Ethnic studies / Ethnicity Books
University of South Carolina Press Ota Benga Under My Mother's Roof
Book SynopsisIn Ota Benga under My Mother's Roof, Carrie Allen McCray (1913–2008) uses poignant and personal verse to trace the ill-fated life of the Congolese pygmy who was famously exhibited in the Bronx Zoo in 1906 before being taken in by the McCray family of Lynchburg, Virginia. Rooted in the rich historical and autobiographic context of her own experiences with Benga, McCray offers compelling, dexterous poems that place Benga’s story within the racial milieu of the early twentieth century as the burgeoning science of social anthropology worked to classify humans based on race and culture. The theme of this book is a study of humanity, of people of all kinds, in which Benga’s vitality becomes the measure against which everyone is measured. With poems that revel in African American signifying, spirituality, and traditional storytelling, McCray’s collection establishes a sincere legacy for Ota Benga as she shares her friend’s harrowing tale with new generations.Trade Review“In a narrative that moves like a classical tragedy, Ota Benga is ‘caught in a web / of flawed science,’ but emerges as a complex and real figure, a man out of time, out of place, whose dignity and humanity have left us with a harrowing story shared here by one who knew him best. Carrie Allen McCray weaves a rich tapestry in this cultural epic. We hear African rhythms and tribal voices, we encounter poems that seem like plays and chants and rituals and journal excerpts, and we witness the ‘birth of anthropology’ with an awful, embedded racism in its infancy. In McCray’s loving portrait of Ota Benga, we come to relish the small touches as much as the large ones—the landscape of turn-of-the-century Virginia, the manners of folks at work and play, the sense of tribal and familial loyalty, and the voices that accumulate into a cultural symphony, sometimes broken into grief, sometimes sustained by joy.”—David Baker, poetry editor, Kenyon Review |“From the deep forests of the Congo, to the black churches of Virginia, to the steel cages of the Bronx Zoo, to the hearth of the McCray household, Ota Benga wished only to be seen as a man. When we read Carrie Allen McCray’s beautiful, haunting poems, we share her great empathy and devotion to sharing the life of another human being once here, but now gone. This is a story about humanity, cultural differences, the beginnings of anthropology, the middle of racism, and how sweetly we used to take each other in and care for the stranger walking the earth just as we cared for our own. McCray carried Ota Benga in her head and heart until she was ready to craft his cautionary tale into something truly wonderful. Now it is our turn to bear this story, to remember who we are, and to act as who we wish to be.”—Nikky Finney, National Book Award winner for Head Off & Split
£14.36
University of South Carolina Press The Spirit of an Activist: The Life and Work of
Book SynopsisThe Spirit of an Activist chronicles the life and distinguished career of Isaiah DeQuincey Newman (1911-1985), a Protestant pastor, civil rights leader, and South Carolina statesman. Known as a tenacious advocate for racial equality, Newman was also renowned for his diplomatic skills when working with opponents and his advocacy of nonviolent protest over confrontation. His leadership and dedication to peaceful change played an important role in the dismantling of segregation in South Carolina. The thirteen narratives in this volume by such diverse contributors as Richard W. Riley, William Saunders, Esther Nell Witherspoon, and Donald L. Fowler attest to Newman's impact on South Carolina. Editor Sadye L. M. Logan orchestrates these many contributions into an informative, moving, and sometimes passionate collage of Newman's challenges, triumphs, and small and significant everyday acts of courage.Through this collection Logan takes the reader on an extraordinary journey from Newman's childhood in Darlington County, South Carolina, to his death at the age of seventy-four. Along that journey Newman led the state's African Americans to join the Democratic Party and was a delegate to several Democratic Presidential Conventions. In 1983 he became the first African American South Carolinian elected to the State Senate in nearly a century. The Spirit of an Activist is essentially biographical, but it uses a diverse chorus of voices to capture Newman's rich and varied contributions in transforming South Carolina's rigid and unjust social systems. His quiet dignity and appeals to reason won him the confidence, and ultimately the support, of key white political and economic leaders. In effect Newman served both as chief strategist for the protest movement and as chief negotiator at the conference table, becoming the ""unofficial liaison"" between South Carolina's African American citizens and the state's white power structure. In the years that followed formal desegregation, Newman remained active in politics and became a trusted confidant of state leaders, many of whom are featured in this volume. The Spirit of an Activist includes a foreword by attorney and civil rights activist Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., and a prologue by South Carolina congressman James E. Clyburn, both personal friends of Newman who worked with him during the civil rights struggle.
£25.16
University of South Carolina Press Blessed Experiences: Genuinely Southern, Proudly
Book SynopsisFrom his humble beginnings in Sumter, South Carolina, to his prominence on the Washington, D.C., political scene as the third highest-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, U.S. Congressman James E. Clyburn has led an extraordinary life. In Blessed Experiences, Clyburn tells in his own inspirational words how an African American boy from the Jim Crow-era South was able to beat the odds to achieve great success and become, as President Barack Obama describes him, ""one of a handful of people who, when they speak, the entire Congress listens.Born in 1940 to a civic-minded beautician and a fundamentalist minister, Clyburn began his ascent to leadership at the age of twelve, when he was elected president of his National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) youth chapter. He broke barriers through peaceful protests and steadfast beliefs in equality and justice. Of his success Clyburn says he was ""blessed with nurturing parents, a supportive family, and loyal friends."" But, he added, ""my life was not just about knocking down doors and lowering barriers. I spent some time marching in the streets and occupying the inside of South Carolina jails."" As a civil rights leader at South Carolina State College, as human affairs commissioner under John C. West and three subsequent governors, and as South Carolina's first African American congressman since 1897, Clyburn has established a long and impressive record of public leadership and advocacy for human rights, education, historic preservation, and economic development. Clyburn was elected to Congress in 1992. Serving as copresident of his freshman class, he rose quickly through the ranks and was elected chair of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1999 and House Democratic Caucus vice chair in 2002. Three years later he was unanimously elected chair of the Democratic Caucus. When Democrats regained the House majority in 2006, Clyburn was elected House majority whip. Now as assistant Democratic leader in the 112th Congress, Clyburn, a self-described independent, prides himself on working to overcome barriers and destroy myths without becoming too predictable. ""I have worked across party lines to further legislative causes, and on occasion publicly differed with some of my allies in the civil rights community,"" says Clyburn. ""My experiences have not always been pleasant, but I have considered all of them blessings."" Blessed Experiences includes a foreword from Emmy Award-winning actress and the congressman's longtime friend Alfre Woodard.
£24.65
University of South Carolina Press Belvidere: A Plantation Memory
Book Synopsis“Belvidere is underwater too deep for any eye but that of memory to reach,” begins Anne Sinkler Fishburne reverential recollections of her ancestral home. Located in between Santee River and Eutaw Creek near present day Eutaw Springs, South Carolina, Belvidere plantation once produced Santee long cotton (a hybrid between Upland cotton and Sea Island cotton) and short staple cotton on its nearly 800 acres of rich Lowcountry soil and served as the home of the Sinkler family from the 1770s until the 1940s. An elegant two-story timber house was built on the property in 1803, complete with full-brick basement, brick foundation, a welcoming piazza across the front, and a large wing balanced on the opposite side with a brick-paved sun piazza. In 1936, a race track was constructed at Belvidere to host races for the St. John’s Jockey Club (originally the Santee Jockey Club). The storied and vibrant life at Belvidere came to a close in 1941, however, with the completion of the huge Santee Cooper hydroelectric development. Belvidere, like many plantations of the parish, now rests below the waters of Lake Marion, but its past can still be experienced by the modern reader in this plantation memory.First published in 1949, Belvidere chronicles life at the plantation through letters, memoir, and historical research. When Fishburne gathered the materials that compose this volume, she merely wished to preserve for her grandchildren the story of the plantation that was her beloved home and that of many generations of her forebears. Written in an invitingly authentic Lowcountry voice, the resulting narrative is an opportunity to sit on the piazza and walk the gardens once more and share stories of a way of life from a bygone era. Featuring twenty-four illustrations, this commemorative edition of Belvidere is enhanced with a new introduction by Fishburne’s granddaughter Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClercq, an accomplished family historian, author, and editor.
£19.90
University of South Carolina Press Understanding Gary Shteyngart
Book SynopsisUnderstanding Gary Shteyngart, the first comprehensive examination of Shteyngart’s novels and memoir, introduces readers to one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful contemporary American authors. Born in Leningrad in 1972, Shteyngart immigrated to the United States in 1979, attended Oberlin College and the City University of New York, and currently teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University. His novels include Super Sad True Love Story, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; Absurdistan, chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review and Time magazine; and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Geoff Hamilton studies three broad, overlapping elements of Shteyngart’s work: his construction of Russian-Jewish identity in the United States, his appraisal of communism’s imaginative legacy for the wider East European diaspora and former Soviet republics, and his representation of the deadening effects of late capitalism. Focusing on Shteyngart’s themes of the fracturing and decay of ethnic identities, the limits and pitfalls of multiculturalism, and the decline of privacy and civility against the creeping power of technological mediation, Hamilton also tracks the author’s playful manipulation of literary traditions and his incisive revision of seminal mythologies of Russian, Jewish, and American selfhood. Although Shteyngart has sometimes been pigeon-holed as an immigrant author working a rather marginal ethnic shtick, Hamilton demonstrates that Shteyngart’s work deserves attention for its remarkable centrality, that is, its relevance to core questions of identity formation and the conditions of belief common to globalized societies.
£26.96
University of South Carolina Press Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in
Book SynopsisClaiming Freedom is a noteworthy and dynamic analysis of the transition African Americans experienced as they emerged from Civil War slavery, struggled through emancipation, and then forged on to become landowners during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction period in the Georgia lowcountry. Karen Cook Bell’s work is a bold study of the political and social strife of these individuals as they strived for and claimed freedom during the nineteenth century.Bell begins by examining the meaning of freedom through the delineation of acts of self-emancipation prior to the Civil War. Consistent with the autonomy that they experienced as slaves, the emancipated African Americans from the rice region understood citizenship and rights in economic terms and sought them not simply as individuals for the sake of individualism, but as a community for the sake of a shared destiny. Bell also examines the role of women and gender issues, topics she believes are understudied but essential to understanding all facets of the emancipation experience. It is well established that women were intricately involved in rice production, a culture steeped in African traditions, but the influence that culture had on their autonomy within the community has yet to be determined.A former archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration, Bell has wielded her expertise in correlating federal, state, and local records to expand the story of the all-black town of 1898 Burroughs, Georgia, into one that holds true for all the American South. By humanizing the African American experience, Bell demonstrates how men and women leveraged their community networks with resources that enabled them to purchase land and establish a social, political, and economic foundation in the rural and urban post-war era.
£32.36
Michigan State University Press The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New
Book SynopsisThe population of Mexican-origin peoples in the United States is a diverse one, as reflected by age, class, gender, sexuality, and religion. Far from antiquated concepts of mestizaje, recent scholarship has shown that Mexican@/Chican@ culture is a mixture of indigenous, African, and Spanish and other European peoples and cultures. No one reflects this rich blend of cultures better than Chican@ rappers, whose lyrics and iconography can help to deepen our understanding of what it means to be Chican@ or Mexican@ today. While some identify as Mexican mestizos, others identify as indigenous people or base their identities on their class and racial/ethnic makeup. No less significant is the intimate level of contact between Chican@s and black Americans. Via a firm theoretical foundation and a collection of vibrant essays, Pancho McFarland explores the language and ethos of Chican@/Mexican@ hip hop and sheds new light on three distinct identities reflected in the music: indigenous/Mexica, Mexican nationalist/immigrant, and street hopper. With particular attention to the intersection of black and Chicano cultures, the author places exciting recent developments in music forms within the context of progressive social change, social justice, identity, and a new transnational, polycultural America.
£41.78
Michigan State University Press Necessarily Black: Cape Verdean Youth, Hip-Hop
Book SynopsisAn ethnographic account of second-generation Cape Verdean youth identity in the United States and a theoretical attempt to broaden and complicate current discussions about race and racial identity in the twenty-first century. P. Khalil Saucier grapples with the performance, embodiment, and nuances of racialized identities (blackened bodies) in empirical contexts. He looks into the durability and (in)flexibility of race and racial discourse through an imbricated and multidimensional understanding of racial identity and racial positioning.In doing so, Saucier examines how Cape Verdean youth negotiate their identity within the popular fabrication of “multiracial America.” He also explores the ways in which racial blackness has come to be lived by Cape Verdean youth in everyday life and how racialization feeds back into the experience of these youth classified as black through a matrix of social and material settings.Saucier examines how ascriptions of blackness and forms of black popular culture inform subjectivities. The author also examines hip-hop culture to see how it is used as a site where new (and old) identities of being, becoming, and belonging are fashioned and reworked. Necessarily Black explores race and how Cape Verdean youth think and feel their identities into existence, while keeping in mind the dynamics and politics of racialization, mixed-race identities, and anti-blackness.
£27.92
Michigan State University Press Sounding Thunder: The Stories of Francis
Book SynopsisFrancis Pegahmagabow (1889–1952), an Ojibwe of the Caribou clan, was born in Shawanaga First Nation, Ontario. Enlisting at the onset of the First World War, he served overseas as a scout and sniper and became Canada’s most decorated Indigenous soldier. After the war, Pegahmagabow settled in Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, where he married and raised six children. He served his community as both Chief and Councillor and was a founding member of the Brotherhood of Canadian Indians, the first national Indigenous political organization. In 1949 and 1950, he was elected the Supreme Chief of the National Indian Government.Francis Pegahmagabow’s stories describe many parts of his life and are characterized by classic Ojibwe narrative. They reveal aspects of Francis’s Anishinaabe life and worldview. Interceding chapters by Brian McInnes provide valuable cultural, spiritual, linguistic, and historical insights that give a greater context and application for Francis’s words and world. Presented in their original Ojibwe as well as in English translation, the stories also reveal a rich and evocative relationship to the lands and waters of Georgian Bay.In Sounding Thunder, Brian McInnes provides a new perspective on Pegahmagabow and his experience through a unique synthesis of Ojibwe oral history, historical record, and Pegahmagabow family stories.
£27.10
Michigan State University Press The Algorithmic Age of Personality
Book SynopsisYékú demonstrates how the politics of both conservative and liberal polarization imbricates to shape what can or cannot be said in online commentaries on African literary forms. This book challenges utopian framings of the digital by exploring how algorithms engender a culture of outrage, conflict, and personality-driven battles that distract from aesthetic considerations of literary texts.
£40.08
Purdue University Press The Challenges of Minoritized Contingent Faculty in Higher Education
Book SynopsisThe Challenges of Minoritized Faculty in Higher Education offers a probing and unvarnished look at the employment challenges of these faculty members in four-year institutions. With dramatic shifts in the faculty workforce and nearly three-quarters of instructional positions in United States institutions now off the tenure track, contingent faculty have become the essential, frontline workers of higher education. Remarkably little research attention has focused on the experiences of minoritized contingent faculty in this new academic underclass. Based on in-depth interviews coupled with extensive research, the book highlights the double marginalization that can occur due to secondary employment status in the academic hierarchy, and the exclusion resulting from the intersectionality of nondominant social identities including race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. As the first-person narratives reveal, these faculty often struggle for acceptance, recognition, and rewards in the day-to-day academic environment, and they can face devaluation of their contributions. As a pragmatic and concrete resource, this book offers proactive workforce strategies and key structural and policy recommendations that will assist academic and administrative leaders, including presidents, provosts, department chairs, and chief diversity officers, in building more inclusive working conditions for contingent faculty.
£73.10
Purdue University Press The Challenges of Minoritized Contingent Faculty
Book SynopsisThe Challenges of Minoritized Faculty in Higher Education offers a probing and unvarnished look at the employment challenges of these faculty members in four-year institutions. With dramatic shifts in the faculty workforce and nearly three-quarters of instructional positions in United States institutions now off the tenure track, contingent faculty have become the essential, frontline workers of higher education. Remarkably little research attention has focused on the experiences of minoritized contingent faculty in this new academic underclass. Based on in-depth interviews coupled with extensive research, the book highlights the double marginalization that can occur due to secondary employment status in the academic hierarchy, and the exclusion resulting from the intersectionality of nondominant social identities including race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. As the first-person narratives reveal, these faculty often struggle for acceptance, recognition, and rewards in the day-to-day academic environment, and they can face devaluation of their contributions. As a pragmatic and concrete resource, this book offers proactive workforce strategies and key structural and policy recommendations that will assist academic and administrative leaders, including presidents, provosts, department chairs, and chief diversity officers, in building more inclusive working conditions for contingent faculty.
£19.76
Purdue University Press The Ripple Effect: Gender and Race in Brazilian
Book SynopsisIn The Ripple Effect: Gender and Race in Brazilian Culture and Literature, Barbosa adopts a comparative, multilayered, and interdisciplinary line of research to examine social values and cultural mores from the first decades of the twentieth century to the present. By analyzing the historical, cultural, religious, and interactive space of Brazil's national identity, The Ripple Effect surveys expressive cultures and literary manifestations. It uses the martial art-dance-ritual capoeira as a lynchpin to disclose historical ambiguities and the negotiation of cultural and literary boundaries within the context of the ideological construct of a mestizo nation. The book also examines laws governing gender in Brazil and discusses honor killings and other types of violence against women. The Ripple Effect appraises the contributions that some iconic female figures have made to the development of Brazil's distinctive cultural and literary production. Drawing on more than fifteen years of field, archival, and scholarly research, this work offers new interpretative venues, and broadens the critical focus and the methodological scope of previous scholarship. It reveals how literature and other arts can be used to document cultural norms, catalog life experiences, and analyze complex constructions of social values, ideas, and belief systems.
£73.10
Purdue University Press The Ripple Effect: Gender and Race in Brazilian
Book SynopsisIn The Ripple Effect: Gender and Race in Brazilian Culture and Literature, Barbosa adopts a comparative, multilayered, and interdisciplinary line of research to examine social values and cultural mores from the first decades of the twentieth century to the present. By analyzing the historical, cultural, religious, and interactive space of Brazil's national identity, The Ripple Effect surveys expressive cultures and literary manifestations. It uses the martial art-dance-ritual capoeira as a lynchpin to disclose historical ambiguities and the negotiation of cultural and literary boundaries within the context of the ideological construct of a mestizo nation. The book also examines laws governing gender in Brazil and discusses honor killings and other types of violence against women. The Ripple Effect appraises the contributions that some iconic female figures have made to the development of Brazil's distinctive cultural and literary production. Drawing on more than fifteen years of field, archival, and scholarly research, this work offers new interpretative venues, and broadens the critical focus and the methodological scope of previous scholarship. It reveals how literature and other arts can be used to document cultural norms, catalog life experiences, and analyze complex constructions of social values, ideas, and belief systems.
£35.06
New Village Press Homeboy Came to Orange: A Story of People's Power
Book SynopsisThe story of a union organizer who found a second career in community organizing and helped a Jim Crow city become a better place. Ernest Thompson dedicated his life to organizing the powerless. This lively, illustrated personal narrative of his work shows the great contribution that people’s coalitions can make to the struggle for equality and freedom. Thompson cut his teeth organizing one of the great industrial unions, the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America, and brought his organizing skills and commitment to coalition building to Orange, New Jersey. He built a strong organization and skillfully led fights for school desegregation, black political representation, and strong government in a city he initially thought of as a “dirty Jim Crow town going nowhere.” Thompson came to love the City of Orange and its caring citizens, seeing in its struggles a microcosm of America. This story of people’s power is meant for all who struggle for human rights, economic opportunity, decent housing, effective education, and a chance for children to have a better life. Ernest Thompson (1906-1971) grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, on a farm that had been given to his family at the end of the Civil War. The family was very poor and oppressed by racist practices. Thompson was determined to get away and to obtain power. He migrated to Jersey City, where he became part of the union organizing movement that built the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO). He became the first African American to hold a fulltime organizing position with his union, the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). He eventually headed UE’s innovative Fair Employment Practices program and fought for equal rights and pay for women and minority workers. Thompson also helped build the National Negro Labor Council, 1951-1956, and served as its director of organizing. In 1956, under the onslaught of the McCarthy era, UE was split in two, and Thompson lost his job. His wife, Margaret Thompson, brought the local school segregation to his attention. Ernie “Home” Thompson organized to desegregate the regional schools, building strong coalitions and political power for the black community that ultimately served all the people of Orange.Trade Review"Thompson helped people see that what’s morally right is politically astute and that the racist and classist power structures you are fighting against want nothing more than for you to fight among yourselves, rather than organize. Organizing, when it’s done right, when people really listen to themselves and each other, isn’t just about winning a race or a campaign. It is a collective act of love. More than anything, Ernie Thompson shows us how to love." -- Robert Sullivan * author, My American Revolution *"Homeboy Came to Orange is an essential read for anyone who wants to organize for change in their towns, schools, churches or communities. It is a story that is at once inspiring, challenging, and unwavering." -- Terri Baltimore * Director of Community Engagement, Hill House Association *"The re-release of Ernie Thompson's book about his rich life as an anti-racism union organizer should be read by young (and other) human beings who have decided to hold church in the streets, courts, state houses, and ballot boxes in the south (and other) parts of the U.S., against the white nationalism of the fake GOP." -- Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, * co-director of the New Poor People's Campaign, architect of the Moral Monday Movement, and past president of the NC NAACP. *"This book encourages the reader to not be complacent with injustice anywhere and to draw from their own strengths to build coalitions that work to actualize a People's Democracy rooted in universal equality (equity)." -- Rev. Dr. Anika Whitfield of Little Rock
£15.29
New Village Press Homeboy Came to Orange: A Story of People's Power
Book SynopsisThe story of a union organizer who found a second career in community organizing and helped a Jim Crow city become a better place. Ernest Thompson dedicated his life to organizing the powerless. This lively, illustrated personal narrative of his work shows the great contribution that people’s coalitions can make to the struggle for equality and freedom. Thompson cut his teeth organizing one of the great industrial unions, the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America, and brought his organizing skills and commitment to coalition building to Orange, New Jersey. He built a strong organization and skillfully led fights for school desegregation, black political representation, and strong government in a city he initially thought of as a “dirty Jim Crow town going nowhere.” Thompson came to love the City of Orange and its caring citizens, seeing in its struggles a microcosm of America. This story of people’s power is meant for all who struggle for human rights, economic opportunity, decent housing, effective education, and a chance for children to have a better life. Ernest Thompson (1906-1971) grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, on a farm that had been given to his family at the end of the Civil War. The family was very poor and oppressed by racist practices. Thompson was determined to get away and to obtain power. He migrated to Jersey City, where he became part of the union organizing movement that built the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO). He became the first African American to hold a fulltime organizing position with his union, the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). He eventually headed UE’s innovative Fair Employment Practices program and fought for equal rights and pay for women and minority workers. Thompson also helped build the National Negro Labor Council, 1951-1956, and served as its director of organizing. In 1956, under the onslaught of the McCarthy era, UE was split in two, and Thompson lost his job. His wife, Margaret Thompson, brought the local school segregation to his attention. Ernie “Home” Thompson organized to desegregate the regional schools, building strong coalitions and political power for the black community that ultimately served all the people of Orange.Trade Review"Thompson helped people see that what’s morally right is politically astute and that the racist and classist power structures you are fighting against want nothing more than for you to fight among yourselves, rather than organize. Organizing, when it’s done right, when people really listen to themselves and each other, isn’t just about winning a race or a campaign. It is a collective act of love. More than anything, Ernie Thompson shows us how to love." -- Robert Sullivan * author, My American Revolution *"Homeboy Came to Orange is an essential read for anyone who wants to organize for change in their towns, schools, churches or communities. It is a story that is at once inspiring, challenging, and unwavering." -- Terri Baltimore * Director of Community Engagement, Hill House Association *"The re-release of Ernie Thompson's book about his rich life as an anti-racism union organizer should be read by young (and other) human beings who have decided to hold church in the streets, courts, state houses, and ballot boxes in the south (and other) parts of the U.S., against the white nationalism of the fake GOP." -- Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, * co-director of the New Poor People's Campaign, architect of the Moral Monday Movement, and past president of the NC NAACP. *"This book encourages the reader to not be complacent with injustice anywhere and to draw from their own strengths to build coalitions that work to actualize a People's Democracy rooted in universal equality (equity)." -- Rev. Dr. Anika Whitfield of Little Rock
£68.00
University Press of Mississippi Mississippi John Hurt: His Life, His Times, His
Book SynopsisWhen Mississippi John Hurt (1892-1966) was ""rediscovered"" by blues revivalists in 1963, his musicianship and recordings transformed popular notions of prewar country blues. At seventy-one he moved to Washington, D.C., from Avalon, Mississippi, and became a live-wire connection to a powerful, authentic past. His intricate and lively style made him the most sought after musician among the many talents the revival brought to light.Mississippi John Hurt provides this legendary creator's life story for the first time. Biographer Philip Ratcliffe traces Hurt's roots to the moment his mother Mary Jane McCain and his father Isom Hurt were freed from slavery. Anecdotes from Hurt's childhood and teenage years include the destiny-making moment when his mother purchased his first guitar for $1.50 when he was only nine years old. Stories from his neighbors and friends, from both of his wives, and from his extended family round out the community picture of Avalon. U.S. census records, Hurt's first marriage record in 1916, images of his first autographed LP record, and excerpts from personal letters written in his own hand provide treasures for fans. Ratcliffe details Hurt's musical influences and the origins of his style and repertoire. The author also relates numerous stories from the time of his success, drawing on published sources and many hours of interviews with people who knew Hurt well, including the late Jerry Ricks, Pat Sky, Stefan Grossman and Max Ochs, Dick Spottswood, and the late Mike Stewart. In addition, some of the last photographs taken of the legendary musician are featured for the first time in Mississippi John Hurt.
£81.75
University Press of Mississippi Curt Flood in the Media: Baseball, Race, and the Demise of the Activist-Athlete
Book SynopsisCurt Flood in the Media examines the public discourse surrounding Curt Flood (1938-1997), the star center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals throughout the sixties. In 1969, Flood was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. At the time, all Major League Baseball players were subject to the reserve clause, which essentially bound a player to work in perpetuity for his original team, unless traded for another player or sold for cash, in which case he worked under the same reserve conditions for the next team.Flood refused the trade on a matter of principle, arguing that Major League Baseball had violated both U.S. antitrust laws and the 13th Amendment's prohibition of involuntary servitude. In a defiant letter to Commissioner Bowie Kuhn asking for his contractual release, Flood infamously wrote, ""after twelve years in the major leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes."" Most significantly, Flood appeared on national television with Howard Cosell and described himself as a ""well-paid slave."" Explosive controversy ensued.Khan examines the ways in which the media constructed the case and Flood's persona. By examining the mainstream press, the black press, and primary sources, including Flood's autobiography, Khan exposes the complexities of what it means to be a prominent black American athlete--in 1969 and today.
£81.75
University Press of Mississippi Sitting in Darkness: New South Fiction, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 1865-1920
Book SynopsisSitting in Darkness explores how fiction of the Reconstruction and the New South intervenes in debates over black schools, citizen-building, Jim Crow discrimination, and U.S. foreign policy towards its territories and dependencies. The author urges a reexamination not only of the contents and formal innovations of New South literature but also its importance in U.S. literary history. Many rarely studied fiction authors (such as Ellwood Griest, Ellen Ingraham, George Marion McClellan, and Walter Hines Page) receive generous attention here, and well-known figures such as Albion Tourgée, Frances E. W. Harper, Sutton Griggs, George Washington Cable, Mark Twain, Thomas Dixon, Owen Wister, and W. E. B. Du Bois are illuminated in significant new ways. The book's readings seek to synthesize developments in literary and cultural studies, ranging through New Criticism, New Historicism, postcolonial studies, black studies, and ""whiteness"" studies. This volume posits and answers significant questions. In what ways did the ""uplift"" projects of Reconstruction-their ideals and their contradictions-affect U.S. colonial policies in the new territories after 1898? How can fiction that treated these historical changes help us understand them? What relevance does this period have for us in the present, during a moment of great literary innovation and strong debate over how well the most powerful country in the world uses its resources?
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Wolf Tracks: Popular Art and Re-Africanization in
Book SynopsisPopular art is a masculine and working-class genre, associated with Panama's black population. Its practitioners are self-taught, commercial painters, whose high-toned designs, vibrant portraits, and landscapes appear in cantinas, barbershops, and restaurants. The red devil buses are popular art's most visible manifestation. The old school buses are imported from the United States and provide public transportation in Colón and Panama City. Their owners hire the artists to attract customers with eye-catching depictions of singers and actors, brassy phrases, and vivid representations of both local and exotic panoramas. The red devils boast powerful stereo systems and dominate the urban environment with their blasting reggae, screeching brakes, horns, sirens, whistles, and roaring mufflers.Wolf Tracks analyzes the origins of these practices, tying them to rebellious, Afro-American festival traditions, and to the rumba craze of the mid-twentieth century. During World War II, thousands of U.S. soldiers were stationed in Panama, and elaborately decorated cabarets opened to cater to their presence. These venues often featured touring Afro-Cuban musicians. Painters such as Luis ""The Wolf"" Evans exploited such moments of modernization to challenge the elite and its older conception of Panama as a country with little connection to Africa. While the intellectual class fled from modernization and asserted a romantic and mestizo (European-indigenous) vision of the republic, popular artists enthusiastically embraced the new influences to project a powerful sense of blackness. Wolf Tracks includes biographies of dozens of painters, as well as detailed discussions of mestizo nationalism, soccer, reggae, and other markers of Afro-Panamanian identity.
£67.91
University Press of Mississippi Exploring American Folk Music: Ethnic,
Book SynopsisExploring American Folk Music: Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States reflects the fascinating diversity of regional and grassroots music in the United States. The book covers the diverse strains of American folk music--Latin, Native American, African, French-Canadian, British, and Cajun--and offers a chronology of the development of folk music in the United States.The book is divided into discrete chapters covering topics as seemingly disparate as sacred harp singing, conjunto music, the folk revival, blues, and ballad singing. It is among the few textbooks in American music that recognizes the importance and contributions of Native Americans as well as those who live, sing, and perform music along our borderlands, from the French speaking citizens in northern Vermont to the extensive Hispanic population living north of the Rio Grande River, recognizing and reflecting the increasing importance of the varied Latino traditions that have informed our folk music since the founding of the United States. Another chapter includes detailed information about the roots of hip hop and this new edition features a new chapter on urban folk music, exploring traditions in our cities, with a case study focusing on Washington, D.C. Exploring American Folk Music also introduces you to such important figures in American music as Bob Wills, Lydia Mendoza, Bob Dylan, and Muddy Waters, who helped shape what America sounds like in the twenty-first century. It also features new sections at the end of each chapter with up-to-date recommendations for ""Suggested Listening,"" ""Suggested Reading,"" and ""Suggested Viewing.""
£27.96
University Press of Mississippi The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and
Book SynopsisThe Black Cultural Front describes how the social and political movements that grew out of the Depression facilitated the left turn of several African American artists and writers. The Communist-led John Reed Clubs brought together black and white writers in writing collectives. The Congress of Industrial Organizations's effort to recruit black workers inspired growing interest in the labor movement. One of the most concerted efforts was made by the National Negro Congress (NNC), a coalition of civil rights and labor organizations, which held cultural panels at its national conferences, fought segregation in the culture industries, promoted cultural education, and involved writers and artists in staging mass rallies during World War II.The formation of a black cultural front is examined by looking at the works of poet Langston Hughes, novelist Chester Himes, and cartoonist Ollie Harrington. While none of them were card-carrying members of the Communist Party, they all participated in the Left at one point in their careers. Interestingly, they all turned to creating popular culture in order to reach the black masses who were captivated by the movies, radio, newspapers, and detective novels. There are chapters on the Hughes' ""Simple"" stories, Himes' detective fiction, and Harrington's ""Bootsie"" cartoons.Collectively, the experience of these three figures contributes to the story of a ""long"" movement for African American freedom that flourished during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Yet this book also stresses the impact that McCarthyism had on dismantling the Black Left and how it affected each individual involved. Each was radicalized at a different moment and for different reasons. Each suffered for their past allegiances, whether fleeing to the haven of the ""Black Bank"" in Paris, or staying home and facing the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Yet the lasting influence of the Depression in their work was evident for the rest of their lives.
£60.00
University Press of Mississippi The Case against Afrocentrism
Book SynopsisPostcolonial discourses on African Diaspora history and relations have traditionally focused intensely on highlighting the common experiences and links between black Africans and African Americans. This is especially true of Afrocentric scholars and supporters who use Africa to construct and validate a monolithic, racial, and culturally essentialist worldview. Publications by Afrocentric scholars such as Molefi Asante, Marimba Ani, Maulana Karenga, and the late John Henrik Clarke have emphasized the centrality of Africa to the construction of Afrocentric essentialism. In the last fifteen years, however, countervailing critical scholarship has challenged essentialist interpretations of Diaspora history. Critics such as Stephen Howe, Yaacov Shavit, and Clarence Walker have questioned and refuted the intellectual and cultural underpinnings of Afrocentric essentialist ideology.Tunde Adeleke deconstructs Afrocentric essentialism by illuminating and interrogating the problematic situation of Africa as the foundation of a racialized worldwide African Diaspora. He attempts to fill an intellectual gap by analyzing the contradictions in Afrocentric representations of the continent. These include multiple, conflicting, and ambivalent portraits of Africa; the use of the continent as a global, unifying identity for all blacks; the de-emphasizing and nullification of New World acculturation; and the ahistoristic construction of a monolithic African Diaspora worldwide.
£27.96
University Press of Mississippi Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of
Book SynopsisGermans and African Americans, unlike other works on African Americans in Europe, examines the relationship between African Americans and one country, Germany, in great depth.Germans and African Americans encountered one another within the context of their national identities and group experiences. In the nineteenth century, German immigrants to America and to such communities as Charleston and Cincinnati interacted within the boundaries of their old-world experiences and ideas and within surrounding regional notions of a nation fracturing over slavery. In the post-Civil War era in America through the Weimar era, Germany became a place to which African American entertainers, travelers, and intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois could go to escape American racism and find new opportunities. With the rise of the Third Reich, Germany became the personification of racism, and African Americans in the 1930s and 1940s could use Hitler's evil example to goad America about its own racist practices. Postwar West Germany regained the image as a land more tolerant to African American soldiers than America. African Americans were important to Cold War discourse, especially in the internal ideological struggle between Communist East Germany and democratic West Germany.Unlike many other countries in Europe, Germany has played a variety of different and conflicting roles in the African American narrative and relationship with Europe. It is this diversity of roles that adds to the complexity of African American and German interactions and mutual perceptions over time.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi C. L. R. James: A Critical Introduction
Book SynopsisThis study of C. L. R. James's writings is the first to look at them as literature and not as theory. This sustained analysis of his major published works places them in the context of his less well-known writings and offers an encompassing critique of one of the African diaspora's most significant thinkers and writers.Here the author of Black Jacobins, World Revolution, A History of Pan-African Revolt, , Beyond a Boundary, and the lyric novel Minty Alley is seen not only as among the great political philosophers but also as the literary artist that he remained, from his first writings in his native Trinidad through his underground years in America, to his final essays and speeches in London.The writings of James have inspired revolutionaries on three continents. They have altered the course of historiography, shown that way toward independent black political struggles, and established a base for much of today's study of culture. This study evaluates them as powerful works of literature.
£29.71
University Press of Mississippi Mobilizing for the Common Good: The Lived Theology of John M. Perkins
Book SynopsisBorn into a sharecropping family in New Hebron, Mississippi, in 1930, and only receiving a third-grade education, John M. Perkins has been a pioneering prophetic African American voice for reconciliation and social justice to America's white evangelical churches. Often an unwelcome voice and always a passionate, provocative clarion, Perkins persisted for forty years in bringing about the formation of the Christian Community Development Association--a large network of evangelical churches and community organizations working in America's poorest communities--and inspired the emerging generation of young evangelicals concerned with releasing the Church from its cultural captivity and oppressive materialism.John M. Perkins has received surprisingly little attention from historians of modern American religious history and theologians. Mobilizing for the Common Good is an exploration of the theological significance of John M. Perkins. With contributions from theologians, historians, and activists, this book contends that Perkins ushered in a paradigm shift in twentieth-century evangelical theology that continues to influence Christian community development projects and social justice activists today.
£61.75
University Press of Mississippi Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities
Book SynopsisImages of upraised fists, afros, and dashikis have long dominated the collective memory of Black Power and its proponents. The ""guerilla"" figure--taking the form of the black-leather-clad revolutionary within the Black Panther Party--has become an iconic trope in American popular culture. That politically radical figure, however, has been shaped as much by Asian American cultural discourse as by African American political ideology. From the Asian-African Conference held in April of 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, onward to the present, Afro-Asian political collaboration has been active and influential.In Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities, author Rychetta Watkins uses the guerilla figure as a point of departure and shows how the trope's rhetoric animates discourses of representation and identity in African American and Asian American literature and culture. In doing so, she examines the notion of ""Power,"" in terms of ethnic political identity, and explores collaborating--and sometimes competing--ethnic interests that have drawn ideas from the concept. The project brings together a range of texts--editorial cartoons, newspaper articles, novels, visual propaganda, and essays--that illustrate the emergence of this subjectivity in Asian American and African American cultural productions during the Power period, roughly 1966 through 1981. After a case study of the cultural politics of academic anthologies and the cooperation between Frank Chin and Ishmael Reed, the volume culminates with analyses of this trope in Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Alice Walker's Meridian, and John Okada's No No Boy.
£27.96
University Press of Mississippi Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights
Book SynopsisFrom 30 Americans to Angry White Boy, from Bamboozled to The Boondocks, from Chappelle's Show to The Colored Museum, this collection of twenty-one essays takes an interdisciplinary look at the flowering of satire and its influence in defining new roles in black identity. As a mode of expression for a generation of writers, comedians, cartoonists, musicians, filmmakers, and visual/conceptual artists, satire enables collective questioning of many of the fundamental presumptions about black identity in the wake of the civil rights movement. Whether taking place in popular and controversial television shows, in a provocative series of short internet films, in prize-winning novels and plays, in comic strips, or in conceptual hip hop albums, this satirical impulse has found a receptive audience both within and outside the black community. Such works have been variously called ""post-black,"" ""post-soul,"" and examples of a ""New Black Aesthetic."" Whatever the label, this collection bears witness to a noteworthy shift regarding the ways in which African American satirists feel constrained by conventional obligations when treating issues of racial identity, historical memory, and material representation of blackness. Among the artists examined in this collection are Paul Beatty, Dave Chappelle, Trey Ellis, Percival Everett, Donald Glover (a.k.a. Childish Gambino), Spike Lee, Aaron McGruder, Lynn Nottage, ZZ Packer, Suzan Lori-Parks, Mickalene Thomas, Touré, Kara Walker, and George C. Wolfe. The essays intentionally seek out interconnections among various forms of artistic expression. Contributors look at the ways in which contemporary African American satire engages in a broad ranging critique that exposes fraudulent, outdated, absurd, or otherwise damaging mindsets and behaviors both within and outside the African American community.
£81.75
Information Age Publishing Pedagogies of Deveiling: Muslim Girls and the
Book SynopsisManal Hamzeh’s book, Pedagogies of deveiling: Muslim girls & the hijab discourse, presents an exploration of a gendering discourse, the hijab (veil) discourse, and how it was negotiated by four girls who self-identified as Muslims. Pedagogies of deveiling emerged over a period of three years writing up a 14 months long study in which Hamzeh collaborated with four Muslim girls in two US southwestern border towns between October 2005 and December 2006. This book stems from the stories of these four Muslim girls weaved with Hamzeh’s stories and perspectives as arabyyah-muslimah, the main researcher in the study—an “insider/in-betweener” educator/researcher who is literate in the cultural/linguistic/historical nuances critical in working with Muslim girls and their communities. Pedagogies of deveiling offers an alternative approach to research and pedagogy with Muslim girls in which the taken-for-granted hijabs in the sacred text and their inscriptions on the bodies of these girls are deveiled, or problematised, rethought, questioned, and countered. As such, what this book offers is first critical to Muslim girls themselves because it shatters the phobia and the impossibility of reinterpreting of some canonical Islamic sacred texts in relation to the hijabs and gender. Finally, in this book, Dr. Manal Hamzeh offers a vision for how the sacred text reinterpreted by critical feminist epistemologies may represent a curriculum that is open to critique and holds potential for change towards justice. With this, Dr. Hamzeh calls upon researchers and educators to open spaces for creativity and collaborate with Muslim girls in order to, 1) navigate the multiplicity and fluidity of their subjectivities implicated by intersecting discourses in their lives, and 2) honour their choices while supporting them to negotiate the thought-of as fixed Islamic values that may jeopardise their chances of any learning opportunity. This a call to work with Muslim girls as theorisers of possibilities and as the main agents of change in their own lives. This is a call to open with Muslim girls opportunities to practice their agency in unpacking and challenging normative discourses in their lives, not exclusive to the hijab discourse This is a call for opening spaces of struggle and uprising and cultivating moments of meaning and shifts of consciousness.
£82.80
Information Age Publishing The Brother Code: Manhood and Masculinity among
Book SynopsisThe Brother Code: What is the role of manhood and masculinity in the lives of African American males in college? How do manhood norms influence decisions within and beyond college? How might mothers and fathers differentially affect manhood and masculinity in their sons? What are African American’s men unique ways of knowing themselves and their surroundings? The Brother Code: Manhood and Masculinity among African American Men in College situates itself at the intersection of higher education and cultural studies to address these questions and more. Primarily, this book offers colleges and universities a penetrative gaze into a complex web of identities—the manhood of African American males in college. Yet the book also seizes a rare opportunity in higher education research to review six historical eras of African American manhood as well as the troublesome relationship between African American males and education in general. This knowledge is important for understanding all aspects of African American male participation in college, including enrolment, retention, curricular, and co-curricular involvement. Based on an empirical study, the data in this book emerged from one-on-one interviews in which 24 African American males enrolled in 12 colleges discussed how manhood matters in their social and college lives. The aim is to help unearth the marginalised topics of manhood, gender, and masculinity in males generally but, more specifically among African American males, a marginalised student group in education. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book draws upon literature in history, African American studies, gender studies, sociology, cultural studies, psychology, and anthropology.
£44.96
Information Age Publishing The Brother Code: Manhood and Masculinity among
Book SynopsisThe Brother Code: What is the role of manhood and masculinity in the lives of African American males in college? How do manhood norms influence decisions within and beyond college? How might mothers and fathers differentially affect manhood and masculinity in their sons? What are African American’s men unique ways of knowing themselves and their surroundings? The Brother Code: Manhood and Masculinity among African American Men in College situates itself at the intersection of higher education and cultural studies to address these questions and more. Primarily, this book offers colleges and universities a penetrative gaze into a complex web of identities—the manhood of African American males in college. Yet the book also seizes a rare opportunity in higher education research to review six historical eras of African American manhood as well as the troublesome relationship between African American males and education in general. This knowledge is important for understanding all aspects of African American male participation in college, including enrolment, retention, curricular, and co-curricular involvement. Based on an empirical study, the data in this book emerged from one-on-one interviews in which 24 African American males enrolled in 12 colleges discussed how manhood matters in their social and college lives. The aim is to help unearth the marginalised topics of manhood, gender, and masculinity in males generally but, more specifically among African American males, a marginalised student group in education. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book draws upon literature in history, African American studies, gender studies, sociology, cultural studies, psychology, and anthropology.
£82.80
Information Age Publishing Contemporary Voices from the Margin: African
Book SynopsisTraditionally, American educators and communities have looked to Europe and Asia for ideas for rethinking and reforming education for America’s diverse children. This book, Contemporary Voices from the Margin: African Educators on African and American Education, brings together new voices of diverse African-born teacher educators and Africanist scholars who share personal experiences as well as research based perspectives about education in Africa and America that will be valuable to rethinking and reforming education for America’s struggling schools. The book is a comprehensive work of experienced educators and scholars in the field of teacher education and African Studies. The editors of the book invited a diverse group of African-born teacher educators and scholars from different countries of Africa who teach in the U.S. The contributors share a common African experience, but they are geographically diverse in countries of origin and research. Their knowledge about African communal living as well as colonial powers and imperialism as they operated in various African countries enables them to compare and contrast various educational models and practices, including traditional ones. They are also diverse in their fields of specialisation but have expertise in multicultural education, urban education, and culturally responsive pedagogy that have become the focus of U.S. discourses in public education and teacher preparation programs. Given that these scholars were born or socialised, and educated in, as well as, taught schools and colleges in their respective African countries before settling in the United States, they bring a wealth of experience and insights into what it means to successfully educate children and youth. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines African processes and practices of education, both formal and informal, as contributing authors share perspectives about African indigenous education including cultural socialisation and formal western-type education and organisation of schools. Part 2 focuses on patterns and structures of formal, western-type education in selected African countries. Part 3 explores cross-cultural perspectives on American education. The contributors provide chapters of stimulating and rich perspectives that will engage the discourse on rethinking and reforming education and schooling for America’s diverse students. CONTENTS Introduction: Voices and Insights on Contemporary Education, Omiunota N. Ukpokodu and Peter Ukpokodu. African Indigenous Education: Formal and Informal, Peter Ukpokodu. African Education Through the Arts, Akosua O. Addo. African Traditional Education and Citizenship Development, Lewis Asimeng-Boahene. Islamic Cultural Socialization and Education in Nigeria, Omiunota N. Ukpokodu and Beverly Mack. Children and Cultural Socialisation Across Two Nations (Kenya and the U.S.), Lydiah Nganga. Perspectives on K–12 Learning and Teacher Preparation in East Africa, Teresa A. Wasonga. Harambee Populism, Social Change, and Modern Education in Kenya, Alfred T. Kisubi. Perspectives on Public Education in Kenya and the U.S., Lydiah Nganga and John Kambutu. Disability Within the African Culture, Michael Eskay. Cultural Socialization and Primary Educational Perspectives in Three East African Countries, Mary Oling-Sisay. Transformative Leadership at the Starehe Boys’ Centre and School in Kenya, Peter O. Ojiambo. Educational Transformation in South Africa, Peter Ukpokodu and Omiunota N. Ukpokodu. A Comparative Study of U.S. Inner-City and Kenyan Rural and Slum Schools, Alfred Taligoola Kisubi. African-Born Teachers’ Perspectives about American Urban Education, Omiunota N. Ukpokodu. Seeing, Teaching, and Leading in an American Urban Public School, Martin Ngom. Preparing Teachers for Diversity Education in a “Lily-White” Community, John Kambutu and Lydiah Nganga. About the Contributors.
£49.95
Information Age Publishing Contemporary Voices from the Margin: African
Book SynopsisTraditionally, American educators and communities have looked to Europe and Asia for ideas for rethinking and reforming education for America’s diverse children. This book, Contemporary Voices from the Margin: African Educators on African and American Education, brings together new voices of diverse African-born teacher educators and Africanist scholars who share personal experiences as well as research based perspectives about education in Africa and America that will be valuable to rethinking and reforming education for America’s struggling schools. The book is a comprehensive work of experienced educators and scholars in the field of teacher education and African Studies. The editors of the book invited a diverse group of African-born teacher educators and scholars from different countries of Africa who teach in the U.S. The contributors share a common African experience, but they are geographically diverse in countries of origin and research. Their knowledge about African communal living as well as colonial powers and imperialism as they operated in various African countries enables them to compare and contrast various educational models and practices, including traditional ones. They are also diverse in their fields of specialisation but have expertise in multicultural education, urban education, and culturally responsive pedagogy that have become the focus of U.S. discourses in public education and teacher preparation programs. Given that these scholars were born or socialised, and educated in, as well as, taught schools and colleges in their respective African countries before settling in the United States, they bring a wealth of experience and insights into what it means to successfully educate children and youth. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines African processes and practices of education, both formal and informal, as contributing authors share perspectives about African indigenous education including cultural socialisation and formal western-type education and organisation of schools. Part 2 focuses on patterns and structures of formal, western-type education in selected African countries. Part 3 explores cross-cultural perspectives on American education. The contributors provide chapters of stimulating and rich perspectives that will engage the discourse on rethinking and reforming education and schooling for America’s diverse students. CONTENTS Introduction: Voices and Insights on Contemporary Education, Omiunota N. Ukpokodu and Peter Ukpokodu. African Indigenous Education: Formal and Informal, Peter Ukpokodu. African Education Through the Arts, Akosua O. Addo. African Traditional Education and Citizenship Development, Lewis Asimeng-Boahene. Islamic Cultural Socialization and Education in Nigeria, Omiunota N. Ukpokodu and Beverly Mack. Children and Cultural Socialisation Across Two Nations (Kenya and the U.S.), Lydiah Nganga. Perspectives on K–12 Learning and Teacher Preparation in East Africa, Teresa A. Wasonga. Harambee Populism, Social Change, and Modern Education in Kenya, Alfred T. Kisubi. Perspectives on Public Education in Kenya and the U.S., Lydiah Nganga and John Kambutu. Disability Within the African Culture, Michael Eskay. Cultural Socialization and Primary Educational Perspectives in Three East African Countries, Mary Oling-Sisay. Transformative Leadership at the Starehe Boys’ Centre and School in Kenya, Peter O. Ojiambo. Educational Transformation in South Africa, Peter Ukpokodu and Omiunota N. Ukpokodu. A Comparative Study of U.S. Inner-City and Kenyan Rural and Slum Schools, Alfred Taligoola Kisubi. African-Born Teachers’ Perspectives about American Urban Education, Omiunota N. Ukpokodu. Seeing, Teaching, and Leading in an American Urban Public School, Martin Ngom. Preparing Teachers for Diversity Education in a “Lily-White” Community, John Kambutu and Lydiah Nganga. About the Contributors.
£87.40
University of Tennessee Press Freedom's Delay: America's Struggle for
Book SynopsisThe Declaration of Independence proclaimed freedom for Americans from the domination of Great Britain, yet for millions of African Americas caught up in a brutal system of racially based slavery, freedom would be denied for ninety additional years until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Freedom’s Delay: America’s Struggle for Emancipation, 1776–1865 probes the slow, painful, yet ultimately successful crusade to end slavery throughout the nation, North and South.This work fills an important gap in the literature of slavery’s demise. Unlike other authors who focus largely on specific time periods or regional areas, Allen Carden presents a thematically structured national synthesis of emancipation. Freedom’s Delay offers a comprehensive and unique overview of the process of manumission commencing in 1776 when slavery was a national institution, not just the southern experience known historically by most Americans. In this volume, the entire country is examined, and major emancipatory efforts—political, literary, legal, moral, and social—made by black and white, free and enslaved individuals are documented over the years from independence through the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.Freedom’s Delay dispels many of the myths about slavery and abolition, including that racial servitude was of little consequence in the North, and, where it did exist, it ended quickly and easily; that abolition was a white man’s cause and blacks were passive recipients of liberty; that the South seceded primarily to protect states’ rights, not slavery; and that the North fought the Civil War primarily to end the subjugation of African Americans. By putting these misunderstandings aside, this book reveals what actually transpired in the fight for human rights during this critical era. Carden’s inclusion of a cogent preface and epilogue assures that Freedom’s Delay will find a significant place in the literature of American slavery and freedom.With a compelling preface and epilogue, notes, illustrations and tables, and a detailed bibliography, this volume will be of great value not only in courses on American history and African American history but also to the general reading public.
£24.71
University of Tennessee Press Engendering African American Archaeology: A Southern Perspective
Book SynopsisOver the last decade, the field of American historical archaeology has seen enormous growth in the study of people of African descent. This edited volume is the first dedicated solely to archaeology and the construction of gender in an African American context. The common thread running through this collection is not a shared definition of gender or an agreed-upon feminist approach, but rather a regional thread, a commitment to understanding ethnicity and gender within the social, political, and ideological structures of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American South. Taken together, these essays represent a departure in historical archaeology, an important foray into the study of the construction of gender within various African American communities that is based in the archaeological record. Those interested in historical archaeology, history, women's studies and African American studies will find this a valuable addition to the literature. Topics range from gendered residential and consumption patterns in colonial Virginia and the construction of identity in Middle Tennessee to midwifery practices in postbellum Louisiana.
£26.96
University of Tennessee Press Amy Jacques Garvey: Selected Writings from the
Book SynopsisAmy Jacques Garvey was one of the most prolific women within any Black nationalist group, yet she has largely only been discussed in relationship to her husband, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, and as the editor of the Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Much of her writing has remained unavailable to the public, lost to the archives, until now. Amy Jacques Garvey: Selected Writings from the Negro World, 1923–1928 seeks to fill this void by making her writings in the Negro World widely available for the first time.Editor Louis J. Parascandola compiles a wide swath of Jacques Garvey’s work in this groundbreaking collection. Born and educated in Jamaica, Jacques Garvey’s atypical opportunity to receive education at elite Jamaican schools, along with her later jobs as a clerk and secretary, prepared her for future positions as journalist and political administrator. She also possessed the rhetorical skills and independent thinking that would help her challenge Marcus Garvey and the other men in Garvey’s organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA). In allowing Jacques Garvey’s work to largely speak for itself, the volume reveals that she concerned herself with a diversity of important and often controversial political and social issues rather than the stereotypical domestic matters expected of most woman’s pages of the time period.By examining her selected writings in the Negro World, this volume affords its readers a better understanding of Jacques Garvey’s powerful contribution not only to Garveyism but also to the growth of Black radical thought, anti-imperialist ideology, and the rights of third-world women. This timely study sheds new light on Jacques Garvey’s pivotal role as a Black female writer and thinker during the twenties.
£40.50
University of Tennessee Press The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor and the Case of Black Washington, D.C.
£19.16
University of Tennessee Press Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America: The
Book SynopsisRace, Manhood, and Modernism in America offers the first extended comparison between American writers Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) and Jean Toomer (1894-1967), examining their engagement with the ideas of “Young American” writers and critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, Paul Rosenfeld, and Waldo Frank. This distinctively modernist school was developing unique visions of how race, gender, and region would be transformed as America entered an age of mass consumerism.Focusing on Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and Toomer’s Cane (1923), Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America brings Anderson and Toomer together in a way that allows for a thorough historical and social contextualization that is often missing from assessments of these two literary talents and of modernism as a whole. The book suggests how the gay subcultures of Chicago and the traumatic events of the Great War provoked Anderson’s anxieties over the future of male gender identity, anxieties that are reflected in Winesburg, Ohio. Mark Whalan discusses Anderson’s primitivistic attraction to African American communities and his ambivalent attitudes toward race, attitudes that were embedded in the changing cultural and gendered landscape of mass mechanical production.The book next examines how Toomer aimed to broaden the racial basis of American cultural nationalism, often inspired by the same cultural critics who had influenced Anderson. He rejected the ethnographically based model of tapping the “buried cultures” of ethnic minorities developed by his mentor, Waldo Frank, and also parted with the “folk” aesthetic endorsed by intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. Instead, Toomer's monumental Cane turned to discourses of physical culture, machine technology, and illegitimacy as ways of conceiving of a new type of manhood that refashioned commonplace notions of racial identity.Taken together, these discussions provide a fresh, interdisciplinary appraisal of the importance of race to “Young America,” suggest provocative new directions for scholarship, and give new insight into some of the most crucial texts of U.S. interracial modernism.
£27.71
University of Tennessee Press The Wanderer in African American Literature
Book SynopsisThe Wanderer in African American Literature highlights an enduring feature of African American letters: "From the slave narrative to Afrofuturism, the literature is populated, driven, and emboldened by wanderers who know no bounds." Gena E. Chandler argues that wanderers and the theme of wandering push the limits of narrative forms and challenge assumptions about the African American experience. The slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Jacobs echo eighteenth-and nineteenth-century literary traditions and chronicle journeys toward freedom and faith. Equiano traces his changing identity, integrating his native African culture with his adopted European one. Jacobs addresses the gender restrictions she faces as a slave and then a free woman whose progress in life remains uncertain and ongoing.Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen chronicle real and imagined journeys during the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Migration. Hughes's autobiography I Wonder as I Wander (1956) traces his global travels in the 1930s, highlighting his unique identity as a black American. Larsen's novel Quicksand (1928) follows its biracial heroine as she travels throughout the United States and to Denmark while navigating matters of race and gender. The protagonist of Richard Wright's The Outsider (1953) seeks individual freedom and a new identity but is "constrained within the boundaries of an American nation and a Western ideal that continuously views the black Subject as outside and distinct from the modern project of advancement and freedom." In James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956), the white protagonist flees America for France yet cannot escape difficult questions about sexuality and race. Finally, John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing (1996) tells the story of two wanderers-an itinerant preacher spreading God's word during the Great Awakening and a twentieth-century writer on a journey of self-discovery about his identity and vocation. The former experiences a crisis of his Christian faith, and the latter endures a crisis of faith in his literary abilities. Tying these diverse threads together, Chandler demonstrates the power of the black narrative to assimilate and redeploy the literary trope of wanderlust, exchanging its premise of rootless drifting for something altogether more mobilizing.
£48.75
University of Tennessee Press Hard-Fighting Soldiers: A History of African
Book SynopsisIn the first full-length scholarly synthesis of the African American Churches of Christ, Edward J. Robinson provides a comprehensive look at the church’s improbable development against a backdrop of African American oppression. The journey begins with a lesser known preacher, F. F. Carson, in many ways a forerunner in the struggles and triumphs awaiting the preachers and lay people in the congregations to come. Robinson then builds on scholarship treating well-known figures, including Marshall Keeble and G. P. Bowser, to present a wide-ranging history of African American Churches of Christ from their beginnings—when enslaved people embraced the nascent Stone-Campbell Christian Movement even though founder Alexander Campbell himself favored slavery. The author moves on to examine how the churches grew under the leadership of S. R. Cassius, even as Jim Crow restrictions put extreme pressure on organizations of any kind among African Americans.Robinson's well-researched narrative treats not only the black male leaders of the church, but also women leaders, such as Annie C. Tuggle, as well as notable activities of the church, including music, education, and global evangelism, thus painting a complete picture of African American Churches of Christ. Through scholarship and compelling storytelling, Robinson tells the two-hundred-year tale of how "black believers survived and thrived on the discarded 'scraps' of America, forging their own identity, fashioning their own lofty ecclesiology and 'hard' theology, and creating their own papers, lectureships, liturgy, and congregations." A groundbreaking exploration by a seasoned scholar in American religion, Hard-Fighting Soldiers is sure to become the standard text for anyone researching the African American Churches of Christ.Trade ReviewThis book will become the reference for anyone doing research on the African American Churches of Christ." - Jerry Rushford, director of Churches of Christ Heritage Center, Pepperdine University
£26.21
Texas A & M University Press Democratic Renewal and the Mutual Aid Legacy of
Book SynopsisThe legacy of the historic mutual aid organizing by US Mexicans, with its emphasis on self-help and community solidarity, continues to inform Mexican American activism and subtly influence a number of major US social movements. In Democratic Renewal and the Mutual Aid Legacy of US Mexicans, Julie Leininger Pycior traces the early origins of organizing in the decades following the US-Mexican War, when Mexicans in the Southwest established mutualista associations for their protection. Further, she traces the ways in which these efforts have been invoked by contemporary Latino civil rights leaders. Pycior notes that the Mexican immigrant associations instrumental in the landmark 2006 immigration reform marches echo mutualista societies at their peak in the 1920s. Then Mexican immigrants from San Diego to New York engaged in economic, medical, cultural, educational, and legal aid. This path-breaking study culminates with an examination of Southwest community organizing networks as crucial counterweights to the outsize role of large financial contributions in the democratic political process. It also finds ways in which this community organizing echoes the activity of mutualista groups in the very same neighbourhoods a century ago.
£31.46
Information Age Publishing Hispanics in the US Labor Market: Selected
Book SynopsisThe Hispanic population has emerged at the largest ethnic/racial minority in the United States, and has also become a major political constituency. Consequently, it is important to gauge the extent to which they have been integrated into various societal institutions. One important institution is the US labour market. The research contained in the present volume assess a number of issues about how well Hispanics are integrated into the US labour market, a major factor in the group’s economic status. The research makes important contributions to the existing body of research on the Hispanic population, and may be used by scholars and policy makers in better understanding the status of this important ethnic/racial group.
£44.96
Information Age Publishing Hispanics in the US Labor Market: Selected
Book SynopsisThe Hispanic population has emerged at the largest ethnic/racial minority in the United States, and has also become a major political constituency. Consequently, it is important to gauge the extent to which they have been integrated into various societal institutions. One important institution is the US labour market. The research contained in the present volume assess a number of issues about how well Hispanics are integrated into the US labour market, a major factor in the group’s economic status. The research makes important contributions to the existing body of research on the Hispanic population, and may be used by scholars and policy makers in better understanding the status of this important ethnic/racial group.
£82.80
Information Age Publishing Historically Black College Leadership & Social
Book SynopsisLittle research has been conducted to identify aspects of effective social transformation leadership in American college and university leadership. The authors of this book argue that while much less has been done at predominantly White institutions to practically apply the processes of social transformation as a leadership model, HBCUs have historically relied upon strategies of social transformation as they sought to build and sustain the distinct mission of their institutions that enhance college access, inclusion, and choice.This publication is intended to serve as a departure from the examination of the typology of transformation leadership in the private sector and, instead, view this leadership model through the lens of higher education. The authors’ intent is to focus on institutional leadership at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and provide a deeper understanding of the Social Change Model and how it can be successfully situated as a conduit for realizing and sustaining the mission of Black colleges from perspectives of the past, present, and future.
£44.96
Information Age Publishing Historically Black College Leadership & Social
Book SynopsisLittle research has been conducted to identify aspects of effective social transformation leadership in American college and university leadership. The authors of this book argue that while much less has been done at predominantly White institutions to practically apply the processes of social transformation as a leadership model, HBCUs have historically relied upon strategies of social transformation as they sought to build and sustain the distinct mission of their institutions that enhance college access, inclusion, and choice.This publication is intended to serve as a departure from the examination of the typology of transformation leadership in the private sector and, instead, view this leadership model through the lens of higher education. The authors’ intent is to focus on institutional leadership at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and provide a deeper understanding of the Social Change Model and how it can be successfully situated as a conduit for realizing and sustaining the mission of Black colleges from perspectives of the past, present, and future.
£82.80
Information Age Publishing STEM Models of Success: Programs, Policies, and
Book SynopsisAs the U.S. focuses on positioning itself to retain and advance its status as a world leader in technology and scientific innovation, a recognition that community colleges are a critical site for intervention has become apparent. Community colleges serve the lion’s share of the nation’s postsecondary students. In fact, 40% of all undergraduate students are enrolled in community colleges, these students account for nearly 30% of all STEM undergraduate majors in postsecondary institutions. These students serve as a core element of the STEM pipeline into four-year colleges and universities via the community college transfer function. Moreover, community colleges are the primary postsecondary access point for non-traditional students, including students of color, first-generation, low-income, and adult students. This is a particularly salient point given that these populations are sordidly underrepresented among STEM graduates and in the STEM workforce.Increasing success among these populations can contribute significantly to advancing the nation’s interests in STEM. As such, the community college is situated as an important site for innovative practices that have strong implications for bolstering the nation’s production and sustenance of a STEM labor force. In recognition of this role, the National Science Foundation and private funding agencies have invested millions of dollars into research and programs designed to bolster the STEM pipeline. From this funding and other independently sponsored inquiry, promising programs, initiatives, and research recommendations have been identified. These efforts hold great promise for change, with the potential to transform the education and outcome of STEM students at all levels. This important book discusses many of these promising programs, initiatives, and research-based recommendations that can impact the success of STEM students in the community college. This compilation is timely, on the national landscape, as the federal government has placed increasing importance on improving STEM degree production as a strategy for America’s future stability in an increasingly competitive global marketplace. Informed by research and theory, each chapter in this volume blazes new territory in articulating how community colleges can advance outcomes for students in STEM, particularly those from historically underrepresented and underserved communities.
£47.45
Information Age Publishing STEM Models of Success: Programs, Policies, and
Book SynopsisAs the U.S. focuses on positioning itself to retain and advance its status as a world leader in technology and scientific innovation, a recognition that community colleges are a critical site for intervention has become apparent. Community colleges serve the lion’s share of the nation’s postsecondary students. In fact, 40% of all undergraduate students are enrolled in community colleges, these students account for nearly 30% of all STEM undergraduate majors in postsecondary institutions. These students serve as a core element of the STEM pipeline into four-year colleges and universities via the community college transfer function. Moreover, community colleges are the primary postsecondary access point for non-traditional students, including students of color, first-generation, low-income, and adult students. This is a particularly salient point given that these populations are sordidly underrepresented among STEM graduates and in the STEM workforce.Increasing success among these populations can contribute significantly to advancing the nation’s interests in STEM. As such, the community college is situated as an important site for innovative practices that have strong implications for bolstering the nation’s production and sustenance of a STEM labor force. In recognition of this role, the National Science Foundation and private funding agencies have invested millions of dollars into research and programs designed to bolster the STEM pipeline. From this funding and other independently sponsored inquiry, promising programs, initiatives, and research recommendations have been identified. These efforts hold great promise for change, with the potential to transform the education and outcome of STEM students at all levels. This important book discusses many of these promising programs, initiatives, and research-based recommendations that can impact the success of STEM students in the community college. This compilation is timely, on the national landscape, as the federal government has placed increasing importance on improving STEM degree production as a strategy for America’s future stability in an increasingly competitive global marketplace. Informed by research and theory, each chapter in this volume blazes new territory in articulating how community colleges can advance outcomes for students in STEM, particularly those from historically underrepresented and underserved communities.
£87.40
Information Age Publishing Researching Race in Education: Policy, Practice
Book SynopsisIn traditional educational research, race is treated as merely a variable. In 1995, Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate, IV argued that race is under-theorized in education and called for educational researchers to pay closer attention to the relationship between race and educational inequity (Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995). In particular, they argued, drawing on legal scholar, Derrick Bell's notion of Racial Realism (Bell, 1995), that racialized inequities are not accidental or aberrant; rather, racialized educational inequities are the result of particular and specific policies and practices that are designed to maintain particular forms of dominance and marginalization. More specifically, Bell and later Ladson-Billings and Tate, argue that racial inequity persists despite liberal policies and legislation that were ostensibly designed to eradicate it. The Racial Realist perspective takes into the consideration the longevity and history of racism, racial inequity and White supremacy in the U.S. and serves as a mirror to reflect back the limitations of proposed policies and legislation that fail to address those issues. In this way, Critical Race Theory and the scholars who draw on CRT, view our work as an important Òcheck and balanceÓ in the effort toward racial equality.
£47.45
