Cultural Literature

What is beauty, and what is its political function? In what ways might it help undermine white supremacy and cultivate a more democratic political culture? Democracy and Beauty shines a light on W. E. B. Du Bois's attempts to answer these questions...

These striking studio portraits, curated and brought together following ten years of research championed by Autograph, constitute the most comprehensive collection of nineteenth-century photography depicting the Black subject in the Victorian era,...

A military memoir by a biracial child of refugees and survivors, Roadside is about life and death, about family lost and gained, and about America, as a dream and a reality. It's about the roads one takes to leave home and find it again. As a...

As seen on Humans of New York, Jonathan Conyers introduces us to the teachers, his debate coach, a homeless man, and a boy named Diego who changed his life. Booklist calls it "a moving story about finding your supporters and building your future." ...

A gorgeous, authoritative, and image-filled celebration of pageantry and community created by ballroom culture for Black and Brown LGBTQIA+ people. The subculture of Ballroom emerged in Harlem in the '60s out of a need for safe and inclusive spaces for...

In this controversial national bestseller, former NBA star and author of I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It Charles Barkley takes on the major issue of our time. Who's Afraid of a Large Black Man is a series of charged, in-your-face conversations about race...

The astonishing little-known history of Harlem racketeer Madame Stephanie St. Clair, one of the only female crime bosses and a Black, self-made businesswoman in early twentieth-century New York. In her heyday, Stephanie St. Clair went by many names, but...

Black Surrealist. Poet. Collage artist. Jazz trumpeter. Painter. Member of the Beat Generation. Life-long wanderer. Pan-Africanist. Black Power agitator. Author of his own "poem-life." Ted Joans (1928-2003) was all of these things, and yet none of these...

Revealing a history that is deep, broad, and infuriating, The Black Tax casts a bold light on the racist practices long hidden in the shadows of America's tax regimes. American taxation is unfair, and it is most unfair to the very people who critically...

A vivid firsthand record of the stain of white supremacy and the outspoken resistance of Black and white Americans who envisioned a better, more just nation W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified "the problem of the color-line" as the defining issue in...

A revelatory first look at the painting practice of artist Lorna Simpson, whose work combines abstraction and figuration to highlight issues of identity and representation Though Lorna Simpson (b. 1960) is perhaps best known as a photographer, this...

From his early self-portraits to his site-specific installations, this volume underscores Rashid Johnson's fearless engagement with the central themes, questions and aesthetics of the contemporary eraCo-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and...