General African American Studies

The soul never thinks without an image, claimed Aristotle. Indeed, as Angeles Arrien displays in this reissued edition of Signs of Life, shapes have significant psychological and mythological meanings embedded in our minds. Understanding the messages...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Why do we sign our names? How can a squiggle both enslave and liberate? Signatures often require a witness-as if the scrawl itself is not enough...

An exceptional ethnography marked by clarity and candor, Sidewalk takes us into the socio-cultural environment of those who, though often seen as threatening or unseemly, work day after day on the blocks of one of New York's most diverse neighborhoods...

When Danilo Docli, peace worker, organizer, educator, first arrived in 1952 in Trappeto, a village of peasants and fishermen in western Sicily, there were no streets, just mud and dust, not a single drugstore, not even a sewer. (In fact, the local...

This book is a true document of issues that follow a child after being abused, it covers a life span of a male child of 4 years to a man well into his sixties.It covers the fear, the mindset that turns his thoughts of hatred and the feeling of being...

Why do I have these stupid looking teeth? Only weird Africans have a gap between their front teeth. It makes me look like a walking joke every time I open my mouth. Why is my hair so kinky? Nobody looks like me, and nobody wants to be my friend.This is...

Not in my backyard -- that's the refrain commonly invoked by property owners who oppose unwanted development. Such words assume a special ferocity when the development in question is public housing. Lisa Belkin penetrates the prejudices, myths, and...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The shipping container is all around: whizzing by on the highway, trundling past on rails, unloading behind a big box store even as you shop there,...

"Always moving, at times haunting, and often inspirational, Shifting provides a richly textured look at the lives of Black women. Jones and Shorter-Gooden poignantly portray the day-to-day challenges and triumphs of 'sisters' at work, in relationships,...

Published between 1987 and 1990, 'Sheer Filth' offered a heady mix of shocking film and book reviews, wild music coverage, weird cartoons, incisive features and fascinating interviews with icons of cult cinema and adult entertainment. Mixing serious...

She Votes is an intersectional story of the women who won suffrage, and those who have continued to raise their voices for equality ever since. From the first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation to the first woman to wear pants on the Senate...

Let residents tell you what it's been like to live in D.C.'s most gentrified neighborhood. When Gretchen Wharton came to Shaw in 1946, the houses were full of families that looked like hers: lower-income, African American, two parents with kids. The...

"...But what will be the place of white males in a multicultural US? This is the question that independent scholar Pulera explores in his fascinating book...The author examines every conceivable dimension of white male experience, from politics,...

This book, whose influence and renown have steadily grown since its first publication, is a psychoanalytic and cultural study of shame and guilt. In Part I, Dr. Gerhart Piers, a psychoanalyst, gives concise definitions of these two previously...

On growing up in the American South of the 1960s--an all-American white boy--son of a long line of Methodist preachers, in the midst of the civil rights revolution, and discovering the culpability of silence within the church. By the Pulitzer...

One might say that the womb of death--the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonization--gave birth to Black populations. Taking this observation as her point of departure, Nathalie Etoke examines Black existence today in her riveting new book, Shades of...