Black History Month

The authors of this volume present Beale street as a living microcosm of determination, survival, and change -- from its early days as a raucous haven for gamblers and grafters and as a black show business center to its present-day languishing. The book is presented in two parts; a well researched history that is richly complemented by the rare, extensive interviews that constitute the second half of the volume.

From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture. The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith -- published here in their entirety for the first time -- Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a consciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory.

Nelson George's chronicle of Motown Records' rise and fall remains a classic account of an essential American music company and its dynamic founder Berry Gordy Jr. Gordy's uncanny instinct for finding extraordinary talent--from performers and musicians to songwriters and producers—packed the label's roster with a who's who of historic artists and hitmakers. Here is the story of the Supremes and superstar Diana Ross, of the towering solo acts Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, of vocal groups led by the Temptations and Four Tops, of the phenomenal Jackson Five and Michael Jackson, and of singer/songwriter and Motown executive Smokey Robinson. Up front about Gordy's manipulative and complex relationships with his artists, George reveals the inner workings of how Motown conducted its business.

Portrays America's foremost blues singer, from his Mississippi sharecropper boyhood to the sixties' worldwide recognition of "Blues Boy" King, with many illustrations documenting the history of the blues.

In this intimate biography of the Prince of Soul, David Ritz provides a candid look at a star and a friend. Ritz had been collaborating with Gaye on his story for several years before the singer's tragic death, and had conducted a series of extraordinary interviews in which Gaye discussed his deepest secrets. Drawing from these interviews, Gaye's life is recounted in his own words and the words of those who knew him best: his family, friends, and colleagues. What emerges is a full-scale portrait of a charming but tortured artist, a brilliant singer with a divided soul. Here is Marvin's story from his early years in the slums of Washington, D.C., to is rise to the top of the Motown industry, his fall from grace, his comeback, and finally his sudden, shocking end at the hands of his own father. The definitive biography of an enormously gifted and sensitive man, Divided Soul takes us deep into the life and music of one of America's most passionate--and most troubled--composers and singers.

Robert Johnson was undoubtedly the most outstanding of the Mississippi Delta blues musicians and also one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but his short life remains steeped in mystery and wrapped in some of the most enduring legends of modern music. Love in Vain is Alan Greenberg's remarkable, highly acclaimed, and genre-defying screenplay and is widely considered to be one of the foremost books on Robert Johnson's life and legacy and an extraordinary exercise in American mythmaking.

Briefly portrays the life of the influential blues singer, Ma Rainey, discusses the development of her music, and analyzes the theme of love in her music.

Rap has emerged as one of the most influential cultural forces of our time. In this work, the editors demonstrate that rap is also a wide reaching and vital poetic tradition born of beats and rhymes. This pioneering anthology brings together more than three hundred lyrics written over thirty years, from the "old school" to the "golden age" to the present day.

Examining rap history's most memorable lyricists and their inimitable techniques, literary scholar Adam Bradley argues that we must understand rap as poetry or miss the vanguard of poetry today. Book of Rhymes explores America's least understood poets, unpacking their surprisingly complex craft, and according rap poetry the respect it deserves.

Can't Stop Won't Stop is a powerful cultural and social history of the end of the American century, and a provocative look into the new world that the hip-hop generation created. Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop became the Esperanto of youth rebellion and a generation-defining movement. In a post-civil rights era defined by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop crystallized a multiracial, polycultural generation's worldview, and transformed American politics and culture.

Decoded is a book like no other: a collection of lyrics and their meanings that together tell the story of a culture, an art form, a moment in history, and one of the most provocative and successful artists of our time. In Decoded, Jay-Z writes a combination of autobiography and analysis of his own lyrics.

This is the first book to discuss in detail how rap music is put together musically. Whereas a great deal of popular music scholarship dismisses music analysis as irrelevant or of limited value, the present book argues that it can be crucial to cultural theory. It is unique for bringing together perspectives from music theory, musicology, cultural studies, critical theory, and communications. It is also the first scholarly book to discuss rap music in Holland, and the rap of Cree Natives in Canada, in addition to such mainstream artists as Ice Cube.

This newly expanded and revised second edition of That's the Joint! brings together the most important and up-to-date hip-hop scholarship in one comprehensive volume. With pedagogical features including author biographies, headnotes summarizing key points of articles, and discussion questions, That's the Joint! is essential reading for anyone seeking deeper understanding of the profound impact of hip-hop as an intellectual, aesthetic, and cultural movement.

In 1996 Tupac Shakur, one of the most talented artists of his time, was murdered by an unknown gunman. Fred L. Johnson and Tayannah Lee McQuillar examine the theories surrounding his death and the story of Tupac's lost legacy in this definitive biography.

A complete anthology of the poetry of Langston Hughes presents 860 poems that capture the rhythms, emotions, cultural significance, and political awareness of African-American life, from his earliest works to his final collection.

Color (1925) is a collection of poems by Countee Cullen. Published the same year Cullen entered Harvard to pursue a masters in English, Color was a brilliant debut by a poet who had already gained a reputation as a leading young artist of the Harlem Renaissance. Deeply personal and attuned to poetic tradition, Cullen’s verses capture the spirit of creative inquiry that defined a generation of writers, musicians, painters, and intellectuals while changing the course of American history itself.

"Comedy: American Style, " Jessie Redmon Fauset's fourth and final novel, recounts the tragic tale of a family's destruction. The story of a mother who denies her clan its heritage. Originally published in 1933, this intense narrative stands the test of time and continues to raise compelling, disturbing, and still contemporary themes of color prejudice and racial self-hatred.

Throughout her short but brilliant literary career, Nella Larsen wrote piercing dramas about the black middle class that featured sensitive, spirited heroines struggling to find a place where they belonged. Race and marriage offer few securities here or in the other stories in this compulsively readable collection, rich in psychological complexity and imbued with a sense of place that brings Harlem vibrantly to life.

Claude McKay (1889-1948) was one of the most prolific and sophisticated African American writers of the early twentieth century. A Jamaican-born author of poetry, short stories, novels, and nonfiction, McKay has often been associated with the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance, a movement of African American art, culture, and intellectualism between World War I and the Great Depression.

One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years--due largely to initial audiences' rejection of its strong black female protagonist--Hurston's classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.

Intended to cut clean through the oppression imposed upon the mainstream by society's "intellectual superstructure," this collection of revolutionary essays by literary and cultural legend Amiri Baraka raises numerous issues concerning contemporary African American life. The socially conscious will appreciate the creative analyses and stimulating critiques on display here, buoyed by Baraka's distinctive, bold, and aggressive opinions about the ways our culture bestows ignorance upon the ignorant merely to exploit them.

Collected poems that serve as a companion to Giovanni's 1997 Love Poems. That book--romantic, bold, and erotic--expressed notions of love in ways that were delightfully unexpected. In the years that followed, Giovanni experienced losses both public and private. A mother's passing, a sister's, too. A massacre on the campus at which she teaches. And just when it seemed life was spinning out of control, Giovanni rediscovered love--what she calls the antidote. Here romantic love--and all its manifestations, the physical touch, the emotional pull, the hungry heart--is distilled as never before by one of our most talented poets.

This new volume by the much-loved poet Sonia Sanchez, her first in over a decade, is music to the ears: a collection of haiku that celebrates the gifts of life and mourns the deaths of revered African American figures in the worlds of music, literature, art, and activism. In her verses, we hear the sounds of Max Roach "exploding in the universe," the "blue hallelujahs" of the Philadelphia Murals, and the voice of Odetta "thundering out of the earth." Sometimes deceptively simple, her lyrics hold a very powerful load of emotion and meaning. There are intimate verses here for family and friends, verses of profound loss and silence, of courage and resilience.

The first oral history to fully explore the contributions of black women intellectuals of the Black Arts Movement, Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of Black Arts Movement Theater and Performance reclaims a vital yet under-researched chapter in African American, women's, and theater history

In California in the year 2025, a small community is overrun by desperate scavengers, as an eighteen-year-old African American woman sets off on foot on a perilous journey northward.

In 2014, Christopher Soto and Lambda Literary Foundation founded the online journal Nepantla, with the mission to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community, including contributions as diverse in style and form, as the experiences of QPOC in the United States. Now, Nepantla will appear for the first time in print as a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history.and more!

Experience the rich imagination and genre-defying writing of multiple-award-winning author Nalo Hopkinson with this special volume, which includes both her epic novel spanning time and place, and her first collection of short fiction. When an Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love is manifested on a nineteenth-century Caribbean island, she explores her newfound powers by traveling through time and space, inhabiting a midwife, a mixed-race Parisian dancer, and an enslaved prostitute in ancient Alexandria. With works ranging from science fiction to Caribbean folklore, passionate love to chilling horror, this story collection illustrates why Hopkinson received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Entertaining, challenging, and alluring, Skin Folk is not to be missed.

Girl, Woman, Other is a celebration of the diversity of Black British experience. Moving, hopeful, and inventive, this extraordinary novel is a vivid portrait of the state of contemporary Britain and the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London's funding-deprived schools; Carole, one of Shirley's former students, works hard to earn a degree from Oxford and becomes an investment banker; Carole's mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about her daughter's lack of rootedness despite her obvious achievements. From a nonbinary social media influencer to a 93-year-old woman living on a farm in Northern England, these unforgettable characters also intersect in shared aspects of their identities, from age to race to sexuality to class. Sparklingly witty and filled with emotion, centering voices we often see othered, and written in an innovative and fast-moving form that borrows from poetry, Girl, Woman, Other is a polyphonic and richly textured social novel that reminds us of everything that connects us to our neighbors, even in times when we are encouraged to be split apart

Pearl Primus (1919-1994) blazed onto the dance scene in 1943 with stunning works that incorporated social and racial protest into their dance aesthetic. In The Dance Claimed Me, Peggy and Murray Schwartz, friends and colleagues of Primus, offer an intimate perspective on her life and explore her influences on American culture, dance, and education. They trace Primus's path from her childhood in Port of Spain, Trinidad, through her rise as an influential international dancer, an early member of the New Dance Group (whose motto was "Dance is a weapon"), and a pioneer in dance anthropology.

Judith Jamison is, in every sense, a towering figure. Her commanding physical presence, elegant manner, and extraordinary technique have made her not only a true superstar of American dance and an historic innovator in her field, but also a beacon of inspiration to African-Americans, to women, and to people of all origins around the world. Dancing Spirit presents this phenomenal woman's story in her own direct and uncompromising voice. Dancing Spirit is a candid and immediate self-portrait of a unique American artist whose work has left an indelible mark on the world of dance, and whose life and career are a monument to her passion, her pride, and her vision.

Josephine Baker (1906-1975) was a dancer, singer, actress, author, politician, militant, and philanthropist, whose images and cultural legacy have survived beyond the hundredth anniversary of her birth. Neither an exercise in postmodern deconstruction nor simple biography, Josephine Baker in Art and Life presents a critical cultural study of the life and art of the Franco-American performer whose appearances as the savage dancer Fatou shocked the world. Although the study remains firmly anchored in Josephine Baker s life and times, presenting and challenging carefully researched biographical facts, it also offers in-depth analyses of the images that she constructed and advanced.

Dancer Janet Collins, born in New Orleans in 1917 and raised in Los Angeles, soared high over the color line as the first African-American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera. Night's Dancer chronicles the life of this extraordinary and elusive woman, who became a unique concert dance soloist as well as a black trailblazer in the white world of classical ballet. During her career, Collins endured an era in which racial bias prevailed, and subsequently prevented her from appearing in the South. Nonetheless, her brilliant performances transformed the way black dancers were viewed in ballet.

The career of Norton and Margot, a ballroom dance team whose work was thwarted by the racial tenets of the era, serves as the barometer of the times and acts as the tour guide on this excursion through the worlds of African American vaudeville, black and white America during the swing era, the European touring circuit, and pre-Civil Rights era racial etiquette.