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This interdisciplinary guide has been compiled to enable the discovery of Black scholarship in the collections of UCL Libraries, including both print and digital resources, and we welcome your input to help us develop it further. If you have any suggestions for content or general feedback please let us know by filling in the form via the 'Help improve this guide' button on the left hand side of this page. We especially welcome resource recommendations from those studying in Science-based disciplines.
This guide focuses on interdisciplinary sources originating from authors / creators of African and African-Caribbean descent, with additional reference to topics relevant to the Black Diaspora. See also our guide to Studies of the Americas for literature originating from and relating specifically to Latin America.
This guide also includes advice on techniques for searching our catalogues and databases to find literature on topics of particular relevance to Black Studies and by Black authors in books and journals as well as films, images and other primary source material.
For further advice relating to resources in your subject area please contact your specialist Librarian via our Subject Guides.
We welcome suggestions for new acquisitions that contribute to the diversification of our collections.
Image: Three friends, William H. Johnson, ca.1944-56. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation
RESIST! illuminates 500 years of anti-colonial resistance in the Global South and tells about colonial violence and oppression and its continuities. The exhibition and the book about it pays homage to the people who resisted in the most diverse ways and whose stories have hardly ever been told or heard to this day. The works of over 40 contemporary artists from the Global South and the diaspora tell stories of rebellion and war, violence and trauma as well as survival and resilience. Their stories are complemented by historical documents and numerous objects from the RJM collection, silent witnesses of moments of anti-colonial resistance.
When Candice fell pregnant and stepped into the motherhood playing field, she found her experience bore little resemblance to the glossy magazine photos of women in horizontal stripe tops and the pinned discussions on mumsnet about what pushchair to buy. Leafing through the piles of prenatal paraphernalia, she found herself wondering: "Where are all the black mothers?". Candice started blogging about motherhood in 2016 after making the simple but powerful observation that the way motherhood is portrayed in the British media is wholly unrepresentative of our society at large. The result is this thought-provoking, urgent and inspirational guide to life as a black mother.
How does the concept of love fit with Black identity? When Black Lives Matter activist Marissa Johnson was pressed to address why she “hates white people”, she responded with this question: do you love Black people? This book is an exploration of the issues raised by this radical question – a refusal to centre Black identity on whiteness, a question of how love, and self-love, fit with Black identity, and a queering of how Black identity is understood. Told through autobiographical reflection, this book contains the story of one Black woman's process of iterative identity formation, grappling with the intersections of sexuality, gender, self-image, and love.
Award-winning author, scholar, and social visionary George Yancy brings together the greatest minds of our time to speak truth to power and welcome everyone into a conversation about the pursuit of justice, equality, and peace. This interwoven collection of searingly honest interviews with leading intellectuals includes conversations with Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Cornel West, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Peter McLaren. Each conversation bears witness to the weighty moment in which it was first conducted and presented by Truthout and Tikkun magazines while pointing to ramifications, future hurdles, and practical optimism for moving forward. Learning how to speak about such topics as white supremacy and global whiteness, xenophobia, anti-BIPOC racism, fear of critical race theory, and the importance of Black feminist and trans perspectives, readers will be better able to join future conversations with their peers, those in power, and those who need to be empowered to change the status quo.
A brilliant scholar imparts the lessons bequeathed by the Black community and its remarkable artists and thinkers. Farah Jasmine Griffin has taken to her heart the phrase "read until you understand," a line her father, who died when she was nine, wrote in a note to her. She has made it central to this book about love of the majestic power of words and love of the magnificence of Black life. Griffin has spent years rooted in the culture of Black genius and the legacy of books that her father left her. A beloved professor, she has devoted herself to passing these works and their wisdom on to generations of students. Here, she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that inspired the stunning oratory of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the inventive artistry of Romare Bearden, and many more.
In 2024, Dulwich Picture Gallery will present Soulscapes, a major exhibition of landscape art that will expand and redefine the genre. Published to coincide with this revelatory exhibition, this book features over 30 contemporary artworks, spanning painting, photography, film, tapestry and collage from leading artists including Hurvin Anderson, Phoebe Boswell, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Kimathi Donkor, Isaac Julien, Marcia Michael, Mónica de Miranda and Alberta Whittle, as well as some of the most important emerging voices working today. Soulscapes explores our connection with the world around us through the eyes of artists from the African Diaspora and considers the power of landscape art through the themes of belonging, memory, joy and transformation.
In this book, the editor and her authors confront various dimensions of decolonizing work, structural, epistemic, personal, and relational, which are entangled and equally necessary. This book illuminates other sites and dimensions of decolonizing not only from Africa but also other areas. This convergence of critical scholarship, theoretical inquiry, and empirical research is committed to questioning and redressing inequality in contemporary history and other African studies. It signals one of many steps in a bid to consultatively examine how knowledge and power have been both defined and subsequently denied through the sphere of academic practice.
The Summer of 2020: George Floyd and the Resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement spotlights the perspectives of individual participants who contributed to the movement's revived impact and global success throughout 2020. Authors Andre E. Johnson and Amanda Nell Edgar interview the movement's activists-from seasoned organizers to first-time protesters-to discover what Black Lives Matter meant to those who participated in one of America's largest social movements. Johnson and Edgar's fieldwork reveals the complexity of taking a stand, especially in the face of increasing threats from white supremacist groups, continuing police aggression, and a persisting global pandemic.
A multidisciplinary illustrated reader unpacking imperialist representations of Africa by promoting dialogue, memory and everyday practice, and reimagining cultural institutions and the arts--from museums to academia, from architecture to art In 2017, curator and art historian Anita N. Bateman and architect and professor Emanuel Admassu initiated research on the traditional positioning and mispositioning of the arts across the African continent. Where Is Africa has been an extended set of exchanges with contemporary artists, curators, designers and academics who are actively engaged in representing the continent--both within and outside its geographic boundaries.
"Ungrateful." An accusation that will be instantly familiar to non-white people throughout majority-white states, levelled by everyone from online trolls to government ministers. Despite a centuries-old colonial history of exploitation, displacement, and enslavement, whiteness continues to construct itself as generous and benevolent: the brave liberators of slaves rather than their captors; the recipients of immigrants to their great lands rather than perpetrators of racist hate crimes; the protectors of the marginalised rather than the perpetrators of oppression. Natalie Wall takes readers on a journey through the tropes and narratives of white generosity, from the onset of the African slave trade to contemporary efforts to ridicule and undermine the "woke agenda."
Cultural criticism and pop culture history intertwine in this important book, which dissects how hip hop has sidelined Black women's identity and emotional well-being. A "ride-or-die chick" is a woman who holds down her family and community. Her ride-or-die trope becomes a problem when she does it indiscriminately. She does anything for her family, friends, and significant other, even at the cost of her own well-being. Her self-worth is connected to how much labor she can provide for others. She goes above and beyond for everyone in every aspect of her life--work, family, church, even if it's not reciprocated, and doesn't require it to be because she's a "strong Black woman". In this book, author, adjunct professor of sociology, and former therapist Shanita Hubbard disrupts the ride-or-die complex and argues that this way of life has left Black women exhausted, overworked, overlooked, and feeling depleted. She suggests that Black women are susceptible to this mentality because it's normalized in our culture.
In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can't always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it. Black citizens, on the other hand, are expected to be political heroes whose civic suffering enables progress toward racial justice. In this book, Juliet Hooker, a leading thinker on democracy and race, argues that the two most important forces driving racial politics in the United States today are Black grief and white grievance. Black grief is exemplified by current protests against police violence--the latest in a tradition of violent death and subsequent public mourning spurring Black political mobilization. The potent politics of white grievance, meanwhile, which is also not new, imagines the United States as a white country under siege. Drawing on African American political thought, Hooker examines key moments in US racial politics that illuminate the problem of loss in democracy.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made transparent the insidiousness of institutional anti-Black racism and its impact on Black people globally. Research and statistics suggest that COVID-19 disproportionately affects African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) people. This collection provides critical discussions on the complexities of resilience in Black communities. Specifically, it highlights the resilience of ACB people, aged 12 to 85 years from Nigeria, South Africa, Jamaica, England, Canada, and the United States, by showcasing their strengths, determination, courage, contribution, leadership, innovation, creativity, cooperation, and community involvement through the sharing of reflections, essays, stories, journals, artwork, and poetry.The authors discuss structural barriers, gender, and sexual violence, health care, education, and institutional anti-anti-Black racism candidly demonstrating their vulnerabilities and resilience.
Scripting Empire recovers the literary and cultural history of West Indian and West African writing at the BBC in order to rethink the critical mid-century decades of shrinking British sovereignty, late modernism, and mass migration to the metropole. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, a remarkable group of black Atlantic artists and intellectuals became producers, editors, and freelancers at the corporation, including Una Marson, Langston Hughes, Louise Bennett, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Amos Tutuola, V.S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Cyprian Ekwensi, Stuart Hall, and C.L.R. James. Operating at the interface of a range of literary and broadcast genres, this loose network of African Caribbean writers and thinkers prompt a reassessment of the aesthetic, formal, and political fallout of decolonization between the outbreak of World War II and the first airings of post-colonial independence.
The Conscious Cultural Worker: Counter-Narratives of Black Women Artivists as Radical Educators uses narrative inquiry and Black feminist and womanist pedagogy to look at the teaching identities and lived experiences of Black women artivist educators in the current neoliberal anti-woke moment. Their counter-narratives are presented as vignettes to look at a certain time in the lives of Black women artists who use rap, spoken word, or visual art to turn public places like bars, clubs, galleries, lounges, and alleys into unofficial educational spaces that the author calls "Communities of Reciprocity" (CoR).
The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art is the first comprehensive survey of the visual representation of people of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean, some twelve million of whom were forcibly imported into the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. This second volume explores the period from the final abolition of slavery in Brazil and Cuba in the nineteenth century through the independence of the Caribbean islands to the present day. The images and essays here reveal the damaging legacy of colonialism and slavery and the vigorous efforts of Afrodescendant artists to assert their identity in the face of prejudice and denial.
A comprehensive and inspiring collection of essays by Larry Neal, a founder of the seminal Black Arts Movement. "The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America." - Larry Neal Growing up in Philadelphia, Neal was surrounded by Bebop music and writing. He culled inspiration and teachings from Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. After studying folklore at the University of Pennsylvania, Neal became a prolific poet and critic, and he served as the arts editor for the Liberator where he published many of his essays about art. Neal encouraged artists to produce work that was not only politically engaged but also unapologetically rooted in the Black experience, and this message reverberated through African American literature, theater, music, and visual arts.
'What happens when Black artists depict Black figures? What art does this produce, and what worlds of possibility does this reveal?' - Ekow Eshun Reframing the Black Figure showcases more than 20 of the most important Black figurative artists working in the UK and US today. This visual giftbook introduces readers to the field of Black figuration by highlighting a selection of key works from the National Portrait Gallery exhibition, The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure. Readers will encounter contemporary Black artists producing beautiful, urgent artworks that presents the Black form with nuance and depth. Richly illustrated with artworks and visual details, alongside short biographies for all featured artists, this accessible publication offers an opportunity for readers to experience some of the most exciting artworks depicting the Black form. Within this context, they take on a dual role, as the accomplished work of individual artists on the one hand, and as a collective assertion of Black presence on the other.
A groundbreaking volume resituating the Harlem Renaissance as integral to the development of twentieth-century modernism Beginning in the 1920s, Upper Manhattan became the center of an explosion of art, writing, and ideas that has since become legendary. But what we now know as the Harlem Renaissance, the first movement of international modern art led by African Americans, extended far beyond New York City. This volume reexamines the Harlem Renaissance as part of a global flowering of Black creativity, with roots in the New Negro theories and aesthetics of Alain Locke, its founding philosopher, as well as the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Featuring artists such as Aaron Douglas, Charles Henry Alston, Augusta Savage, and William H. Johnson, who synthesized the expressive figuration of the European avant-garde with the aesthetics of African sculpture and folk art to render all aspects of African American city life, this publication also includes works by lesser-known contributors, including Laura Wheeler Waring and Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr., who took a more classical approach to depicting Black subjects with dignity, interiority, and gravitas.
Immerse yourself in Africa's vast and intricate story and discover Africa's true place in world history. Spanning more than 200,000 years, from the emergence of the first humans to the rise of megacities, Africa explores the history and cultures of the world's second-largest continent in vivid detail. It brings to life the stories that shaped Africa and the world around it, from powerful and influential empires and kingdoms such as Mali and Benin, through the struggle against colonization and the fight for independence to Africa's place on the global stage today.
This book draws inspiration from the author''s own scholarship on race, anti-Blackness, Indigeneity, and anti-colonial studies to offer the personal travelogue of a Black scholar in academia. The author reflects on how he came to a critical consciousness about critical issues of race, anti-Black racism, and anti-colonial studies in the 1980s. The intersecting theme of Black scholars'' responsibility for advancing a path of Blackcentricity wedded in Black and African Indigeneities to address global anti-Black racism and anti-Blackness is an important intellectual pursuit. In the struggle for true liberation, our work for social justice, equity, decolonization, and the anti-colonial end is only possible if we embrace critical solidarity through Indigenous resistance and community building. We must all be part of an on-going struggle; those of us with the privilege of being familiar with history have a responsibility to mentor and be mentored by our young colleagues as a nurturing of the power of knowledge.
In uncertain times, the focus on advanced economies overshadows the often-overlooked contributions of African economies. However, it is crucial not to underestimate Africa's paramount importance in the global economy. With a diverse economy shaped by historical, social, and cultural changes, Africa offers a rich and compelling narrative. Presenting ten exciting chapters delving into the socio-cultural aspects of African contexts and their profound impact on regional, national, and international business, Contextualising African Studies lays the foundation for a comprehensive exploration of Africa's business landscape. Examining contemporary issues, the authors shed new light on the intricate relationship between businesses, societies, and economics across various African societies.
Showcases the role HBCUs play in empowering Black students, fostering economic development, building community, and mentoring leaders and activists. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) play a pivotal role in promoting social and economic mobility for African Americans and in mentoring the next generation of Black leaders. In HBCU, Marybeth Gasman and Levon T. Esters explore the remarkable impact and contributions of these significant institutions. Through inspiring personal stories and extensive research, Gasman and Esters showcase how HBCUs have mentored generations of leaders and scholars, fostering a collaborative culture of success and empowerment. These schools shape and propel Black students into leadership and intellectual roles where they have a major impact on medicine, literature, law, higher education, art, sports, and business.
The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure edited by Ekow Eshun celebrates flourishing Black artists whose work illuminates the richness, beauty and complexity of Black life. The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure assembles contemporary African diasporic artists working in the UK and US whose practice foregrounds the Black figure. Edited and with texts by Ekow Eshun, and original essays by Bernardine Evaristo, Esi Edugyan and Dorothy Price. Published to coincide with the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, this publication explores and celebrates contemporary Black artists internationally who work within Black figuration.
On the centennial anniversary of André Breton's first Surrealist Manifesto, Surrealism and Us shines new light on how Surrealism was consumed and transformed in the Caribbean and the United States. It brings together more than 50 works from the 1940s to the present that convey how Caribbean and African diasporic artists reclaimed a European avant-garde for their own purposes. Since its inception, the Surrealist movement--and many other European art movements of the early 20th century--embraced and transformed African art, poetry and music traditions. Concurrently, artists in the Americas proposed subsets of Surrealism more closely tied to African diasporic culture. In Martinique, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire proposed a Caribbean Surrealism that challenged principles of order and reason and embraced African spiritualities. Meanwhile, artists in the United States such as Romare Bearden and Ted Joans engaged deeply with Surrealist ideas. These trends lasted far beyond those of their European counterparts. Indeed, the term "Afro-surrealism" was created by poet Amiri Baraka in 1974; today the movement still flourishes in tandem with Afrofuturism.
This book examines the historiography of the African American freedom struggle from the 1890s to the present. It considers how, and why, the study of African American history developed from being a marginalized subject in American universities and colleges at the start of the twentieth century to become one of the most extensively researched fields in American history today. There is analysis of the changing scholarly interpretations of African American leaders from Booker T. Washington through to Barack Obama. The impact and significance of the leading civil rights organizations are assessed, as well as the white segregationists who opposed them and the civil rights policies of presidential administrations from Woodrow Wilson to Donald Trump. The civil rights struggle is also discussed in the context of wider, political, social and economic changes in the United States and developments in popular culture.
Shining Lights is the first critical anthology to bring together the ground-breaking work of Black women photographers active in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s, providing a richly illustrated overview of a signif-icant and overlooked chapter of photographic history. Seen through the lens of Britain?s sociopolitical and cultural contexts, the publication draws on both lived experience and historical investigation to explore the communities, experiments, collaborations, and complexities that defined the decades. The innovative and diverse work created during this period spanned documentary and conceptual practices, including the experimental use of photomontage, self-portraiture, staged imagery, and photography in dialogue with other media.
Screen Deep is a book about the immense potential of screen storytelling to defeat an evil both historic and urgently topical: racism. Everyone watches TV and movies. Everyone has an interest in building a more just and equitable world. Screen Deep goes beyond the many film books and anti-racist manuals by demonstrating the connection between these two aspects of modern life.
American artist Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) revolutionized contemporary portraiture with his vivid depictions of Black subjects beginning in the late 1960s. This book contextualizes Hendricks's portraits at different stages of the country's history and places him in the pantheon of innovative twentieth-century artists. Hendricks developed his signature style at a time of significant social and cultural change in the United States, especially with regard to Black artists, and amid a perceived bifurcation between abstraction and representation. He produced portraits from the late 1960s through the early 1980s.
Scholars have long recognized that interpersonal networks play a role in mobilizing social movements. Yet, many questions remain. This Element addresses these questions by theorizing about three dimensions of ties: emotionally strong or weak, movement insider or outsider, and ingroup or cross-cleavage. The survey data on the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests show that weak and cross-cleavage ties among outsiders enabled the movement to evolve from a small provocation into a massive national mobilization. In particular, the authors find that Black people mobilized one another through social media and spurred their non-Black friends to protest by sharing their personal encounters with racism. These results depart from the established literature regarding the civil rights movement that emphasizes strong, movement-internal, and racially homogenous ties. The networks that mobilize appear to have changed in the social media era.
In Revolutionary Poetics, Sarah RudeWalker details the specific ways that the Black Arts Movement (BAM) achieved its revolutionary goals through rhetorical poetics-in what forms, to what audiences, and to what effect. BAM has had far-reaching influence, particularly in developments in positive conceptions of Blackness, in the valorization of Black language practices and its subsequent effects on educational policy, in establishing a legacy of populist dissemination of African American vernacular culture, and in setting the groundwork for important considerations of the aesthetic intersections of race with gender and sexuality. These legacies stand as the movement's primary-and largely unacknowledged-successes, and they provide significant lessons for navigating our current political moment.
African American literature has changed in startling ways since the end of the Black Arts Era. The last five decades have generated new paradigms of racial formation and novel patterns of cultural production, circulation, and reception. This volume takes up the challenge of mapping the varied and changing field of contemporary African American writing. Balancing the demands of historical and political context with attention to aesthetic innovation, it considers the history, practice, and future directions of the field. Examining various historical forces shaping the creation of innovative genres, the turn to the afterlife of slavery, the pull toward protest, and the impact of new and expanded geographies and methods, this Companion provides an invaluable point of reference for readers seeking rigorous and cutting-edge analyses of contemporary African American literature.
You've seen their work--but have you seen them? Black designers have been working in every major industry but, for the past decades, have not been given the spotlight anywhere near to the extent of their white counterparts. This vibrant and wide-ranging book, full of photographs and illustrations, aims to correct that oversight, bringing a century of Black designers and their work into focus.Organized into three sections focusing on Fashion, Architecture and Graphic Design, Prempeh uses the pioneering work of key figures from the twentieth and twenty-first century to explore important aspects of how Black design has been perceived within culture and society. From the necessity of the sidehustle, to interrogating the value placed on Black design, from reclaiming traditions, to exploring how design can be a form of protest, this book brings to the fore the stories of figures such as Ann Lowe, Dapper Dan, Norma Sklarek, Francis Kéré, Emory Douglas and Liz Montague to unpick what it means to be a Black designer.
Caribbean art as a diasporic, fugitive phenomenon: a groundbreaking global survey The 1990s were a period of profound political transformation, from the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc to the rise of trade agreements that continue to influence the world we live in today. Emerging from this pivotal decade--which also shaped the production, circulation and framing of art in the Caribbean--Forecast Form traces a path into the present, highlighting forms, materials and processes that reveal new modes of thinking about identity and place. This volume features scholarly essays alongside richly illustrated plate sections and texts focused on an intergenerational group of 37 artists working across the Americas and Europe. A radical rethinking of contemporary art in the Caribbean, Forecast Form reveals the region as a place where the past, the present and the future meet--where continuous exchanges forecast what is to come while remaining grounded in the histories that shape the present.
Despite the long history of decolonization as a 'third world' political project, decolonization as an intellectual project has gained tremendous momentum in recent times, signalled by movements such as #RhodesMustFall, #BlackInTheIvory, and Why Is My Curricula So White among others. These movements situate the coloniality of power within ongoing practices in academia and seek to disrupt systemic racism and oppressive structures of knowledge production and dissemination. Assembling critical perspectives of scholars engaged in African Studies and other cognate disciplines on the continent and in the diaspora, the book elucidates and fuses ideas together to produce nuanced pedagogical advances in the service of students, academics, and educators.
An engaging introduction to contemporary Black American collage brings together art by fifty artists that reflects the breadth and complexity of Black identity Building on a technique that has roots in European and American traditions, Black artists have turned to collage as a way to convey how the intersecting facets of their lives combine to make whole individuals. Artists have assembled pieces of paper, fabrics, and other, often salvaged, materials to create unified compositions that express the endless possibilities of Black-constructed narratives despite the fragmentation of our times. As artist Deborah Roberts asserts, "With collage, I can create a more expansive and inclusive view of the Black cultural experience." More than 50 artists are represented in the book's 140 color images, with some creating original artworks for this project.
An adventurous collection that examines how the design field has consistently failed to attract and support Black professionals--and how to create an anti-racist, pro-Black design industry instead. An Anthology of Blackness examines the intersection of Black identity and practice, probing why the design field has failed to attract Black professionals, how Eurocentric hegemony impacts Black professionals, and how Black designers can create an anti-racist design industry. Contributing authors and creators demonstrate how to develop a pro-Black design practice of inclusivity, including Black representation in designed media, anti-racist pedagogy, and radical self-care. Through autoethnography, lived experience, scholarship, and applied research, these contributors share proven methods for creating an anti-racist and inclusive design practice.
An inspirational trove of film posters and ephemera, photographs, artwork and more from the collection of Spike Lee For nearly four decades, Spike Lee has made movies that demand our attention. His extensive filmography reflects an unflinching critique of race relations in the United States, from the Student Academy Award(R)-winning short Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads and the ever-relevant Do the Right Thing to the more recent Oscar(R)-winning BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods. A lifelong cinephile and film scholar, Lee draws inspiration from other artists working across a range of eras, genres and global cinemas.
Following the highly influential Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time, this collection of essays, interviews and reflections gives new depth to Mark Sealy’s work challenging the legacies of colonial Othering in photography over a quarter of a century.
Weaving together analyses of work by Black photographers in the UK and internationally, interviews with key figures and personal reflections on the changing landscape of Black photography, this book offers an exploration of the past, present and future of decolonial visual practices. Sealy marks out a new path for photography – jazz-like, sensorial and experimental – in order to free it from the classifying colonial lens, offering the reader the opportunity to move both conceptually and spiritually into new visual realms when reading an image.
This book offers an international breadth of historical and theoretical insights into recent efforts to 'decolonise' legal education across the world. With a specific focus on post/decolonial thought and anti-racist methods in pedagogy, this edited collection provides an accessible illustration of pedagogical innovation in teaching and learning law. Chapters cover civil and common law legal systems, incorporate cases from non-state Indigenous legal systems, and critically examine key topics such as decolonization and anti-racism in criminology, colonialism and the British Empire, and court process and indigenous justice.
jennifer susanne leath explores the relationship between Afrodiasporic theories of justice and Black sexual ethics through a womanist engagement with Ma’at—the ancient Egyptian deity of justice and truth.
This book deconstructs stereotypes about Black men through the exploration of their vulnerability, drawing attention to their demographic-specific issues and needs that are so rarely articulated. Since the Black Power era, many Black men have responded with a Black identity affirming sensibility that sought to advance the cause of Black people. However, Black males have a need for race and gender-specific vocabulary that explains their experience with specificity, including concepts such as Black Masculinism, anti-Black misandry, and Black Andromortality, which seek to explain the experiences of Black males from the context of their lived experiences.
The first ever collection of writing from the Brixton Black Women's Group, one of the first and most important black radical organisations of the 1970s "We came to Britain in search of better opportunities or to get some of the wealth which had been misappropriated from the Caribbean, but what in reality did we find? Speak Out brings together the writings of Brixton Black Women's Group for the first time, in a landmark collection.
A timely reconsideration of the history of photography that places Black studio photographers, and their subjects, at the center From photography's beginnings in the United States, Black studio photographers operated on the developing edge of popular media to produce affirming portraits for their clients, as well as a wide range of photographic work rooted in their communities. Called to the Camera offers a comprehensive history of this work, from the nineteenth-century daguerreotypes of James Presley Ball to the height of Black studios in the mid-twentieth century, and considers contemporary photographers responding to Black studio traditions today.
This richly illustrated catalogue celebrates the 2023 Hasselblad Award winner, by highlighting a number of prominent works, including 'Family Pictures and Stories' (1978-84), 'Kitchen Table Series' (1990), and 'From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried' (1995-96).With an intersectional approach to history and politics, Weems digs deep into photography's multiple roles in the representation of race, gender, and class.Published on occasion of the exhibition 'Carrie Mae Weems: Hasselblad Award Winner 2023', 14 Oct 2023 - 21 Jan 2024, Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg.
Taking readers on a thought-provoking poetical journey through Black British history, the anthology brings together some of the most exciting wordsmiths from across the diaspora and fascinating era-by-era notes from historian Dr Christienna Fryar. From Africans in Roman Britannia to the first Black actor to play Othello on stage, from Malcolm X's visit to the West Midlands to highlighting an organizer of the UK's first Gay Pride, this important collection reveals unsun people and events from our past to recognize the intrinsic impact they've had on Britain today.
Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anti-colonial struggles in Africa. Kevin Ochieng Okoth revisits historical moments when Black radicalism was defined by international solidarity in the struggle against capitalist-imperialism, that together help us to navigate the complex histories of the Black radical tradition. He challenges common misconceptions about national liberation, showing that the horizon of national liberation was not limited to the nation-building projects of post-independence governments. While African socialists sought to distance themselves from Marxism and argued for a 'third way' socialism rooted in 'traditional African culture' the intellectual and political tradition Okoth calls 'Red Africa' showed that Marxism and Black radicalism were never incompatible.
This study presents the history of the Market Photo Workshop (MPW) in Johannesburg and works produced by its new generation of photography students. Founded in 1989 by internationally renowned documentary photographer David Goldblatt, the MPW has reflected upon South African political struggles and sociocultural changes since its creation. Its foundation parallels a moment in time when photography was considered a 'truth telling' genre and an essential source of documents deployed against the apartheid regime.
Illustrated essays that broaden our understanding of modernism by centering Black artists and experiences, with a contribution featuring the work of Venice Biennale Golden Lion winner Simone Leigh. In this volume, ten leading scholars examine the contradictions of modernity and Black agency that continue to define the Western art world. Illustrated essays explore the work of artists such as Roy DeCarava, Ben Enwonwu, James Hampton, Norman Lewis, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Augusta Savage, and Carrie Mae Weems, always with an eye toward reframing our understanding of Black artistic producers.
Historically, many Black women have viewed political participation as a means to achieve full equality and improve their status in US society. To this end, Black women have long engaged in politics through activism, voting, mobilization, and seeking office. Since 2016 the number of women, particularly Black women, seeking office has increased dramatically. Including interviews with Black women holding political office at the national, state, and local levels, as well as focus group data, The Radical Imagination of Black Women challenges political science's current approach to political ambition by exploring how Black women decide to seek political office.
The contributors to The Black Geographic explore the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially situated. In studies that span from Oakland to the Alabama Black Belt to Senegal to Brazil, the contributors draw on ethnography, archival records, digital humanities, literary criticism, and art to show how understanding the spatial dimensions of Black life contributes to a broader understanding of race and space. They examine key sites of inquiry: Black spatial imaginaries, resistance to racial violence, the geographies of racial capitalism, and struggles over urban space.
This Element attributes this pattern to the fact that mobilization around officer-involved killings is shaped by anti-Black discrimination, rather than general sentiments about police violence. It also finds that the local density of social justice organizations increases political mobilization.
Washington State Rising documents the origins, actions, and impact of the Black Student Union (BSU) in Washington from 1967 to 1970. The BSU was a politicized student organization that had chapters across the West Coast and played a prominent role in the student wing of the Black Power Movement. Through accounts of Black student struggles at two different college campuses in Washington, one urban and one rural, Marc Arsell Robinson details how the BSU led highly consequential protest campaigns at both institutions and beyond, which led to reforms such as the establishment of Black Studies programs, increased hiring of Black faculty and staff, and new initiatives to recruit and retain students of color.
A celebration of the visual and cultural landscape of contemporary African photography, this stunning exhibition book offers critical insight from the perspectives of Africa's leading artists and thinkers. Since the invention of photography in the 19th century, Africa has been defined largely by Western images of its cultures and traditions. From the colonial carte de visite and ethnographic archive to the rise of studio portraiture and social documents of racial surveillance, the fraught relationship between Africa and the photographic lens has become inseparable from the discourses of postcolonialism. Challenging these dominant images of exoticism and otherness, this book illustrates how photography has allowed artists to reimagine African histories through the lens of the present, to shape our understanding of the contemporary realities we face.
This book examines the art markets of the Global South while questioning, based on the heterogeneity of the selected contributions, the very idea of its existence in the context of the global art market. Gathering new research by recognized scholars, you will discover different markets from the so-called Global South, their structure, the external determinants affecting their behavior, their role in the art system's development, and how they articulate with other agents at the local, regional, and international level. In this publication, an important wealth of research on various African countries stands out, providing an unprecedented overview of the markets in that region.
In Black Boys: The Aesthetics of British Urban Film, Nwonka offers the first dedicated analysis of Black British urban cinematic and televisual representation as a textual encounter with Blackness, masculinity and urban identity where the generic construction of images and narratives of Black urbanity is informed by the (un)knowable allure of Black urban Otherness. Foregrounding the textual Black urban identity as a historical formation, and drawing on a range of theoretical frameworks that allow for an examination of the emergence and continued social, cultural and industrial investment in the fictitious and non-fictitious images of Black urban identities and geographies, Nwonka convenes a dialogue between the disciplines of Film and Television Studies, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Black Studies, Sociology and Criminology.
Black women's work in television has been, since the beginning, a negotiation. Black Women and the Changing Television Landscape explores the steps black women, as actors, directors, and producers, have taken to improve representations of black people on the small screen. Beginning with The Beulah Show, Anderson articulates the interrelationship between US culture and the televisual, demonstrating the conditions under which black women particularly, and black people generally, exist in popular culture.
Madgermanes is what the Mozambican workers once contracted out to East Germany are called today. At the end of the 1970s, some 20,000 of them were sent from the People's Republic of Mozambique to the GDR to labour for their socialist sister country. After the Berlin Wall fell, almost all of them lost their residency status. Decades later, they are still waiting for most of their wages to be paid.
Congo Style presents a postcolonial approach to discussing the visual culture of two now-notorious regimes: King Leopold II's Congo Colony and the state sites of Mobutu Sese Seko's totalitarian Zaïre. Readers are brought into the living remains of sites once made up of ambitious modernist architecture and art in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. From the total artworks of Art Nouveau to the aggrandizing sites of post-independence Kinshasa, Congo Style investigates the experiential qualities of man-made environments intended to entertain, delight, seduce, and impress.
The early drama of Eugene O'Neill, with its emphasis on racial themes and conflicts, opened up extraordinary opportunities for Black performers to challenge racist structures in modern theater and cinema. By adapting O'Neill's dramatic writing--changing scripts to omit offensive epithets, inserting African American music and dance, or including citations of Black internationalism--theater artists of color have used O'Neill's texts to raze barriers in American and transatlantic theater. Challenging the widely accepted idea that Broadway was the white-hot creative engine of U.S. theater during the early 20th century, author Katie N. Johnson reveals a far more complex system of exchanges between the Broadway establishment and a vibrant Black theater scene in New York and beyond to chart a new history of American and transnational theater.
This new edition provides an expanded, comprehensive history of African American theatre, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Including discussions of slave rebellions on the national stage, African Americans on Broadway, the Harlem Renaissance, African American women dramatists, and the New Negro and Black Arts movements, the Companion also features fresh chapters on significant contemporary developments, such as the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the mainstream successes of Black Queer Drama and the evolution of African American Dance Theatre.
This open access book suggests new ways of reading nineteenth-century African American literature environmentally. Combining insights from ecocriticism, African American studies, and Foucauldian theory, Matthias Klestil examines forms of environmental knowledge in African American writing ranging from antebellum slave narratives and pamphlets to Charlotte Fortens journals, Booker T. Washingtons autobiographies, and Charles W. Chesnutts short fiction.
This abundantly illustrated book examines the figure of Balthazar, one of the biblical magi, and explains how and why he came to be depicted as a Black African king. According to the Gospel of Matthew, magi from the East, following a star, traveled to Jerusalem bearing precious gifts for the infant Jesus. The magi were revered as wise men and later as kings. Over time, one of the three came to be known as Balthazar and to be depicted as a Black man. Balthazar was familiar to medieval Europeans, appearing in paintings, manuscript illuminations, mosaics, carved ivories, and jewelry.
A groundbreaking method for writing art history, using the language of geometry. How do we embark on a history of art from the assumption of a global majority, outside of essentializing categories like race or hollow proclamations of solidarity? With this book, Joan Kee presents a framework for understanding the rich and surprisingly understudied relationship between Black and Asian artists and the worlds they initiate through their work.
Join Peter Brathwaite on an extraordinary journey through representations of Black subjects in Western art, from medieval Europe through the present day. "These mirror images with their uncanny resemblances traverse space and time, spotlighting the black lives that have been silenced by the canon of western art, while also inviting us to interrogate the present." --Times (UK)
A timely and revealing look at the intertwined histories of science, art, and racism. 'Race Is Everything' explores the spurious but influential ideas of so-called racial science in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, and how art was affected by it. David Bindman looks at race in general, but with particular concentration on attitudes toward and representations of people of African and Jewish descent.
Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style charts a period in American history when black men across the country adopted the clothing of a privileged elite and made it their own. From the most avant-garde jazz musicians, visual artists and poets to the most unassuming architects, philosophers and writers, Black Ivy looks at how a generation of men took the classic Ivy Look and made it cool, edgy and unpredictable in ways that continue to influence today's modern menswear.
A collection of illustrated essays highlights the works of influential Black artists from Washington, DC, from the 1920s to the present. In a twentieth century during which modern art largely abandoned beauty as its imperative, a group of Black artists from Washington, DC, made beauty the center of their art making. This book highlights these influential artists, including David C. Driskell, Sam Gilliam, Lois Mailou Jones, and Alma Thomas, in the context of what Jeffrey C. Stewart describes as the Washington Black Renaissance.
Despite the best efforts of researchers and campaigners, there remains today a steadfast tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple story- it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush, and continues mostly apart from a distinct British history, overlapping only on occasion amid grotesque injustice or pioneering protest. Yet, as acclaimed historian Hakim Adi demonstrates, from the very beginning, from the moment humans first stood on this rainy isle, there have been African and Caribbean men and women set at Britain's heart.
Black communities have been making major contributions to Europe's social and cultural life and landscapes for centuries. However, their achievements largely remain unrecognized by the dominant societies, as their perspectives are excluded from traditional modes of marking public memory. For the first time in European history, leading Black scholars and activists examine this issue - with first-hand knowledge of the eight European capitals in which they live.
Drawing from stratification economics, intersectionality, and respectability politics, The Love Jones Cohort centers on the voices and lifestyles of members of the Black middle class who are single and living alone (SALA). While much has been written about both the Black middle class and the rise of singlehood, this book represents a first foray into bridging these two concepts.
A provocative study that reconsiders our notion of play-and how its deceptively wholesome image has harmed and erased people of color. Contemporary theorists present play as something wholly constructive and positive. But this broken definition is drawn from a White European philosophical tradition that ignores the fact that play can, and often does, hurt. In fact, this narrow understanding of play has been complicit in the systemic erasure of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) from the domain of leisure. In this book, Aaron Trammell proposes a corrective a radical reconsideration of play that expands its definition to include BIPOC suffering, subjugation, and taboo topics such as torture.
Jennifer Griffiths's At Risk: Black Youth and the Creative Imperative in the Post-Civil Rights Era focuses on literary representations of adolescent artists as they develop strategies to intervene against the stereotypes that threaten to limit their horizons. The authors of the analyzed works capture and convey the complex experience of the generation of young people growing up in the era after the civil rights movement.
Faith Ringgold (1930-2024) was an American painter, mixed media sculptor, teacher, author and intersectional activist. Her art works explore themes of family, race, class and gender. She is best known for her series of paintings entitled ‘The American People Series’ of the 1960s and her intricate quilts of the 1980s that highlight the experiences of African Americans during the last century. She has written numerous children’s books about growing up black in America. She was an advocate of black representation in the Arts, and in 1988 she co-founded the Coast-to-Coast National Women’s Artists of Color Projects which exhibited works of African American female artists across America until 1996.
Books and articles
Faith Ringgold in ProQuest One Literature
Faith Ringgold: tell it like it is (BBC4)
Artist Elyse Pignolet on Artist Faith Ringgold (film)
Image: Andi Wong
Benjamin Zephaniah (1958-2023) was a British writer, poet, actor, academic, and activist. He was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008. Zephaniah has said that his mission was to fight the dead image of poetry in academia, and to "take [it] everywhere" to people who do not read books, turning poetry readings into concert-like performances. Zephaniah was a prolific cultural commentator, as much at home making documentaries on topics of relevance to the Black diaspora as appearing on TV quiz shows or as a panelist on the BBC's topical debate show, Question Time.
Books and articles
Benjamin Zephaniah in ProQuest One Literature
Benjamin Zephaniah: to do wid me (film)
A picture of Birmingham, by Benjamin Zephaniah (BBC4)
Treasures of the British Library (Sky Arts)
The South Bank Show: Benjamin Zephaniah (Sky Arts)
Standing Firm: Football’s Windrush Story (ITV London)
The life and rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah (BBC Radio 4 Extra)
Caribbean Domino Club (BBC Radio 4 Extra)
Music Life: Benjamin Zephaniah and Novelist: Is there a place for politics in music? (BBC World Service)
Image: Guy Evans
Octavia Butler (1947-2006) was a pioneering writer of science fiction. As one of the first African American and female science fiction writers, Butler wrote novels that concerned themes of injustice towards African Americans, global warming, women’s rights, and political disparity. Her work envisaged an alternate future that foresaw many aspects of life today, from big pharma to Trumpism. She won numerous prestigious awards for her writing and as a pioneer in science fiction, she opened up the genre to many other African American and female writers.
Books and articles
Octavia Butler in ProQuest One Literature
Octavia Butler and the utopian alien (film)
Octavia Butler and utopian hybridity (film)
Afterwords: Octavia E. Butler (BBC Radio 3)
Free Thinking (BBC Radio 3)
Audre Lorde (1934 – 1992) was an American writer, feminist, womanist, librarian, and civil rights activist. She was a self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," who "dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia." Her visits to Berlin in the 1980s were a catalyst for Black German women to speak out and make themselves more visible in German society.
Audre Lorde (Untold: authors that changed America) (film)
A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (film)
The Edge of Eachother's Battles: the Vision of Audre Lorde (film)
Free Thinking (BBC Radio 3)
Great Lives (BBC Radio 4)
Image: K. Kendall
Kimberlé Crenshaw (1959-) is an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory and gender issues. Crenshaw is known for the introduction and development of intersectional theory, the study of how overlapping or intersecting social identities, particularly minority identities, relate to systems and structures of oppression, domination, or discrimination.Her work further expands to also include intersectional feminism, which examines the overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that women face due to their ethnicity, sexuality, and economic background.
Books and articles
Woman’s Hour: Kimberlé Crenshaw and Intersectionality at 30 (BBC Radio 4)
Woman's Hour: why feminism can’t ignore race (BBC Radio 4)
bell hooks (1952 - 2021) is the pen name used by the American public intellectual, author and activist Gloria Jean Watkins. Her work covers a range of issues and genres including, but not limited to; gender, race/racism, class, sexual politics, spirituality, love, education and pedagogy, cultural criticism, poetry, and children’s fiction.
bell hooks: Cultural Criticism & Transformation (film)
Image: Alex Lozupone
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr.(1943-) is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets, her work covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. Giovanni gained initial fame in the late 1960s as part of the Black Arts Movement. Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement of the period, her early work provides a strong, militant African-American perspective, leading one writer to dub her the "Poet of the Black Revolution".
Nikki Giovanni interviews Lena Horne (film)
Nikki Giovanni: Lecture at ASU (film)
Stuart Henry McPhail Hall FBA (1932 – 2014) was a Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist, and political activist. Hall was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.
Books and articles
Stuart Hall: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life (film)
Stuart Hall: Representation & the Media (film)
Stuart Hall: The Origins of Cultural Studies (film)
Stuart Hall: Race - the Floating Signifier (film)
Personally Speaking: Stuart Hall's Work in Cultural Studies (film, 16 episodes)
The Last Interview: Stuart Hall on the Politics of Cultural Studies (film)
Cosmopolitanism - Conversation with Stuart Hall (film)
Hall's encoding/decoding model for media analysis (film)
Free Thinking (BBC Radio 3)
Unforgettable: Professor Stuart Hall and Isaac Julien (BBC Radio 4)
Image: Open University
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868 – 1963) was an American sociologist, socialist, historian and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. He was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century.
W.E.B. Du Bois in ProQuest Black Studies
W.E.B. Du Bois: a Biography in Four Voices (film)
Du Bois & Race Conflict (film)
Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah FRSL (1954-) is a philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history.
The Reith Lectures: Country (BBC Radio 4)
The Reith Lectures: Creed (BBC Radio 4)
The Reith Lectures: Colour (BBC Radio 4)
The Reith Lectures: Culture (BBC Radio 4)
Image: barberbonanza
Zethu Matebeni is a sociologist, activist, writer, documentary film maker. She has published on queer issues, sexuality, gender, race, HIV and AIDS, African film, cinema and photography. She is an active member of the Black Academic Caucus, a collective of black academics based at the University of Cape Town.
Frantz Omar Fanon (1925 – 1961), also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique. His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism.
Frantz Fanon, His Life, His Struggle, His Work (film)
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (film)
Fanon hier, aujourd'hui (film)
Les Damnés de la Terre (film)
Great Lives (BBC Radio 4)
Angela Yvonne Davis (1944-) is an American political activist, philosopher, academic, scholar, and author. She emerged as the leader of Communist Party USA in the 1960s and had close ties to the Black Panther Party. She has advocated for the abolishment of prisons and the prison-industrial complex. In the early 1970s she became a symbol of the struggle for Black liberation, anticapitalism and feminism. She has taught the history of consciousness, critical theory and feminist studies for five decades.
Books and articles
Angela Davis in ProQuest Black Studies
Angela Davis: interview from jail (film)
Tony Brown's journal: Angela Davis (film)
Angela Davis: resisting the system (film)
Our Friend Angela Davis (film)
The Frost Interview (BBC 2, 1974)
Carter Godwin Woodson (1875 – 1950) was an American historian, author, journalist, and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He was one of the first scholars to study the history of the African diaspora, including African-American history.
Eddie Chambers (born 1960) is a British contemporary art historian, curator, and artist. As a student he co-founded the BLK Art Group, a groundbreaking association of Black British art students, and in 1989 he set up the African and Asian Visual Artists' Archive (AAVAA), which was the first research and reference facility in the country for documenting British-based Black visual artists.
Eddie Chambers: an interview (film)
Free Thinking: The Influence of the British Black Art Movement (BBC Radio 3)
Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960) was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays. She also wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the Black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun (film)
Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space (film)
Professor Paul Gilroy is one of the foremost theorists of race and racism in the world today. Author of foundational and highly influential books such as There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Against Race (2000), Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) and Darker Than Blue (2010) alongside numerous key articles, essays and critical interventions, Gilroy’s is a unique voice that speaks to the centrality and tenacity of racialized thought and representational practices in the modern world.
Free Thinking (BBC Radio 3)
Kobena Mercer (born 1960) is a British art historian and writer on contemporary art and visual culture. Much of Mercer's writing has focused on the work and cultural context of black British artists, including monographs for Keith Piper, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Hew Locke – as well as on contemporary and modern art of the African Diaspora more widely.
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (1931 – 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Morrison became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. Her works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.
Books and articles
Toni Morrison in ProQuest One Literature
Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (film)
Sheer Good Fortune - Celebrating Toni Morrison (film)
Toni Morrison, in In Black and White: Six Profiles of African American Authors (film)
Toni Morrison: Black Matters (film)
The Foreigner's Home: Toni Morrison at the Louvre (film)
Imagine: Toni Morrison Remembers (BBC4)
Front Row: Toni Morrison Special (BBC Radio 4)
Ekow Eshun (1968-) is a Ghanaian-British writer, editor and curator. He is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, overseeing London's most significant public art programme. He writes for the Guardian, Independent on Sunday, and the Observer and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4 arts shows. His memoir, Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa (2005) explores issues of race and identity. In 2016, he curated a group exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, London exploring the identity of the black dandy, Made You Look: Dandyism and Black Masculinity.
James Mercer Langston Hughes (1901 – 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue." In addition to poetry, Hughes wrote plays and short stories. He also published several nonfiction works. From 1942 to 1962, as the civil rights movement was gaining traction, he wrote an in-depth weekly column in a leading black newspaper, The Chicago Defender.
Langston Hughes in ProQuest One Literature
Hughes' Dream Harlem: Langston Hughes, Harlem's Poet Laureate (film)
Langston Hughes: The Dream Keeper (film)
Mother to Son by Langston Hughes: The Recital and Analysis (Digital Theatre+)
I, Too by Langston Hughes: The Recital and Analysis (Digital Theatre+)
Harlem by Langston Hughes: The Recital and Analysis (Digital Theatre+)
Dreams by Langston Hughes: The Recital and Analysis (Digital Theatre+)
Langston Hughes: Performance "The Weary Blues" with Jazz Accompaniment (film)
Sunday Feature: Langston Hughes at the Third (BBC Radio 3)
Kara Elizabeth Walker (1969-) is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, print-maker, installation artist, filmmaker, and professor who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker is regarded as among the most prominent and acclaimed Black American artists working today.
The ProQuest Black Studies database is an interdisciplinary collection of resources including the full text of the most influential Black historical newspapers, scholarly journals, archival and other primary materials related to the Black experience, and topic pages collating resources on notable people and organizations from the late 18th Century to the early 21st Century, including Black Lives Matter, the Black Panther Party, and The Civil Rights Congress.
For more guidance on searching for material in your subject area, contact your specialist librarian via our Subject Guides.
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Kieron Jones kieron.jones@ucl.ac.uk
Liz Lawes e.lawes@ucl.ac.uk
Emily Selvidge e.selvidge@ucl.ac.uk
