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African American Inventors (Lucent Library of Black History)
by Stephen CurrieThis survey of African-American inventors includes some familiar names, but more whose names are less recognizable than their work. The stories of these bright and ambitious individuals are about science, technology, and individual discovery, but also about what it means - and what it has meant - to be black in the United States. Profiles of the most prominent inventors during each era of American history illustrate how blacks were viewed in society, as well as how they perceived themselves and how they functioned as a community through time.
African American Islam
by Aminah Beverly McCloudIslam is a vital, growing religion in America. Little is known, however, about the religion except through the biased lens of media reports which brand African American Muslims as "Black Muslims" and portray their communities as places of social protest. African American Islam challenges these myths by contextualizing the experience and history of African American Islamic life. This is the first book to investigate the diverse African American Islamic community on its own terms, in its own language and through its own synthesis of Islamic history and philosophy.
African American Language: Language development from Infancy to Adulthood (Language In Society Ser. #7)
by Walt Wolfram Mary Kohn Charlie Farrington Jennifer Renn Janneke Van HofwegenFrom birth to early adulthood, all aspects of a child's life undergo enormous development and change, and language is no exception. This book documents the results of a pioneering longitudinal linguistic survey, which followed a cohort of sixty-seven African American children over the first twenty years of life, to examine language development through childhood. It offers the first opportunity to hear what it sounds like to grow up linguistically for a cohort of African American speakers, and provides fascinating insights into key linguistics issues, such as how physical growth influences pronunciation, how social factors influence language change, and the extent to which individuals modify their language use over time. By providing a lens into some of the most foundational questions about coming of age in African American Language, this study has implications for a wide range of disciplines, from speech pathology and education, to research on language acquisition and sociolinguistics.
African American Legislators in the American States (Power, Conflict, and Democracy: American Politics Into the 21st Century)
by Kerry HaynieHas black inclusion in the political process changed political institutions and led to more black influence in the governmental process? How do African American legislators balance racial interests with broader issues of government? And how is their effectiveness subjectively perceived and objectively evaluated?In one of the first book-length studies to analyze the behavior of African American state legislators in multiple legislative sessions across five states, Kerry Haynie has compiled a wealth of valuable data that reveals the dynamics and effectiveness of black participation in the legislative process. Owing to the increasing role of state government in administering what he defines as key "black issues"— education, healthcare, poverty/social welfare, civil rights, and children's issues—Haynie focuses on bills introduced in these categories in Arkansas, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, and North Carolina.The book reveals how responsive political institutions have been to the nation's largest minority group. It explores the question of how legislators deal with the "duality dilemma"—which requires them to be both responsible legislators and race representatives—and whether agendas should be "deracialized" in order to appeal to a broader constituency. Along with numerous statistical charts illustrating everything from representation on house standing committees to a ranking of the fifteen legislative sessions by quartiles of African American political incorporation, a useful and revealing portrait emerges—one that will fuel debate and inform future discussions of the role of African Americans in the political process.
African American Literacies (Literacies)
by Elaine RichardsonAfrican-American Literacies is a personal, public and political exploration of the problems faced by student writers from the African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) culture.Drawing on personal experience, Elaine Richardson provides a compelling account of the language and literacy practices of African-American students. The book analyses the problems encountered by the teachers of AAVE speakers, and offers African American centred theories and pedagogical methods of addressing these problems. Richardson builds on recent research to argue that teachers need not only to recognise the value and importance of African-American culture, but also to use African-American English when teaching AAVE speakers standard English.African-American Literacies offers a holistic and culturally relevant approach to literacy education, and is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the literacy practices of African-American students.
African American Literary Theory
by Winston Napier"African American Literary Theory is an extraordinary gift to literary studies. It is necessary, authoritative and thorough. The timing of this book is superb!" -Karla F.C. Holloway, Duke University"The influence of African American literature can be attributed, in no small part, to the literary theorists gathered in this collection. This is a superb anthology that represents a diversity of voices and points of view, and a much needed historical retrospective of how African American literary theory has developed." -Marlon B. Ross, University of Michigan"A volume of great conceptual significance and originality in its focus on the development of African American literary theory." -Farah Jasmine Griffin, University of PennsylvaniaAfrican American Literary Theory: A Reader is the first volume to document the central texts and arguments in African American literary theory from the 1920s through the present. As the volume progresses chronologically from the rise of a black aesthetic criticism, through the Blacks Arts Movement, feminism, structuralism and poststructuralism, and the rise of queer theory, it focuses on the key arguments, themes, and debates in each period.By constantly bringing attention to the larger political and cultural issues at stake in the interpretation of literary texts, the critics gathered here have contributed mightily to the prominence and popularity of African American literature in this country and abroad. African American Literary Theory provides a unique historical analysis of how these thinkers have shaped literary theory, and literature at large, and will be a indispensable text for the study of African American intellectual culture.Contributors include Sandra Adell, Michael Awkward, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Hazel V. Carby, Barbara Christian, W.E.B. DuBois, Ann duCille, Ralph Ellison, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Addison Gayle Jr., Carolyn F. Gerald, Evelynn Hammonds, Phillip Brian Harper, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, Stephen E. Henderson, Karla F.C. Holloway, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Joyce A. Joyce, Alain Locke, Wahneema Lubiano, Deborah E. McDowell, Harryette Mullen, Larry Neal, Charles I. Nero, Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Marlon B. Ross, George S. Schuyler, Barbara Smith, Valerie Smith, Hortense J. Spillers, Sherley Anne Williams, and Richard Wright.
African American Literature
by Keith Gilyard Anissa Janine WardiA thematically arranged, comprehensive survey of African-American Literature.
African American Literature Beyond Race: An Alternative Reader
by Gene Andrew JarrettIt is widely accepted that the canon of African American literature has racial realism at its core: African American protagonists, social settings, cultural symbols, and racial-political discourse. As a result, writings that are not preoccupied with race have long been invisible—unpublished, out of print, absent from libraries, rarely discussed among scholars, and omitted from anthologies.However, some of our most celebrated African American authors—from Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright to James Baldwin and Toni Morrison—have resisted this canonical rule, even at the cost of critical dismissal and commercial failure. African American Literature Beyond Race revives this remarkable literary corpus, presenting sixteen short stories, novelettes, and excerpts of novels-from the postbellum nineteenth century to the late twentieth century-that demonstrate this act of literary defiance. Each selection is paired with an original introduction by one of today's leading scholars of African American literature, including Hazel V. Carby, Gerald Early, Mae G. Henderson, George Hutchinson, Carla Peterson, Amritjit Singh, and Werner Sollors.By casting African Americans in minor roles and marking the protagonists as racially white, neutral, or ambiguous, these works of fiction explore the thematic complexities of human identity, relations, and culture. At the same time, they force us to confront the basic question, “What is African American literature?”Stories by: James Baldwin, Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Chester B. Himes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Ann Petry, Wallace Thurman, Jean Toomer, Frank J. Webb, Richard Wright, and Frank Yerby.Critical Introductions by: Hazel V. Carby, John Charles, Gerald Early, Hazel Arnett Ervin, Matthew Guterl, Mae G. Henderson, George B. Hutchinson, Gene Jarrett, Carla L. Peterson, Amritjit Singh, Werner Sollors, and Jeffrey Allen Tucker.
African American Literature in Transition, 1750–1800: Volume 1 (African American Literature in Transition)
by Rhondda Robinson ThomasThis volume provides an illuminating exploration of the development of early African American literature from an African diasporic perspective—in Africa, England, and the Americas. It juxtaposes analyses of writings by familiar authors like Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano with those of lesser known or examined works by writers such as David Margrett and Isabel de Olvera to explore how issues including forced migration, enslavement, authorship, and racial identity influenced early Black literary production and how theoretical frameworks like Afrofuturism and intersectionality can enrich our understanding of texts produced in this period. Chapters grouped in four sections – Limits and Liberties of Early Black Print Culture, Black Writing and Revolution, Early African American Life in Literature, and Evolutions of Early Black Literature – examine how transitions coupled with conceptions of race, the impacts of revolution, and the effects of religion shaped the trajectory of authors' lives and the production of their literature.
African American Literature in Transition, 1800–1830: Volume 2, 1800–1830 (African American Literature in Transition)
by Jasmine Nichole CobbAfrican American literature in the years between 1800 and 1830 emerged from significant transitions in the cultural, technological, and political circulation of ideas. Transformations included increased numbers of Black organizations, shifts in the physical mobility of Black peoples, expanded circulation of abolitionist and Black newsprint as well as greater production of Black authored texts and images. The perpetuation of slavery in the early American republic meant that many people of African descent conveyed experiences of bondage or promoted abolition in complex ways, relying on a diverse array of print and illustrative forms. Accordingly, this volume takes a thematic approach to African American literature from 1800 to 1830, exploring Black organizational life before 1830, movement and mobility in African American literature, and print culture in circulation, illustration, and the narrative form.
African American Literature in Transition, 1830–1850: Volume 3 (African American Literature in Transition)
by Benjamin FaganThis volume charts the ways in which African American literature fosters transitions between material cultures and contexts from 1830 to 1850, and showcases work that explores how African American literature and lived experiences shaped one another. Chapters focus on the interplay between pivotal political and social events, including emancipation in the West Indies, the Irish Famine, and the Fugitive Slave Act, and key African American cultural productions, such as the poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the writings of David Walker, and the genre of the Slave Narrative. Chapters also examine the relationship between African American literature and a variety of institutions including, the press, and the post office. The chapters are grouped together in three sections, each of which is focused on transitions within a particular geographic scale: the local, the national, and the transnational. Taken together, they offer a crucial account of how African Americans used the written word to respond to and drive the events and institutions of the 1830s, 1840s, and beyond.
African American Literature in Transition, 1850–1865: Volume 4, 1850–1865 (African American Literature in Transition)
by Teresa ZackodnikThe period of 1850-1865 consisted of violent struggle and crisis as the United States underwent the prodigious transition from slaveholding to ostensibly 'free' nation. This volume reframes mid-century African American literature and challenges our current understandings of both African American and American literature. It presents a fluid tradition that includes history, science, politics, economics, space and movement, the visual, and the sonic. Black writing was highly conscious of transnational and international politics, textual circulation, and revolutionary imaginaries. Chapters explore how Black literature was being produced and circulated; how and why it marked its relation to other literary and expressive traditions; what geopolitical imaginaries it facilitated through representation; and what technologies, including print, enabled African Americans to pursue such a complex and ongoing aesthetic and political project.
African American Literature in Transition, 1865–1880: Black Reconstructions (African American Literature in Transition)
by Eric GardnerThis volume offers the most nuanced treatment available of Black engagement with print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It locates and studies materials that many literary historians leave out of narratives of American culture. But as important as such recovery work is, African American Literature in Transition, 1865–1880 also emphasizes innovative approaches, recognizing that such recovery inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. At the book's core is the recognition that many period texts - by writers from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and William Wells Brown to Mattie Jackson and William Steward - are not only aesthetically striking but also central to understanding key socio-historical and cultural trends in the nineteenth century. Chapters by leading scholars are grouped in three sections - 'Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities', 'Persons and Bodies', and 'Memories, Materialities, and Locations' - and focus on debates over race, nation, personhood, and print that were central to Reconstruction.
African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910: Volume 7 (African American Literature in Transition)
by Shirley Moody-TurnerAfrican American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910 offers a wide ranging, multi-disciplinary approach to early twentieth century African American literature and culture. It showcases the literary and cultural productions that took shape in the critical years after Reconstruction, but before the Harlem Renaissance, the period known as the nadir of African American history. It undercovers the dynamic work being done by Black authors, painters, photographers, poets, editors, boxers, and entertainers to shape 'New Negro' identities and to chart a new path for a new century. The book is structured into four key areas: Black publishing and print culture; innovations in genre and form; the race, class and gender politics of literary and cultural production; and new geographies of Black literary history. These overarching themes, along with the introduction of established figures and movement, alongside lesser known texts and original research, offer a radical re-conceptualization of this critical, but understudied period in African American literary history.
African American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930: Volume 9 (African American Literature in Transition)
by Rachel Farebrother Miriam ThaggertAfrican American Literature in Transition, 1920-1930 presents original essays that map ideological, historical, and cultural shifts in the 1920s. Complicating the familiar reading of the 1920s as a decade that began with a spectacular boom and ended with disillusionment and bust, the collection explores the range and diversity of Black cultural production. Emphasizing a generative contrast between the ephemeral qualities of periodicals, clothes, and décor and the relative fixity of canonical texts, this volume captures in its dynamics a cultural movement that was fluid and expansive. Chapters by leading scholars are grouped into four sections: 'Habitus, Sound, Fashion'; 'Spaces: Chronicles of Harlem and Beyond'; 'Uplift Renewed: Religion, Protest, and Education,' and 'Serial Reading: Magazines and Periodical Culture.'
African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940: Volume 10 (African American Literature in Transition)
by Ayesha K. Hardison Eve DunbarThe volume explores 1930s African American writing to examine Black life, culture, and politics to document the ways Black artists and everyday people managed the Great Depression's economic impact on the creative and the social. Essays engage iconic figures such as Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Richard Wright as well as understudied writers such as Arna Bontemps and Marita Bonner, Henry Lee Moon, and Roi Ottley. This book demonstrates the significance of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and Black literary circles in the absence of white patronage. By featuring novels, poetry, short fiction, and drama alongside guidebooks, photographs, and print culture, African American Literature in Transition 1930-1940 provides evidence of the literary culture created by Black writers and readers during a period of economic precarity, expanded activism for social justice, and urgent internationalism.
African American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970: Black Art, Politics, and Aesthetics (African American Literature in Transition)
by Shelly EversleyThis volume considers innovations, transitions, and traditions in both familiar and unfamiliar texts and moments in 1960s African American literature and culture. It interrogates declarations of race, authenticity, personal and collective empowerment, political action, and aesthetics within this key decade. It is divided into three sections. The first section engages poetry and music as pivotal cultural form in 1960s literary transitions. The second section explains how literature, culture, and politics intersect to offer a blueprint for revolution within and beyond the United States. The final section addresses literary and cultural moments that are lesser-known in the canon of African American literature and culture. This book presents the 1960s as a unique commitment to art, when 'Black' became a political identity, one in which racial social justice became inseparable from aesthetic practice.
African American Literature in Transition, 1980–1990: Volume 15 (African American Literature in Transition)
by Rich Blint D. Quentin MillerAfrican American Literature in Transition, 1980–1990 tracks Black expressive culture in the 1980s as novelists, poets, dramatists, filmmakers, and performers grappled with the contradictory legacies of the civil rights era, and the start of culture wars and policy machinations that would come to characterize the 1990s. The volume is necessarily interdisciplinary and critically promiscuous in its methodologies and objects of study as it reconsiders conventional temporal, spatial, and moral understandings of how African American letters emerged immediately after the movement James Baldwin describes as the 'latest slave rebellion.' As such, the question of the state of America's democratic project as refracted through the literature of the shaping presence of African Americans is one of the guiding concerns of this volume preoccupied with a moment in American literary history still burdened by the legacies of the 1960s, while imagining the contours of an African Americanist future in the new millennium.
African American Literature: Voices in a Tradition
by Holt Winston RinehartAfrican American Literature Anthology for High School students
African American Literature: Voices in a Tradition
by Holt Winston RinehartAfrican American Literature Anthology for High School students
African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom Volume II
by Gary B. Nash Clayborne Carson Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner'African American Lives, American History' uses a biographical approach to present African Americans as active and thoughtful agents in the construction of their lives and communities. Each chapter opens with a vignette focusing on an individual involved in a dramatic moment or event. Personal stories are told throughout the narrative.
African American Males: A Critical Link in the African American Family
by Dionne J. JonesAfrican American families have demonstrated their strengths and survival skills through many generations, from slavery to the present time. As the African American middle class has grown over the last two decades, so have their numbers among elected officials and in business. Despite this, African Americans are experiencing extreme stress, but African American males appear to suffer the most. The disproportionate share of African American male inmates in the United States, the high homicidal rate, the astronomical rise and spread of the AIDS virus, and the continuing growth of drug abuse, all suggest that the African American male may be becoming an endangered species. In order to save the African American family. the structural and environmental conditions that give rise to these negative conditions must be studied. The chapters in this volume address some of the pressing issues affecting African American men. Chapters and contributors include: "Reaffirming Young African American Males: Mentoring and Community Involvement by Fraternities and Other Groups" by Dionne J. Jones. Victor E. Bibbins, and Ronald D. Henderson; "Health Status of African American Men" by Lawrence E. Gary; "Urban Adolescent Homicidal Violence: An Emerging Public Health Concern" by Ronald K. Barrett; and "Pastoral Counseling with African American Men" by Edward P. Wimberly. African American Males affirms that this segment of the population is a precious resource, and as such, they must be nurtured throughout their lives. The current situation makes for structural unbalance in American society as a whole, no less than within African American communities as such. This book will be of interest to sociologists, psychologists, and black studies specialists.
African American Medicine in Washington, D.C.: Healing the Capital During the Civil War Era
by Heather ButtsThe true story of the black doctors and nurses who tended to Civil War soldiers in the capital. Just as African Americans fought in defense of the Union during the Civil War, African American nurses, doctors, and surgeons worked to heal those soldiers. In the nation&’s capital, these brave healthcare workers created a medical infrastructure for African Americans, by African Americans. Preeminent surgeon Alexander T. Augusta fought discrimination, visited President Lincoln, testified before Congress, and aided the war effort. Washington&’s Freedmen&’s Hospital was formed to serve the District&’s growing free African American population, eventually becoming the Howard University Medical Center. These physicians would form the National Medical Association, the largest and oldest organization representing African American doctors and patients. This book recounts the heroic lives and work of Washington&’s African American medical community during the Civil War.
African American Men and the Labor Market during the Great Recession
by Michelle HolderThis book analyzes the status and position of African American men in the U.S. labor market prior to, during, and after the Great Recession. Using a model of occupational crowding, the book outlines how the representation of African American men in major occupational categories almost universally declined during the recent recession even as white non-Hispanic men were able to maintain their occupational representation in the face of staggering job losses. Using US Census Bureau data, this book illustrates how African American men sought to insulate their group from devastating job losses by increasing their educational attainment in a job market where employers exercised more leverage in hiring. However, this strategy was unable to protect this group from disparate job losses as African American men became further marginalized in the workforce during the Great Recession. Policy approaches to address high African American male unemployment are outlined in the final chapter.