Cultural Literature

A deep dive into racial politics, Hollywood, and Black cultural struggles for liberation as reflected in the extraordinary life and times of Sammy Davis Jr. Through the lens of Sammy Davis Jr.'s six-decade career in show business--from vaudeville to...

An epic story, Africatown charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and...

Microsoft's associate general counsel shares the inspirational story of his rise from childhood poverty in pre-gentrified New York City to a stellar career at the top of the technology and music industries in this stirring true story of grit and...

Revisiting an almost-forgotten American interracial literary culture that advanced racial pluralism in the decades before the 1960s In Impermanent Blackness, Korey Garibaldi explores interracial collaborations in American commercial publishing--authors,...

Who had the right to live within the newly united states of America?In the country's founding decades, federal and state politicians debated which categories of people could remain and which should be subject to removal. The result was a white Republic,...

The witnesses of segregation still live among us, and award-winning broadcaster and educator Alvin Hall sets out to record their dramatic memories. He uses The Green Book, the guide that helped Black people travel safely on the nation's highways and...

In October 2016, thirty intellectuals and artists from Africa, its diasporas, and beyond gathered together in Dakar and Saint-Louis, Senegal, to reflect on the present and future of Africa in the midst of transformations that are sweeping through the...

In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political...

As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the world is undergoing a major historical shift: Africa, and the Global South more generally, is increasingly becoming a principal theatre in which the future of the planet plays itself out. But...

In 1897 the promising young sociologist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was given a temporary post as Assistant in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in order to conduct a systematic investigation of social conditions in the seventh...

A debut illustrated manifesto by Rinny Perkins (@RinnyRiot) about what she's learned as a queer Black woman through the art of self-validation. In this graphic collection of mini essays, comedian Rinny Perkins illustrates her experiences as the owner of...

In Death's Futurity Sampada Aranke examines the importance of representations of death to Black liberation. Aranke analyzes posters, photographs, journalism, and films that focus on the murders of Black Panther Party members Lil' Bobby Hutton, Fred...

Anne Spencer between Worlds provides an indispensable reassessment of a critically neglected figure. Looking beyond the poetry she published during the Harlem Renaissance, Noelle Morrissette provides a new critical lens for interpreting Spencer's...

The story of the enslaved West Indian women in the struggle for freedom The forgotten history of women slaves and their struggle for liberation. Enslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. In this riveting work...