Cultural Literature

The Making of American Whiteness: The Formation of Race in Seventeenth-Century Virginia changes the narrative about the origins of race and Whiteness in America. With an exhaustive array of archival documents, Carmen P. Thompson demonstrates not only...

Challenge your biases and broaden your understanding of power and how we wield it with this essential guide. Power is complex. But Do The Work is a guide to navigating those complexities. From ancient theories of power to contemporary examples, from...

All the unwritten rules of rap say it doesn't happen like this. Yet Killer Mike, a Black man from Atlanta, Georgia, and El-P, a white man from Brooklyn, New York, have transformed what should have been the twilight of their careers as rappers into their...

The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who "endured." Although most of these...

From Black clubwomen to members of preservation organizations, African American women have made commemoration a central part of Black life and culture. Alexandria Russell illuminates the process of memorialization while placing African American women at...

In the vein of Medical Apartheid, The Color of Law, and Just Medicine, a prodigious history of global disease that reveals the devastating link between public health and systemic inequality. AIDS, cholera, the Spanish flu--epidemics become catastrophic...

- Eloquent portraits and self-portraits by a contemporary African studio photographer that expand on the tradition of Malick Sedibé and Seydou Keita Since 2012, Dakar-born Omar Victor Diop has been hailed by the art world for his stunning,...

An imaginative, narratological reading of Chinua Achebe's novels, stories, poetry, and essays through a literary and historical framework. Toyin Falola analyzes fictional and historical cartographies of Africa in Achebe's literary works to offer a...

In this controversial essay collection, award-winning writer Shelby Stelle illuminates the origins of the current conflict in race relations--the increase in anger, mistrust, and even violence between black and whites. With candor and persuasive...

The Greatest Generation meets Bloods in this revealing oral history of the unrecognized contributions of African American veterans.Award-winning journalist Yvonne Latty never bothered to find out the extent of her father's service until it was almost too...

A black professor takes on the cult of diversity, equity, and inclusion. In this compelling appeal to true justice, he demolishes the identity politics that makes a travesty of Martin Luther King's dream. Martin Luther King's dream of a colorblind...

In February 1946, when 21-year-old Malcolm Little was sentenced to eight to ten years in a maximum-security prison, he was a petty criminal and street hustler in Boston. By the time he was paroled in August 1952, he had transformed into a voracious...

A complex, poignant exploration of racial attitudes in America, as illumined by the case of Edmund Perry. Perry, a seventeen-year-old black honors student from Harlem, was fatally shot by a young white plainclothes policeman in 1985 in an alleged mugging...

In Barack and Michelle, America's First Couple is scrutinized in stirring detail by Christopher Andersen, author of thirteen New York Times bestsellers including Jack and Jackie, Somewhere in Heaven, and the phenomenal #1 New York Times bestsellers The...

This is the extraordinary first-person account of a young woman's coming of age in Somalia and her struggles against the obligations and strictures of family and society. By the time she is nine, Aman has undergone a ritual circumcision ceremony; at...

"Superb."--Oliver Burkeman A challenge to the tyranny of work and a call to reclaim our lives from its clutches. From the moment we ask children what they want to "be" when they grow up, we exalt the dream job as if it were life's ultimate objective...