Books published by University of Illinois Press

"Robert J. Patterson and his contributors interrogate how African American writers and cultural producers use black modes of cultural expressivity to engage, make, and change history in order to imagine the future and to provide alternate ways of thinking, existing, and being for black subjects in particular, and American citizens in general, in the midst of this historical paradox. This volume insists that black cultural production during the 1970s anchors the philosophical, aesthetic, and political debates that animate contemporary debates in African American studies, and insists that, despite abject social and political conditions, black cultural production keeps imagining black thriving. Simultaneously, it demonstrates the specific ways that the cultural production itself re(imagines) ways to transform that which prevents black thriving. Thus, the volume argues that African American cultural production continues to engage in social critique and transformation and remains an important site for the (re)making of black politics"--

A daring collaboration among scholars, Black Sexual Economies challenges thinking that sees black sexualities as a threat to normative ideas about sexuality, the family, and the nation. The essays highlight alternative and deviant gender and sexual identities, performances, and communities, and spotlights the sexual labor, sexual economy, and sexual agency to black social life. Throughout, the writers reveal the lives, everyday negotiations, and cultural or aesthetic interventions of black gender and sexual minorities while analyzing the systems and beliefs that structure the possibilities that exist for all black sexualities. They also confront the mechanisms of domination and subordination attached to the political and socioeconomic forces, cultural productions, and academic work that interact with the energies at the nexus of sexuality and race. Contributors: Marlon M. Bailey, Lia T. Bascomb, Felice Blake, Darius Bost, Ariane Cruz, Adrienne D. Davis, Pierre Dominguez, David B. Green Jr., Jillian Hernandez, Cheryl D. Hicks, Xavier Livermon, Jeffrey McCune, Mireille Miller-Young, Angelique Nixon, Shana L. Redmond, Matt Richardson, L. H. Stallings, Anya M. Wallace, and Erica Lorraine Williams

Reveals the many ways in which identities, economies, and geographies are changing as Latin Americans adjust to their new homes, jobs, and communities.

Melanie Holmes graduated from St. Xavier University in Chicago. She is the author of The Female Assumption, recipient of a 2014 Global Media Award from the Population Institute. She is also a speaker, educator, and freelance writer. ¿

Deploying African American sports stars in the Cold War