"Television scholarship has substantially ignored programming aimed at Black audiences despite a few sweeping histories and critiques. In this volume, the first of its kind, contributors examine the televisual diversity, complexity, and cultural imperatives manifest in programmi…
"From the revered historian, the long-awaited conclusion of the magisterial history of slavery and emancipation in Western culture that has been nearly fifty years in the making. David Brion Davis is one of the foremost historians of the twentieth century, and in this final volu…
"At its simplest, the dozens is a comic concatenation of "yo' mama" jokes. At its most complex, it is a form of social interaction that reaches back to African ceremonial rituals. Whether considered vernacular poetry, verbal dueling, a test of street cool, or just a mess of dirt…
""Perhaps," wrote Ralph Ellison more than seventy years ago, "the zoot suit contains profound political meaning; perhaps the symmetrical frenzy of the Lindy-hop conceals clues to great potential power." As Ellison noted then, many of our most mundane cultural forms are larger an…
Explores the relationship between African-Americans and their hair, offering a chronological look at the culture and politics behind the ever-changing state of African-American hair from fifteenth-century Africa to the present-day United States. Two world wars, the Civil Rights…
Soundworks: race, sound, and poetry in production
"Soundworks takes the many recorded collaborations between African American poets and musicians associated with the long Black Arts era (late-1950s through mid-1970s) as the occasion to reframe the object of black sound studies as the product of material, technical, sensual, and…
In 1820, a group of about eighty African Americans reversed the course of history and sailed back to Africa, to a place they would name after liberty itself. They went under the banner of the American Colonization Society, a white philanthropic organization with a dual agenda: t…