Books in the Blacks in the Diaspora series

Discussing the roles of women in an urban slave society, this book takes up issues of gender, race, condition (slave or free), and class and examines the ways each contributed to conveying and replicating power. It analyses what it meant to be a woman in a world where historically specific social classifications determined personal destiny.

Although they came from distinct polities and peoples who spoke different languages, slaves from the African Gold Coast were collectively identified by Europeans as "e;Coromantee"e; or "e;Mina."e; Why these ethnic labels were embraced and how they were utilized by enslaved Africans to develop new group identities is the subject of Walter C. Rucker's absorbing study. Rucker examines the social and political factors that contributed to the creation of New World ethnic identities and assesses the ways displaced Gold Coast Africans used familiar ideas about power as a means of understanding, defining, and resisting oppression. He explains how performing Coromantee and Mina identity involved a common set of concerns and the creation of the ideological weapons necessary to resist the slavocracy. These weapons included obeah powders, charms, and potions; the evolution of "e;peasant"e; consciousness and the ennoblement of common people; increasingly aggressive displays of masculinity; and the empowerment of women as leaders, spiritualists, and warriors, all of which marked sharp breaks or reformulations of patterns in their Gold Coast past.

The election of Barack Obama gave political currency to the (white) idea that Americans now live in a post-racial society. But the persistence of racial profiling, economic inequality between blacks and whites, disproportionate numbers of black prisoners, and disparities in health and access to healthcare suggest there is more to the story. David H. Ikard addresses these issues in an effort to give voice to the challenges faced by most African Americans and to make legible the shifting discourse of white supremacist ideology-including post-racialism and colorblind politics-that frustrates black self-determination, agency, and empowerment in the 21st century. Ikard tackles these concerns from various perspectives, chief among them black feminism. He argues that all oppressions (of race, gender, class, sexual orientation) intersect and must be confronted to upset the status quo.

In a speech from which Nation of Cowards derives its title, Attorney General Eric Holder argued forcefully that Americans today need to talk more-not less-about racism. This appeal for candid talk about race exposes the paradox of Barack Obama's historic rise to the US presidency and the ever-increasing social and economic instability of African American communities. David H. Ikard and Martell Lee Teasley maintain that such a conversation can take place only with passionate and organized pressure from black Americans, and that neither Obama nor any political figure is likely to be in the forefront of addressing issues of racial inequality and injustice. The authors caution blacks not to slip into an accommodating and self-defeating "e;post-racial"e; political posture, settling for the symbolic capital of a black president instead of demanding structural change. They urge the black community to challenge the social terms on which it copes with oppression, including acts of self-imposed victimization.

A look at African and African American participation in the 1893 Columbian Exposition.

Examines developments within several societies in the Greater Caribbean during the revolutionary period to illustrate the pervasive and multi-layered impact of the revolutions on the region. This book looks at several dimensions of the impact of the two interconnected revolutions on what may be called the Greater Caribbean.

The impact of slavery and freedom on black identity and cultural formation

That the Blood Stay Pure traces the history and legacy of the commonwealth of Virginia's effort to maintain racial purity and its impact on the relations between African Americans and Native Americans. Arica L. Coleman tells the story of Virginia's racial purity campaign from the perspective of those who were disavowed or expelled from tribal communities due to their affiliation with people of African descent or because their physical attributes linked them to those of African ancestry. Coleman also explores the social consequences of the racial purity ethos for tribal communities that have refused to define Indian identity based on a denial of blackness. This rich interdisciplinary history, which includes contemporary case studies, addresses a neglected aspect of America's long struggle with race and identity.

What effect has the black literary imagination attempted to have on, in Toni Morrison's words, "e;a race of readers that understands itself to be 'universal' or race-free"e;? How has black literature challenged the notion that reading is a race-neutral act? Race and the Literary Encounter takes as its focus several modern and contemporary African American narratives that not only narrate scenes of reading but also attempt to intervene in them. The texts interrupt, manage, and manipulate, employing thematic, formal, and performative strategies in order to multiply meanings for multiple readers, teach new ways of reading, and enable the emergence of antiracist reading subjects. Analyzing works by James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Jamaica Kincaid, Percival Everett, Sapphire, and Toni Morrison, Lesley Larkin covers a century of African American literature in search of the concepts and strategies that black writers have developed in order to address and theorize a diverse audience, and outlines the special contributions modern and contemporary African American literature makes to the fields of reader ethics and antiracist literary pedagogy.

The Afro-Brazilian religion Candomble has long been recognised as a resource of African tradition, values, and identity among its adherents in Bahia, Brazil. This book describes development of religion as an "alternative" space in which subjugated and enslaved blacks were able to cultivate a sense of individual.

Examination of the development of racial attitudes and color prejudice.

African American suffragists in the suffrage movement.

Exploring slavery and slave society through the lives of black women.

A collection of plays by contemporary Black dramatists from Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and the United States. This anthology contains "Death and the King's Horseman", "Edufa", "Woza Albert!", "Pantomime", "Sortilege II: Zumbi Returns", "Slave Ship", "In Splendid Error", "Joe Turner's Come and Gone", and "The Talented Tenth".

As forerunners to the activist black theater of the 1950s and 1960s, these plays represent a critical stage in the development of black drama in the United States.

Race, Class, and the Civil Rights Movement is a unique sociohistorical analysis of the civil rights movement. In it Jack M. Bloom analyzes the interaction between the economy and political systems in the South, which led to racial stratification.

A revised and expanded edition of a groundbreaking text

Cuba's social and cultural complexity interpreted through the history and expressive power of rumba.

have been incorporated by black leaders and institutions to create a unique style of black political behavior." -Choice

Contains contributions on the state of race relations from several scholars who reflect upon their careers to show how personal experiences have influenced their scholarship.

A study of three Harlem Renaissance poets - Angelina Weld Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Georgia Douglas Johnson - during a rich and colorful period. Writing from a black feminist critical perspective, it recovers these black foremothers and in the process shakes up the traditional black literary canon.

Examines developments within several societies in the Greater Caribbean during the revolutionary period to illustrate the pervasive and multi-layered impact of the revolutions on the region.

Provides an overview of the Atlantic world, since the 15th century, by exploring the major themes that define the study of this region. This work discusses topics such as: Contact with Europeans in Africa and the Americas, the slave trade, gender and race in the early Atlantic world, independence movements in Africa, and Caribbean nationalism.

Examines the settlement of African Americans in Buffalo during the Great Migration. This book delineates values and institutions that the black migrant population brought with it from the South, as well as those that evolved as a result of their interaction with blacks native to the city and the city itself.

Focuses on the means employed by former slaves in Charleston, South Carolina to adjust to their status as a free people and to battle attempts by whites to regain control over them. This study attempts to understand how the freedmen saw themselves in the new order and to shed light on their hopes and aspirations.