On Morrison - REVIEW

by Namwali Serpell

Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, “she is our only truly canonical black female writer—and her work is highly complex.” In On Morrison, Serpell brings her unique experience as both an award-winning writer and a professor who teaches a course on Morrison to illuminate her masterful experiments with literary form.

This is Morrison as you’ve never encountered her before, a journey through her oeuvre—her fiction and criticism, as well as her lesser-known dramatic works and poetry—with contextual guidance and original close readings. At once accessible and uncompromisingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American authors of all time but also on how to read great works of literature in general. This dialogue on the page between two black women artist-readers is stylish, edifying, and thrilling in its scope and intelligence.

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Furrows, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was selected as one of The New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year. Her book of essays, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, the Caine Prize for African Writing, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. She is a professor of English at Harvard University.

Hogarth
ISBN-13: 978-0593732915

The New Negro: A History in Documents, 1887–1937 - REVIEW

by Martha H. Patterson and Henry Louis Gates Jr.

An authoritative anthology tracing the history of one of the most important concepts Black people drew on to challenge the brutal, totalizing system of Jim Crow racism.

This book brings together a wealth of readings on the metaphor of the “New Negro,” charting how generations of thinkers debated its meaning and seized on its potency to stake out an astonishingly broad and sometimes contradictory range of ideological positions. It features dozens of newly unearthed pieces by major figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, and Drusilla Dunjee Houston as well as writings from Cuba, the US Virgin Islands, Dominica, France, Sierra Leone, South Africa, colonial Zimbabwe, and the United States. Demonstrating how this evocative and supremely protean concept predates its popularization in Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology of the same name, The New Negro takes readers from its beginnings as a response to Henry Grady’s famous “New South” address in 1886 through the Harlem Renaissance and the New Deal.

Opening a fascinating window into a largely unexplored chapter in African American, Afro-Latin American, and African intellectual history, this groundbreaking anthology includes writings by Gwendolyn Bennett, Marita Bonner, John Edward Bruce (“Bruce Grit”), Nannie Helen Burroughs, Charles W. Chesnutt, James Bertram Clarke (“José Clarana,” “Jaime Gil”), Anna Julia Cooper, Alexander Crummell, Countee Cullen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Marcus Garvey, Hubert Harrison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, D. Hamilton Jackson, Fenton Johnson, Claude McKay, Oscar Micheaux, Jeanne “Jane” Nardal, Jean Toomer, Gustavo Urrutia, Booker T. Washington, Dorothy West, Ruth Whitehead Whaley, Fannie Barrier Williams, Carter G. Woodson, and a host of others.

Martha H. Patterson is professor of English at McKendree University. Her books include The Harlem Renaissance Weekly: Reading the New Negro in Jazz Age African American Newspapers. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is the host of Finding Your Roots on PBS and the author of many books, including The Black Box: Writing the Race.

Princeton University Press
ISBN-13: 978-0691268590

Understanding Octavia E. Butler - REVIEW

by Kendra R. Parker 

Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006), a pioneer of science fiction and foremother of Afrofuturism, is among the most influential science fiction writers of all time. Butler's work blurs the boundaries of commercial genres, exploring themes of race, gender and sexuality, religion, politics, and environment. A recipient of the MacArthur "Genius Grant" and PEN America Lifetime Achievement Award, Butler is best known for her novels Kindred (1979), Parable of the Sower (1993), and Fledgling (2005).

In Understanding Octavia E. Butler, Kendra R. Parker surveys Butler's life, career, and major works, highlighting her ongoing interest in Black peoples' pasts, presents, and futures. After a biographical introduction, Parker evaluates Butler's career chronologically and thematically, with chapters covering her engagement with the African American literary tradition, her romance novels, and her nonfiction.

Kendra R. Parker is associate professor of African American Literature at Georgia Southern University. She is the author of She Bites Back: Black Female Vampires in African American Women's Novels, 1977–2011, and coeditor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler. Parker is president of the Octavia E. Butler Literary Society and has appeared on NPR's hit podcast It's Been a Minute.

University of South Carolina Press

ISBN-13: 978-1643365770

Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History - REVIEW

by Laura Helton

During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history, these bibliophiles, scrapbookers, and librarians created an enduring set of African diasporic archives. In building these institutions and amassing abundant archival material, they also reshaped Black public culture, animating inquiry into the nature and meaning of Black history.

Scattered and Fugitive Things tells the stories of these Black collectors, traveling from the parlors of the urban north to HBCU reading rooms and branch libraries in the Jim Crow south. Laura E. Helton chronicles the work of six key figures: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick. Drawing on overlooked sources such as book lists and card catalogs, she reveals the risks collectors took to create Black archives. This book also explores the social life of collecting, highlighting the communities that used these collections from the South Side of Chicago to Roanoke, Virginia. In each case, Helton argues, archiving was alive in the present, a site of intellectual experiment, creative abundance, and political possibility. Offering new ways to understand Black intellectual and literary history, Scattered and Fugitive Things reveals Black collecting as a radical critical tradition that reimagines past, present, and future.

Laura E. Helton is an assistant professor of English and history at the University of Delaware. She is a coeditor of the digital humanities project “Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg.”

Columbia University Press
ISBN-13 978-0231212748

The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature - REVIEW

Edited by Yogita Goyal

African American literature has changed in startling ways since the end of the Black Arts Era. The last five decades have generated new paradigms of racial formation and novel patterns of cultural production, circulation, and reception. This volume takes up the challenge of mapping the varied and changing field of contemporary African American writing. Balancing the demands of historical and political context with attention to aesthetic innovation, it considers the history, practice, and future directions of the field. Examining various historical forces shaping the creation of innovative genres, the turn to the afterlife of slavery, the pull toward protest, and the impact of new and expanded geographies and methods, this Companion provides an invaluable point of reference for readers seeking rigorous and cutting-edge analyses of contemporary African American literature.

Yogita Goyal is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA and author of Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) and Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (2019; winner of ACLA's René Wellek Prize). She edited The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature (2017) and has published widely on African diaspora, postcolonial, and US literature.

Cambridge University Press
ISBN-13 978-1009159715

Images in the River: The Life and Work of Waring Cuney - REVIEW

by Cynthia Davis and Verner D. Mitchell

The poet William Waring Cuney (1906–1976) hails from an illustrious Afro-Texan family whose members include the charismatic politician Norris Wright Cuney (1846–1898) and his daughter, Maud Cuney Hare (1874–1936), the concert pianist and writer. Waring Cuney’s maternal line, after whom he was named, was equally eminent.

Cuney was born and raised in Washington, DC, just a few blocks from Howard University where three generations of his family studied. Despite his privileged upbringing among the city’s Black elite, Cuney embraced his family’s passionate commitment to racial uplift and civil rights; in exploring the relationship between African Americans and their environment, he was thus able to transmute into two books of poetry a broad cross section of African American life; his poems and songs explore the lives of jazz musicians, athletes, domestic and railway workers, women and children, blues singers, prisoners, sharecroppers, and soldiers. In addition, Cuney published in all the major Harlem Renaissance journals and anthologies alongside the luminaries of the period, many of whom were good friends.

Through 100 of his best poems, many never before collected or published, and a detailed biographical monograph, Images in the River: The Life and Work of Waring Cuney introduces readers to a newly recovered Harlem Renaissance poet, and to the history of a remarkable American family.

Texas Tech University Press
ISBN-13 978-1682831977

Thinking About Black Education: An Interdisciplinary Reader - REVIEW

Edited by Hilton Kelly and Heather Moore Roberson

In this pioneering interdisciplinary reader, Hilton Kelly and Heather Moore Roberson have curated essential readings for thinking about black education from slavery to the present day.

The reading selections are timeless, with both historical and contemporary readings from educational anthropology, history, legal studies, literary studies, and sociology to document the foundations and development of Black education in the United States. In addition, the authors highlight scholarship offering historical, conceptual, and pedagogical gems that shine a light on Black people’s enduring pursuit of liberatory education. This book is an invitation to a broad audience, from people with no previous knowledge to scholars in the field, to think critically about Black education and to inspire others to uncover the agency, dreams, struggles, aspirations, and liberation of Black people across generations.

Thinking About Black Education: An Interdisciplinary Reader will address essential readings in African-Americans’ education. The text is inspired by the editors’ diverse backgrounds in interdisciplinary scholarship and professional communities. Necessary after 400 years of struggle for people of African-American descent to become fully-educated citizens with all the rights and privilege that true freedom brings, it can serve as a cornerstone during this quadricentennial moment by showcasing canonical, cutting-edge, and essential scholarship that people of African descent have produced in the United States.

The collection includes many of the great foundational thinkers and writers of the last 100 years. Selections include work from:

• Heather Andrea Williams

• James D. Anderson

• Elizabeth McHenry

• D. M. Douglas

• Vanessa Siddle Walker

• Thomas Sowell

• Trudier Harris

• Signithia Fordham and John U. Ogbu

• A. A. Akom

• Mano Singham

• Gloria Ladson-Billings

• bell hooks

• William F. Tate IV

• James Earl Davis

• Emery Petchauer

• Michael J. Dumas and kihana miraya ross

Thinking About Black Education is an essential text for a variety of Black Studies courses, but it should also appeal to a broader audience of students and scholars interested in racial equity and social justice across the disciplines.

Perfect for courses such as: Black Education from Slavery to Freedom ¦ Foundations of American Education ¦ Introduction to Africana Studies ¦ Introduction to Foundations of Education ¦ Schools & Society ¦ Race and Education ¦ African American Education ¦ African American Philosophy ¦ Education in African American Culture

Myers Education Press
ISBN-13  978-1975502522

Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War - REVIEW

by Florian Illies

As the Roaring Twenties wind down, Jean-Paul Sartre waits in a Paris café for a first date with Simone de Beauvoir, who never shows. Marlene Dietrich slips away from a loveless marriage to cruise the dive bars of Berlin. The fledgling writer Vladimir Nabokov places a freshly netted butterfly at the end of his wife’s bed. Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Zelda and Scott, Dalí and Gala, Picasso and his many muses, Henry and June and Anaïs Nin, the entire extended family of Thomas Mann, and a host of other fascinating and famous figures make art and love, write and row, bed and wed and betray. They do not yet know that they, along with millions of others, will soon be forced to contemplate flight—or fight—as the world careens from one global conflict to the next.

Riverhead Books
ISBN-13 978-0593713938

The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race - REVIEW

by Jesmyn Ward

In this bestselling, widely lauded collection, Jesmyn Ward gathers our most original thinkers and writers to speak on contemporary racism and race, including Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Edwidge Danticat, Kevin Young, Claudia Rankine, and Honoree Jeffers. “An absolutely indispensable anthology” (Booklist, starred review), The Fire This Time shines a light on the darkest corners of our history, wrestles with our current predicament, and imagines a better future.

Envisioned as a response to The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin’s groundbreaking 1963 essay collection, these contemporary writers reflect on the past, present, and future of race in America. We’ve made significant progress in the fifty-odd years since Baldwin’s essays were published, but America is a long and painful distance away from a “post-racial society”—a truth we must confront if we are to continue to work towards change. Baldwin’s “fire next time” is now upon us, and it needs to be talked about; The Fire This Time “seeks to place the shock of our own times into historical context and, most importantly, to move these times forward” (Vogue).

Scribner
ISBN-13 978-1501126352

Minor Notes, Volume 1 - REVIEW

Edited by Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy

Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy repeatedly found themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they came across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals whose work has been neglected or entirely ignored, even by scholars of Black poetry. Minor Notes is an excavation initiative that recovers and curates archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and aims to bridge scholarly interest with the growing general audience who reads, writes, and circulates poetry within that tradition. As Minor Notes clarifies, the work of contemporary Black poets is perhaps best understood through the lens of a long-standing tradition of the poet as witness, as prophetic voice, as communal bard, and as scholar of the everyday and the miraculous. The poets featured in Volume 1 are George Moses Horton, Fenton Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, David Wadsworth Cannon Jr., Anne Spencer, and Angelina Weld Grimké.

Penguin Classics
ISBN-13: 978-0143137269

African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era: Transgressive Performativity of Black Vulnerability as Praxis in Everyday Life - REVIEW

by E. Lâle Demirtürk

African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era: Transgressive Performativity of Black Vulnerability as Praxis in Everyday Life explores the undoing of whiteness by black people, who dissociate from scripts of black criminality through radical performative reiterations of black vulnerability. It studies five novels that challenge the embodied discursive practices of whiteness in interracial social encounters, showing how they use strategic performances of Blackness to enable subversive practices in everyday life, which is constructed and governed by white mechanisms of racialized control. The agency portrayed in these novels opens up alternative spaces of Blackness to impact the social world and effects transformative change as a forceful critique of everyday life. African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era shows how these novels reformulate the problem of black vulnerability as a constitutive source of the right to life in their refusal of subjection to vulnerability, enacted by white institutional and individual forms of violence. It positions a white-black-encounter-oriented reading of these “neo-resistance novels” of the Black Lives Matter era as a critique of everyday life in an effort to explore spaces of radical performativity of blackness to make happen social change and transformation.

Lexington Books
ISBN-13 978-1498596213

The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature - REVIEW

by Anika Prather

The powerful legacy of classical education among Black intellectuals and teachers in America is a national treasure with the capacity to bless teachers and students the world over! In The Black Intellectual Tradition, authors Dr. Anika Prather and Dr. Angel Adams Parham introduce us to readers, writers, teachers, artists, and people of action who loved, taught, and put into practice the wisdom and virtue of the great voices who came before. These Black educators and intellectuals, while living with the injustices and hardships that gave them unique insights, mined the tradition, weaving it together with their African and African American heritage to create a new narrative that would aid all people in understanding injustice and was thus integral to the fight for liberation and equality. In the process, they brought to light a wealth of truth, goodness, and beauty from within the great tradition.<P>With this rich heritage increasingly lost from view, this book restores stories and experiences to us that will inform and inspire ideas for action and application within all classical schools and homeschools. Dr. Prather and Dr. Parham bring to the book two different scholarly perspectives and voices as well as their own personal experiences as classical educators, parents, and organizational leaders.

Classical Academic Press
ISBN-13 978-1600514425

Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik by Winston James - REVIEW

 One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. McKay’s life and writing were defined by his class consciousness and anticolonialism, shaped by his experiences growing up in colonial Jamaica as well as his early career as a writer in Harlem and then London. Dedicated to confronting both racism and capitalist exploitation, he was a critical observer of the Black condition throughout the African diaspora and became a committed Bolshevik.

 Winston James offers a revelatory account of McKay’s political and intellectual trajectory from his upbringing in Jamaica through the early years of his literary career and radical activism. In 1912, McKay left Jamaica to study in the United States, never to return. James follows McKay’s time at the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University, as he discovered the harshness of American racism, and his move to Harlem, where he encountered the ferment of Black cultural and political movements and figures such as Hubert Harrison and Marcus Garvey. McKay left New York for London, where his commitment to revolutionary socialism deepened, culminating in his transformation from Fabian socialist to Bolshevik.

 Drawing on a wide variety of sources, James offers a rich and detailed chronicle of McKay’s life, political evolution, and the historical, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped him.

Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik
by Winston James
ISBN: 978-0231135931

Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird by Gene Andrew Jarrett - REVIEW

On the 150th anniversary of his birth, a definitive new biography of a pivotal figure in American literary history.

A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the “poet laureate of his race” hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a “caged bird” that sings.

Jarrett tells the fascinating story of how Dunbar, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to become an accomplished and versatile artist. A prolific and successful poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and Broadway librettist, he was also a friend of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Orville and Wilbur Wright. But while audiences across the United States and Europe flocked to enjoy his literary readings, Dunbar privately bemoaned shouldering the burden of race and catering to minstrel stereotypes to earn fame and money. Inspired by his parents’ survival of slavery, but also agitated by a turbulent public marriage, beholden to influential benefactors, and helpless against his widely reported bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism, he came to regard his racial notoriety as a curse as well as a blessing before dying at the age of only thirty-three.

Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and generously illustrated, this biography presents the richest, most detailed, and most nuanced portrait yet of Dunbar and his work, transforming how we understand the astonishing life and times of a central figure in American literary history.

Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird by Gene Andrew Jarrett
ISBN: 978-0-691-15052-9

The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century - REVIEW

Edited by Derrick P. Alridge, Cornelius L. Bynum, James B. Stewart

From 1900 to the present, people of African descent living in the United States have drawn on homegrown and diasporic minds to create a Black intellectual tradition engaged with ideas on race, racial oppression, and the world. This volume presents essays on the diverse thought behind the fight for racial justice as developed by African American artists and intellectuals; performers and protest activists; institutions and organizations; and educators and religious leaders. By including both women’s and men’s perspectives from the U.S. and the Diaspora, the essays explore the full landscape of the Black intellectual tradition. Throughout, contributors engage with important ideas ranging from the consideration of gender within the tradition, to intellectual products generated outside the intelligentsia, to the ongoing relationship between thought and concrete effort in the quest for liberation.

Expansive in scope and interdisciplinary in practice, The Black Intellectual Tradition delves into the ideas that animated a people’s striving for full participation in American life.

Contributors: Derrick P. Alridge, Keisha N. Blain, Cornelius L. Bynum, Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, Stephanie Y. Evans, Aaron David Gresson III, Claudrena N. Harold, Leonard Harris, Maurice J. Hobson, La TaSha B. Levy, Layli Maparyan, Zebulon V. Miletsky, R. Baxter Miller, Edward Onaci, Venetria K. Patton, James B. Stewart, and Nikki M. Taylor

University of Illinois Press
ISBN-13 978-0252085840

The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy - REVIEW

 “The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people… American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto.”

These words, written by Albert Murray at the height of the Black Power movement, cut against the grain of their moment, announcing the arrival of a new kind of “militant integrationist.”  Against narratives of marginalization and racial pathology, Murray argued that black art and culture, particularly jazz and blues, stand at the very headwaters of the American mainstream – that “American culture” and “black American culture” were one and the same.  As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., makes clear in his foreword, Murray’s poetic voice, impassioned argumentation, and pluralistic vision have only become more urgently needed today.

Albert Murray (1916-2013) was the author of Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree, The Seven League Boots, The Magic Keys, and Stomping the Blues, among many other works.  His collected writings are published in two volumes by Library of America.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African American Research at Harvard University and an award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, culture critic, and institution builder.

The Buck, the Black, and the Existential Hero: Refiguring The Black Male Literary Canon, 1850 to Present - REVIEW

 

            The Buck, the Black, and the Existential Hero combines philosophy, literary theory, and jazz studies with Africana studies to develop a theory of the black male literary imagination. In doing so, James B. Haile III seeks to answer fundamental aesthetic and existential questions: How does the experience of being black and male in the modern West affect the telling of a narrative, the shape or structure of a novel, the development of characters and plot lines, and the nature of criticism itself?

            Haile argues that, since black male identity is largely fluid and open to interpretation, reinterpretation, and misinterpretation, the literature of black men has developed flexibility and improvisation, which he terms the “jazz of life.” Reading this literature requires the same kind of flexibility and improvisation to understand what is being said and why, as well as what is not being said and why. The book attempts to offer this new reading experience by placing texts by well-known authors, such as Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Colson Whitehead, in conversation with texts by less well-known figures who are largely forgotten, in particular, Cecil Brown. Doing so challenges the reader to visit and revisit these novels with a new perspective on the social, political, historical, and psychic realities of black men.

“James B. Haile III has fashioned a penetrating lens through which to examine the African American male subject in literature, as well as how this subject is conventionally discussed within literary criticism and philosophy . . . This will be an important work.”
-Anthony Stewart, author of George Orwell, Doubleness, and the Value of Decency

James B. Haile III is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Rhode Island

The Buck, the Black, and the Existential Hero: Refiguring The Black Male Literary Canon, 1850 to Present by James B. Haile III
Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 978-0-8191-4166-7, 214 pages