An ambitious genre-crossing exploration of Black speculative imagination, The Dark Delight of Being Strange combines fiction, historical accounts, and philosophical prose to unveil the extraordinary and the surreal in everyday Black life. In a series of stories and essays, James B. Haile, III, traces how Black speculative fiction responds to enslavement, racism, colonialism, and capitalism and how it reveals a life beyond social and political alienation. He reenvisions Black technologies of freedom through Henry Box Brown’s famed escape from slavery in a wooden crate, fashions an anticolonial “hollow earth theory” from the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and considers the octopus and its ability to camouflage itself as a model for Black survival strategies, among others. Looking at Black life through the lens of speculative fiction, this book transports readers to alternative worlds and spaces while remaining squarely rooted in present-day struggles. In so doing, it rethinks historical and contemporary Black experiences as well as figures such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Dumas, and Toni Morrison. Offering new ways to grasp the meanings and implications of Black freedom, The Dark Delight of Being Strange invites us to reimagine history and memory, time and space, our identities and ourselves.

During the Harlem Renaissance, African-American culture flourished. The period gave birth to numerous significant and enduring creative works that were at once American and emblematic of the black experience in particular. It was a time when African-American culture became more distinct from American culture in general, though it also continued to be a part of America's larger cultural heritage. While the writers, artists, and intellectuals who contributed to the Harlem Renaissance recognized that they had much in common, they also sought to distinguish themselves from one another. This book approaches the achievement of the Harlem Renaissance from the perspective of the conflict between individual and group identity. According to W.E.B. Du Bois, black intellectuals of the period sought to be both Negroes and Americans. At the same time, the relationship of the individual to the group was no less problematic and served to inspire, as well as complicate, the imaginations of the principal figures discussed in this book—W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston. As a consequence, this study focuses on the tension each of these individuals felt as he or she sought to construct a narrative that mirrored this complex experience as well as the problematics of one's own self-identity.

Modern Library Harlem Renaissance In 1923, the Urban League's Opportunity magazine made its first appearance. Spearheaded by the noted sociologist Charles S. Johnson, it became, along with the N.A.A.C.P.'s Crisis magazine, one of the vehicles that drove the art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. As a way of attracting writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Johnson conducted literary contests that were largely funded by Casper Holstein, the infamous Harlem numbers gangster, who contributed several essays in addition to money. Dorothy West, Nella Larsen, and Arthur Schomburg were among Opportunity's contributors. Many of the pieces included in The Opportunity Reader have not been seen since their publication in the magazine, whose motto was "Not alms, but opportunity." The fertile artistic period now known as the Harlem Renaissance (1920-1930) gave birth to many of the world-renowned masters of black literature and is the model for today's renaissance of black writers.

This selection from the work of 38 poets was made by Countee Cullen in 1927. His stated purpose at the time was to bring together a miscellany of deeper appreciated but scattered verse. Poets include Countee Cullen, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Sterling A. Brown, Jessie Faucet, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, W.E.B. Du Bois, and other poets of the twenties. **Lightning Print On Demand Title