Building Black: Towards Antiracist Architecture brings together the forefronts of Black Studies and architectural theory. Only recently, architecture and urban planning have started to confront their constitution of race as a social referent, and their part in the establishment of racist logics. This confrontation usually results in projects that respond to their surroundings, that merge into a changing and multicultural city. Building Black, however, proposes the construction of a Black radical position: building islands of resistance against the expanding sea of imperial architecture. In Building Black, Mason reads the racial meaning of current construction projects in England through the histories of race and architecture. Closely reading Immanuel Kant's formulation of the Subject as the creator of space and the development of whiteness in Modernist architecture, Mason finds that Blackness is an ongoing, antecedent island that can never quite be subsumed in the racializing project of modernity. Pushing this further, he positions antiracist architecture on a self-enclosed island de-linked from the city, preserving a sociality that cannot be incorporated into liberal universality. Alongside sustained critiques of architectural theory and Western philosophy, and close engagements with Black Studies and Indigenous thinking, Mason offer a critique of the writing subject as a collaborator in the racialization of urban cartography. In response, Mason turns inwards in this book, opening the impossibility of the writer's position in architecture and philosophy, and setting up an alternative mode of self-critical architectural writing. Elliot C. Mason is a PhD candidate in Black studies and poetry at Uppsala University in Sweden. His essays and poetry have been widely published, including in the Journal of Italian Philosophy, Tribune, 3: AM, Magma, and SPAM. He has written three plays and translated contemporary poetry between English and Spanish, alongside his work on many exhibitions, talks, and performances with his group, Penny Drops Collective. He is the author of The Instagram Archipelago: Race, Gender, and the Lives of Dead Fish (Zer0 Books, 2022), and two collections of poetry: City Embers (Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers Press, 2021), and Materials for Building a City (Marble Books, 2021). A section of Building Black was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize 2020. A full list of publications and a selection of work is available on his website, pennydropscollective.org. Having lived in London for over ten years, in 2021 Mason moved with his partner, Eugenia Lapteva, to Stockholm.

Ninety years after W.E.B. Du Bois first articulated the need for "the equivalent of a black Encyclopedia Britannica," Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., realized his vision by publishing Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience in 1999. This new, greatly expanded edition of the original work broadens the foundation provided by Africana. Including more than one million new words, Africana has been completely updated and revised. New entries on African kingdoms have been added, bibliographies now accompany most articles, and the encyclopedia's coverage of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean has been expanded, transforming the set into the most authoritative research and scholarly reference set on the African experience ever created. More than 4,000 articles cover prominent individuals, events, trends, places, political movements, art forms, business and trade, religion, ethnic groups, organizations and countries on both sides of the Atlantic. African American history and culture in the present-day United States receive a strong emphasis, but African American history and culture throughout the rest of the Americas and their origins in African itself have an equally strong presence. The articles that make up Africana cover subjects ranging from affirmative action to zydeco and span over four million years from the earlies-known hominids, to Sean "Diddy" Combs. With entries ranging from the African ethnic groups to members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Africana, Second Edition, conveys the history and scope of cultural expression of people of African descent with unprecedented depth.

An encyclopedic reference of African American history and culture.

An unprecedented package that gives readers the content of three important references by one of today's most influential design writers. This is a master class in the principles and practical fundamentals of design that will appeal to a broad audience of graphic artists and designers.

" another missing piece of our rich history and profound contribution to western civilization. For history buffs please put this book on your must read list... " George C. Fraser, Author of Race For Success and Success Runs In Our Race "[Mitchell] believes that the entire future of blacks in the field of architecture is in jeopardy He then discusses the impact of the Harlem Renaissance on black architecture and the subsequent emergence of Howard University as the center of the black architectural universe..." The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education " seminal " Architecture Magazine In this long overdue book, aimed at Black America and her allies, Melvin Mitchell poses the question "why haven't black architects developed a Black Architecture that complements modernist black culture that is rooted in world-class blues, jazz, hip-hop music, and other black aesthetic forms?" His provocative thesis, inspired by Harold Cruse's landmark book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, exposes the roots of an eighty-year-old estrangement between black architects and Black America. Along the way he provides interesting details about the politics of downtown development in the Marion Barry era of Washington, DC. Mitchell calls for a bold and inclusive "New (Black) Urbanism." He sees the radical reform and "re-missioning" of the handful of accredited HBCU based architecture schools as a critical tool in refashioning a rapprochement between black architects and Black America.

The Black Experience in Design spotlights teaching practices, research, stories, and conversations from a Black/African diasporic lens. Excluded from traditional design history and educational canons that heavily favor European modernist influences, the work and experiences of Black designers have been systematically overlooked in the profession for decades. However, given the national focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the aftermath of the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, educators, practitioners, and students now have the opportunity—as well as the social and political momentum—to make long-term, systemic changes in design education, research, and practice, reclaiming the contributions of Black designers in the process. The Black Experience in Design, an anthology centering a range of perspectives, spotlights teaching practices, research, stories, and conversations from a Black/African diasporic lens. Through the voices represented, this text exemplifies the inherently collaborative and multidisciplinary nature of design, providing access to ideas and topics for a variety of audiences, meeting people as they are and wherever they are in their knowledge about design. Ultimately, The Black Experience in Design serves as both inspiration and a catalyst for the next generation of creative minds tasked with imagining, shaping, and designing our future.

In Anteaesthetics, Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the antiblack terror that lies just beyond its sanctuary, Bradley insists that blackness cannot make a home within the aesthetic, yet is held as its threshold and aporia. The book problematizes the phenomenological and ontological conceits that underwrite the visual, sensual, and abstract logics of modernity. Moving across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms, from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to the contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art of Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry, Bradley inaugurates a new method for interpretation—an ante-formalism which demonstrates how black art engages in the recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity. Foregrounding the negativity of black art, Bradley shows how each of these artists disclose the racialized contours of the body, form, and medium, even interrogating the form that is the world itself. Drawing from black critical theory, Continental philosophy, film and media studies, art history, and black feminist thought, Bradley explores artistic practices that inhabit the negative underside of form. Ultimately, Anteaesthetics asks us to think philosophically with black art, and with the philosophical invention black art necessarily undertakes.

Since the early 1800s, African Americans have designed signature buildings; however, in the mainstream marketplace, African American architects, especially women, have remained invisible in architecture history, theory and practice. Traditional architecture design studio education has been based on the historical models of the Beaux-Arts and the Bauhaus, with a split between design and production teaching. As the result of current teaching models, African American architects tend to work on the production or technical side of building rather than in the design studio. It is essential to understand the centrality of culture, gender, space and knowledge in design studios. Space Unveiled is a significant contribution to the study of architecture education, and the extent to which it has been sensitive to an inclusive cultural perspective. The research shows that this has not been the case in American education because part of the culture remains hidden.