February is Black History Month, where the focus is on the experiences and history of African Americans, both as a whole and as individuals. Celebrating a rich cultural heritage, it is an opportunity to spotlight the achievements that African Americans have accomplished in this country, despite the long and continuing history of racism and oppression. Enjoy these ebooks and be sure to check out the rotating display of physical books in the main lobby of Hunt Library!
Analyzing Black History from Slavery through Racial Profiling by Police
Simmons, Janelle Christine (2023)
Around the world, Black individuals still fight for their rights. It is important to see the roots, the progression, and current state of both Black discrimination and Black liberation. In order to gain a complete understanding of this journey, a complete view of Black history is needed.
"Analyzing Black History From Slavery Through Racial Profiling by Police" gives a historical overview of the transatlantic slave trade and police brutality. This book addresses various systemic injustices that have not only build the foundation of the land of the United States of America, but also lands like Australia and South Africa. Covering topics such as police brutality, slave mutinies, and traffic stops, this premier reference source is a dynamic resource for sociologists, historians, government officials, professionals, law enforcement officers, policymakers, students and educators of higher education, researchers, and academicians. - Publisher's Description
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Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America
West, James (2020)
From its launch in 1945, Ebony magazine was politically and socially influential. However, the magazine also played an important role in educating millions of African Americans about their past. Guided by the pen of Lerone Bennett Jr., the magazine’s senior editor and in-house historian, Ebony became a key voice in the popular black history revival that flourished after World War II. Its content helped push representations of the African American past from the margins to the center of the nation’s cultural and political imagination.
E. James West's fresh and fascinating exploration of Ebony's political, social, and historical content illuminates the intellectual role of the iconic magazine and its contribution to African American scholarship. He also uncovers a paradox. Though Ebony provided Bennett with space to promote a militant reading of black history and protest, the magazine’s status as a consumer publication helped to mediate its representation of African American identity in both past and present.
Mixing biography, cultural history, and popular memory, West restores Ebony and Bennett to their rightful place in African American intellectual, commercial, and political history. - Publisher's Description
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The Scholar and the Struggle: Lawrence Reddick's Crusade for Black History and Black Power
Varel, David (2020)
From its launch in 1945, Ebony magazine was politically and socially influential. However, the magazine also played an important role in educating millions of African Americans about their past. Guided by the pen of Lerone Bennett Jr., the magazine’s senior editor and in-house historian, Ebony became a key voice in the popular black history revival that flourished after World War II. Its content helped push representations of the African American past from the margins to the center of the nation’s cultural and political imagination.
E. James West's fresh and fascinating exploration of Ebony's political, social, and historical content illuminates the intellectual role of the iconic magazine and its contribution to African American scholarship. He also uncovers a paradox. Though Ebony provided Bennett with space to promote a militant reading of black history and protest, the magazine’s status as a consumer publication helped to mediate its representation of African American identity in both past and present.
Mixing biography, cultural history, and popular memory, West restores Ebony and Bennett to their rightful place in African American intellectual, commercial, and political history. - Publisher's Description
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New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair
Cobb, Jasmine Nichole (2022)
From Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, “natural hair” has been associated with the Black freedom struggle. In "New Growth," Jasmine Nichole Cobb traces the history of Afro-textured coiffure, exploring it as a visual material through which to reimagine the sensual experience of Blackness.
Through close readings of slave narratives, scrapbooks, travel illustrations, documentary films, and photography as well as collage, craft, and sculpture, from the nineteenth century to the present, Cobb shows how the racial distinctions ascribed to people of African descent become simultaneously visible and tactile. Whether examining Soul Train’s and Ebony’s promotion of the Afro hairstyle alongside styling products or how artists such as Alison Saar and Lorna Simpson underscore the construction of Blackness through the representation of hair, Cobb foregrounds the inseparability of Black hair’s look and feel. Demonstrating that Blackness is palpable through appearance and feeling, Cobb reveals the various ways that people of African descent forge new relationships to the body, public space, and visual culture through the embrace of Black hair. - Publisher's Description
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Put Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman Black History and Poetics in Performance
Jackson, Gale (2020)
In a gathering of griot traditions fusing storytelling, cultural history, and social and literary criticism, "Put Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman" "re-members" and represents how women of the African diaspora have drawn on ancient traditions to record memory, history, and experience in performance.
These women's songs and dances provide us with a wealth of polyphonic text that records their reflections on identity, imagination, and agency, providing a collective performed autobiography that complements the small body of pre-twentieth-century African and African American women's writing. Gale P. Jackson engages with a range of vibrant traditions to provide windows into multiple discourses as well as "new" and old paradigms for locating the history, philosophy, pedagogy, and theory embedded in a lineage of African diaspora performance and to articulate and address the postcolonial fragmentation of humanist thinking. In lyrically interdisciplinary movement, across herstories, geographies, and genres, cultural continuities, improvisation, and transformative action, "Put Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman" offers a fresh perspective on familiar material and an expansion of our sources, reading, and vision of African diaspora, African American, and American literatures. - Publisher's Description
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Janelle Monáe's Queer Afrofuturism: Defying Every Label
Hassler-Forest, Dan (2022)
Singer. Dancer. Movie star. Activist. Queer icon. Afrofuturist. Working class heroine. Time traveler. Prophet. Feminist. Android. Dirty Computer.
Janelle Monáe is all these things and more, making her one of the most fascinating artists to emerge in the twenty-first century. This provocative new study explores how Monáe’s work has connected different media platforms to strengthen and enhance new movements in art, theory, and politics. It considers not only Monáe’s groundbreaking albums "The ArchAndroid," "The Electric Lady," and "Dirty Computer," but also Monáe’s work as an actress in such films as "Hidden Figures" and "Antebellum," as well as her soundtrack appearances in socially-engaged projects ranging from I May Destroy You to Us. Examining Monáe as a cultural icon whose work is profoundly intersectional, this book maps how she is actively reshaping discourses around race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism. Tracing Monáe’s performances of joy, desire, pain, and hope across a wide range of media forms, it shows how she imagines Afrofuturist, posthumanist, and postcapitalist utopias, while remaining grounded in the realities of being a Black woman in a white-dominated industry. This is an exciting introduction to an audacious innovator whose work offers us fresh ways to talk about identity, desire, and power. - Publisher's Description
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Unbroken and Unbowed: A History of Black Protest in America
Hawkins, Jimmie (2022)
In this compelling and informative volume, Jimmie R. Hawkins walks the reader through the many forms of Black protest in American history, from pre-colonial times though the George Floyd protests of 2020. Hawkins breaks American history into five sections, with subsections highlighting how Black identity helped to shape protest during that period.
These protests include slave ship mutinies, the abolitionist movement, the different approaches to protest from Frederick Douglas, W. E. B. Dubois, and Booker T. Washington, protest led by various Black institutions, Black Lives Matter movements, and protests of today's Black athletes, musicians, and intellectuals, such as Lebron James, Beyonce, and Kendrick Lamar. Hawkins also covers the backlash to these protests, including the Jim Crow era, the Red Summer of 1919, and modern-day wars on the Black community in the form of the War on Drugs and voter suppression. - Publisher's Description
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The Art of Ruth E. Carter
Carter, Ruthe (2023)
Ruth E. Carter is a living legend of costume design. For three decades, she has shaped the story of the Black experience on screen—from the ’80s streetwear of Do the Right Thing to the royal regalia of Coming 2 America. Her work on Marvel's Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever not only brought Afrofuturism to the mainstream, but also made her the first Black winner of an Oscar in costume design and the first Black woman to win two Academy Awards in any category. In 2021, she became the second-ever costume designer to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
In this definitive book, Carter shares her origins—recalling a trip to the sporting goods store with Spike Lee to outfit the School Daze cast and a transformative moment stepping inside history on the set of Steven Spielberg's Amistad. She recounts anecdotes from dressing the greats: Eddie Murphy, Samuel L. Jackson, Angela Bassett, Halle Berry, Chadwick Boseman, and many more. She describes the passion for history that inspired her period pieces—from Malcolm X to What's Love Got to Do With It—and her journey into Afrofuturism.
Carter's wisdom and stories are paired with deluxe visuals, including sketches, mood boards, and film stills. Danai Gurira, beloved for her portrayal of Okoye in Black Panther, has contributed a foreword. Fans will even get a glimpse behind the scenes of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
At its core, Carter's oeuvre celebrates Black heroes and sheroes, whether civil rights leaders or Wakandan warriors. She has brought the past to life and helped us imagine a brighter future. This book is sure to inspire the next generation of artists and storytellers. - Publisher's Description
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Hidden Histories: Faith and Black Lesbian Leadership
Monique Moultrie (2023)
In Hidden Histories, Monique Moultrie collects oral histories of Black lesbian religious leaders in the United States to show how their authenticity, social justice awareness, spirituality, and collaborative leadership make them models of womanist ethical leadership. By examining their life histories, Moultrie frames queer storytelling as an ethical act of resistance to the racism, sexism, and heterosexism these women experience.
She outlines these women’s collaborative, intergenerational, and leadership styles, and their concerns for the greater good and holistic well-being of humanity and the earth. She also demonstrates how their ethos of social justice activism extends beyond LGBTQ and racialized communities and provides other models of religious and community leadership. Addressing the invisibility of Black lesbian religious leaders in scholarship and public discourse, Moultrie revises modern understandings of how race, gender, and sexual identities interact with religious practice and organization in the twenty-first century. - Publisher's Description
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The History of Black Studies
McWorter, Gerald (aka) Alkalimat, Abdul (2021)
A surge of African American enrolment and student activism brought Black Studies to many US campuses in the 1960s. Sixty years later, Black Studies programs are taught at more than 1,300 universities worldwide. This book is the first history of how that happened.
Black Studies founder and movement veteran Abdul Alkalimat offers a comprehensive history of the discipline that will become a key reference for generations to come. Structured in three broadly chronological sections - Black Studies as intellectual history; as social movement; and as academic profession - the book demonstrates how Black people themselves established the field long before its institutionalization in university programs.
At its heart, Black Studies is profoundly political. Black Power, the New Communist Movement, the Black women’s and students’ movements – each step in the journey for Black liberation influenced and was influenced by this revolutionary discipline. - Publisher's Description
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Hearing Enslaved Voices
White, Sophie; Burnard, Trevor (2020)
This book focuses on alternative types of slave narratives, especially courtroom testimony, and interrogates how such narratives were produced, the societies (both those that were majority slave societies and those in which slaves were a distinct minority of the population) in which testimony was permitted, and the meanings that can be attached to such narratives.
The chapters in this book provide valuable information about the everyday lives—including the inner and spiritual lives—of enslaved African American and Native American individuals in the British and French Atlantic World, from Canada to the Caribbean. It explores slave testimony as a form of autobiographical narrative, and in ways that allow us to foreground enslaved persons’ lived experience as expressed in their own words. - Publisher's Description
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Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest
Hartman, Ian; Reamer, David; Williams, Calvin (2022)
The history of Black Alaskans runs deep and spans generations. Decades before statehood and earlier even than the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s, Black men and women participated in Alaska's politics and culture. They hunted whales, patrolled the seas, built roads, served in the military, and opened businesses, even as they endured racism and fought injustices. Into the twentieth century, Alaska's Black residents were often part of the larger, nationwide freedom struggle. At the same time, Black settlers found themselves in a far different context than elsewhere in the United States, as Alaska's strategic military location, economic reliance on oil, and unique racial landscape influenced how Black Alaskans made a home for themselves in the northwesternmost corner of the country.
Centering the agency and diversity of Black Alaskans, "Black Lives in Alaska" chronicles how Alaska's Black population, though small, has had an outsized impact on the culture and civic life of the region. Alaska's history of race relations and civil rights reminds the reader that the currents of discrimination and its responses―determination, activism, and perseverance―are American stories that might be explored in the unlikeliest of places. - Publisher's Description
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Not Your Mother's Mammy
Walters, Tracey (2021)
"Not Your Mother’s Mammy" examines how black artists of the African diaspora, many of them former domestics, reconstruct the black female subjectivities of domestics in fiction, film, and visual and performance art. In doing so, they undermine one-dimensional images of black domestics as victims lacking voice and agency and prove domestic workers are more than the aprons they wear.
An analysis of selected media by Alice Childress, Nandi Keyi, Victoria Brown, Kara Walker, Mikalene Thomas, Rene Cox, Lynn Nottage, and others provides examples of generations of domestics who challenged their performative roles of subservience by engaging in subversive actions contradicting the image of the deferential black maid. Through verbal confrontation, mobilization, passive resistance, and performance, black domestics find their voices, exercise their power, and maintain their dignity in the face of humiliation. "Not Your Mother’s Mammy" brings to life stories of domestics often neglected in academic studies, such as the complexity of interracial homoerotic relationships between workers and employers, or the mental health challenges of domestics that lead to depression and suicide. In line with international movements like #MeToo and #timesup, the women in these stories demand to be heard. - Publisher's Description
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Black Ball 10: New Research in African American Baseball History
Heaphy, Leslie (2021)
Under the guidance of Leslie Heaphy and an editorial board of leading historians, this peer-reviewed, annual book series offers new, authoritative research on all subjects related to black baseball, including the Negro major and minor leagues, teams, and players; pre-Negro League organization and play; barnstorming; segregation and integration; class, gender, and ethnicity; the business of black baseball; and the arts. - Publisher's Description
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The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice
Darity, William (2023)
A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. "The Black Reparations Project" gathers an accomplished interdisciplinary team of scholars—members of the Reparations Planning Committee—who have considered the issues pertinent to making reparations happen. This book will be an essential resource in the national conversation going forward.
The first section of "The Black Reparations Project" crystallizes the rationale for reparations, cataloguing centuries of racial repression, discrimination, violence, mass incarceration, and the immense black-white wealth gap. Drawing on the contributors’ expertise in economics, history, law, public policy, public health, and education, the second section unfurls direct guidance for building and implementing a reparations program, including draft legislation that addresses how the program should be financed and how claimants can be identified and compensated. Rigorous and comprehensive, "The Black Reparations Project" will motivate, guide, and speed the final leg of the journey for justice. - Publisher's Description
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Black Culture, Inc: How Ethnic Community Support Pays for Corporate America
Banks, Patricia (2022)
Open the brochure for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and you'll see logos for corporations like American Express. Visit the website for the Apollo Theater, and you'll notice acknowledgments to corporations like Coca Cola and Citibank. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, owe their very existence to large corporate donations from companies like General Motors. And while we can easily make sense of the need for such funding to keep cultural spaces afloat, less obvious are the reasons that corporations give to them. In "Black Culture, Inc.," Patricia A. Banks interrogates the notion that such giving is completely altruistic, and argues for a deeper understanding of the hidden transactions being conducted that render corporate America dependent on Black culture.
Drawing on a range of sources, such as public relations and advertising texts on corporate cultural patronage and observations at sponsored cultural events, Banks argues that Black cultural patronage profits firms by signaling that they value diversity, equity, and inclusion. By functioning in this manner, support of Black cultural initiatives affords these companies something called "diversity capital," an increasingly valuable commodity in today's business landscape. While this does not necessarily detract from the social good that cultural patronage does, it reveals its secret cost: ethnic community support may serve to obscure an otherwise poor track record with social justice.
Banks deftly weaves innovative theory with detailed observations and a discerning critical gaze at the various agendas infiltrating memorials, museums, and music festivals meant to celebrate Black culture. At a time when accusations of discriminatory practices are met with immediate legal and social condemnation, the insights offered here are urgent and necessary. - Publisher's Description
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Successful Black Entrepreneurs
Rogers, Steven (2022)
"Successful Black Entrepreneurs" is an insightful collection of Harvard Business School case studies about Black entrepreneurs succeeding in a variety of industries and through different routes, including start-ups, franchising, and acquisitions. The book also recognizes and celebrates Black entrepreneurial excellence, as it takes the reader through the stages of entrepreneurship, including ideation, raising capital, growing the company, and taking it public. In addition to identifying the positive aspects of Black entrepreneurship, the book also uses data, research, and anecdotes to highlight the challenges faced by Black entrepreneurs, including:
Perfect for students, aspiring entrepreneurs, and established business leaders, "Successful Black Entrepreneurs" provides practical perspectives from Black entrepreneurs about what it takes to succeed in business. - Publisher's Description
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Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire
Avilez, GerShun (2020)
Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomical injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists’ work throughout the black diaspora.
GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces—specifically prisons and hospitals—and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility. - Publisher's Description
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Black Women Navigating Historically White Higher Education Institutions and the Journey Toward Liberation
Logan, Stephanie; Good, Tyra (2022)
Black women in higher education continue to experience colder institutional climates that devalue their presence. They are relied on to mentor students and expected to commit to service activities that are not rewarded in the tenure process and often lack access to knowledgeable mentors to offer career support.
There is a need to move beyond the individual resistance strategies employed by Black women to institutional and policy changes in higher education institutions. Specifically, higher education policymakers and administrators should understand and acknowledge how the race and gender makeup of campuses and departments impact the successes and failures of Black women as they work to recruit and retain Black women graduate students, faculty, and administrators. - Publisher's Description
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The Future of Black Studies
Alkalimat, Abdul (2022)
The marginalization of Black voices from the academy is a problem in the Western world. But Black Studies, where it exists, is a powerful, boundary-pushing discipline, grown out of struggle and community action. Here, Abdul Alkalimat, one of the founders of Black Studies in the US, presents a reimagining of the future trends in the study of the Black experience.
Taking Marxism and Black Experientialism, Afro-Futurist and Diaspora frameworks, he projects a radical future for the discipline at this time of social crisis. Choosing cornerstones of culture, such as the music of Sun Ra, the movie Black Panther and the writer Octavia Butler, he looks at the trajectory of Black liberation thought since slavery, including new research on the rise in the comparative study of Black people all over the world. Turning to look at how digital tools enhance the study of the discipline, this book is a powerful read that will inform and inspire students and activists. - Publisher's Description
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Special thanks to our Materials Processing Coordinator Leah Zande for compiling this list.