Books in the The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute Series series

In the face of centuries-long devastations wrought on the African continent and her diaspora by slavery, colonialism, apartheid and racism, what form of recompense could possibly be adequate? This work examines the question, illuminating the principle duty of memory to bear the record of injustice.

These essays examine the forced dispossession of the Middle Passage through the texts, religious rites, economic exchanges, dance and music it elicited, on the liminal transatlantic journey, on the continent and the eventual return. The work seeks to reconceptualize the Middle Passage's meaning.

This is a fascinating examination of the explosion of black television programming in the 1980s and 1990s. Locating a persistent black nationalist desire - yearning for home and community - in the shows produced by and for African Americans in this period, Zook shows how the Fox hip-hop sitcom both reinforced and rebelled against earlier black sitcoms from the sixties and seventies.

This work explores Emerson's contribution to the debate on democracy, race and social reform. Emerson's writings, it argues, reveal a pattern of contradiction between fundamental individual rights and race as a factor impossible to dismiss in a consideration of democratic values.

This text is a discussion of the ways that innovations of form and structure contain and bolster arguments for personhood. Organized thematically, with chapters focusing on central questions of form, this work pairs canonized texts with less well-known works.

Lemke's book proffers a bold new account of the origins of modernism. By focusing upon cubism, primitivist-modernism, jazz, and Josephine Baker's performance, Lemke demonstrates that black art exerted a crucial if masked presence in both Euro-American high art and popular culture. American and European modernism each owes much of its symbolic capital to its black cultural other.

The essays in this collection examine the disputed relationships between modernity, modernism and American cultural diversity and thus add an important dimension to our understanding of 20th-century literature.