African-American Studies: Books, eBooks & Media

Geneva Cobb Moore deftly combines literature, history, criticism, and theory in Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature by offering insight into the historical black experience from slavery to freedom as depicted in the literature of nine female writers across several centuries.Moore traces black women writers' creation of feminine and maternal metaphors of power in literature from the colonial era work of Phillis Wheatley to the postmodern work of Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.

Celebrate the Achievements . . . The Complete Encyclopedia of African American History chronicles 400 years of African American history. This comprehensive resource explores the past, the progress, and the present of African Americans in four volumes, each building, complementing, and expanding on the previous volume.

With an outward gaze focused on a better future, ""Between Good and Ghetto"" reflects the social world of inner city African American girls and how they manage threats of personal violence. Drawing on personal encounters, traditions of urban ethnography, Black feminist thought, gender studies, and feminist criminology, Nikki Jones gives readers a richly descriptive and compassionate account of how African American girls negotiate schools and neighborhoods governed by the so-called 'code of the street' - the form of street justice that governs violence in distressed urban areas. She reveals the multiple strategies they use to navigate interpersonal and gender-specific violence and how they reconcile the gendered dilemmas of their adolescence. Illuminating struggles for survival within this group, ""Between Good and Ghetto"" encourages others to move African American girls toward the center of discussions of 'the crisis' in poor, urban neighborhoods.

African Americans' historical roots are encapsulated in the lyrics, melodies, and rhythms of their music. In the 18th and 19th centuries, African slaves, longing for emancipation, expressed their hopes and dreams through spirituals. Inspired by African civilization and culture, as well as religion, art, literature, and social issues, this influential, joyous, tragic, uplifting, challenging, and enduring music evolved into many diverse genres, including jazz, blues, rock and roll, soul, swing, and hip hop. Providing a lyrical history of our nation, this groundbreaking encyclopedia, the first of its kind, showcases all facets of African American music including folk, religious, concert and popular styles. Over 500 in-depth entries by more than 100 scholars on a vast range of topics such as genres, styles, individuals, groups, and collectives as well as historical topics such as music of the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and numerous others. Offering balanced representation of key individuals, groups, and ensembles associated with diverse religious beliefs, political affiliations, and other perspectives not usually approached, this indispensable reference illuminates the profound role that African American music has played in American cultural history. Editors Price, Kernodle, and Maxile provide balanced representation of various individuals, groups and ensembles associated with diverse religious beliefs, political affiliations, and perspectives.

The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and disseminated throughout the US by African Americans. Aston Gonzalez charts the changing roles of African American visual artists as they helped build the world they envisioned.

Koritha Mitchell analyzes canonical texts by and about African American women to lay bare the hostility these women face as they invest in traditional domesticity. Instead of the respectability and safety granted white homemakers, black women endure pejorative labels, racist governmental policies, attacks on their citizenship, and aggression meant to keep them in "their place." Tracing how African Americans define and redefine success in a nation determined to deprive them of it, Mitchell plumbs the works of Frances Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Michelle Obama, and others. These artists honor black homes from slavery and post-emancipation through the Civil Rights era to "post-racial" America. Mitchell follows black families asserting their citizenship in domestic settings while the larger society and culture marginalize and attack them, not because they are deviants or failures but because they meet American standards. Powerful and provocative, From Slave Cabins to the White House illuminates the links between African American women's homemaking and citizenship in history and across literature.

From BlackPlanet to #BlackGirlMagic, 'Distributed Blackness' places blackness at the very center of internet culture. Andre Brock Jr. claims issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. 'Distributed Blackness' analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how "blackness" gets worked out in various technological domains. 0As Brock demonstrates, there's nothing niche or subcultural about expressions of blackness on social media: internet use and practice now set the terms for what constitutes normative participation. Drawing on critical race theory, linguistics, rhetoric, information studies, and science and technology studies, Brock tabs between black-dominated technologies, websites, and social media to build a set of black beliefs about technology. In explaining black relationships with and alongside technology, Brock centers the unique joy and sense of community in being black online now.

Formed in 1960 in Raleigh, North Carolina, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was a high-profile civil rights collective led by young people. For Howard Zinn in 1964, SNCC members were "new abolitionists," but SNCC pursued radical initiatives and Black Power politics in addition to reform. It was committed to grassroots organizing in towns and rural communities, facilitating voter registration and direct action through "projects" embedded in Freedom Houses, especially in the South: the setting for most of SNCC's stories. Over time, it changed from a tight cadre into a disparate group of many constellations but stood out among civil rights organizations for its participatory democracy and emphasis on local people deciding the terms of their battle for social change.

"The end of desegregation and the attainment of civil rights for South Carolinas African American community from the 1940s through the 1960s was a long and arduous struggle. Enduring lynchings, death threats, bombs, robed Klansmen, burning crosses, whippings, beatings, arson, and venemous hatred, African Americans from Upstate to the Lowcountry displayed astonishing courage, devotion, and commitment to gain equality. This book tells stories of those struggles. For the past fifteen years South Carolina journalist Claudia Smith Brinson has researched the history of civil rights in the Palmetto State and interviewed dozens of civil rights activists who risked their lives to make their communities better places: fair, equal, democratic, and respectful of all human beings. Many of these individuals had never told their stories-to anyone. These are stories of petitioning, preaching, picketing, boycotting, marching, and holding sit-ins at stores, libraries, parks, and beaches. Brinson focuses on five case studies, reflecting individuals and actions that changed the landscape of civil rights in South Carolina but also reverberated throughout the South: the legal strategies of James Myles Hinton, Sr., the president of the South Conference of Branches of the NAACP in the 1940s and 50s; Joseph Armstrong Delaine and others involved in the Summertons Briggs v. Elliott case in the early 1950s that led to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision; Cecil Augustus Ivory, and the Freedom Riders in Rock Hill in 1960; the sit-ins that same year in Rock Hill, Orangeburg, Denmark, and Columbia, in which thousands of African American studies were arrested and jailed; and the 1969 hospital strikes in Charleston at Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital, during which dozens of women played key roles. And while these are stories from South Carolinas past, the journey to equality never ends--as recently as 2014 the SC Supreme Court, in Abbeville II, ruled that the state had failed in its constitutional duty to provide a minimally adequate education--but provided no remedy. The struggle endures"--