Books in the Critical Africana Studies series

Framing the concept of transcendence, this study covers over a dozen traditional African American works in an original and thought-provoking analysis that places canonical approaches in enlightened discourse with Africana studies reader-response priorities.

In Transatlantic Liverpool: Shades of the Black Atlantic, Mark Christian presents a Black British study within the context of the transatlantic and Liverpool, England. Taking a semi-autoethnographic approach based on the authors Black Liverpool heritage, Christian interacts with Paul Gilroys notion of the Black Atlantic. Yet, provides a fresh perspective that takes into account a famous British slave ports history that has been overlooked or under-utilized. The longevity of Black presence in the city involves a history of discrimination, stigma, and a population group known colloquially as Liverpool Born Blacks (LBBs). Crucially, this book provides the reader with a deeper insight of the transatlantic in regard to the movement of Black souls and their struggle for acceptance in a hostile environment. This book is an evocative, passionate, and revealing read.

African Sovereigns shows how the lived experience of Jamaican Maroons is linked to the African Diaspora. The author demonstrates that an examination of Jamaican Maroon communities, particularly their socio-political development, can further highlight the significance of the African Diaspora as an analytical tool.

This book critically examines Ama Mazama, a prominent and leading female theorist in Africology and African American Studies, and her intellectual work. The author studies how and why Ama Mazama has evolved into one of the most popular Africologists in the field.

The Negritude Movement provides readers with not only an intellectual history of the Negritude Movement but also its prehistory (W.E.B. Du Bois, the New Negro Movement, and the Harlem Renaissance) and its posthistory (Frantz Fanon and the evolution of Fanonism). By viewing Negritude as an ';insurgent idea' (to invoke this book's intentionally incendiary subtitle), as opposed to merely a form of poetics and aesthetics, The Negritude Movement explores Negritude as a ';traveling theory' ( la Edward Said's concept) that consistently crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean in the twentieth century: from Harlem to Haiti, Haiti to Paris, Paris to Martinique, Martinique to Senegal, and on and on ad infinitum. The Negritude Movement maps the movements of proto-Negritude concepts from Du Bois's discourse in The Souls of Black Folk through to post-Negritude concepts in Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Utilizing Negritude as a conceptual framework to, on the one hand, explore the Africana intellectual tradition in the twentieth century, and, on the other hand, demonstrate discursive continuity between Du Bois and Fanon, as well as the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude Movement, The Negritude Movement ultimately accents what Negritude contributed to arguably its greatest intellectual heir, Frantz Fanon, and the development of his distinct critical theory, Fanonism. Rabaka argues that if Fanon and Fanonism remain relevant in the twenty-first century, then, to a certain extent, Negritude remains relevant in the twenty-first century.

Molefi Kete Asante confronts the socialist Pan African idea with an Afrocentric orientation grounded in history and culture, suggesting that the African renaissance cannot take place unless there is a commitment to creating an African community conscious of its own myths, origins, and economic, cultural, and philosophical traditions.

This book engages deeply with the epistemologies and methodologies that have emerged from Mwalimu Molefi Kete Asante's work on Afrocentricity.

A Soviet Journey by the South African activist and novelist Alex La Guma (1925-1985) is one of the longest and most substantive accounts of the USSR by an African writer. It is a rare and important document of the antiapartheid struggle and the cold war period.

This book presents a metacritique of racial formation theory. Across a diversity of approaches and objects of analysis, the contributors assess the 'conceptual aphasia' gripping racial theorizing in our multicultural moment: analyses of racism struck dumb when confronted with the insatiable specter of black historical struggle.

This book explores how African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans from the former British colonies can be so different in their approaches toward social mobility.

Dialogues across Diasporas makes an important contribution to the growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the intimate historical, political, and literary connections between two of the largest diasporic groups in the Americas and beyond - members of the African/a and Latina/o diasporas. This collection not only serves as a useful required text for Diaspora Studies courses, it offers a model for taking discussions of diasporic identities, community politics, and cultural memory beyond the classroom and into the community.

This work argues that Africology represents an oasis of innovation in progressive venues. It brings together some of the most discussed theorists and intellectuals in the field of Africology and offers new interpretations and analysis while challenging the predominant frameworks in philosophy, social justice, literature, and history.

Moving away from the domain of commemorative, iconicity, monumentalization, and memorialization, Sithole uses Steve Bikos meditations as a discursive intervention to understand black subjectivity. The epistemological shift of this book is not to be bogged down by the cataloging of events, something that is popular in the literature of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness. Rather, a theoretical imagination and conceptual invention is engaged upon in order to situate Biko within the existential repertoire of blackness as a site of subjectivity and not the object of study. The theoretical imagination and conceptual invention fosters an interpretive approach and an ongoing critique that cannot reach any epistemic closure. This is what decolonial meditations are all about, opening up new vistas of thought and new modes of critique informed by epistemic breaks from ';empirical absolutism' that reduce Biko to an epistemic catalogue. It is in Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness that the black subject is engaged not only in the politics of criticism for its own sake, but philosophy of existence.

Facing South to Africa is a bold synthesis of the ideas that have made Afrocentric theorists the leading voices of the African renaissance. Written from the vantage point of the philosophical and political discourse that emerged over the past twenty-five years, this is a highly readable and accessible introduction to African social and cultural criticism. Molefi Kete Asante engages in the practice of critical thinking by raising fundamental questions about how Africans view themselves and the world. Tackling the themes of culture, education, social sciences, the university, politics, African unity, and the prospects for peace in Africa, Facing South to Africa is a fresh, daring, and popularizing synthesis of the best critical thought on the issues of modern knowledge. Asante's plan is to reorient our thinking on Africa by asking questions of Africa and Africans rather than imposing preconceived, external ideas on African issues.

This book traces W.E.B. Du Bois's fictionalization of history in his five major works of fiction and in his debut short story The Souls of Black Folk through a thematic framework of cosmopolitanism. In texts like The Negro and Black Folk: Then and Now, Du Bois argues that the human race originated from a single source, a claim authenticated by anthropologists and the Human Genome Project. This book breaks new ground by demonstrating the fashion in which the variants of cosmopolitanism become a profound theme in Du Bois's contribution to fiction. In general, cosmopolitanism claims that people belong to a single community informed by common moral values, function through a shared economic nomenclature, and are part of political systems grounded in mutual respect. This book addresses Du Bois's works as important additions to the academy and makes a significant contribution to literature by first demonstrating the way in which fiction could be utilized in discussing historical accounts in order to reach a global audience. ';The Coming of John', The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Dark Princess: A Romance, and The Black Flame, an important trilogy published sequentially as The Ordeal of Mansart, Mansart Builds a School, and Worlds of Color are grounded in historical occurrences and administer as social histories providing commentary on Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, African American leadership, school desegregation, the Pan-African movement, imperialism, and colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

By examining Amilcar Cabral's theories and praxes, as well as several of the antecedents and major influences on the evolution of his radical politics and critical social theory, Concepts of Cabralism:Amilcar Cabral and Africana Critical Theory simultaneously reintroduces, chronicles, and analyzes several of the core characteristics of the Africana tradition of critical theory. Reiland Rabaka's primary preoccupation is with Cabral's theoretical and political legaciesthat is to say, with the ways in which he constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed theory and the aims, objectives, and concrete outcomes of his theoretical applications and discursive practices. The book begins with the Negritude Movement, and specifically the work of Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Next, it shifts the focus to Frantz Fanon's discourse on radical disalienation and revolutionary decolonization. Finally, it offers an extended engagement of Cabral's critical theory and contributions to the Africana tradition of critical theory. Ultimately, Concepts of Cabralism chronicles and critiques, revisits and revises the black radical tradition with an eye toward the ways in which classical black radicalism informs, or should inform, not only contemporary black radicalism, African nationalism, and Pan-Africanism, but also contemporary efforts to create a new anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and anti-imperialist critical theory of contemporary societywhat has come to be called ';Africana critical theory.'

Unlike any text to date, this revolutionary study surveys Black research and literature to determine the processes formal education uses to dehumanize Black students. This is a socio-historical analysis of the Black Flame trilogy (BFT), W. E. B. Du Bois's unparalleled, thirty-year study of Atlanta, Georgia from Black Reconstruction (1860 1880) to 1956. W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the most prescient sociologists of the twentieth century in his research of Black people in America. These ground-breaking novels establish racialization, colonization, and globalization as processes that continue to dehumanize Black students in education. Africana critical theory (ACT), critical race theory (CRT), and Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS) privilege the research, voice, and experiences of Blacks. These theoretical frames speak to the pain and effects of the impact of unchecked, gross, voyeuristic violence that helps define the White supremacist patriarchal culture in which we live. Straight forward and direct, this book show how the processes of dehumanization contribute to the legacy of trauma White supremacy exacts upon Black people and their humanity. This study is aimed at highlighting the stark disparities in Black and White education over times. This book offers a candid look at how the myth of Black inferiority and the metaphor of the achievement gap describe conscious economic deprivation, mob violence and intimidation, and White supremacist curricula, yet continues to imply long-standing cultural notion of Blacks intellectual inferiority. This research is offered to help mitigate the multigenerational education trauma Blacks have experienced since Reconstruction to envision a educational system that is efficacious and socially just in the distribution of resources, expanding diversity in curricula, and exposing pedagogical biases that traumatize not only Black people but all people.

Rastafari Reasoning and the RastaWoman:Gender Constructions in the Shaping of Rastafari Livity examines the complex ways that gender and race shaped a liberation movement propelled by the Caribbean evolution of an African spiritual ethos. Jeanne Christensen proposes that Rastafari represents the most recent reworking of this spiritual ethos, referred to as African religiosity. The book contributes a new perspective to the literature on Rastafari, and through a historical lens, corrects the predominant static view of Rastafari women.In certain Rastafari manifestations, a growing livity developed by RastaMen eventually excluded women from an important ritual called Reasoninga conscious search for existential and ontological truth through self-understanding performed in a group setting. Restoring agency to the RastaWoman, Christensen argues that RastaWomen, intimately in touch with this spiritual ethos, challenged oppressive structures within the movement itself. They skirted official restrictions, speaking out in public and written forums whenever such avenues presented themselves, and searched for their own truth through conscious intentional self-examination characteristic of the Reasoning ritual.With its powerful, theoretically informed narrative, Rastafari Reasoning and the RastaWoman:Gender Constructions in the Shaping of Rastafari Livity will appeal to students and scholars interested in religious transformation, resistance movements, gender issues, critical race studies, and the history and culture of the English-speaking Caribbean.

Dialogues across Diasporas makes an important contribution to the growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the intimate historical, political, and literary connections between two of the largest diasporic groups in the Americas and beyond - members of the African/a and Latina/o diasporas. This collection not only serves as a useful required text for Diaspora Studies courses, it offers a model for taking discussions of diasporic identities, community politics, and cultural memory beyond the classroom and into the community.

Black Muslims and the Law: Civil Liberties From Elijah Muhammad to Muhammad Ali examines the Nation of Islam's quest for civil liberties as what might arguably be called the inaugural and first sustained challenge to the suppression of religious freedom in African American legal history. Borrowing insights from A. Leon Higgonbotham Jr.'s classic works on American slavery jurisprudence, Black Muslims and the Law reveals the Nation of Islam's strategic efforts to engage governmental officials from a position of power, and suggests the federal executive, congressmen, judges, lawyers, law enforcement officials, prison administrators, state governments, and African American civic leaders held a common understanding of what it meant to be and not to be African American and religious in the period between World War II and the Vietnam War. The work raises basic questions about the rights of African descended people to define god, question white moral authority, and critique the moral legitimacy of American war efforts according to their own beliefs and standards.