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Examines how and why government leaders understand and respond to African Americans and Latinos in northeastern cities with strong political traditions. ... Read more

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African-American Studies remains one of the more controversial disciplines in the courses of academic pursuit today. In part, much of the controversy emanates from an inability of practitioners to agree upon any rigid definition of just what constitutes and just what is encompassed within the field. At least, there is some agreement that its achievement of institutional acceptance with separate programs, departments, and granting of advanced degrees warrants its treatment as a legitimate field of pursuit in and of itself - but indeed, this is where the agreement ends.On a range of topics, scholars in the field of African-American Studies hold decidedly different opinions. What ought we to include as African-American Studies? Is Afrocentricity a figment of the imagination or sound scientific enquiry? And what place if any does race and racism continue to play in the life changes of African-Americans? Bi-racialism, underclassness, intra-community crime and Afro-Jewish relations are also prominent subjects of consideration.In Leading Issues in African-American Studies, BaNikongo has brought together scholars from every associated field of African-American Studies and offers a range of perspective on a myriad of topics. The text presents differing viewpoints on political, social, economic, cultural and legal issues and succeeds in addressing every major contemporary area of debate in African-American academic circles. ... Read more

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This insightful study describes and makes an evaluative analysis of selected programs in African American Studies for the purpose of determining their viability, autonomy, and curricular development. An historical overview of the field of African American studies, citing the major intellectual and scholarly innovations over the past twenty-two years is also incorporated. Contents: Preface; Introduction; Literature Review; Method of Procedure; Historical Overview; Selected Programs and; Center Selected Departments; Conclusion. ... Read more

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Lindsey R. Swindall 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.These performances took place in London in 1930, on Broadway in 1943, and in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959.All three of the productions, when considered together, provide an intriguing glimpse into Robeson's artistry as well as his political activism.

The Politics of Paul Robeson's Othello maintains that Robeson's development into a politically minded artist explicates the broader issue of the role of the African American artist in times of crisis.Robeson (1898-1976) fervently believed that political engagement was an inherent component of the role of the artist in society, and his performances demonstrate this conviction.

In the 1930 production, audiences and critics alike confronted the question: Should a black actor play Othello in an otherwise all-white cast?In the 1943 production on Broadway, Robeson consciously used the role as a form for questioning theater segregation both onstage and in the seats.In 1959, after he had become well known for his leftist views and sympathies with Communism, his performance in a major Stratford-upon-Avon production called into question whether audiences could accept onstage an African American who held radical-and increasingly unpopular-political views.Swindall thoughtfully uses Robeson's Othello performances as a collective lens to analyze the actor and activist's political and intellectual development.

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Examines the political and economic changes of recent decades in the Mississippi Delta. ... Read more

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What role did religion play in sparking the call for civil rights? Was the African American church a motivating force or a calming eddy?

The conventional view among scholars of the period is that religion as a source for social activism was marginal, conservative, or pacifying.

Not so, argues Johnny E. Williams. Focusing on the state of Arkansas as typical in the role of ecclesiastical activism, his book argues that black religion from the period of slavery through the era of segregation provided theological resources that motivated and sustained preachers and parishioners battling racial oppression.

Drawing on interviews, speeches, case studies, literature, sociological surveys, and other sources, Williams persuasively defines the most ardent of civil rights activists in the state as products of church culture.

Both religious beliefs and the African American church itself were essential in motivating blacks to act individually and collectively to confront their oppressors in Arkansas and throughout the South. Williams explains how the ideology of the black church roused disparate individuals into a community and how the church established a base for many diverse participants in the civil rights movement.

He shows how church life and ecumenical education helped to sustain the protest of people with few resources and little permanent power. Williams argues that the church helped galvanize political action by bringing people together and creating social bonds even when societal conditions made action difficult and often dangerous. The church supplied its members with meanings, beliefs, relationships, and practices that served as resources to create a religious protest message of hope.

Johnny E. Williams is an associate professor of sociology at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. His work has been published in Sociological Forum and Sociological Spectrum. ... Read more

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The essays explore the loopholes and retreats employed and exploited by African American polemicists, poets, novelists, slave narrators, playwrights, short story writers, essayists, editors, educators, historians, clubwomen, and autobiographers during the nineteenth century. The contributions use comparative, transnational, literary historical, cultural studies, and Foucauldian perspectives to examine how apparent weakness was turned into strength, and the machinery of oppression into the keys to liberation.

John Cullen Gruesser teaches English and American studies at Kean University (U.S.A).

Hanna Wallinger teaches American studies at Salburg University (Austria).

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"A lyrical new book on African-American communities."

—Condè Nast Traveler




Blue as the Lake maps out an African-American landscape unique in American literature. From Idlewild, the black resort on Lake Michigan where he vacationed as a child with his grandparents, to Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard, Robert Stepto traces a history of generations finding and making a home. His family lore careens through American history— we meet a black regiment in World War I; legendary jazz musician Coleman Hawkins, and Inabel Burns, pioneering feminist and great-granddaughter of slaves.
Beautifully and intimately rendered, Stepto's memoir is a stunning meditation on what it means to be American.

"Through loosely linked, informal essays Stepto . . . traces his own past through his family's history and migrations. . . These evocative meditations on home and the family are thoughtful and moving."


—Publisher's Weekly
"[A] graceful family memoir. . . . [Stepto] wonderfully evokes the delights and confusions of childhood."


—Laura Green, The New York Times Book Review
"A book . . . [where] eloquence is the essential ingredient. A major waterway for our national journey."


—Michael S. Harper, author of Songlines: Mosaics; Dear John, Dear Coltrane; and Images of Kin
"Blue as the Lake is a lyrical memoir rendered with precision, grace, and intimacy. Stepto takes us on a 'blues-ride' through places . . . which are locations in his personal geography but also special places in the collective memory and history of African Americans."


—Mary Helen Washington, editor of Black-Eyed Susans/Midnight Birds
"Stepto, an English and Afro-American Studies professor at Yale, vividly portrays the sights and sounds of a black resort in the 1940s and 1950s and the racially changing Chicago neighborhoods of his youth. In his lyrically written memoir, he recalls summers at Idlewild, a resort in Michigan, where black families determinedly built enclaves for themselves, a place to bring their families and not face the ever-present threat of racial prejudice and discrimination, even in the North. He traces the racial changes in Chicago's neighborhoods as his family migrated from working class to upper middle class, changing geography as they progressed. His intertwining stories of his ancestors offer similar portraits of changing geography (through Virginia to Missouri to Chicago to Connecticut) and social statuses (attaining degrees and progressing, along with the race, to new jobs and opportunities). And Stepto manages to recall not just his family's development but also that of African Americans generally in their journey through the same time period--postslavery to the present."


— Booklist ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Wonderful, Eloquent, Funny
Bob Stepto, a professor at Yale University, recalls his early youth growing up in Chicago and spending summers at a nearby lake community.He weaves his stories of the lake, school, his family and his African American community into a seamless tapestry filled with humor and warmth.Stepto is a great story teller.Don't miss it.

Charmed
When I began the book, I knew the author was a sophisticated man, a professor at Yale.As I read, I discovered the depth of his observations of his life.I was awed by his understanding of what was going on aroundhim and his wonderful way of expressing it.

What could have been justanother light little book became both easy reading and deep.It exposedsomething of the author's soul without being maudlin or trying to findmeaning that was not there.

I enjoyed the book so much, I read it againimmediately to find the parts I missed the first time. ... Read more

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Comprehensive study of the state of black state legislative politics. ... Read more

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The first comprehensive study of African American suburban political empowerment. ... Read more

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The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman.At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale"-an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener-with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader.The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late 20th century.
This is the first scholarly book to examine black storytelling as from the frame-tale perspective.The book treats several types of frame texts: short stories as well as novel-length tales; tales that are embedded early in a novel that are referred to later; and tales that appear to have a teller but have no apparent listener. ... Read more

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Passing in the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt is a collection that reevaluates 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---including intertextual, signifying/discourse analysis, narratological, formal, psychoanalytical, new historical, reader response, and performative frameworks---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: journal entries, speeches, essays, and short and long fiction.

The essays engage with each other to display the continuum in Chesnutt's thinking as he began his writing career and established his sense of social activism, as evidenced in his early journal entries. Collectively, the essays follow Chesnutt's works as he proceeded through the Jim Crow era, honing his ability to manipulate his mostly white audience through the astute, though apparently self-effacing, narrator, Uncle Julius, of his popular conjure tales. Chesnutt's ability to subvert audience expectations is equally noticeable in the subtle irony of his short stories. Several of the collection's essays address Chesnutt's novels, including Paul Marchand, F.M.C., Mandy Oxendine, The House Behind the Cedars, and Evelyn's Husband. The volume opens up new paths of inquiry into a major African American writer's oeuvre.

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Most people who have heard of Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) are aware of the impassioned testimony that this Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights activist delivered at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.Far fewer people are familiar with the speeches Hamer delivered at the 1968 and 1972 conventions, to say nothing of addresses she gave closer to home, or with Malcolm X in Harlem, or even at the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus.Until now, dozens of Hamer's speeches have been buried in archival collections and in the basements of movement veterans.After years of combing library archives, government documents, and private collections across the country, Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck have selected twenty-one of Hamer's most important speeches and testimonies.

As the first volume to exclusively showcase Hamer's talents as an orator, this book includes speeches from the better part of her fifteen-year activist career delivered in response to occasions as distinct as a Vietnam War Moratorium Rally in Berkeley, California, and a summons to testify in a Mississippi courtroom.

Brooks and Houck have coupled these heretofore unpublished speeches and testimonies with brief critical descriptions that place Hamer's words in context.The editors also include the last full-length oral history interview Hamer granted, a recent oral history interview Brooks conducted with Hamer's daughter, as well as a bibliography of additional primary and secondary sources.The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer demonstrates that there is still much to learn about and from this valiant black freedom movement activist.

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African American Studies introduces the discipline's rich area of inquiry and scholarship. It reproduces the foundational content, demonstrates the inextricable link between social activism and community service within African American studies, and facilitates an understanding of related global perspectives. The volume also features an exclusive interview with Danny Glover, internationally acclaimed actor, regarding his own relationship with the origins of the African American studies and his related work both as an artist and community activist. A comparative analysis highlights the connections and disparaties between black studies within the United Kingdom and the United States, and topics covered include African aesthetics; African American visual culture; African American womanist literature and theory; and African American religion and philosophy. Current challenges and opportunities for African American studies within predominantly white institutions are addressed, along with important new curricular directions that promise to push the boundaries of black studies.

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Manjani Jackson is a mouthy New York teenager who believes her life's purpose is to lead her "deaf, dumb, and blind" brothas and sistahs into The Revolution. On one of the worst days of her life, tragedy strikes, landing her at an all white school. Although she is working on getting along, the racist students make it impossible, and before long, the administration crosses the line, forcing Manjani into political action. Then one of her events gets out of hand, sending Manjani on the run. Her journey leads to a place where bittersweet lessons about liberation are learned as her comrades turn against her. Only tough love, spiritual revelations, and self-determination will help her find her place in the struggle. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Manjani
Revolutionary. Trouble maker. Confident. Obnoxious. Informed. Misguided. Enlightened. Shadowed.

"Manjani Jackson is a mouthy New York teenager who believes her life purpose is to lead her 'deaf, dumb, and blind' brothers and sistahs into The Revolution."

Freedom Speaks Diaspora has written a novel about what it does - and does not - mean to be a Revolutionary. Set in 1996, "Manjani" is the story of an (often misunderstood) young sistah who is trying to find her place in The Struggle. Family secrets, loss of friends, questions about her sexuality, and political agendas dog her steps from start to finish. She learns on her journey the true definitions of struggle, leadership, birth right, and power. At turns amusing, thought-provoking and awe-inspiring, "Manjani" is a story of discovery and consciousness as seen through the eyes of a self-proclaimed "warrior of The People."

I grant this book 5 out of 5 stars. Buy it, borrow it, but please don't steal it!

Great Read!
I read this book in one day! It is truly a page turner. Freedom Speaks touches on a lot of subject from passionate beliefs and idealogies, to inner truth, dysfuntional families, to lesbian/gay acceptance and following your true passion. The main character was well developed and showed her growth and transformation throughout the book as she became more in tune with herself. Definitely a book you wouldn't want to miss!

Love this book, very enjoyable
I am really enjoying this book. I cracked up when Manjani straight forwardly asks white characters, "Tell me about White Power." I lost it when her new found friend Hollis did something very funny during her father's poetry reading (I won't give it away).Engaging book. I was reminded of how I felt in the 90s as the only black girl attending an all white school and all the anger I had inside of me... and my unproductive way of channeling it. I like that the character is 17 years old. There aren't many books out there in which it is fictional account of a young black women dealing with the issues of sex, sexuality, racism, class, etc. Thanks Freedom for sharing this with us.

What is my purpose?
Manjani would be considered, by many, to be a brat. She says whatever she is thinking, and sometimes says it in a brusque manner. She feels it is her duty to wake up her dormant brothers and sisters to life as an African American in the United States. One day tragedy strikes her family and realizing their neighbors are no help, her father moves Manjani and her small brother to another neighborhood. Manjani's mother, ripped apart emotionally by the destruction of her life, lands in a mental institution.

Manjani ends up in a mostly white school and the only other person there, who might be like her, shuns her. Manjani is not happy and she talks herself into plenty of trouble. She joins a group of revolutionaries and things get even worse for her. At the Black Nationalist Academy she really begins to find out about life. She starts to question her sexuality, family secrets are exposed and her comrades turn against her. What will become of Manjani?

MANJANI by Freedom Speaks Diaspora is an interesting look into the life and times of African Americans in an environment that is not always welcoming, not even by other African Americans. The characters are developed so that even the unpleasant characters are understandable. It is a revolutionary work well worth reading.

Reviewed by Alice Holman
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers

Manjani - A Fierce Novel About a Revolutionary Teen
Manjani is a new and riveting novel by an author by the name of Freedom Speaks Diaspora. From the beginning of the novel, the heroine, Manjani, springs to life as she describes how she was "born conscious." From that point on, it is clear that Manjani is not your average teen girl.

She's a rather fierce character. On one hand, she's wise beyond her years. On the other hand, this young lady has a lot to learn about life, love, family, happiness, and her purpose in life. From birth, she has had a militant belief that blacks have been and continued to be oppressed in "Amerikka" and that she will be a leader who will lead her people to The Revolution. The novel is bursting with vibrant themes such as adolescent challenges, sexuality, spirituality, and race relations. At the same time, the novel centers around a young girl's coming of age, and her struggle to save not only her own family, but also the world. Manjani wants to see change - in her own life and in society. However, Manjani discovers that not everything in life is as black and white as it appears.

The author manages to tackle complex topics while still keeping the tone of the novel fresh and entertaining.The crucial issues facing communities across America are discussed in a meaningful way, throughout the dialogue of the characters and in each situation that Manjani faces. This book will make you challenge your attitudes about sexuality, spirituality, and race relations.

If you're tired of the same old tired African-American novels full of cliches, then you will definitely enjoy Manjani.

... Read more