This is a comprehensive representation of Addison Gayle, Jr.'s crucial influence on African American aesthetics and literature. The reader collects 60 personal essays, critical articles, and other seminal works which represent the range of Gayle's writing in such subjects as cultural nationalism and racism.

This book presents the first introduction to African American academic philosophers, exploring their concepts and ideas and revealing the critical part they have played in the formation of philosophy in the USA. The book begins with the early years of educational attainment by African American philosophers in the 1860s. To demonstrate the impact of their philosophical work on general problems in the discipline, chapters are broken down into four major areas of study: Axiology, Social Science, Philosophy of Religion and Philosophy of Science. Providing personal narratives on individual philosophers and examining the work of figures such as H. T. Johnson, William D. Johnson, Joyce Mitchell Cooke, Adrian Piper, William R. Jones, Roy D. Morrison, Eugene C. Holmes, and William A. Banner, the book challenges the myth that philosophy is exclusively a white academic discipline. Packed with examples of struggles and triumphs, this engaging introduction is a much-needed approach to studying philosophy today.

The Teaching Archive shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up “the teaching archive”—the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments—of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot, Caroline Spurgeon, I. A. Richards, Edith Rickert, J. Saunders Redding, Edmund Wilson, Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and Simon J. Ortiz. This new history of English rewrites what we know about the discipline by showing how students helped write foundational works of literary criticism and how English classes at community colleges and HBCUs pioneered the reading methods and expanded canons that came only belatedly to the Ivy League. It reminds us that research and teaching, which institutions often imagine as separate, have always been intertwined in practice. In a contemporary moment of humanities defunding, the casualization of teaching, and the privatization of pedagogy, The Teaching Archive offers a more accurate view of the work we have done in the past and must continue to do in the future.

Writing, publishing, and marketing five politically engaged novels that appeared between 1899 and 1908, Sutton E. Griggs (1872-1933) was among the most prolific African American authors at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast to his Northern contemporaries Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt, Griggs, as W. E. B. Du Bois remarked, "spoke primarily to the Negro race," using his own Nashville-based publishing company to produce four of his novels. Griggs pastored Baptist churches in three Southern states and played a leading role in the influential but understudied National Baptist Convention. Until recently, little was known about the personal and professional life of this religious and community leader. Thus, critics could only contextualize his literary texts to a limited degree and were forced to speculate about how he published them. This literary biography, the first written about the author, draws extensively on primary sources and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals, local and national, African American and white. A very different Sutton Griggs emerges from these materials—a dynamic figure who devoted himself to literature for a longer period and to a more profound extent than has ever been previously imagined but also someone who frequently found himself embroiled in controversy because of what he said in his writings and the means he used to publish them. The book challenges currently held notions about the audience for, and the content, production, and dissemination of politically engaged US black fiction, altering the perception of the African American literature and print culture of the period.

The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature considers the key literary, political, historical and intellectual contexts of African American literature from its origins to the present, and also provides students with an analysis of the most up-to-date literary trends and debates in African American literature. This accessible and engaging guide covers a variety of essential topics such as: Vernacular, Oral, and Blues Traditions in Literature Slave Narratives and Their Influence The Harlem Renaissance Mid-twentieth century black American Literature Literature of the civil rights and Black Power era Contemporary African American Writing Key thematic and theoretical debates within the field Examining the relationship between the literature and its historical and sociopolitical contexts, D. Quentin Miller covers key authors and works as well as less canonical writers and themes, including literature and music, female authors, intersectionality and transnational black writing.

In the 1905 letter to William Monroe Trotter, Pauline Hopkins wrote that she lost the editorship of the Colored American Magazine because she "refused partisan lines" and "pursued an independent course." This book focuses on how her editorship promoted an advocacy journalism that sought to abolish Jim Crow. The work of the magazine under her editorship "pursued an independent course" because it included in-depth biographical sketches of those whose lives she, before many, deemed important to know, such as Toussaint L'Ouverture and Harriet Tubman. Hopkins "pursued an independent course" also as a novelist, particularly in her first novel Contending Forces, a work unique for a narrator that tried to, in Hopkins's words, "raise the stigma of degradation from my race." Her following three novels were serialized in the Colored American Magazine. Her 1901 novel Hagar's Daughter is about the attempt of two generations to assimilate within the Washingtonian elite, her 1902 novel Winona exposes the effect of Washington's 1850 Fugitive Slave Law on enslaved children, and her 1903 novel Of One Blood explores what it means for an individual socialized in the West to, in Hopkins's words, "curse the bond of the white race." In Dr. Rhone Fraser's, close reading of her fiction, he looks at how her protagonists in each novel pursue "an independent course" and in his final chapter he compares her essential work to Black journalists of the twenty first century who, like her, "refused partisan lines" and "pursued an independent course." Pauline Hopkins's work was not just the work of a typical journalist, but the work of an advocate.

Shows Wright's art was intrinsic to his politics, grounding his exploration of the intersections between race, gender, and class.

The Rapture has occurred, America is devastated and the Islamic Messiah, the 12th Imam, is moving quickly to establish his ultimate control over the world. Soon all will be in place according to the plans of the Antichrist. As America attempts to recover from the trio of a nuclear explosion in the nation’s capital, an EMP attack on the electrical grid, and the disappearance of millions of people across the globe, over in Iran the Islamic messiah known as the 12th Imam takes advantage of the ensuing chaos. To consolidate his power, he quickly divides all the nations into ten distinct districts ruled by the ten clerics who confirmed his identity as the Mahdi, the 12th direct descendant of Muhammed. With Islam now being the pre-eminent superpower by emerging virtually unscathed from the worldwide catastrophes due to having a relatively small number of Christians, the Mahdi flexes his power and goes about eliminating any and all factions that refuse to comply with his dictates. Back in the remnants of the United States, President Stevens is frantically attempting to reunite the nation as new members of Congress are seated to replace the entirety of American government lost in the Washington D.C. nuclear attack. As the nation descends into tribalism with states fiercely reclaiming their sovereignty, the president works to repair and restore the electrical grid while cleaning up the vast swathes of destruction that resulted from attacks on State capitols and innumerable vehicle crashes following their driver’s disappearances. The wreckage of the Pope’s plane has been located and the College of Cardinals moves to elect a new pontiff. The 12th Imam seizes on the opportunity to influence the selection process by playing on statements by previous popes suggesting the two religions worship the same God. Over in Israel construction of the new Temple is quickly moving along and Isaac and his sons are being installed as priests. The two witnesses are having an influence on the Jewish people, leading to the proliferation of a new sect of Messianic Jews who are beginning to spread the word of God around the world, much to the chagrin of the 12th Imam.

In this insightful book, one of America's leading commentators on culture and society turns his gaze upon cinematic race relations, examining the relationship between film, race and culture. Acute, richly illustrated and timely, the book deepens our understanding of the politics of race and the symbolic complexity of segregation and discrimination.

Honorable Mention for the 2022 Modern Language Association Prize for an Edited Collection Interrogates how artists have created new ways to imagine the past of American slavery From Kara Walker’s hellscape antebellum silhouettes to Paul Beatty’s bizarre twist on slavery in The Sellout and from Colson Whitehead’s literal Underground Railroad to Jordan Peele’s body-snatching Get Out, this volume offers commentary on contemporary artistic works that present, like musical deep cuts, some challenging “alternate takes” on American slavery. These artists deliberately confront and negotiate the psychic and representational legacies of slavery to imagine possibilities and change. The essays in this volume explore the conceptions of freedom and blackness that undergird these narratives, critically examining how artists growing up in the post–Civil Rights era have nuanced slavery in a way that is distinctly different from the first wave of neo-slave narratives that emerged from the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination positions post-blackness as a productive category of analysis that brings into sharp focus recent developments in black cultural productions across various media. These ten essays investigate how millennial black cultural productions trouble long-held notions of blackness by challenging limiting scripts. They interrogate political as well as formal interventions into established discourses to demonstrate how explorations of black identities frequently go hand in hand with the purposeful refiguring of slavery’s prevailing tropes, narratives, and images. A V Ethel Willis White Book