Literary Criticism

When slaves were set free, forty acres and a mule were promised to the slaves on the plantation. The "40 acres" was the land on the plantation, while "the mule" was the physical body that did the work. Back when Black men were slaves on forty acres of...

As a member of the original Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, I have never forgotten how much that organization advanced my intellectual understanding of the dynamics of America and the world. Poetry and the Black Panther Party: from Ancestral...

By turns subtle and intense, disturbing and elusive, the stories in this collection are ultimately connected by themes of memory and loss, reality and fabrication, and by a richless of language that rests lightly on its carefully foundation.

With clear, conversational prose, this is the first book dedicated entirely to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's writings on translation. Through his many critically acclaimed novels, stories, essays, plays, and memoirs, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa...

After its start in 1910, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races magazine became the major outlet for works by African American writers and intellectuals. In 1920, Langston Hughes's poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers was published in The Crisis and W. E. B...

From poet, author, educator Nikia Chaney comes an experimental memoir of extreme poverty and schizophrenia, mothering and love. This is Inglewood, California, 1988, bright and loud, spilling brown colored kids out on the sidewalk, like butterflies or...

At once a powerful evocation of his early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic, James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil rights movement...

Mechanic Accents is a widely acclaimed study of American popular fiction and working-class culture. Combining Marxist literary theory with American labor history, Michael Denning explores what happened when, in the nineteenth century, working people...

This new edition gives an insight into Ken Saro-Wiwa's ideology, his own record of arrest in July 1993 and imprisonment, the story of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), the struggle against the multinational Shell, the Nigerian...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Hair, a primary marker of our mammalian nature, is an extraordinary indicator of economic and social standing, political orientation, religious...

In this book the author argues that a younger generation of South Africans is developing important and innovative ways of understanding South African pasts, and that challenge the narratives that have over the last decades been informed by notions of...

Sensuous, spiritual, and ethereal, this selection of works by the prominent Andalusian Sufi mystic and poet Abū al-Hasan al-Shushtarī (1212-1269) will delight everyone, whether or not they are devotees of Islamic literature. +

Learning from Black voices means listening to more than snippets. It means attending to Black stories. Reading Black Books helps Christians hear and learn from enduring Black voices and stories as captured in classic African American literature.Pastor...