Aldridge, Larry Ossei Mensah, Daniela Fifi , and other luminaries contextualize the works and provide detailed commentary. A dialogue between Thelma Golden, Connie Choi, and Kellie Jones draws out themes and challenges in collecting and exhibiting modern and contemporary art by artists of African descent. More than a document of a particular institution's trailblazing path, or catalytiing modern and contemporary art by artists of African descent. More than a document of a particular institution's trailblazing path, or catalytic role in the development of American appreciation for art of the African diaspora, this volume is a compendium of a vital art tradition.ing modern and contemporary art by artists of African descent. More than a document of a particular institution's trailblazing path, or catalytiing modern and contemporary art by artists of African descent. More than a document of a particular institution's trailblazing path, or catalytic role in the development of American appreciation for art of the African diaspora, this volume is a compendium of a vital art tradition.
- Black Social Movements in Latin America by Jean Muteba Rahier (Editor); J. Rahier (Editor)Call Number: Gaines F 1419 .N4 B498 2012ISBN: 9781349352357Publication Date: 2012-05-31Drawing from a wide spectrum of disciplines, the essays in this collection examine in different national contexts the consequences of the "Latin American multicultural turn" in Afro Latino social movements of the past two decades.
- Black Star, Crescent Moon by Sohail DaulatzaiCall Number: Gaines DT 16.5 .D38 2012ISBN: 9780816675869Publication Date: 2012-07-31"The same rebellion, the same impatience, the same anger that exists in the hearts of the dark people in Africa and Asia," Malcolm X declared in a 1962 speech, "is existing in the hearts and minds of 20 million black people in this country who have been just as thoroughly colonized as the people in Africa and Asia." Four decades later, the hip-hop artist Talib Kweli gave voice to a similar Pan-African sentiment in the song "K.O.S. (Determination)": "The African diaspora represents strength in numbers, a giant can't slumber forever." Linking discontent and unrest in Harlem and Los Angeles to anticolonial revolution in Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere, Black leaders in the United States have frequently looked to the anti-imperialist movements and antiracist rhetoric of the Muslim Third World for inspiration. In Black Star, Crescent Moon, Sohail Daulatzai maps the rich, shared history between Black Muslims, Black radicals, and the Muslim Third World, showing how Black artists and activists imagined themselves not as national minorities but as part of a global majority, connected to larger communities of resistance. Daulatzai traces these interactions and alliances from the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power era to the "War on Terror," placing them within a broader framework of American imperialism, Black identity, and the global nature of white oppression. From Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali to contemporary artists and activists like Rakim and Mos Def, Black Star, Crescent Moon reveals how Muslim resistance to imperialism came to occupy a central position within the Black radical imagination, offering a new perspective on the political and cultural history of Black internationalism from the 1950s to the present.
- Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba by Takkara K. BrunsonCall Number: Gaines HQ 1507 .B78 2023ISBN: 9781683403739Publication Date: 2023-03-07Illuminating the activism of Black women during Cuba's prerevolutionary period Association of Black Women Historians Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize In Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba, Takkara Brunson traces how women of African descent battled exclusion on multiple fronts and played an important role in forging a modern democracy. Brunson takes a much-needed intersectional approach to the political history of the era, examining how Black women's engagement with questions of Cuban citizenship intersected with racial prejudice, gender norms, and sexual politics, incorporating Afro-diasporic and Latin American feminist perspectives. Brunson demonstrates that between the 1886 abolition of slavery in Cuba and the 1959 Revolution, Black women--without formal political power--navigated political movements in their efforts to create a more just society. She examines how women helped build a Black public sphere as they claimed moral respectability and sought racial integration. She reveals how Black women entered into national women's organizations, labor unions, and political parties to bring about legal reforms. Brunson shows how women of African descent achieved individual victories as part of a collective struggle for social justice; in doing so, she highlights how racism and sexism persisted even as legal definitions of Cuban citizenship evolved.
- Black Women Against the Land Grab by Keisha-Khan Y. PerryCall Number: Gaines HQ 1236.5 .B6 P47 2013ISBN: 9780816683246Publication Date: 2013-10-16In Brazil and throughout the African diaspora, black women, especially poor black women, are rarely considered leaders of social movements let alone political theorists. But in the northeastern city of Salvador, Brazil, it is these very women who determine how urban policies are established. Focusing on the Gamboa de Baixo neighborhood in Salvador's city center, Black Women against the Land Grab explores how black women's views on development have radicalized local communities to demand justice and social change. In Black Women against the Land Grab, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry describes the key role of local women activists in the citywide movement for land and housing rights. She reveals the importance of geographic location for understanding the gendered aspects of urban renewal and the formation of black women-led social movements. How have black women shaped the politics of urban redevelopment, Perry asks, and what does this kind of political intervention tell us about black women's agency? Her work uncovers the ways in which political labor at the neighborhood level is central to the mass mobilization of black people against institutional racism and for citizenship rights and resources in Brazil. Highlighting the political life of black communities, specifically those in urban contexts often represented as socially pathological and politically bankrupt, Black Women against the Land Grab offers a valuable corrective to how we think about politics and about black women, particularly poor black women, as a political force.
- Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (Foreword by); Aisha Finch (Editor); Fannie Rushing (Editor); Manuel Barcia (Contribution by); Matt Childs (Contribution by); Willaim F. Santiago-Valles (Contribution by); Michele Reid-Vazquez (Contribution by); Tomás Fernández Robaina (Contribution by); Matthew Pettway (Contribution by); Melina Pappademos (Contribution by); Reynaldo Ortiz-Minaya (Contribution by); Jacqueline Grant Kent (Contribution by); Aline Helg (Contribution by); Ada Ferrer (Contribution by); Joseph C. Dorsey (Contribution by); Barbara Francisca Danzie León (Contribution by); Takkara Brunson (Contribution by)Call Number: Gaines F 1789 .N3 B74 2019ISBN: 9780807170625Publication Date: 2019-04-10Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation offers a new perspective on black political life in Cuba by analyzing the time between two hallmark Cuban events, the Aponte Rebellion of 1812 and the Race War of 1912. In so doing, this anthology provides fresh insight into the ways in which Cubans practiced and understood black freedom and resistance, from the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution to the early years of the Cuban republic. Bringing together an impressive range of scholars from the field of Cuban studies, the volume examines, for the first time, the continuities between disparate forms of political struggle and racial organizing during the early years of the nineteenth century and traces them into the early decades of the twentieth. Matt Childs, Manuel Barcia, Gloria García, and Reynaldo Ortíz-Minayo explore the transformation of Cuba?s nineteenth-century sugar regime and the ways in which African-descended people responded to these new realities, while Barbara Danzie León and Matthew Pettway examine the intellectual and artistic work that captured the politics of this period. Aisha Finch, Ada Ferrer, Michele Reid-Vazquez, Jacqueline Grant, and Joseph Dorsey consider new ways to think about the categories of resistance and agency, the gendered investments of traditional resistance histories, and the continuities of struggle that erupted over the course of the mid-nineteenth century. In the final section of the book, Fannie Rushing, Aline Helg, Melina Pappademos, and Takkara Brunson delve into Cuba?s early nationhood and its fraught racial history. Isabel Hernández Campos and W. F. Santiago-Valles conclude the book with reflections on the process of history and commemoration in Cuba. Together, the contributors rethink the ways in which African-descended Cubans battled racial violence, created pathways to citizenship and humanity, and exercised claims on the nation state. Utilizing rare primary documents on the Afro-Cuban communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation explores how black resistance to exploitative systems played a central role in the making of the Cuban nation.
- Bridges of Memory by Timuel D. Black; Studs Terkel (Foreword by); John Hope Franklin (Foreword by); DuSable Museum (Other Primary Creator)Call Number: Gaines F 548.9 .N4 B55 2005ISBN: 9780810123151Publication Date: 2005-02-22Co-published with the DuSable Museum of African American History Recipient of 2007 The Hyde Park Historical Society Paul Cornell Award A collection of interviews with African Americans who came to Chicago from the South. In their first great migration to Chicago that began during World War I, African Americans came from the South seeking a better life--and fleeing a Jim Crow system of racial prejudice, discrimination, and segregation. What they found was much less than what they'd hoped for, but it was much better than what they'd come from--and in the process they set in motion vast changes not only in Chicago but also in the whole fabric of American society. This book, the first of three volumes, revisits this momentous chapter in American history with those who lived it. Oral history of the first order, Bridges of Memory lets us hear the voices of those who left social, political, and economic oppression for political freedom and opportunity such as they'd never known--and for new forms of prejudice and segregation. These children and grandchildren of ex-slaves found work in the stockyards and steel mills of Chicago, settled and started small businesses in the "Black Belt" on the South Side, and brought forth the jazz, blues, and gospel music that the city is now known for. Historian Timuel D. Black, Jr., himself the son of first-generation migrants to Chicago, interviews a wide cross-section of African Americans whose remarks and reflections touch on issues ranging from fascism to Jim Crow segregation to the origin of the blues. Their recollections comprise a vivid record of a neighborhood, a city, a society, and a people undergoing dramatic and unprecedented changes.
- Britain's Black Debt by Hilary McD BecklesCall Number: Gaines F 1629 .B55 B43 2013ISBN: 9789766402686Publication Date: 2013-02-25Since the mid-nineteenth-century abolition of slavery, the call for reparations for the crime of African enslavement and native genocide has been growing. In the Caribbean, grassroots and official voices now constitute a regional reparations movement. While it remains a fractured, contentious and divisive call, it generates considerable public interest, especially within sections of the community that are concerned with issues of social justice, equity, civil and human rights, education, and cultural identity. The reparations discourse has been shaped by the voices from these fields as they seek to build a future upon the settlement of historical crimes. This is the first scholarly work that looks comprehensively at the reparations discussion in the Caribbean. Written by a leading economic historian of the region, a seasoned activist in the wider movement for social justice and advocacy of historical truth, Britain?s Black Debt looks at the origins and development of reparations as a regional and international process. Weaving detailed historical data on Caribbean slavery and the transatlantic slave trade together with legal principles and the politics of postcolonialism, Beckles sets out a solid academic analysis of the evidence. He concludes that Britain has a case of reparations to answer which the Caribbean should litigate. International law provides that chattel slavery as practised by Britain was a crime against humanity. Slavery was invested in by the royal family, the government, the established church, most elite families, and large public institutions in the private and public sector. Citing the legal principles of unjust and criminal enrichment, the author presents a compelling argument for Britain?s payment of its black debt, a debt that it continues to deny in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It is at once an exciting narration of Britain?s dominance of the slave markets that enriched the economy and a seminal conceptual journey into the hidden politics and public posturing of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. No work of this kind has ever been attempted. No author has had the diversity of historical research skills, national and international political involvement, and personal engagement as an activist to present such a complex yet accessible work of scholarship.
- The Browning of the New South by Jennifer A. JonesCall Number: Gaines F 264 .W8 J66 2019ISBN: 9780226600987Publication Date: 2019-05-13Studies of immigration to the United States have traditionally focused on a few key states and urban centers, but recent shifts in nonwhite settlement mean that these studies no longer paint the whole picture. Many Latino newcomers are flocking to places like the Southeast, where typically few such immigrants have settled, resulting in rapidly redrawn communities. In this historic moment, Jennifer Jones brings forth an ethnographic look at changing racial identities in one Southern city: Winston-Salem, North Carolina. This city turns out to be a natural experiment in race relations, having quickly shifted in the past few decades from a neatly black and white community to a triracial one. Jones tells the story of contemporary Winston-Salem through the eyes of its new Latino residents, revealing untold narratives of inclusion, exclusion, and interracial alliances. The Browning of the New South reveals how one community's racial realignments mirror and anticipate the future of national politics.
- Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora by Linda M. Heywood (Editor)Call Number: Gaines E 29 .N3 C46 2002ISBN: 9780521002783Publication Date: 2001-11-19This volume sets out a new paradigm that increases our understanding of African culture and the forces that led to its transformation during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and beyond, putting long due emphasis on the importance of Central African culture to the cultures of the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Focusing on the Kongo/Angola culture zone, the book illustrates how African peoples re-shaped their cultural institutions as they interacted with Portuguese slave traders up to 1800, then follows Central Africans through all the regions where they were taken as slaves and captives.
- Cold War Civil Rights by Mary L. DudziakCall Number: Gaines E 185.61 .D85 2011ISBN: 9780691152431Publication Date: 2011-07-31In 1958, an African-American handyman named Jimmy Wilson was sentenced to die in Alabama for stealing two dollars. Shocking as this sentence was, it was overturned only after intense international attention and the interference of an embarrassed John Foster Dulles. Soon after the United States' segregated military defeated a racist regime in World War II, American racism was a major concern of U.S. allies, a chief Soviet propaganda theme, and an obstacle to American Cold War goals throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Each lynching harmed foreign relations, and "the Negro problem" became a central issue in every administration from Truman to Johnson. In what may be the best analysis of how international relations affected any domestic issue, Mary Dudziak interprets postwar civil rights as a Cold War feature. She argues that the Cold War helped facilitate key social reforms, including desegregation. Civil rights activists gained tremendous advantage as the government sought to polish its international image. But improving the nation's reputation did not always require real change. This focus on image rather than substance--combined with constraints on McCarthy-era political activism and the triumph of law-and-order rhetoric--limited the nature and extent of progress. Archival information, much of it newly available, supports Dudziak's argument that civil rights was Cold War policy. But the story is also one of people: an African-American veteran of World War II lynched in Georgia; an attorney general flooded by civil rights petitions from abroad; the teenagers who desegregated Little Rock's Central High; African diplomats denied restaurant service; black artists living in Europe and supporting the civil rights movement from overseas; conservative politicians viewing desegregation as a communist plot; and civil rights leaders who saw their struggle eclipsed by Vietnam. Never before has any scholar so directly connected civil rights and the Cold War. Contributing mightily to our understanding of both, Dudziak advances--in clear and lively prose--a new wave of scholarship that corrects isolationist tendencies in American history by applying an international perspective to domestic affairs. In her new preface, Dudziak discusses the way the Cold War figures into civil rights history, and details this book's origins, as one question about civil rights could not be answered without broadening her research from domestic to international influences on American history.
- Confronting Black Jacobins by Gerald HorneCall Number: Gaines E 183.8 .H2 H67 2015ISBN: 9781583675625Publication Date: 2015-10-22The Haitian Revolution, the product of the first successful slave revolt, was truly world-historic in its impact. When Haiti declared independence in 1804, the leading powers--France, Great Britain, and Spain--suffered an ignominious defeat and the New World was remade. The island revolution also had a profound impact on Haiti's mainland neighbor, the United States. Inspiring the enslaved and partisans of emancipation while striking terror throughout the Southern slaveocracy, it propelled the fledgling nation one step closer to civil war. Gerald Horne's path breaking new work explores the complex and often fraught relationship between the United States and the island of Hispaniola. Giving particular attention to the responses of African Americans, Horne surveys the reaction in the United States to the revolutionary process in the nation that became Haiti, the splitting of the island in 1844, which led to the formation of the Dominican Republic, and the failed attempt by the United States to annex both in the 1870s. Drawing upon a rich collection of archival and other primary source materials, Horne deftly weaves together a disparate array of voices--world leaders and diplomats, slaveholders, white abolitionists, and the freedom fighters he terms Black Jacobins. Horne at once illuminates the tangled conflicts of the colonial powers, the commercial interests and imperial ambitions of U.S. elites, and the brutality and tenacity of the American slaveholding class, while never losing sight of the freedom struggles of Africans both on the island and on the mainland, which sought the fulfillment of the emancipatory promise of 18th century republicanism.
- The Creole Archipelago by Tessa MurphyCall Number: Gaines F 2001 .M87 2021ISBN: 9780812253382Publication Date: 2021-10-26In The Creole Archipelago, Tessa Murphy traces how generations of Indigenous Kalinagos, free and enslaved Africans, and settlers from a variety of European nations used maritime routes to forge social, economic, and informal political connections that spanned the eastern Caribbean. Focusing on a chain of volcanic islands, each one visible from the next, whose societies developed outside the sphere of European rule until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Murphy argues that the imperial frameworks typically used to analyze the early colonial Caribbean are at odds with the geographic realities that shaped daily life in the region. Through use of wide-ranging sources including historical maps, parish records, an Indigenous-language dictionary, and colonial correspondence housed in the Caribbean, France, England, and the United States, Murphy shows how this watery borderland became a center of broader imperial experimentation, contestation, and reform. British and French officials dispatched to Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Tobago after 1763 encountered a creolized society that repeatedly frustrated their attempts to transform the islands into productive plantation colonies. By centering the stories of Kalinagos who asserted continued claims to land, French Catholics who demanded the privileges of British subjects, and free people of African descent who insisted on their right to own land and enslaved people, Murphy offers a vivid counterpoint to larger Caribbean plantation societies like Jamaica and Barbados. By looking outward from the eastern Caribbean chain, The Creole Archipelago resituates small islands as microcosms of broader historical processes central to understanding early American and Atlantic history, including European usurpation of Indigenous lands, the rise of slavery and plantation production, and the creation and codification of racial difference.
- Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection by Matthew PettwayCall Number: Gaines PQ 7377 .P48 2020ISBN: 9781496825018Publication Date: 2019-12-30Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era. Both nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic Language for African-inspired spirituality. Likewise, Plácido and Manzano subverted the popular imagery of neoclassicism and Romanticism in order to envision black freedom in the tradition of the Haitian Revolution. Plácido and Manzano envisioned emancipation through the lens of African spirituality, a transformative moment in the history of Cuban letters. Matthew Pettway examines how the portrayal of African ideas of spirit and cosmos in otherwise conventional texts recur throughout early Cuban literature and became the basis for Manzano and Plácido's antislavery philosophy. The portrayal of African-Atlantic religious ideas spurned the elite rationale that literature ought to be a barometer of highbrow cultural progress. Cuban debates about freedom and selfhood were never the exclusive domain of the white Creole elite. Pettway's emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers deepens our understanding of Manzano and Plácido not as mere imitators but as aesthetic and political pioneers. As Pettway suggests, black Latin American authors did not abandon their African religious heritage to assimilate wholesale to the Catholic Church. By recognizing the wisdom of African ancestors, they procured power in the struggle for black liberation.
- Deana Lawson: an Aperture Monograph by Arthur Jafa (Interviewer); Deana Lawson (Photographer); Zadie Smith (Text by)Call Number: Ref Gaines TR 681 .B52 L39 2018ISBN: 9781597114226Publication Date: 2018-09-25Winner of the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize One of the most intriguing photographers of her generation, Deana Lawson's subject is black expressive culture and her canvas is the African Diaspora. Over the last ten years, she has created a striking visual language to describe black identities, through figurative portraiture and social documentary accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Lawson works with large-format cameras and models she meets in the United States and on travels in the Caribbean and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes animated by an exquisite range of color and attention to surprising details: bedding and furniture in domestic interiors or lush plants in Edenic gardens. The body-often nude-is central. Throughout her work, Lawson seeks to portray the personal and the powerful in black life. Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty-five beautifully reproduced photographs and an extensive interview with the filmmaker Arthur Jafa. "Outside a Deana Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling. But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen." - Zadie Smith
- Demonic Grounds by Katherine McKittrickCall Number: Gaines E 29 .N3 M38 2006ISBN: 9780816647026Publication Date: 2006-05-03IIn a long overdue contribution to geography and social theory, Katherine McKittrick offers a new and powerful interpretation of black women's geographic thought. In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material geographies, McKittrick reveals how human geographies are a result of racialized connections, and how spaces that are fraught with limitation are underacknowledged but meaningful sites of political opposition. Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, the author addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs's attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter's philosophies. Central to McKittrick's argument are the ways in which black women are not passive recipients of their surroundings and how a sense of place relates to the struggle against domination. Ultimately, McKittrick argues, these complex black geographies are alterable and may provide the opportunity for social and cultural change. Katherine McKittrick is assistant professor of women's studies at Queen's University.
- Diasporic Africa by Michael A. Gomez (Editor)Call Number: Gaines DT 16.5 .D54 2006ISBN: 9780814731666Publication Date: 2006-01-01Diasporic Africa presents the most recent research on the history and experiences of people of African descent outside of the African continent. By incorporating Europe and North Africa as well as North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this reader shifts the discourse on the African diaspora away from its focus solely on the Americas, underscoring the fact that much of the movement of people of African descent took place in Old World contexts. This broader view allows for a more comprehensive approach to the study of the African diaspora. The volume provides an overview of African diaspora studies and features as a major concern a rigorous interrogation of "identity." Other primary themes include contributions to western civilization, from religion, music, and sports to agricultural production and medicine, as well as the way in which our understanding of the African diaspora fits into larger studies of transnational phenomena.
- Diasporic Blackness by VANESSA VALDESCall Number: Gaines E 185.97 .S36 V35 2017ISBN: 9781438465142Publication Date: 2018-01-02A Black Puerto Rican-born scholar, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874-1938) was a well-known collector and archivist whose personal library was the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. He was an autodidact who matched wits with university-educated men and women, as well as a prominent Freemason, a writer, and an institution-builder. While he spent much of his life in New York City, Schomburg was intimately involved in the cause of Cuban and Puerto Rican independence. In the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, he would go on to cofound the Negro Society for Historical Research and lead the American Negro Academy, all the while collecting and assembling books, prints, pamphlets, articles, and other ephemera produced by Black men and women from across the Americas and Europe. His curated library collection at the New York Public Library emphasized the presence of African peoples and their descendants throughout the Americas and would serve as an indispensable resource for the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. By offering a sustained look at the life of one of the most important figures of early twentieth-century New York City, this first book-length examination of Schomburg's life as an Afro-Latino suggests new ways of understanding the intersections of both Blackness and latinidad.
- Dreams of Africa in Alabama by Sylviane A. DioufCall Number: Gaines E 445 .A3 D56 2007ISBN: 9780195382938Publication Date: 2009-02-18Winner of the 2007 Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association, this acclaimed volume tells the moving story of the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves--more than fifty years after the United States abolished the international slave trade.Sylviane A. Diouf reconstructs the lives of 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria who were brought ashore in Alabama in 1860 under cover of night, recounting their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describing their experience of slavery alongside American-bornenslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought land, and founded their own settlement, known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws, spoke their own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers usetheir African names so that their families would know that they were still alive. African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants.
- Engaging the African Diaspora in K-12 Education by Emily Chávez (Editor); Kia Caldwell (Editor)Call Number: Gaines LB 1513 .E44 2020ISBN: 9781433172236Publication Date: 2020-04-06Engaging the African Diaspora in K-12 Educationprovides in-service and pre-service teachers with valuable information and resources related to African diaspora communities in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. This unique anthology fills an important gap in current pedagogical and curricular publications by combining the writings of leading scholars of the African diaspora with practical, hands-on tips and resources from middle and high school teachers and administrators. Drawing on cutting-edge academic scholarship, chapters of the book address topics such as the transatlantic slave trade, slavery in Latin America, the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, Pan-Africanism, Black German Studies, and literature and art by Black women in the diaspora. In addition, Engaging the African Diaspora in K-12 Educationincludes chapters on anti-racist education, use of the performing arts to teach African American history, and critical reflections by several middle and high school teachers on practices they have adopted to increase their students' exposure to the African diaspora in the classroom.
- Escape from New York by Davarian L. Baldwin (Editor); Minkah Makalani (Editor)Call Number: Gaines GN 645 .E79 2013ISBN: 9780816677399Publication Date: 2013-10-05In the midst of vast cultural and political shifts in the early twentieth century, politicians and cultural observers variously hailed and decried the rise of the "New Negro." This phenomenon was most clearly manifest in the United States through the outpouring of Black arts and letters and social commentary known as the Harlem Renaissance. What is less known is how far afield of Harlem that renaissance flourished--how much the New Negro movement was actually just one part of a collective explosion of political protest, cultural expression, and intellectual debate all over the world. In this volume, the Harlem Renaissance "escapes from New York" into its proper global context. These essays recover the broader New Negro experience as social movements, popular cultures, and public behavior spanned the globe from New York to New Orleans, from Paris to the Philippines and beyond. Escape from New York does not so much map the many sites of this early twentieth-century Black internationalism as it draws attention to how New Negroes and their global allies already lived. Resituating the Harlem Renaissance, the book stresses the need for scholarship to catch up with the historical reality of the New Negro experience. This more comprehensive vision serves as a lens through which to better understand capitalist developments, imperial expansions, and the formation of brave new worlds in the early twentieth century. Contributors: Anastasia Curwood, Vanderbilt U; Frank A. Guridy, U of Texas at Austin; Claudrena Harold, U of Virginia; Jeannette Eileen Jones, U of Nebraska-Lincoln; Andrew W. Kahrl, Marquette U; Shannon King, College of Wooster; Charlie Lester; Thabiti Lewis, Washington State U, Vancouver; Treva Lindsey, U of Missouri-Columbia; David Luis-Brown, Claremont Graduate U; Emily Lutenski, Saint Louis U; Mark Anthony Neal, Duke U; Yuichiro Onishi, U of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Theresa Runstedtler, U at Buffalo (SUNY); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Vanderbilt U; Michelle Stephens, Rutgers U, New Brunswick; Jennifer M. Wilks, U of Texas at Austin; Chad Williams, Brandeis U.
- Exchanging Our Country Marks by Michael A. GomezCall Number: Gaines E 185.18 .G18 1998ISBN: 9780807846940Publication Date: 1998-03-30The transatlantic slave trade brought individuals from diverse African regions and cultures to a common destiny in the American South. In this comprehensive study, Michael Gomez establishes tangible links between the African American community and its African origins and traces the process by which African populations exchanged their distinct ethnic identities for one defined primarily by the conception of race. He examines transformations in the politics, social structures, and religions of slave populations through 1830, by which time the contours of a new African American identity had begun to emerge. After discussing specific ethnic groups in Africa, Gomez follows their movement to North America, where they tended to be amassed in recognizable concentrations within individual colonies (and, later, states). For this reason, he argues, it is possible to identify particular ethnic cultural influences and ensuing social formations that heretofore have been considered unrecoverable. Using sources pertaining to the African continent as well as runaway slave advertisements, ex-slave narratives, and folklore, Gomez reveals concrete and specific links between particular African populations and their North American progeny, thereby shedding new light on subsequent African American social formation.
- An Eye for the Tropics by Krista A. ThompsonCall Number: Gaines G 155 .C35 T53 2006ISBN: 9780822337645Publication Date: 2007-03-15Images of Jamaica and the Bahamas as tropical paradises full of palm trees, white sandy beaches, and inviting warm water seem timeless. Surprisingly, the origins of those images can be traced back to the roots of the islands' tourism industry in the 1880s. As Krista A. Thompson explains, in the late nineteenth century, tourism promoters, backed by British colonial administrators, began to market Jamaica and the Bahamas as picturesque "tropical" paradises. They hired photographers and artists to create carefully crafted representations, which then circulated internationally via postcards and illustrated guides and lectures. Illustrated with more than one hundred images, including many in color, An Eye for the Tropics is a nuanced evaluation of the aesthetics of the "tropicalizing images" and their effects on Jamaica and the Bahamas. Thompson describes how representations created to project an image to the outside world altered everyday life on the islands. Hoteliers imported tropical plants to make the islands look more like the images. Many prominent tourist-oriented spaces, including hotels and famous beaches, became off-limits to the islands' black populations, who were encouraged to act like the disciplined, loyal colonial subjects depicted in the pictures. Analyzing the work of specific photographers and artists who created tropical representations of Jamaica and the Bahamas between the 1880s and the 1930s, Thompson shows how their images differ from the English picturesque landscape tradition. Turning to the present, she examines how tropicalizing images are deconstructed in works by contemporary artists--including Christopher Cozier, David Bailey, and Irénée Shaw--at the same time that they remain a staple of postcolonial governments' vigorous efforts to attract tourists.
- Ezili's Mirrors by Omise'eke Natasha TinsleyCall Number: Gaines HQ 1075.5 .H2 T567 2018ISBN: 9780822370383Publication Date: 2018-02-27From the dagger mistress EziliJe Wouj and the gender-bending mermaid Lasiren to the beautiful femme queen Ezili Freda, the Ezili pantheon of Vodoun spirits represents the divine forces of love, sexuality, prosperity, pleasure, maternity, creativity, and fertility. And just as Ezili appears in different guises and characters, so too does Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley in her voice- and genre-shifting, exploratory book Ezili's Mirrors. Drawing on her background as a literary critic as well as her quest to learn the lessons of her spiritual ancestors, Tinsley theorizes black Atlantic sexuality by tracing how contemporary queer Caribbean and African American writers and performers evoke Ezili. Tinsley shows how Ezili is manifest in the work and personal lives of singers Whitney Houston and Azealia Banks, novelists Nalo Hopkinson and Ana Lara, performers MilDred Gerestant and Sharon Bridgforth, and filmmakers Anne Lescot and Laurence Magloire--none of whom identify as Vodou practitioners. In so doing, Tinsley offers a model of queer black feminist theory that creates new possibilities for decolonizing queer studies.
- The First Black Slave Society by Hilary McD BecklesCall Number: Gaines HT 1105 .B3 B335 2016ISBN: 9789766405854Publication Date: 2016-09-30In this remarkable exploration of the brutal course of Barbados?s history, Hilary McD. Beckles details the systematic barbarism of the British colonial project. Trade in enslaved Africans was not new in the Americas in the seventeenth century ? the Portuguese and Spanish had commercialized chattel slavery in Brazil and Cuba in the 1500s ? but in Barbados, the practice of slavery reached its apotheosis. Barbados was the birthplace of British slave society and the most ruthlessly colonized. The geography of Barbados was ideally suited to sugar plantations and there were enormous fortunes to be made for British royalty and ruling elites from sugar produced by an enslaved, ?disposable? workforce, fortunes that secured Britain?s place as an imperial superpower. The inhumane legacy of plantation society has shaped modern Barbados and this history must be fully understood by the inheritors on both sides of the power dynamic before real change and reparatory justice can take place. A prequel to Beckles?s equally compelling Britain?s Black Debt, The First Black Slave Society: Britain?s ?Barbarity Time? in Barbados, 1636?1876 is essential reading for anyone interested in Atlantic history, slavery and the plantation system, and modern race relations.
- Frottage by Keguro MachariaCall Number: Gaines DT 16.5 .M26 2019ISBN: 9781479865017Publication Date: 2019-11-19Winner, 2020 Alan Bray Memorial Prize, given by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association A new understanding of freedom in the black diaspora grounded in the erotic In Frottage, Keguro Macharia weaves together histories and theories of blackness and sexuality to generate a fundamentally new understanding of both the black diaspora and queer studies. Macharia maintains that to reach this understanding, we must start from the black diaspora, which requires re-thinking not only the historical and theoretical utility of identity categories such as gay, lesbian, and bisexual, but also more foundational categories such as normative and non-normative, human and non-human. Simultaneously, Frottage questions the heteronormative tropes through which the black diaspora has been imagined. Between Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta, and Claude McKay, Macharia moves through genres--psychoanalysis, fiction, anthropology, poetry--as well as regional geohistories across Africa and Afro-diaspora to map the centrality of sex, gender, desire, and eroticism to black freedom struggles. In lyrical, meditative prose, Macharia invigorates frottage as both metaphor and method with which to rethink diaspora by reading, and reading against, discomfort, vulnerability, and pleasure.
- The Global History of Black Girlhood by Corinne T. Field (Editor); S. A. Smythe (Contribution by); Nastassja E. Swift (Contribution by); Jennifer L. Palmer (Contribution by); Nazera Sadiq Wright (Contribution by); Cynthia R. Greenlee (Contribution by); Vanessa D. Plumly (Contribution by); Najya A. Williams (Contribution by); Katharine Capshaw (Contribution by); Dara Walker (Contribution by); Shani Roper (Contribution by); LaKisha Michelle Simmons (Editor); Janaé E. Bonsu (Contribution by); Beverley Palesa Ditsie (Contribution by); Phindile Kunene (Contribution by); Denise Oliver-Velez (Contribution by); Claudrena N. Harold (Contribution by); Ruth Nicole Brown (Contribution by); Casidy Campbell (Contribution by); S. E. Duff (Contribution by); Crystal Lynn Webster (Contribution by); Tara Bynum (Contribution by); Anasa Hicks (Contribution by); Lindsey Elizabeth Jones (Contribution by)Call Number: Gaines HQ 798.5 .B53 G56 2022ISBN: 9780252086694Publication Date: 2022-09-27The Global History of Black Girlhood boldly claims that Black girls are so important we should know their histories. Yet, how do we find the stories and materials we need to hear Black girls' voices and understand their lives? Corinne T. Field and LaKisha Michelle Simmons edit a collection of writings that explores the many ways scholars, artists, and activists think and write about Black girls' pasts. The contributors engage in interdisciplinary conversations that consider what it means to be a girl; the meaning of Blackness when seen from the perspectives of girls in different times and places; and the ways Black girls have imagined themselves as part of a global African diaspora. Thought-provoking and original, The Global History of Black Girlhood opens up new possibilities for understanding Black girls in the past while offering useful tools for present-day Black girls eager to explore the histories of those who came before them. Contributors: Janaé E. Bonsu, Ruth Nicole Brown, Tara Bynum, Casidy Campbell, Katherine Capshaw, Bev Palesa Ditsie, Sarah Duff, Cynthia Greenlee, Claudrena Harold, Anasa Hicks, Lindsey Jones, Phindile Kunene, Denise Oliver-Velez, Jennifer Palmer, Vanessa Plumly, Shani Roper, SA Smythe, Nastassja Swift, Dara Walker, Najya Williams, and Nazera Wright
- Health Equity in Brazil by Kia Lilly CaldwellCall Number: Gaines RA 463 .C35 2017ISBN: 9780252082474Publication Date: 2017-06-06Brazil's leadership role in the fight against HIV has brought its public health system widespread praise. But the nation still faces serious health challenges and inequities. Though home to the world's second largest African-descendant population, Brazil failed to address many of its public health issues that disproportionately impact Afro-Brazilian women and men. Kia Lilly Caldwell draws on twenty years of engagement with activists, issues, and policy initiatives to document how the country's feminist health movement and black women's movement have fought for much-needed changes in women's health. Merging ethnography with a historical analysis of policies and programs, Caldwell offers a close examination of institutional and structural factors that have impacted the quest for gender and racial health equity in Brazil. As she shows, activists have played an essential role in policy development in areas ranging from maternal mortality to female sterilization. Caldwell's insightful portrait of the public health system also details how its weaknesses contribute to ongoing failures and challenges while also imperiling the advances that have been made.
- How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean by Hilary McD BecklesCall Number: Gaines HC 151 .B45 2021ISBN: 9789766408695Publication Date: 2021-11-24"The modern Caribbeaneconomy was invented, structured and managed by European states for onepurpose: to achieve maximum wealth extraction to fuel and sustain theirnational financial, commercial and industrial transformation." So begins How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean: AReparation Response to Europe's Legacy of Plunder and Poverty as HilaryMcD. Beckles continues the groundbreaking work he began in Britain's Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and NativeGenocide. We are now ina time of global reckoning for centuries of crimes against humanity perpetratedby European colonial powers as they built their empires with the wealthextracted from the territories they occupied and exploited with enslaved and,later, indentured labour. The systematic brutality of the transatlantic tradein enslaved Africans and the plantation economies did not disappear with theabolition of slavery. Rather, the means of exploitation were reconfigured toensure that wealth continued to flow to European states. Independencefrom colonial powers in the twentieth century did not mean real freedom for theCaribbean nations, left as they were without the resources for meaningfuldevelopment and in a state of persistent poverty. Beckles focuses his attentionon the British Empire and shows how successive governments have systematicallysuppressed economic development in their former colonies and have refused to acceptresponsibility for the debt and development support they owe the Caribbean.
- Identities in Flux by Niyi AfolabiCall Number: Gaines PQ 9523 .B57 A46 2021ISBN: 9781438482491Publication Date: 2021-02-01Drawing on historical and cultural approaches to race relations, Identities in Flux examines iconic Afro-Brazilian figures and theorizes how they have been appropriated to either support or contest a utopian vision of multiculturalism. Zumbi dos Palmares, the leader of a runaway slave community in the seventeenth century, is shown not as an anti-Brazilian rebel but as a symbol of Black consciousness and anti-colonial resistance. Xica da Silva, an eighteenth-century mixed-race enslaved woman who "married" her master and has been seen as a licentious mulatta, questions gendered stereotypes of so-called racial democracy. Manuel Querino, whose ethnographic studies have been ignored and virtually unknown for much of the twentieth century, is put on par with more widely known African American trailblazers such as W. E. B. Du Bois. Niyi Afolabi draws out the intermingling influences of Yoruba and Classical Greek mythologies in Brazilian representations of the carnivalesque Black Orpheus, while his analysis of City of God focuses on the growing centrality of the ghetto, or favela, as a theme and producer of culture in the early twenty-first-century Brazilian urban scene. Ultimately, Afolabi argues, the identities of these figures are not fixed, but rather inhabit a fluid terrain of ideological and political struggle, challenging the idealistic notion that racial hybridity has eliminated racial discrimination in Brazil.
- Ifá Divination, Knowledge, Power, and Performance by Jacob K. Olupona (Editor, Contribution by); Rowland O. Abiodun (Editor, Contribution by); Adélékè Adéèkó (Contribution by); Akintunde Akinyemi (Contribution by); Andrew Apter (Contribution by); Barry Hallen (Contribution by); Bolaji Campbell (Contribution by); Henry John Drewal (Contribution by); Ifaboyede McElwaine Abimbola (Contribution by); Akinwumi Isola (Contribution by); John Mason (Contribution by); Joseph M. Murray (Contribution by); Kamari M. Clarke (Contribution by); Laura S. Grillo (Contribution by); Mei-Mei Sanford (Contribution by); Olúfémi Táíwò (Contribution by); J. A. Opefeyitimi (Contribution by); Olasope O. Oyelaran (Contribution by); Philip M. Peek (Contribution by); Stefania Capone (Contribution by); Wyatt MacGaffey (Contribution by); Ysamur M. Flores-Peña (Contribution by)Call Number: Gaines BF 1779 .I4 1347 2016ISBN: 9780253018908Publication Date: 2016-02-29This landmark volume compiled by Jacob K. Olupona and Rowland O. Abiodun brings readers into the diverse world of Ifá--its discourse, ways of thinking, and artistic expression as manifested throughout the Afro-Atlantic. Firmly rooting Ifá within African religious traditions, the essays consider Ifá and Ifá divination from the perspectives of philosophy, performance studies, and cultural studies. They also examine the sacred context, verbal art, and the interpretation of Ifá texts and philosophy. With essays from the most respected scholars in the field, the book makes a substantial contribution toward understanding Ifá and its role in contemporary Yoruba and diaspora cultures.
- Imperial Intimacies by Hazel V. CarbyCall Number: Gaines DA 3 .C37 A3 2021ISBN: 9781788735100Publication Date: 2021-10-12Winner of the British Academy's Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2020 Highly commended for PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2020 A haunting and evocative history of British empire, told through one woman's family story "Where are you from?" was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post-war London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby's place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt. Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby's working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the "white Carbys" and the "black Carbys," including Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. Moving between Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby's family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire's interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.
- In Search of Liberty by Ousmane K. Power-Greene (Editor); Gerald Horne (Contribution by); Angela F. Murphy (Contribution by); Pia Wiegmink (Contribution by); Claire Bourhis-Mariotti (Contribution by); Brandon R. Byrd (Contribution by); Dexter J. Gabriel (Contribution by); Marcus Bruce (Contribution by); Caree A. Banton (Contribution by); Lawrence Aje (Contribution by); Thomas Mareite (Contribution by); Mekala Audain (Contribution by); Franco Paz (Contribution by); Harvey Whitfield (Contribution by); James Sidbury (Contribution by); Ronald Angelo Johnson (Editor)Call Number: Gaines E 185.18 .I525 2021ISBN: 9780820360102Publication Date: 2021-07-30In Search of Liberty explores how African Americans, since the founding of the United States, have understood their struggles for freedom as part of the larger Atlantic world. The essays in this volume capture the pursuits of equality and justice by African Americans across the Atlantic World through the end of the nineteenth century, as their fights for emancipation and enfranchisement in the United States continued. This book illuminates stories of individual Black people striving to escape slavery in places like Nova Scotia, Louisiana, and Mexico and connects their eff orts to emigration movements from the United States to Africa and the Caribbean, as well as to Black abolitionist campaigns in Europe. By placing these diverse stories in conversation, editors Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene have curated a larger story that is only beginning to be told. By focusing on Black internationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, In Search of Liberty reveals that Black freedom struggles in the United States were rooted in transnational networks much earlier than the better-known movements of the twentieth century.
- An Introduction to Africana Philosophy by Lewis R. GordonCall Number: Ref. Gaines B 5305 .G67 2008ISBN: 9780521675468Publication Date: 2008-05-01In this undergraduate textbook Lewis R. Gordon offers the first comprehensive treatment of Africana philosophy, beginning with the emergence of an Africana (i.e. African diasporic) consciousness in the Afro-Arabic world of the Middle Ages. He argues that much of modern thought emerged out of early conflicts between Islam and Christianity that culminated in the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula, and from the subsequent expansion of racism, enslavement, and colonialism which in their turn stimulated reflections on reason, liberation, and the meaning of being human. His book takes the student reader on a journey from Africa through Europe, North and South America, the Caribbean, and back to Africa, as he explores the challenges posed to our understanding of knowledge and freedom today, and the response to them which can be found within Africana philosophy.
- Left of Karl Marx by Carole Boyce DaviesCall Number: Gaines HX 84 .J66 B69 2008ISBN: 9780822341161Publication Date: 2008-02-05In Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915-1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London's Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx--a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism. Claudia Cumberbatch Jones was born in Trinidad. In 1924, she moved to New York, where she lived for the next thirty years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early twenties onward. A talented writer and speaker, she traveled throughout the United States lecturing and organizing. In the early 1950s, she wrote a well-known column, "Half the World," for the Daily Worker. As the U.S. government intensified its efforts to prosecute communists, Jones was arrested several times. She served nearly a year in a U.S. prison before being deported and given asylum by Great Britain in 1955. There she founded The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and the Caribbean Carnival, an annual London festival that continues today as the Notting Hill Carnival. Boyce Davies examines Jones's thought and journalism, her political and community organizing, and poetry that the activist wrote while she was imprisoned. Looking at the contents of the FBI file on Jones, Boyce Davies contrasts Jones's own narration of her life with the federal government's. Left of Karl Marx establishes Jones as a significant figure within Caribbean intellectual traditions, black U.S. feminism, and the history of communism.
- A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne BrandCall Number: Gaines PR 9199.3 .B683 Z47 2011ISBN: 9780385258920Publication Date: 2002-09-17A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond. The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history--the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.
- Migrating the Black Body by Leigh Raiford (Editor); Heike Raphael-Hernandez (Editor)Call Number: Gaines N 8232 .M54 2017ISBN: 9780295999579Publication Date: 2017-05-01Migrating the Black Body explores how visual media--from painting to photography, from global independent cinema to Hollywood movies, from posters and broadsides to digital media, from public art to graphic novels--has shaped diasporic imaginings of the individual and collective self. How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past? And how do visual technologies structure the way we see African subjects and subjectivity? This volume brings together an international group of scholars and artists who explore these questions in visual culture for the historical and contemporary African diaspora. Examining subjects as wide-ranging as the appearance of blackamoors in Russian and Swedish imperialist paintings, the appropriation of African and African American liberation images for Chinese Communist Party propaganda, and the role of YouTube videos in establishing connections between Ghana and its international diaspora, these essays investigate routes of migration, both voluntary and forced, stretching across space, place, and time.
- Mobilizing Black Germany by Tiffany N. FlorvilCall Number: Gaines DD 78 .B55 F55 2020ISBN: 9780252085413Publication Date: 2020-12-28In the 1980s and 1990s, Black German women began to play significant roles in challenging the discrimination in their own nation and abroad. Their grassroots organizing, writings, and political and cultural activities nurtured innovative traditions, ideas, and practices. These strategies facilitated new, often radical bonds between people from disparate backgrounds across the Black Diaspora. Tiffany N. Florvil examines the role of queer and straight women in shaping the contours of the modern Black German movement as part of the Black internationalist opposition to racial and gender oppression. Florvil shows the multifaceted contributions of women to movement making, including Audre Lorde's role in influencing their activism; the activists who inspired Afro-German women to curate their own identities and histories; and the evolution of the activist groups Initiative of Black Germans and Afro-German Women. These practices and strategies became a rallying point for isolated and marginalized women (and men) and shaped the roots of contemporary Black German activism. Richly researched and multidimensional in scope, Mobilizing Black Germany offers a rare in-depth look at the emergence of the modern Black German movement and Black feminists' politics, intellectualism, and internationalism.
- A Nation for All by Alejandro de la FuenteCall Number: Gaines F 1789 .A1 F84 2001ISBN: 9780807849224Publication Date: 2001-04-30After thirty years of anticolonial struggle against Spain and four years of military occupation by the United States, Cuba formally became an independent republic in 1902. The nationalist coalition that fought for Cuba's freedom, a movement in which blacks and mulattoes were well represented, had envisioned an egalitarian and inclusive country--a nation for all, as Jose Marti described it. But did the Cuban republic, and later the Cuban revolution, live up to these expectations? Tracing the formation and reformulation of nationalist ideologies, government policies, and different forms of social and political mobilization in republican and postrevolutionary Cuba, Alejandro de la Fuente explores the opportunities and limitations that Afro-Cubans experienced in such areas as job access, education, and political representation. Challenging assumptions of both underlying racism and racial democracy, he contends that racism and antiracism coexisted within Cuban nationalism and, in turn, Cuban society. This coexistence has persisted to this day, despite significant efforts by the revolutionary government to improve the lot of the poor and build a nation that was truly for all.
- Negras in Brazil by Kia Lilly CaldwellCall Number: Gaines HQ 1236.5 .B6 C34 2007ISBN: 9780813539577Publication Date: 2006-12-04For most of the twentieth century, Brazil was widely regarded as a "racial democracy"-a country untainted by the scourge of racism and prejudice. In recent decades, however, this image has been severely critiqued, with a growing number of studies highlighting persistent and deep-seated patterns of racial discrimination and inequality. Yet, recent work on race and racism has rarely considered gender as part of its analysis. In Negras in Brazil, Kia Lilly Caldwell examines the life experiences of Afro-Brazilian women whose stories have until now been largely untold. This pathbreaking study analyzes the links between race and gender and broader processes of social, economic, and political exclusion. Drawing on ethnographic research with social movement organizations and thirty-five life history interviews, Caldwell explores the everyday struggles Afro-Brazilian women face in their efforts to achieve equal rights and full citizenship. She also shows how the black women's movement, which has emerged in recent decades, has sought to challenge racial and gender discrimination in Brazil. While proposing a broader view of citizenship that includes domains such as popular culture and the body, Negras in Brazil highlights the continuing relevance of identity politics for members of racially marginalized communities. Providing new insights into black women's social activism and a gendered perspective on Brazilian racial dynamics, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American Studies, African diaspora studies, women's studies, politics, and cultural anthropology.
- Never Meant to Survive by Joao H. Costa VargasCall Number: Gaines E 29 .N3 V27 2008ISBN: 9780742541023Publication Date: 2010-01-16Never 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.
- Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution by C. L. R. James; Leslie James (Editor)Call Number: Gaines DT 512 .J35 2022ISBN: 9781478006220Publication Date: 2022-04-01In this new edition of Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, C. L. R. James tells the history of the socialist revolution led by Kwame Nkrumah, the first president and prime minister of Ghana. Although James wrote it in the immediate post-independence period around 1958, he did not publish it until nearly twenty years later, when he added a series of his own letters, speeches, and articles from the 1960s. Although Nkrumah led the revolution, James emphasizes that it was a popular mass movement fundamentally realized by the actions of everyday Ghanaians. Moreover, James shows that Ghana's independence movement was an exceptional moment in global revolutionary history: it moved revolutionary activity to the African continent and employed new tactics not seen in previous revolutions. Featuring a new introduction by Leslie James, an unpublished draft of C. L. R. James's introduction to the 1977 edition, and correspondence, this definitive edition of Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution offers a revised understanding of Africa's shaping of freedom movements and insight into the possibilities for decolonial futures.
- Nomenclature by Dionne Brand; Christina Sharpe (Introduction by)Call Number: Gaines PR 9199.3 .B683 N664 2022ISBN: 9781478016625Publication Date: 2022-10-18Spanning almost four decades, Dionne Brand's poetry has given rise to whole new grammars and vocabularies. With a profound alertness that is attuned to this world and open to some other, possiblyfuture, time and place, Brand's ongoing labors of witness and imagination speak directly to where and how we live and reach beyond those worlds, their enclosures, and their violences. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems begins with a new long poem, the titular Nomenclature for the Time Being, in which Dionne Brand's diaspora consciousness dismantles our quotidian disasters. In addition to this searing new work, Nomenclature collects eight volumes of Brand's poetry published between 1982and 2010 and includes a critical introduction by the literary scholar and theorist Christina Sharpe. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poemsfeatures the searching and centering cantos of Primitive Offensive; the sharp musical conversations of Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia; and the documentary losses of revolutions in Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, in which "The street was empty/with all of us standing there." No Language Is Neutral reads language, coloniality, and sexuality as a nexus. Land to Light On writes intimacies and disaffections with nation, while in thirsty a cold-eyed flâneursurveys the workings of the city. In Inventory, written during the Gulf Wars, the poet is "the wars' last and latenight witness," her job is not to soothe but to "revise and revise this bristling list/hourly."Ossuaries' futurist speaker rounds out the collectionand threads multiple temporal worlds--past, present, and future. This masterwork displays Dionne Brand's ongoing body of thought--trenchant, lyrical, absonant, discordant, and meaning-making. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems is classic and living, a record of one of the great writers of our age.
- Oshun's Daughters by VANESSA VALDESCall Number: Gaines PN 56.3 .A45 V35 2014ISBN: 9781438450438Publication Date: 2014-01-01Finalist for the 2015 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions presented by the Journal of Africana Religions Oshun's Daughters examines representations of African diasporic religions from novels and poems written by women in the United States, the Spanish Caribbean, and Brazil. In spite of differences in age, language, and nationality, these women writers all turn to variations of traditional Yoruba religion (Santería/Regla de Ocha and Candomblé) as a source of inspiration for creating portraits of womanhood. Within these religious systems, binaries that dominate European thought--man/woman, mind/body, light/dark, good/evil--do not function in the same way, as the emphasis is not on extremes but on balancing or reconciling these radical differences. Involvement with these African diasporic religions thus provides alternative models of womanhood that differ substantially from those found in dominant Western patriarchal culture, namely, that of virgin, asexual wife/mother, and whore. Instead we find images of the sexual woman, who enjoys her body without any sense of shame; the mother, who nurtures her children without sacrificing herself; and the warrior woman, who actively resists demands that she conform to one-dimensional stereotypes of womanhood.
- Ouidah by Robin LawCall Number: Gaines HT 1334 .O85 L39 2004ISBN: 9780821415726Publication Date: 2005-10-25Ouidah, an African town in the Republic of Benin, was the principal precolonial commercial center of its region and the second-most-important town of the Dahomey kingdom. It served as a major outlet for the transatlantic slave trade. Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, Ouidah was the most important embarkation point for slaves in the region of West Africa known to outsiders as the Slave Coast. This is the first detailed study of the town's history and of its role in the Atlantic slave trade. Ouidah is a well-documented case study of precolonial urbanism, of the evolution of a merchant community, and in particular of the growth of a group of private traders whose relations with the Dahomian monarchy grew increasingly problematic over time.
- Pauulu's Diaspora by Quito J. SwanCall Number: Gaines DT 16.5 .S93 2020ISBN: 9780813068572Publication Date: 2021-10-30African American Intellectual History Society Pauli Murray Book Prize A Black Perspectives Best Black History Book of 2020 Honorable Mention, Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Foundation Award Finalist, Association for the Study of African American Life and History Book Prize Pauulu's Diaspora is a sweeping story of black internationalism across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean worlds, told through the life and work of twentieth-century environmental activist Pauulu Kamarakafego. Challenging U.S.-centered views of Black Power, Quito Swan offers a radically broader perspective, showing how Kamarakafego helped connect liberation efforts of the African diaspora throughout the Global South. Born in Bermuda and with formative experiences in Cuba, Kamarakafego was aware at an early age of the effects of colonialism and the international scope of racism and segregation. After pursuing graduate studies in ecological engineering, he traveled to Africa, where he was inspired by the continent's independence struggles and contributed to various sustainable development movements. Swan explores Kamarakafego's remarkable fusion of political agitation and scientific expertise and traces his emergence as a central coordinator of major black internationalist conferences. Despite government surveillance, Kamarakafego built a network of black organizers that reached from Kenya to the islands of Oceania and included such figures as C. L. R. James, Queen Mother Audley Moore, Kwame Nkrumah, Sonia Sanchez, Sylvia Hill, Malcolm X, Vanessa Griffen, and Stokely Carmichael. In a riveting narrative that runs through Caribbean sugarcane fields, Liberian rubber plantations, and Papua New Guinean rainforests, Pauulu's Diaspora recognizes a global leader who has largely been absent from scholarship. In doing so, it brings to light little-known relationships among Black Power, pan-Africanism, and environmental justice.
- The Practice of Diaspora by Brent Hayes EdwardsCall Number: Gaines PN 841 .E38 2003ISBN: 9780674011038Publication Date: 2003-07-10A pathbreaking work of scholarship that will reshape our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, The Practice of Diaspora revisits black transnational culture in the 1920s and 1930s, paying particular attention to links between intellectuals in New York and their Francophone counterparts in Paris. Brent Edwards suggests that diaspora is less a historical condition than a set of practices: the claims, correspondences, and collaborations through which black intellectuals pursue a variety of international alliances. Edwards elucidates the workings of diaspora by tracking the wealth of black transnational print culture between the world wars, exploring the connections and exchanges among New York-based publications (such as Opportunity, The Negro World, and The Crisis) and newspapers in Paris (such as Les Continents, La Voix des Nègres, and L'Etudiant noir). In reading a remarkably diverse archive--the works of writers and editors from Langston Hughes, René Maran, and Claude McKay to Paulette Nardal, Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté--The Practice of Diaspora takes account of the highly divergent ways of imagining race beyond the barriers of nation and language. In doing so, it reveals the importance of translation, arguing that the politics of diaspora are legible above all in efforts at negotiating difference among populations of African descent throughout the world.
- Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality by Charles W. MillsCall Number: Gaines HN 242 .Z9 S615 2010ISBN: 9789766402273Publication Date: 2010-04-01This 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.?
- Readings in Sexualities from Africa by Rachel Spronk (Editor); Thomas Hendriks (Editor)Call Number: Gaines HQ 18 .A35 R43 2020ISBN: 9780253047618Publication Date: 2020-02-04Images and stories about African sexuality abound in today's globalized media. Frequently old stereotypes and popular opinion inform these stories, and sex in the media is predominately approached as a problem in need of solutions and intervention. The authors gathered here refuse an easy characterization of African sexuality and instead seek to understand the various erotic realities, sexual practices, and gendered changes taking place across the continent. They present a nuanced and comprehensive overview of the field of sex and sexuality in Africa to serve as a guide though the quickly expanding literature. This collection offers a set of texts that use sexuality as a prism for studying how communities coalesce against the canvas of larger political and economic contexts and how personal lives evolve therein. Scholars working in Africa, the U.S., and Europe reflect on issues of representation, health and bio-politics, same-sex relationships and identity, transactional economies of sex, religion and tradition, and the importance of pleasure and agency. This multidimensional reader provides a comprehensive view of sexuality from an African perspective.
- Reversing Sail by Michael A. GomezCall Number: Gaines DT 16.5 .G66 2020ISBN: 9781108712439Publication Date: 2019-10-10Beginning with antiquity, Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora captures the essential political, cultural, social, and economic developments that shaped the black experience. In this second edition, Michael A. Gomez updates the text to include the most recent research on the African Diaspora. Continuing to pay particular attention to the lives of the working classes, the second edition expands its temporal boundaries to include developments into the twenty-first century, as well as integrating women and feminist perspectives more thoroughly. It also widens the geographical span to include Latin America, while incorporating more on African experiences in Europe, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf. Assessing the impact of religion, global trade, slavery and resistance, and the challenges of modernity, this edition further connects the experiences of Africans and their descendants over time and space, attending to both convergences and divergences, while explaining how the deep past informs subsequent developments.
- Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era by Tiffany Austin (Editor); Sequoia Maner (Editor); Emily Ruth Rutter (Editor); darlene anita scott (Editor)Call Number: Gaines PS 309 .N4 R48 2020ISBN: 9780367321581Publication Date: 2019-12-17Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era is an edited collection of critical essays and poetry that investigates contemporary elegy within the black diaspora. Scores of contemporary writers have turned to elegiac poetry and prose in order to militate against the white supremacist logic that has led to recent deaths of unarmed black men, women, and children. This volume combines scholarly and creative understandings of the elegy in order to discern how mourning feeds our political awareness in this dystopian time as writers attempt to see, hear, and say something in relation to the bodies of the dead as well as to living readers. Moreover, this book provides a model for how to productively interweave theoretical and deeply personal accounts to encourage discussions about art and activism that transgress disciplinary boundaries, as well as lines of race, gender, class, and nation.
- Rice and Slaves by Daniel C. LittlefieldCall Number: Gaines E 445 .S7 L57 1991ISBN: 9780252062148Publication Date: 1991-06-01Daniel Littlefield's investigation of colonial South Carolinianss preference for some African ethnic groups over others as slaves reveals how the Africans' diversity and capabilities inhibited the development of racial stereotypes and influenced their masters' perceptions of slaves. It also highlights how South Carolina, perhaps more than anywhere else in North America, exemplifies the common effort of Africans and Europeans in molding American civilization.
- Rihanna by Hilary McD Beckles (Editor); Heather D. Russell (Editor)Call Number: Gaines ML 3930 .R44 R45 2015ISBN: 9789766405021Publication Date: 2015-03-31Rihanna is arguably the most commercially successful Caribbean artist in history. She is Barbadian and has been unwavering in publicly articulating her national and regional belonging. Still, there have been varied responses to Rihanna?s ascendancy, among both Barbadians and the wider Caribbean community. The responses reveal as much about our own national and regional anxieties as they do about the artist herself. The boundary-transgressing, cultural icon Rihanna is subject to anxieties about her body language and latitude from her global audiences as well; however, the essays in this collection purposely seek to de-centre the dominance of the Euro-American gaze, focusing instead on considerations of the Caribbean artist and her oeuvre from a Caribbean postcolonial corpus of academic inquiry. This collection brings together US- and Caribbean-based scholars to discuss issues of class, gender, sexuality, race, culture and economy. Using the concept of diasporic citizenship as a theoretical frame, the authors intervene in current questions of national and transnational circuits of exchange as they pertain to the commoditization and movement of culture, knowledge, values and identity. The contributors approach the subjects of Rihanna, globalization, gender and sexuality, commerce, transnationalism, Caribbean regionalism, and Barbadian national identity and development from different disciplinary and at times radically divergent perspectives. At the same time, they collectively work through the limitations, possibilities and promise of our best Caribbean imaginings.
- The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press by Gerald HorneCall Number: Gaines PN 4841 .A73 H67 2017ISBN: 9780252082733Publication Date: 2017-08-04For nearly fifty years, the Chicago-based Associated Negro Press (ANP) fought racism at home and grew into an international news organization abroad. At its head stood founder Claude Barnett, one of the most influential African Americans of his day and a gifted, if unofficial, diplomat who forged links with figures as diverse as Jawaharlal Nehru, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Nixon. Gerald Horne weaves Barnett's fascinating life story through a groundbreaking history of the ANP, including its deep dedication to Pan-Africanism. An activist force in journalism, Barnett also helped send doctors and teachers to Africa, advised African governments, gave priority to foreign newsgathering, and saw the African American struggle in global terms. Yet Horne also confronts Barnett's contradictions. A member of the African American elite, Barnett's sympathies with black aspirations often clashed with his ethics and a powerful desire to join the upper echelons of business and government. In the end, Barnett's activist success undid his work. Horne traces the dramatic story of the ANP's collapse as the mainstream press, retreating from Jim Crow, finally covered black issues and hired African American journalists. Revelatory and entertaining, The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press tells the story of a forgotten pioneer and the ambitious black institution he created.
- Rites of Return by Marianne Hirsch (Editor); Nancy K. Miller (Editor)Call Number: Gaines PN 56 .R475 R58 2011ISBN: 9780231150910Publication Date: 2011-11-29The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a passionate engagement with the losses of the past. Rites of Return examines the effects of this legacy of historical injustice and documented suffering on the politics of the present. Twenty-four writers, historians, literary and cultural critics, anthropologists and sociologists, visual artists, legal scholars, and curators grapple with our contemporary ethical endeavor to redress enduring inequities and retrieve lost histories. Mapping bold and broad-based responses to past injury across Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Australia, the Middle East, and the United States, Rites of Return examines new technologies of genetic and genealogical research, memoirs about lost family histories, the popularity of roots-seeking journeys, organized trauma tourism at sites of atrocity and new Museums of Conscience, and profound connections between social rites and political and legal rights of return. Contributors include: Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University; Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College; Elazar Barkan, Columbia University; Svetlana Boym, Harvard University; Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University; Amira Hass, journalist; Jarrod Hayes, University of Michigan; Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University; Eva Hoffman, writer; Margaret Homans, Yale University; Rosanne Kennedy, Australian National University; Daniel Mendelsohn, writer; Susan Meiselas, photographer; Nancy K. Miller, CUNY Graduate Center; Alondra Nelson, Columbia University; Jay Prosser, University of Leeds; Liz Sevchenko, Coalition of Museums of Conscience; Leo Spitzer, Dartmouth College; Marita Sturken New York University; Diana Taylor, New York University; Patricia J. Williams, Columbia University
- Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage by Sherwin K. BryantCall Number: Gaines HT 1136 .Q58 B79 2014ISBN: 9781469645667Publication Date: 2018-08-01In this pioneering study of slavery in colonial Ecuador and southern Colombia--Spain's Kingdom of Quito--Sherwin Bryant argues that the most fundamental dimension of slavery was governance and the extension of imperial power. Bryant shows that enslaved black captives were foundational to sixteenth-century royal claims on the Americas and elemental to the process of Spanish colonization. Following enslaved Africans from their arrival at the Caribbean port of Cartagena through their journey to Quito, Bryant explores how they lived during their captivity, formed kinships and communal affinities, and pressed for justice within a slave-based Catholic sovereign community. In Cartagena, officials branded African captives with the royal insignia and gave them a Catholic baptism, marking slaves as projections of royal authority and majesty. By licensing and governing Quito's slave trade, the crown claimed sovereignty over slavery, new territories, natural resources, and markets. By adjudicating slavery, royal authorities claimed to govern not only slaves but other colonial subjects as well. Expanding the diaspora paradigm beyond the Atlantic, Bryant's history of the Afro-Andes in the early modern world suggests new answers to the question, what is a slave?
- Sans Souci and Other Stories by Dionne BrandCall Number: Gaines PR 9199.3 .B683 S26 1989ISBN: 9780932379702Publication Date: 1989-12-01Eleven stories deal with rape, humiliation, Caribbean life, childhood, teachers, American football, and war.
- Servants of Allah by Sylviane A. DioufCall Number: Gaines E 443 .D56 2013ISBN: 9781479847112Publication Date: 2013-10-04Illuminates how African Muslims drew on Islam while enslaved, and how their faith ultimately played a role in the African Disapora Servants of Allah presents a history of African Muslims, following them from West Africa to the Americas. Although many assume that what Muslim faith they brought with them to the Americas was quickly absorbed into the new Christian milieu, as Sylviane A. Diouf demonstrates in this meticulously-researched, groundbreaking volume, Islam flourished during slavery on a large scale. She details how, even while enslaved, many Muslims managed to follow most of the precepts of their religion. Literate, urban, and well-traveled, they drew on their organization, solidarity and the strength of their beliefs to play a major part in the most well-known slave uprisings. But for all their accomplishments and contributions to the history and cultures of the African Diaspora, the Muslims have been largely ignored. Servants of Allah--a Choice 1999 Outstanding Academic Title--illuminates the role of Islam in the lives of both individual practitioners and communities, and shows that though the religion did not survive in the Americas in its orthodox form, its mark can be found in certain religions, traditions, and artistic creations of people of African descent. This 15th anniversary edition has been updated to include new materials and analysis, a review of developments in the field, prospects for new research, and new illustrations.
- Shine by Krista A. ThompsonCall Number: Gaines P 94.5 .M552 U685 2015ISBN: 9780822358077Publication Date: 2015-03-02In Jamaican dancehalls competition for the video camera's light is stiff, so much so that dancers sometimes bleach their skin to enhance their visibility. In the Bahamas, tuxedoed students roll into prom in tricked-out sedans, staging grand red-carpet entrances that are designed to ensure they are seen being photographed. Throughout the United States and Jamaica friends pose in front of hand-painted backgrounds of Tupac, flashy cars, or brand-name products popularized in hip-hop culture in countless makeshift roadside photography studios. And visual artists such as Kehinde Wiley remix the aesthetic of Western artists with hip-hop culture in their portraiture. In Shine, Krista Thompson examines these and other photographic practices in the Caribbean and United States, arguing that performing for the camera is more important than the final image itself. For the members of these African diasporic communities, seeking out the camera's light--whether from a cell phone, Polaroid, or video camera--provides a means with which to represent themselves in the public sphere. The resulting images, Thompson argues, become their own forms of memory, modernity, value, and social status that allow for cultural formation within and between African diasporic communities.
- The Denial of Antiblackness by João H. Costa VargasCall Number: Gaines E 185.86 .V37 2018ISBN: 9781517900939Publication Date: 2018-08-28An 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.
- Un/settled Multiculturalisms by Barnor Hesse (Editor)Call Number: Gaines DA 125 .A1 U57 2000ISBN: 9781856495608Publication Date: 2000-11-01This anthology reconsiders the social, political and intellectual meanings of multiculturalism in the West, particularly Britain. In introducing a new conceptual language for thinking about it, the volume stresses the importance of distinguishing between the multicultural as a signifier of the unsettled meanings of cultural differences, and multiculturalism as the signfied of attempts to 'fix' their meaning in national imaginaries. The book also casts the debates about multiculturalism in the contexts of globalization, post-colonialism and what Barnor Hesse calls 'multicultural transruptions' - which he sees as resurgent, irrepressible multicultural issues which unsettle the racialized meanings of social norms and the cultural habits of national politics. Divided into two parts, the first considers a variety of diaspora formations ranging from the Muslim Umma and Black Britain to the Chinese foodscape and Transatlantic Black sporting performances. It examines their transnational impact on how cultural differences are lived and poses questions for how we participate in and think about Western societies. The second part on cultural entanglements focuses on media constructions of the 'Asian Gang' in Britain, gender and sexuality in 'ragga music', and the ambivalences of Black/White identities in post-Apartheid South Africa. The contributors explore the consequences of understanding cultural identities as cross-cut by other identities and entangled with wider social issues, rather than simply existing as distinct, celebratory and free-standing. The conclusion by Stuart Hall makes a timely reassessment of the multicultural question for the social cohesiveness and political future of liberal democracies. Un/Settled Multiculturalisms offers a fresh and reinvigorated challenge to those who continue to ignore the complex political and theoretical implications of living in the contested post-colonial fall-out of Western 'multicultural-scapes'.
- IVenceremos? by Jafari S. AllenCall Number: Gaines F 1789 .N3 A45 2011ISBN: 9780822349501Publication Date: 2011-08-12Promoting the revolutionary socialist project of equality and dignity for all, the slogan ¡Venceremos! (We shall overcome!) appears throughout Cuba, everywhere from newspapers to school murals to nightclubs. Yet the accomplishments of the Cuban state are belied by the marginalization of blacks, the prejudice against sexual minorities, and gender inequities. ¡Venceremos? is a groundbreaking ethnography on race, desire, and belonging among blacks in early-twenty-first-century Cuba, as the nation opens its economy to global capital. Expanding on Audre Lorde's vision of embodied, even "useful," desire, Jafari S. Allen shows how black Cubans engage in acts of "erotic self-making," reinterpreting, transgressing, and potentially transforming racialized and sexualized interpellations of their identities. He illuminates intimate spaces of autonomy created by people whose multiply subaltern identities have rendered them illegible to state functionaries, and to most scholars. In everyday practices in Havana and Santiago de Cuba--including Santeria rituals, gay men's parties, hip hop concerts, the tourist-oriented sex trade, lesbian organizing, HIV education, and just hanging out--Allen highlights small but significant acts of struggle for autonomy and dignity.
- Varieties of African American Religious Experience by Anthony B. PinnCall Number: Gaines BL 2490 .P46 1998ISBN: 9780800629946Publication Date: 1998-11-19Anthony Pinn's engrossing survey highlights the rich diversity of black religious life in America, revealing manifestations of an ever-changing black religious quest in four non-Christian indigenous movements. Based on extensive interviews, travel, and research -- embellished with ample photos, bibliographies, and case studies -- Pinn provides an insider look especially at Voodoo, Orisha devotion, Santeria, the Nation ofIslam, and Black Humanism in the U.S. Focusing less on institutional and doctrinal history and more onthe varied popular religious practices and sites, his volume highlights, for example, the influence ofCaribbean religions in the U.S., practices of divination and healing, the surge of black Muslim religion, theemergence of black humanism, religious influences on the ethical practices of black women, and the importof previously overlooked religious settings (e.g., church women's clubs, local politics, Pentecostal religion, private religious practices). The emergent picture, more subtle, varied, and vibrant than traditional black Christian denominational history, marks a new era in African American religious studies.
- Visions of Zion by Erin C. MacLeodCall Number: Gaines BL 2532 .R37 M33 2014ISBN: 9781479882243Publication Date: 2014-07-04In reggae song after reggae song Bob Marley and other reggae singers speak of the Promised Land of Ethiopia. "Repatriation is a must!" they cry. The Rastafari have been travelling to Ethiopia since the movement originated in Jamaica in 1930s. They consider it the Promised Land, and repatriation is a cornerstone of their faith. Though Ethiopians see Rastafari as immigrants, the Rastafari see themselves as returning members of the Ethiopian diaspora. In Visions of Zion, Erin C. MacLeod offers the first in-depth investigation into how Ethiopians perceive Rastafari and Rastafarians within Ethiopia and the role this unique immigrant community plays within Ethiopian society. Rastafari are unusual among migrants, basing their movements on spiritual rather than economic choices. This volume offers those who study the movement a broader understanding of the implications of repatriation. Taking the Ethiopian perspective into account, it argues that migrant and diaspora identities are the products of negotiation, and it illuminates the implications of this negotiation for concepts of citizenship, as well as for our understandings of pan-Africanism and south-south migration. Providing a rare look at migration to a non-Western country, this volume also fills a gap in the broader immigration studies literature.
- Visualizing Black Lives by Reighan Gillam (Contribution by)Call Number: Gaines P 94.5 .B552 B645 2022ISBN: 9780252086489Publication Date: 2022-04-26A new generation of Afro-Brazilian media producers have emerged to challenge a mainstream that frequently excludes them. Reighan Gillam delves into the dynamic alternative media landscape developed by Afro-Brazilians in the twenty-first century. With works that confront racism and focus on Black characters, these artists and the visual media they create identify, challenge, or break with entrenched racist practices, ideologies, and structures. Gillam looks at a cross-section of media to show the ways Afro-Brazilians assert control over various means of representation in order to present a complex Black humanity. These images--so at odds with the mainstream--contribute to an anti-racist visual politics fighting to change how Brazilian media depicts Black people while highlighting the importance of media in the movement for Black inclusion. An eye-opening union of analysis and fieldwork, Visualizing Black Lives examines the alternative and activist Black media and the people creating it in today's Brazil.
- Voices of the Race by Paulina Laura Alberto (Edited and Translated by); George Reid. Andrews (Edited and Translated by); Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof (Edited and Translated by)Call Number: Gaines PN 4930 .V65 2022ISBN: 9781009073318Publication Date: 2022-09-01Voices of the Race offers English translations of more than one hundred articles published in Black newspapers in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay from 1870 to 1960. Those publications were as important in Black community and intellectual life in Latin America as African American newspapers were in the United States, yet they are almost completely unknown to English-language readers. Expertly curated, the articles are organized into chapters centered on themes that emerged in the Black press: politics and citizenship, racism and anti-racism, family and education, community life, women, Africa and African culture, diaspora and Black internationalism, and arts and literature. Each chapter includes an introduction explaining how discussions on those topics evolved over time, and a list of questions to provoke further reflection. Each article is carefully edited and annotated; footnotes and a glossary explain names, events, and other references that will be unfamiliar to English-language readers. A unique, fascinating insight into the rich body of Black cultural and intellectual production across Latin America.