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"FICTION - African American - General."
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White lines II : Sunny : a white lines novel
\"On the surface, it appears that Sunny has got it all-looks, money, a beautiful home, a healthy daughter, and friends who love her. But Sunny has a secret--something she hasn't even told her best friend. The truth is Sunny is unhappy. She still misses her beloved Dorian, and worries that no other man will ever captivate her the way he did. She dated some very powerful and successful men since Dorian's death. But will she ever find love again? It's not long before Sunny is chasing those white lines again. And, when the truth finally explodes, will Sunny be able to put her life back together again?\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts
\"Washington writes supple and thoughtful prose and creatively integrates African and African-derived terminology, which never distract the reader. I consider Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts not only a brilliant study, but also a model to be emulated.\" -- Ousseynou B. Traore, William Patterson UniversityÀjé is a Yoruba word that signifies a spiritual power of vast potential, as well as the human beings who exercise that power. Although both men and women can have Àjé, its owners and controllers are women, the literal and cosmic Mothers who are revered as the gods of society. Because of its association with female power, its invisibility and profundity, Àjé is often misconstrued as witchcraft. However, as Teresa N. Washington points out in Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts, Àjé is central to the Yoruba ethos and cosmology. Not only does it underpin the concepts of creation and creativity, but as a force of justice and retribution, Àjé is essential to social harmony and balance. As Africans were forced into exile and enslavement, they took Àjé with them and continued its work of creating, destroying, harming, and healing in the New World.Washington seeks out Àjé's subversive power of creation and re-creation in a diverse range of Africana texts, from both men and women, from both oral and contemporary literature, and across space and time. She guides readers to an understanding of the symbolic, methodological, and spiritual issues that are central to important works by Africana writers but are rarely elucidated by Western criticism. She begins with an examination of the ancient forms of Àjé in Yoruba culture, which creates a framework for innovative readings of important works by Africana writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka, Jamaica Kincaid, and Ntozake Shange. This rich analysis will appeal to readers of
Africana literature, African religion and philosophy, feminist studies, and comparative literature.
eBook
Negrophobia : an urban parable
\"A provocative, raucous dark comedy about race and racism in America, now back in print after twenty-five years. Negrophobia, with its outrageous and electrifying mix of screenplay, poetry, and performance piece on paper, pushes the conventional territory of the novel to its outer, outer limits. Raunchy and rambunctious, Darius James turns words into flesh and flesh into monstrous forms. His writing is as intoxicating as the works of William Burroughs and Ishmael Reed. Under the earthshattering effects of a voodoo spell, blond teenage sex-bomb Bubbles Brazil is plunged into a startling realm of grotesque racist visions. Horrific figures populate this parallel world wherein the demagogic Uncle H. Rap Remus calls for the instant extermination of the white race by spontaneous combustion and various citizens of Harlem are found floating in a haunting underwater dreamscape. In Negrophobia worlds collapse and re-form, people explode into strange and unnatural beings from conga-drumming Muslims and ill-tempered young Negroes with numbers instead of names to Muppet-like crack-heads and a visionary extraterrestrial who never combs his hair. By the final scene, Bubbles herself has been transformed after the strangest trip a girl can have\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Speculative Blackness
InSpeculative Blackness, André M. Carrington analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction-including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan cultures-to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination.
Carrington's argument about authorship, fandom, and race in a genre that has been both marginalized and celebrated offers a black perspective on iconic works of science fiction. He examines the career of actor Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed the character Uhura in the originalStar Trektelevision series and later became a recruiter for NASA, and the spin-off seriesStar Trek: Deep Space Nine, set on a space station commanded by a black captain. He recovers a pivotal but overlooked moment in 1950s science fiction fandom in which readers and writers of fanzines confronted issues of race by dealing with a fictitious black fan writer and questioning the relevance of race to his ostensible contributions to the 'zines. Carrington mines the productions of Marvel comics and the black-owned comics publisher Milestone Media, particularly the representations of black sexuality in its flagship title,Icon. He also interrogates online fan fiction about black British women inBuffy the Vampire Slayerand the Harry Potter series.Throughout this nuanced analysis, Carrington theorizes the relationship between race and genre in cultural production, revealing new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture.
eBook
The wide circumference of love : a novel
\"You just can't plan for this kind of thing. Diane Tate certainly hasn't. She never expected to slowly lose her talented husband to the debilitating effects of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. As a respected family court judge, she's spent her life making tough calls, but when her sixty-eight-year-old husband's health worsens and Diane is forced to move him into an assisted living facility, it seems her world is spinning out of control\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Black Resonance
Ever since Bessie Smith's powerful voice conspired with the \"race records\" industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women's singing. InBlack Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin.
Focusing on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s,Black Resonancereveals a musical-literary tradition in which singers and writers, faced with similar challenges and harboring similar aims, developed comparable expressive techniques. Drawing together such seemingly disparate works as Bessie Smith's blues and Richard Wright's neglected film ofNative Son, Mahalia Jackson's gospel music and Ralph Ellison'sInvisible Man, each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice. In the process, Lordi demonstrates that popular female singers are not passive muses with raw, natural, or ineffable talent. Rather, they are experimental artists who innovate black expressive possibilities right alongside their literary peers.
The first study of black music and literature to centralize the music of black women,Black Resonanceoffers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century's most beloved and challenging voices.
eBook
Night hawks : stories
\"A masterful story collection--thirteen years in the making--from National Book Award winner Charles Johnson, showcasing the incredible range and resonant voice of this American treasure\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Burnin' Down the House
Home is a powerful metaphor guiding the literature of African Americans throughout the twentieth century. While scholars have given considerable attention to the Great Migration and the role of the northern city as well as to the place of the South in African American literature, few have given specific notice to the site of \"home.\" And in the twenty years since Houston A. Baker Jr.’s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature appeared, no one has offered a substantial challenge to his reading of the blues matrix. Burnin'Down the House creates new and sophisticated possibilities for a critical engagement with African American literature by presenting both a meaningful critique of the blues matrix and a careful examination of the place of home in five classic novels: Native Son by Richard Wright, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, and Corregidora by Gayl Jones.
eBook
One night in Georgia : a novel
\"At the end of a sweltering summer shaped by the tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy, race riots, political protests, and the birth of Black power, three coeds from New York City--Zelda Livingston, Veronica Cook, and Daphne Brooks--pack into Veronica's new Ford Fairlane convertible, bound for Atlanta and their last year at Spelman College. It is the beginning of a journey that will change their lives irrevocably\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
A man's game : masculinity and the anti-aesthetics of American literary naturalism
Demonstrates how concepts of masculinity shaped the aesthetic foundations of literary naturalism A Man's Game explores the development of American literary naturalism as it relates to definitions of manhood in many of the movement's key texts and the aesthetic goals of writers such as Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton.
eBook