Today is the beginning of Black History Month! To celebrate, we offer the following reading selections from our books and journals. We hope they will help enhance your understanding of important issues in African American studies.
Forthcoming in paperback
Oscar Micheaux and His Circle
African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era
Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser, Editors and Curators
"An extremely valuable contribution to the history of African American art." —Toni Morrison
In this important collection, prominent scholars examine the surviving silent films of Oscar Micheaux—the most prolific African-American filmmaker to date and a filmmaking giant of the silent period.
Roland Hayes
The Legacy of an American Tenor
Christopher A. Brooks and Robert Sims
Gold winner, 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards, Performing Arts and Music
"Largely forgotten today outside specialist circles, the African-American tenor Roland Hayes (1887–1976) was a much admired and internationally celebrated artist during his lifetime. As the authors of this substantial and well-documented new biography suggest, a reluctance to broadcast and a relatively limited recording career have prevented wider circulation of his fame in our own day. . . The authors detail his long career meticulously, as well as his complicated private life." —BBC Music Magazine
Listen to a podcast with the authors
Misremembering Dr. King
Revisiting the Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
Jennifer J. Yanco
2015 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection
"A succinct eighty-one-page reminder that Americans currently experience collective amnesia when it comes to Martin Luther King Jr." —H-Net
"Yanco’s important book is a reminder that when we raise a transformative figure to a pedestal, we mustn’t overlook their most challenging beliefs, even (or especially) if those beliefs force us to realize how far we still have to go." —Biographile
Listen to a podcast with the author
Racing to Justice
Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society
john a. powell
Renowned social justice advocate john a. powell persuasively argues that we have not achieved a post-racial society and that there is much work to do to redeem the American promise of inclusive democracy. Racing to Justice challenges us to replace attitudes and institutions that promote and perpetuate social suffering with those that foster relationships and a way of being that transcends disconnection and separation.
Watch the book trailer
“Can You Save Me?: Black Male Superheroes in Hollywood Film”
Tia C. M. Tyree and Liezille J. Jacobs
Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men
Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn 2014), pp. 1-24
Film is an important component of society and works to influence how Blacks are viewed and constructed in the world. Today, as in the past, media are spaces of struggle over power and meaning in our culture as well as mediums where dominant power relations are reproduced. American cinema has normalized Whiteness of superheroes in action films, classic examples of which include Superman, Spider-Man, and Batman. The purpose of this study was to investigate how Black superheroes were constructed in films. This project used the Afrocentric approach as a lens to uncover moments when films play on the unconscious adoption of Western worldviews and perspectives on race and gender roles.
Read the article (free access until March 1, 2016)
“Afro-Dog”
Bénédicte Boisseron
Transition
No. 118, I Can Be Lightning (2015), pp. 15-31
Bénédicte Boisseron observes that black people and dogs have often been at odds in the fight for freedom and civil rights. Tracing the historical interaction between blacks and dogs, she explores the tremendous impact perceptions of goodness or badness have had from slavery through today’s Black Lives Matter movement.
“Cinema as Political Activism: Contemporary Meanings in The Spook Who Sat by the Door”
Marilyn Yaquinto
Black Camera
Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 2014), pp. 5-33
In 1973 Sam Greenlee created a film based on his controversial 1969 novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door. It is often mislabeled as blaxploitation—an intentional tactic on his part at the time to attract a distributor. The FBI then purportedly short-circuited Spook's box office run, given its tale of a black CIA operative who returns to his Chicago community and uses his training to organize and execute a guerilla war against oppressive conditions that keep people trapped in urban ghettoes.
Considered by producer Tim Reid to be one of the most significant black films ever made, the film was digitally remastered and rereleased in 2003, and was again celebrated as insightful while at the same time vilified for its depiction of violence rooted in race-based anger. The film endures as a historical text about black militancy in the early 1970s, but also as a study of the revolutionary potential of oppressed peoples anywhere and the use of cinema as a potential tool of liberation.
Read the article (free access until March 1, 2016)
This is a great collection of books about African Americans, which some of them I have never heard of, I am going to go through your online library.
Posted by: Ronell | February 19, 2016 at 08:52 AM