Books in the Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies series

Reevaluates Charles Chesnutt's deft manipulation of the "passing" theme to expand understanding of the author's fiction and nonfiction. Nine contributors apply a variety of theories to add richness to readings of Chesnutt's works. Together the essays provide convincing evidence that "passing" is an intricate, essential part of Chesnutt's writing, and that it appears in all the genres he wielded.

Analyses riot iconography and its usefulness as a political strategy of protestation. Through a mixed-methods approach of literary close-reading, historical, and sociological analysis, Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani considers how BAM artist-writers challenge misconceptions regarding Black protest through experimental explorations in their writings.

A classic ethnographic study of rural children, their community, and their school

Fifty years after Freedom Summer, To Write in the Light of Freedom offers a glimpse into the hearts of the African American youths who attended the Mississippi Freedom Schools in 1964. One of the most successful initiatives of Freedom Summer, more than forty Freedom Schools opened doors to thousands of young African American students.

Offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the African American West through close readings of texts from a variety of media. This approach allows for both an in-depth analysis of individual texts and a discussion of material often left out or under-represented in studies focused only on traditional literary material.

Before the innovative work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied, and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, these folklorists worked within but also beyond the bounds of white mainstream institutions. They often called into question the meaning of the very folklore projects in which they were engaged. Shirley Moody-Turner analyzes this output, along with the contributions of a disparate group of African American authors and scholars. She explores how black authors and folklorists were active participants-rather than passive observers-in conversations about the politics of representing black folklore. Examining literary texts, folklore documents, cultural performances, legal discourse, and political rhetoric, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation demonstrates how folklore studies became a battleground across which issues of racial identity and difference were asserted and debated at the turn of the twentieth century. The study is framed by two questions of historical and continuing import. What role have representations of black folklore played in constructing racial identity? And, how have those ideas impacted the way African Americans think about and creatively engage black traditions? Moody-Turner renders established historical facts in a new light and context, taking figures we thought we knew-such as Charles Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, and Paul Laurence Dunbar-and recasting their place in African American intellectual and cultural history.

Reveals Richard Wright's poetic vision toward the human world. These essays open up a new territory in Wright studies by tracing the development of Wright's aesthetic and its relationship to African and Japanese cultures.

Essays that reveal the public slide into disrepute of oncecherished male sports iconsEssays by Lisa Doris Alexander, Gregory J. Kaliss, Jeffrey Lane, Thabiti Lewis, Robert F. Lewis II, Shelley Lucas, Roberta J. Newman, C. Oren Renick and Joel Nathan Rosen, and Sherrie L. WilsonFame to Infamy: Race, Sport, and the Fall from Grace follows the paths of sports figures who were embraced by the general populace but who, through a variety of circumstances, real or imagined, found themselves falling out of favor. The contributors focus on the roles played by athletes, the media, and fans in describing how once-esteemed popular figures find themselves scorned by the same public that at one time viewed them as heroic, laudable, or otherwise respectable.The book examines a wide range of sports and eras, and includes essays on Barry Bonds, Kirby Puckett, Mike Tyson, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, Branch Rickey, Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain, and Jim Brown, as well as an afterword by noted scholar Jack Lule and an introduction by the editors. Fame to Infamy is an interdisciplinary volume encompassing numerous approaches in tracing the evolution of each subject's reputation and shifting public image.David C. Ogden, Pacific Junction, Iowa, is associate professor of communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Joel Nathan Rosen, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is assistant professor of sociology at Moravian College. He is the author of The Erosion of the American Sporting Ethos: Shifting Attitudes toward Competition.

Percival Everett (b. 1956) writes novels, short stories, poetry, and essays, and is one of the most prolific, acclaimed, yet under-examined African American writers working today. In this volume, scholars engage all of his creative production. These essays examine issues of identity, authenticity, and semiotics, in addition to postmodernism and African American and American literary traditions.

Examines the historical and political context of acclaimed African American actor Paul Robeson's three portrayals of Shakespeare's Othello in the United Kingdom and the United States. All three of the productions, when considered together, provide an intriguing glimpse into Robeson's artistry as well as his political activism.

Using the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass, as well as the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Walter Mosley, and Barack Obama, Ronda C. Henry Anthony examines how women's bodies are used in African American literature to fund the production of black masculine ideality and power.

Recovers the work of early African American authors and editors such as Elisha Weaver who have been left off maps drawn by historians and literary critics. Individual chapters restore to consideration black literary locations in antebellum St. Louis, antebellum Indiana, Reconstruction-era San Francisco, and several sites tied to the Philadelphia-based Recorder during and after the Civil War.

Raymond Pace Alexander was a prominent black attorney in Philadelphia and a distinguished member of the National Bar Association. Yet his legacy to the civil rights struggle has received little national recognition. Alexander was a major contributor to the northern civil rights struggle and was committed to improving the status of black lawyers. This volume examines his life and work.

History is made and remade by the availability of new documents, sources, and interpretations. Can Anything Beat White? contributes a great deal to this process. The experiences of the James family as documented in their letters challenge both representations of black people at the turn of the century as well as our contemporary sense of black Americans.

Reevaluates Charles Chesnutt's deft manipulation of the "passing" theme to expand understanding of the author's fiction and nonfiction. Nine contributors apply a variety of theories to add richness to readings of Chesnutt's works. Together the essays provide convincing evidence that "passing" is an intricate, essential part of Chesnutt's writing, and that it appears in all the genres he wielded.

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 formation of a black cultural front is examined by looking at the works of poet Langston Hughes, novelist Chester Himes, and cartoonist Ollie Harrington.

The Second Great Migration, the movement of African Americans between the South and the North that began in the early 1940s and tapered off in the late 1960s, transformed America. Over seven years, Lisa Krissoff Boehm gathered oral histories with women migrants and their children. In extended excerpts from the oral histories, this book offers a unique window into African American women's history.

This is the first study to consider the substantial body of African American writing that critiques whiteness as social construction and racial identity. Arguing against the prevailing approach to these texts, Veronica T. Watson identifies this body of literature as an African American intellectual and literary tradition that she names "the literature of white estrangement".

The personal account of a community and a lawyer united to battle one of the most recalcitrant bastions of resistance to civil rights

Post-Blackness. Post-Soul. Post-Black Art. New Blackness. Cameron Leader-Picone suggests that this proliferation of terms, along with the renewed focus on questioning the relationship between individual black artists and the larger black community, indicates the arrival of novel forms of black identity and black art.

The first book-length study of Frank Yerby's life and work. The collection explores a myriad of topics, including his connections to the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances; readership and reception; representations of masculinity and patriotism; film adaptations; and engagement with race, identity, and religion.

Based on extensive archival research, The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Timo Muller uses sonnets to open up fresh perspectives on African American literary history, and examines the inventive strategies African American poets devised to occupy and reshape a form overwhelmingly associated with Europe.