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Black Mountain College
by Anne Chesky Smith Heather SouthLocated in the mountains of North Carolina, Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and other former faculty members from Rollins College. Their mission was to provide a liberal arts education that developed the student as a whole. Students and faculty lived and worked together on campus. Grades were abolished, and the arts were central to education. The college rented space for their first campus at Blue Ridge Assembly. In 1941, the college moved to the Lake Eden property they had purchased across the valley, allowing the school to grow. Many refugee artists found a home there, which provided an open and safe environment to create. Among the famous faculty and students of the college were Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller. Funding for the college was always scarce, and in debt, the college was finally forced to close its doors in 1957. Black Mountain College operated for only 24 years but left a lasting impact on the arts and education on an international scale.
Black Mountain and the Swannanoa Valley
by Swannanoa Valley MuseumNorth Carolina's magnificent Blue Ridge Mountains have drawn people to the Swannanoa Valley since the beginning of time. Rivers and forests lured early hunters and gatherers; later inhabitants tilled the rich, fertile soil and logged the thick forests on the mountainsides. People also came to the mountains to enjoy the mystical beauty and enchantment of the area, the cool, crisp climate, and the sparkling waters of brooks and streams. Hiking, camping, and the tranquility of a woodland world provided escape from city life. The Swannanoa Valley is cradled between the Craggy Mountains to the north and the Swannanoa Mountains to the south. Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in America east of the Mississippi River, rises majestically nearby. Among the early visitors who decided to settle in the valley were those who purchased the land that later became the sites of the famous conference centers in the area-Montreat, YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly, and Ridgecrest-and businessmen, who brought industry to the area.
Black Oak: Odes Celebrating Powerful Black Men
by Harold GreenAs he did for Black women in Black Roses, Harold Green III, poet and founder of the music collective Flowers for the Living, now honors the Black men he most admires—groundbreakers including Tyler Perry, Barry Jenkins, Billy Porter, Chance the Rapper, LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick, and John Legend—and celebrates their achievements which are transforming lives and making history.Black men are changing society and the world through mastery, innovation, and inspiration at a pace never seen before. In awe of the myriad ways in which Black men are using their vision and power to remake culture and society, spoken word artist Harold Green began writing odes recognizing the extraordinary accomplishments of a series of Black men, which heshared on his Instagram account—tributes that went viral and became a social media sensation. Black Oak brings together many of these popular odes with original works written for this collection.Divided into five sections—bravehearts, champions, dreamers, guardians, and humanitarians—Black Oak features iconic men who are spearheading movements, fighting for equality, challenging the status quo, embracing fatherhood, providing a transformative model of masculinity for our children, inspiring a new generation of creators, and more. Through these beautifully written verses, Harold does not simply place the Black men in this book on a pedestal, he transcends even the most positive stereotypes to view these men and their accomplishments in a new light, and creates meaningful connections between these beloved figures and the lives and experiences of readers of all backgrounds. Featuring full-color illustrations by Melissa Koby, Black Oak includes odes to Barry Jenkins, Big K.R.I.T, Billy Porter, Black Thought, Chance the Rapper, Charles Booker, Colin Kaepernick, Dwyane Wade, Edmund Graham III, Eric Hale, Excell Hardy Jr., Harold Green III, Harold Green Jr., Harold Green Sr., Hebru Brantley, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jamaal Bowman, Jason Reynolds, Jericho Brown, John Legend, Kehinde Wiley, Kerry James Marshall, Kevin Fredricks, Killer Mike, Kyler Broadus, LeBron James, Mahershala Ali, Marc Lamont Hill, Matthew Cherry, Orlando Cooper, Pharrell, Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III, Rev. Dr. William Barber II, Ryan Coogler, Swizz Beatz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Theaster Gates, Tobe Nwigwe, Tristan Walker, and Tyler Perry.
Black Ops Bricks: How to Build Your Own Model Military and Armored Fighting Vehicles
by Nick GrantTwenty of the coolest vehicles ever dreamed up, ready to come to life brick by brick!Black Ops Bricks reconstructs the finest military and spy jets, trucks, and ships ever built. Inside you'll find step-by-step, full-color illustrations showing you how to create the best and most badass military and special operations vehicles ever made. From smaller projects to the eight-hundred-plus-piece hovercraft, the twenty projects included will keep you busy for weeks, putting your brick-building skills to the test as you race to complete and test-drive a variety of fighter jets, helicopters, and much more.These aren't wimpy diplay models that have to be handled with white gloves once assembled. These are fully usable models. All parts of the models are accessible and playable; there's never a cockpit you can't open. And the projects are constructed to be fully customizable; stopping points indicate breaks in a project where builders can choose to continue building with only their imaginations and ingenuity to guide them.As a useful tool, each building guide is fully annotated to show exactly which pieces are used in each step. Following along as these projects move their way toward the fully operational finished project is as easy as ever, and the majority of pieces needed to bring these projects to life are commonly available bricks, with piece substitutions offered to replace hard-to-find bricks.
Black Panther: Interrogating a Cultural Phenomenon (Reframing Hollywood)
by Terence McSweeneyNamed a Nonfiction Book Awards Gold Winner by the Nonfiction Authors AssociationGold Winner of the 2022 eLit Book Award for Popular CultureWinner of a National Indie Excellence Award in the category of “Movies & TV”Book of the Year 2021 in African Studies awarded by CESTAFWinner of the 2022 Best Book Award in the category of “Performing Arts”Black Panther is one of the most financially successful and culturally impactful films to emerge from the American film industry in recent years. When it was released in 2018 it broke numerous records and resonated with audiences all around the world in ways that transcended the dimensions of the superhero film. In Black Panther: Interrogating a Cultural Phenomenon, author Terence McSweeney explores the film from a diverse range of perspectives, seeing it as not only a comic book adaptation and a superhero film, but also a dynamic contribution to the discourse of both African and African American studies. McSweeney argues that Black Panther is one of the defining American films of the last decade and the most remarkable title in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2008–). The MCU has become the largest film franchise in the history of the medium and has even shaped the contours of the contemporary blockbuster, but the narratives within it have almost exclusively perpetuated largely unambiguous fantasies of American heroism and exceptionalism. In contrast, Black Panther complicates this by engaging in an entirely different mythos in its portrayal of an African nation—never colonized by Europe—as the most powerful and technologically advanced in the world. McSweeney charts how and why Black Panther became a cultural phenomenon and also a battleground on which a war of meaning was waged at a very particular time in American history.
Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (Performance and American Cultures)
by Julius B. Fleming Jr.Honorable Mention, 2024 Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies (New York University)2024 College Language Association Book Award Winner2023 Hooks National Book Award Winner (Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change)Honorable Mention, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present 2023 Book PrizeHonorable Mention, 2023 John W. Frick Book Award (American Theatre and Drama Society)Finalist, 2022 George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theatre Library Association.Finalist, Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History (ASTR)Finalist, ATHE Outstanding Book AwardA bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of Black theater“Freedom, Now!” This rallying cry became the most iconic phrase of the Civil Rights Movement, challenging the persistent command that Black people wait—in the holds of slave ships and on auction blocks, in segregated bus stops and schoolyards—for their long-deferred liberation. In Black Patience, Julius B. Fleming Jr. argues that, during the Civil Rights Movement, Black artists and activists used theater to energize this radical refusal to wait. Participating in a vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins and speeches, these artists turned to theater to unsettle a violent racial project that Fleming refers to as “Black patience.” Inviting the likes of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Douglas Turner Ward, Duke Ellington, and Oscar Brown Jr. to the stage, Black Patience illuminates how Black artists and activists of the Civil Rights era used theater to expose, critique, and repurpose structures of white supremacy. In this bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement, Fleming contends that Black theatrical performance was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and a crucial site of Black artistic and cultural production.
Black Performance Theory
by Anita Gonzalez Thomas F. DefrantzBlack performance theory is a rich interdisciplinary area of study and critical method. This collection of new essays by some of its pioneering thinkers--many of whom are performers--demonstrates the breadth, depth, innovation, and critical value of black performance theory. Considering how blackness is imagined in and through performance, the contributors address topics including flight as a persistent theme in African American aesthetics, the circulation of minstrel tropes in Liverpool and in Afro-Mexican settlements in Oaxaca, and the reach of hip-hop politics as people around the world embrace the music and dance. They examine the work of contemporary choreographers Ronald K. Brown and Reggie Wilson, the ways that African American playwrights translated the theatricality of lynching to the stage, the ecstatic music of Little Richard, and Michael Jackson's performance in the documentary This Is It. The collection includes several essays that exemplify the performative capacity of writing, as well as discussion of a project that re-creates seminal hip-hop album covers through tableaux vivants. Whether deliberating on the tragic mulatta, the trickster figure Anansi, or the sonic futurism of Nina Simone and Adrienne Kennedy, the essays in this collection signal the vast untapped critical and creative resources of black performance theory.Contributors. Melissa Blanco Borelli, Daphne A. Brooks, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Nadine George-Graves, Anita Gonzalez, Rickerby Hinds, Jason King, D. Soyini Madison, Koritha Mitchell, Tavia Nyong'o, Carl Paris, Anna B. Scott, Wendy S. Walters, Hershini Bhana Young
Black Playwrights and Heightened Text: When Shakespeare Ain’t Enuf
by Jacqueline SpringfieldBlack Playwrights and Heightened Text: When Shakespeare Ain’t Enuf breaks down the misconception that heightened text sits only within a white tradition and brings the work of Black playwrights from across history to the forefront by highlighting the use of heightened dramatic text in their work.Interrogating the use of linguistic techniques often seen in heightened text, such as: enjambment, assonance, and consonance, author Jacqueline Springfield looks at the ways in which these techniques allow the text itself to have a kind of permanence in audiences’ minds and works to reinforce a character’s objective within the play. The book presents examples of works from a plethora of Black playwrights, including Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, August Wilson, Katori Hall, Marcus Gardley, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and many more, as well as providing the context in which they’re writing. Theatre artists who read, teach, direct and perform the work of Black playwrights answer key questions in their own words in interviews with the author. Interviewees include Dominique Morisseau, Ron OJ Parson, Mfoniso Udofia, Zora Howard and many other theatre practitioners. Taking a chronological approach, the book examines the history of heightened text in the works of Black playwrights and re-defines the ways in which theatre students and scholars can understand the techniques of heightened texts outside of a purely Eurocentric and white perspective.Ideal for students of theatre history, acting, playwriting, and text analysis, as well as researchers of African American theatre.
Black Poetic Inquiry: A Daily Writing Project on Race, Culture, and Life (International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) Foundations and Futures in Qualitative Inquiry)
by Bryant Keith Alexander Mary E. WeemsThe poems in this project were written within a 24‑hour period of each other and are presented in order of their appearance for the month of January 2024.Written as a call and response to each other, the poems are at times direct responses in content and form, or a mediation on what the offering triggered in the other. Using poetry writing as a methodological engagement with the reflective and reflexive attributes of autoethnography, this project offers an examination of lived experience and will provide a critical expansion of poetic inquiry. An example of "collaborative spirit‑writing," this text uses a dialogical exchange of responsiveness, excavating the lived experiences of the two authors (a Black man and a Black woman) with complex intersectional identities. Using poetic writing as both form and function, this book provides a performance of remembrance and resistance.Students and researchers working with qualitative inquiry and in areas from performative writing to Critical Race Studies will find this book a useful addition to their research. Teachers will also find this book facilitates pedagogies of engagement.
Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics
by Margo Natalie CrawfordA 2008 cover of The New Yorker featured a much-discussed Black Power parody of Michelle and Barack Obama. The image put a spotlight on how easy it is to flatten the Black Power movement as we imagine new types of blackness. Margo Natalie Crawford argues that we have misread the Black Arts Movement's call for blackness. We have failed to see the movement's anticipation of the "new black" and "post-black." Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics. Crawford zooms in on the 1970s second wave of the Black Arts Movement and shows the connections between this final wave of the Black Arts movement and the early years of twenty-first century black aesthetics. She uncovers the circle of black post-blackness that pivots on the power of anticipation, abstraction, mixed media, the global South, satire, public interiority, and the fantastic.
Black Power TV
by Devorah HeitnerIn Black Power TV, Devorah Heitner chronicles the emergence of Black public affairs television starting in 1968. She examines two local shows, New York's Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant and Boston's Say Brother, and the national programs Soul! and Black Journal. These shows offered viewers radical and innovative programming: the introspections of a Black police officer in Harlem, African American high school students discussing visionary alternatives to the curriculum, and Miriam Makeba comparing race relations in the United States to apartheid in South Africa. While Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant and Say Brother originated from a desire to contain Black discontent during a period of urban uprisings and racial conflict, these shows were re-envisioned by their African American producers as venues for expressing Black critiques of mainstream discourse, disseminating Black culture, and modeling Black empowerment. At the national level, Soul! and Black Journal allowed for the imagining of a Black nation and a distinctly African American consciousness, and they played an influential role in the rise of the Black Arts Movement. Black Power TV reveals how regulatory, activist, and textual histories are interconnected and how Black public affairs television redefined African American representations in ways that continue to reverberate today.
Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It
by Charlamagne Tha God<P>Charlamagne Tha God—the self-proclaimed “Prince of Pissing People Off,” co-host of Power 105.1’s The Breakfast Club, and “hip-hop’s Howard Stern”—shares his unlikely success story as well as how embracing one’s truths is a fundamental key to success and happiness. <P>In his new book, Charlamagne Tha God presents his comic, often controversial, and always brutally honest insights on how living an authentic life is the quickest path to success. Beginning with his journey from the small town of Moncks Corner, South Carolina to his headline grabbing interviews with celebrities like Justin Bieber, Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj, Kanye West, and Hillary Clinton, he shares how he turned his troubled early life around by owning his (many) mistakes and refusing to give up on his dreams, even after his controversial opinions got him fired from several on-air jobs. <P>Combining his own story with bold advice and his signature commitment to honesty at all costs, Charlamagne hopes this book will give others the confidence to live their own truths. <P><b>A New York Times Bestseller</b>
Black Queer Dance: Gay Men and the Politics of Passing for Almost Straight (ISSN)
by Mark BroomfieldThis book is a groundbreaking exploration of black masculinity and sexual passing in American contemporary dance.Based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City, the book features keen observations and in-depth interviews with acclaimed dancer-choreographers Desmond Richardson and Dwight Rhoden Co-Artistic Directors of Complexions Contemporary Ballet and Ronald K. Brown, Artistic Director of Evidence. Black Queer Dance examines one of the most visible crucibles for masculinity—the male dancer—and illuminates the contradictory and conditional acceptance of black gay men’s contributions to American modern dance. The book questions the politics of "coming out" and situates a new framework of "doing out" for understanding marginalized black LGBTQ people in the 20th and 21st century. Narratives of black queer male dancers’ performance of identity reveals the challenges posed navigating strategic gender performances in a purportedly post-gay and post-race American culture. Broomfield demonstrates how the experiences of black queer, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary men expose the illusions of all masculine gender performances. Drawing on masculinity studies, dance studies, critical race and performance theory, and queer studies Black Queer Dance implicates the author’s embodied history, autoethnography, memoir and poetry that shines light on how black queer men offer an expansive vision of masculinity.This book will be a vital read for graduate and undergraduate students within dance and performance studies.
Black River & Western Railroad (Images of Rail)
by Jerry J. JaggerThe Black River & Western Railroad has provided over 50 continuous years of passenger excursions in rural New Jersey between Flemington and Ringoes, passing through the pristine scenery of Hunterdon County. May 16, 1965, was the first official day of steam-powered passenger excursions, and 50 years later, on May 16, 2015, the same steam locomotive provided power for another steam-powered excursion. During those years, the railroad has grown from the simple excursion attraction of historic railroad equipment, providing the public amusement, to a regional short-line railroad.
Black River Canal (Images of America)
by Edward P. Fynmore Harney J. CorwinBlack River Canal documents in images how a manmade river transformed a region. This upper New York State canal was an improbable engineering success. In 1825, DeWitt Clinton proposed construction of a canal that would link the Erie Canal at Rome with the Black River at Lyons Falls. The idea was well received, but the obstacles were great. The canal would have to run uphill. In the end, the 35-mile overland canal required a record 109 locks to negotiate a rise and fall of 1,079 feet. Construction was authorized in 1836, and against all odds, the Black River Canal was fully operational in 1855. The canal brought a measure of prosperity to an isolated region of the state and promoted development of a wood products industry that continues to this day.
Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western
by Mia MaskAfrican American westerns have a rich cinematic history and visual culture. Mia Mask examines the African American western hero within the larger context of film history by considering how Black westerns evolved and approached wide-ranging goals. Woody Strode’s 1950s transformation from football star to actor was the harbinger of hard-edged western heroes later played by Jim Brown and Fred Williamson. Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher provided a narrative helmed by a groundbreaking African American director and offered unconventionally rich roles for women. Mask moves from these discussions to consider blaxploitation westerns and an analysis of Jeff Kanew’s hard-to-find 1972 documentary about an all-Black rodeo. The book addresses how these movies set the stage for modern-day westploitation films like Django Unchained. A first-of-its kind survey, Black Rodeo illuminates the figure of the Black cowboy while examining the intersection of African American film history and the western.
Black Roses: Odes Celebrating Powerful Black Women
by Harold GreenThe poet and founder of the music collective Flowers for the Living pays tribute to all Black women by focusing on visionaries and leaders who are making history right now, including Ava DuVernay, Janelle Monae, Kamala Harris, Misty Copeland, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Robin Roberts, Roxane Gay, and Simone Biles—with this compilation of celebratory odes featuring full-color illustrations by Melissa Koby.Black women are exceptional. To honor how Black women use their minds, talent, passion, and power to transform society, Harold Green began writing love letters in verse which he shared on his Instagram account. Balm for our troubled times, his tributes to visionaries and leaders quickly went viral and became a social media sensation. Now, in this remarkable collection, Green brings together many of these popular odes with never-before-seen works. A timely celebration of contemporary Black figures who are making history and shaping our culture today, Black Roses is divided into five sections—advocates, curators, innovators, luminaries, trailblazers—reflecting the diversity of Black women’s achievements and the depth of their reach. These inspiring changemakers are leaving their mark on the world by creating new beauty in their respective art forms, heading movements, fighting for equality and to change the status quo, and championing new definitions of what’s possible in every meaningful way. Green lifts them up to create meaningful connections between these figures and our own lives and experiences.Black Roses spotlights and urges readers to learn more about Allyson Felix, Angelica Ross, Ava DuVernay, Bisa Butler, Bozoma Saint John, Charisma Sweat-Green, Dr. Eve Ewing, Dr. Janice Jackson, Dr. Johnnetta Cole, Eunique Jones-Gibson, Issa Rae, Janelle Monae, Jennifer Hudson, Jessica Matthews, Kamala Harris, Keisha Bottoms, Kimberly Bryant, Kimberly Drew, Lisa Green, Lizzo, Mandilyn Graham, Mellody Hobson, Michelle Alexander, Misty Copeland, Naomi Beckwith, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Rapsody, Raquel Willis, Robin Roberts, Roxane Gay, Shellye Archambeau, Simone Biles, Stacey Abrams, Tabitha Brown, Tamika Mallory, Tarana Burke, Tasha Bell, Tomi Adeyemi, and Tracee Ellis Ross.
Black Sheep: The Authorised Biography of Nicol Williamson
by Gabriel HershmanOnce hailed by John Osborne as ‘the greatest actor since Brando’, latterly known as a ruined genius whose unpredictable, hellraising behaviour was legendary, Nicol Williamson always went his own way. Openly dismissive of ‘technical’ actors, or others who played The Bard as if ‘their finger was up their arse’, Williamson tore up the rule book to deliver a fast-talking canon of Shakespearean heroes, with portrayals marked by gut-wrenching passion. According to one co-star, Williamson was like a tornado on stage – ‘he felt he was paddling for his life’. Fiercely uncompromising, choosy about the roles he accepted, contemptuous of the ‘suits’ who made money from artists, and a perfectionist who never accepted second best from himself or others, Nicol sometimes alienated those around him. But even his detractors still acknowledge his brilliance. After an extraordinary career on both stage and screen, Williamson was burnt out as an actor by the age of 60. Yet, as Gabriel Hershman explains in this authorised biography, a premature end was perhaps inevitable for an actor who always went the extra mile in every performance.
Black Soundscapes White Stages: The Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic (The <I>Callaloo</I> African Diaspora Series)
by Edwin C. Hill Jr.An innovative look at the dynamic role of sound in the culture of the African Diaspora as found in poetry, film, travel narratives, and popular music.Black Soundscapes White Stages explores the role of sound in understanding the African Diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic, from the City of Light to the islands of the French Antilles. From the writings of European travelers in the seventeenth century to short-wave radio transmissions in the early twentieth century, Edwin C. Hill Jr. uses music, folk song, film, and poetry to listen for the tragic cri nègre. Building a conceptualization of black Atlantic sound inspired by Frantz Fanon's pioneering work on colonial speech and desire, Hill contends that sound constitutes a terrain of contestation, both violent and pleasurable, where colonial and anti-colonial ideas about race and gender are critically imagined, inscribed, explored, and resisted. In the process, this book explores the dreams and realizations of black diasporic mobility and separation as represented by some of its most powerful soundtexts and cultural practitioners, and it poses questions about their legacies for us today.In the process, thee dreams and realities of Black Atlantic mobility and separation as represented by some of its most powerful soundtexts and cultural practitioners, such as the poetry of Léon-Gontran Damas—a founder of the Négritude movement—and Josephine Baker’s performance in the 1935 film Princesse Tam Tam. As the first in Johns Hopkins’s new series on the African Diaspora, this book offers new insight into the legacies of these exceptional artists and their global influence.
Black South African Women: An Anthology of Plays
by Kathy A. PerkinsThis is the first anthology to focus exclusively on the lives of Black South African women. This collection represents the work of both female and male writers, including national and international award-winning playwrights. The collection includes six full-length and four one-act plays, as well as interviews with the writers, who candidly discuss the theatrical and political situation in the new South Africa. Written before and after apartheid, the plays present varying approaches and theatrical styles from solo performances to collective creations. The plays dramatise issues as diverse as: * women's rights * displacement from home * violence against women * the struggle to keep families together * racial identity * education in the old and new South Africa * and health care.
Black Space
by Adilifu NamaScience fiction film offers its viewers many pleasures, not least of which is the possibility of imagining other worlds in which very different forms of society exist. Not surprisingly, however, these alternative worlds often become spaces in which filmmakers and film audiences can explore issues of concern in our own society. Through an analysis of over thirty canonic science fiction (SF) films, including Logan's Run, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Back to the Future, Gattaca, and Minority Report, Black Space offers a thorough-going investigation of how SF film since the 1950s has dealt with the issue of race and specifically with the representation of blackness. Setting his study against the backdrop of America's ongoing racial struggles and complex socioeconomic histories, Adilifu Nama pursues a number of themes in Black Space. They include the structured absence/token presence of blacks in SF film; racial contamination and racial paranoia; the traumatized black body as the ultimate signifier of difference, alienness, and "otherness"; the use of class and economic issues to subsume race as an issue; the racially subversive pleasures and allegories encoded in some mainstream SF films; and the ways in which independent and extra-filmic productions are subverting the SF genre of Hollywood filmmaking. The first book-length study of African American representation in science fiction film, Black Space demonstrates that SF cinema has become an important field of racial analysis, a site where definitions of race can be contested and post-civil rights race relations (re)imagined.
Black Square
by Ms Marian Schwartz Aleksandra ShatskikhKazimir Malevich's painting Black Square is one of the twentieth century's emblematic paintings, the visual manifestation of a new period in world artistic culture at its inception. None of Malevich's contemporary revolutionaries created a manifesto, an emblem, as capacious and in its own way unique as this work; it became both the quintessence of the Russian avant-gardist's own art--which he called Suprematism--and a milestone on the highway of world art. Writing about this single painting, Aleksandra Shatskikh sheds new light on Malevich, the Suprematist movement, and the Russian avant-garde.Malevich devoted his entire life to explicating Black Square's meanings. This process engendered a great legacy: the original abstract movement in painting and its theoretical grounding; philosophical treatises; architectural models; new art pedagogy; innovative approaches to theater, music, and poetry; and the creation of a new visual environment through the introduction of decorative applied designs. All of this together spoke to the tremendous potential for innovative shape and thought formation concentrated in Black Square.To this day, many circumstances and events of the origins of Suprematism have remained obscure and have sprouted arbitrary interpretations and fictions. Close study of archival materials and testimonies of contemporaries synchronous to the events described has allowed this author to establish the true genesis of Suprematism and its principal painting.
Black Sunday (Devil's Advocates)
by Martyn ConterioConsiders the particularly Italian perspective on the gothic and a fresh and pioneering approach to horror tropes
Black Swan Class Sloops: Detailed in the Original Builders' Plans
by Les BrownAn illustrated reference featuring the superbly drawn plans for these highly effective anti-submarine ships. The technical details of British warships were recorded in a set of plans produced by the builders on completion of every ship. Known as the &“as fitted&” general arrangements, these drawings represented the exact appearance and fitting of the ship as it entered service. Intended to provide a permanent reference for the Admiralty and the dockyards, these plans were drawn with exquisite skill in multi-colored inks and washes that represent the acme of the draftsman&’s art. Today they form part of the collection of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, which is using the latest scanning technology to make digital copies of the highest quality. This book is one of a series based entirely on these drafts, depicting famous warships in unprecedented detail—complete sets in full color, with many close-ups and enlargements that make every aspect clear. Captions point the reader to important features, and an introduction covers the background to the design. This volume is devoted to the sloops of the Black Swan class and its improved derivatives, widely regarded as the &“Rolls-Royce&” of Second World War convoy escorts. Heavily armed and superbly equipped for their role, they were among the most effective anti-submarine ships of the battle in the Atlantic. The design was gradually improved and this book uses plans of four selected ships to chart that development. These comprise: Black Swan as built; Flamingo as modified later; Starling, the single most successful U-boat hunter of the war, as in 1943; and Amethyst, as refitted after her clash with Chinese communists on the Yangtze in 1949.
Black TV: Five Decades of Groundbreaking Television from Soul Train to Black-ish and Beyond
by Bethonie ButlerWith iconic imagery and engrossing text, Black TV is the first book of its kind to celebrate the groundbreaking, influential, and often under-appreciated shows centered on Black people and their experiences from the last fifty years. Over the past decade, television has seen an explosion of acclaimed and influential debut storytellers including Issa Rae (Insecure), Donald Glover (Atlanta), and Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You). This golden age of Black television would not be possible without the actors, showrunners, and writers that worked for decades to give voice to the Black experience in America. Written by veteran TV reporter Bethonie Butler, Black TV tells the stories behind the pioneering series that led to this moment, celebrating the laughs, the drama, and the performances we&’ve loved over the last fifty years. Beginning with Julia, the groundbreaking sitcom that made Diahann Carroll the first Black woman to lead a prime-time network series as something other than a servant, she explores the 1960s and 1970s as an era of unprecedented representation, with shows like Soul Train, Roots, and The Jeffersons. She unpacks the increasingly nuanced comedies of the 1980s from 227 to A Different World, and how they paved the way for the &’90s Black-sitcom boom that gave us The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Living Single. Butler also looks at the visionary comedians—from Flip Wilson to the Wayans siblings to Dave Chappelle—and connects all these achievements to the latest breakthroughs in television with showrunners like Shonda Rhimes, Ava DuVernay, and Quinta Brunson leading the charge. With dozens of photographs reminding readers of memorable moments and scenes, Butler revisits breakout performances and important guest appearances, delivering some overdue accolades along the way. So, put on your Hillman sweatshirt, make some popcorn, and get ready for a dyn-o-mite retrospective of the most groundbreaking and entertaining shows in television history.