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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
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.
For her new book, Florence Brokowski-Shekete spoke to 12 black Germans from a wide variety of professions about their lives - from the master butcher in Speyer to the East Frisian car mechanic and the gynecologist in Saarbrücken. What is your everyday life like? What are your experiences as black people in Germany? According to the motto "Get out of the drawers!" Florence Brokowski-Shekete invites you to get to know different ways of life, to learn something about everyday racism that Black people still experience, and to broaden your own horizons.
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.
An important examination of how artists have grappled with anti-Black violence and its representations from the late nineteenth century to the present. From the horrors of slavery and lynching to the violent suppression of civil rights struggles and recent acts of police brutality, targeted violence of Black lives has been an ever-present fact in American history. Images of African American suffering and death have constituted an enduring part of the nation's cultural landscape, and the development of creative counterpoints to these images has been an ongoing concern for American artists. A Site of Struggle highlights diverse works of art and ephemera from the post-Reconstruction period of the late nineteenth century to the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement.
An investigation into Saar's lifelong interest in Black dolls, with new watercolors, historic assemblages, sketchbooks and a selection of Black dolls from the artist's collection. This volume features new watercolor works on paper and assemblages by Betye Saar (born 1926) that incorporate the artist's personal collection of Black dolls. These watercolors showcase the artist's experimentation with vivid color and layered techniques, and her new interest in flat shapes.
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.
With a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, Fashioning the Afropolis provides a range of innovative perspectives on global fashion, design, dress, photography, and the body in some of the major cities, with a focus on Lagos, Johannesburg, Dakar, and Douala. It contributes to the ongoing debates around the globalization of fashion and fashion theory by exploring fashion as a genuine urban phenomenon on the continent and among its diasporas.
Decolonization has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West's direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing "morality" or "authenticity;" it suffocates African thought and denies African agency. Olufemi Taiwo fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of 'decolonization' to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonization industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa.
Launched at the 1982 Notting Hill Carnival, The Voice newspaper captured and addressed a generation figuring out what it meant to be Black and British. Written for and by Black people, the newspaper shone a light on systematic injustices as well as celebrating Black Britain's success stories. From hard hitting news reports covering the murder of Stephen Lawrence to championing the likes of Sir Lewis Hamilton and Idris Elba, the newspaper has campaigned, celebrated and educated people for the last forty years.
Is white privilege real? Does American history begin in 1619 or 1776? Why has left-wing antisemitism grown? How racist is the working class? Who benefits most, when anti-racists speak in racial terms? These very different questions have all emerged from today's heated debates around race, identity and culture. The "culture wars" have generated ferocious argument, but little clarity. Not So Black and White offers that clarity by taking the long view, explaining the real origins of 'race' in Western thought, and tracing its path from those beginnings to today's fractious world.
This stunning exhibition catalogue visualizes what freedom looks like for Black Americans today and the legacy of the Civil War in 2023 and beyond. Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation sits at the intersection of history and contemporary life. Building upon in-depth conversations about representations of enslavement and emancipation at the close of the Civil War, this project originates from an analysis of sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward's The Freedman (1863), one of the first bronze representations of a Black person in the United States, and expands into an investigation of how living artists envision emancipation, freedom, and liberation today.
A cut & paste celebration of Black punk and outsider identity, this is the only complete collection of the fanzine Shotgun Seamstress, a legendary DIY project that centered the scope of Blackness outside of mainstream corporate consumerist identity.
The Harlem Renaissance was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. The movement laid the groundwork for subsequent African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. In its attention to a wide range of genres and forms - from the roman à clef and the bildungsroman, to dance and book illustrations - this book seeks to encapsulate and analyze the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression.
Three decades after her pioneering anthology, Daughters of Africa, Margaret Busby curates an extraordinary collection of contemporary writing by 200 women writers of African descent, including Zadie Smith, Bernardine Evaristo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A glorious portrayal of the richness and range of African women's voices, this major international book brings together their achievements across a wealth of genres.
This Handbook provides a comprehensive roadmap to the burgeoning area of Afro-Latin American Studies. Afro-Latins include the civilization phenomenon of the African diaspora in the Americas, which developed during the period of slavery, obtaining cultural contributions from indigenous and European worlds and which today is enriched by new social configurations derived from contemporary migrations from Africa.
Representing twenty-five years of commentary and scholarship, these essays document Ramsey's search to understand America's Black musical past and present and to find his own voice as an African American writer in the field of musicology. This far-reaching collection embraces historiography, ethnography, cultural criticism, musical analysis, and autobiography, traversing the landscape of Black musical expression from sacred music to art music, and jazz to hip-hop.
A major new study of Black figurative art from Africa and the African diaspora, covering 100 years from the early 20th century to now. Published to accompany a major exhibition at Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, this book presents a comprehensive exploration of Black self representation through portraiture and figuration, celebrating Black subjectivity and Black consciousness from Pan-African and Pan-Diasporic perspectives.
Unsettling the Great White North offers a chronological, regional, and thematic compilation of some of the latest and best scholarship in the field of Black Canadian history.
A colossal, panoramic, much-needed appraisal of the visual cultures of Afro-Atlantic territories across six centuries Named one of the best books of 2021 by Artforum Afro-Atlantic Histories brings together a selection of more than 400 works and documents by more than 200 artists from the 16th to the 21st centuries that express and analyze the ebbs and flows between Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe.
Critics often chastised the twentieth-century black press for focusing on sex and scandal rather than African American achievements. In Pleasure in the News, Kim Gallon takes an opposing stance--arguing that African American newspapers fostered black sexual expression, agency, and identity.
New ways of understanding Caribbean visual culture, from historical photographs following emancipation to contemporary transnational perspectives. Anchored by an extensive selection from the world-class Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Fragments of Epic Memory situates a range of prints, postcards, daguerreotypes and albums from the period just after emancipation in 1838 within a broader context of visual culture in the Caribbean.
In Assembling a Black Counter Culture, writer and musician DeForrest Brown, Jr, provides a history and critical analysis of techno and adjacent electronic music such as house and electro, showing how the genre has been shaped over time by a Black American musical sensibility.
A visual and literary meditation juxtaposing Isaac Julien's artworks with archival images of Frederick Douglass and essays that consider his enduring legacy. This sumptuously illustrated artist's book and reader documents Lessons of the Hour (2019), the ten-screen film installation and series of related photographic artworks by the internationally acclaimed artist Isaac Julien CBE RA (born 1960), which honor the public and private life of one the most important figures in US history: Frederick Douglass.
The history of slavery, colonization, subjugation, gratuitous violence, and the denial of basic human rights to people of African descent has led Afro-Pessimists to look at black existence through the lens of white supremacy and anti-blackness. Against this trend, Black Existential Freedom argues that Blackness is not inherently synonymous with victimhood. Rather, it is inextricable from existential freedom and the struggle for political liberation.
An unprecedented look at Nellie Mae Rowe's art as a radical act of self-expression and liberation in the post-civil rights-era South. During the last 15 years of her life, Nellie Mae Rowe lived on Paces Ferry Road, a major thoroughfare in Vinings, Georgia, and welcomed visitors to her "Playhouse," which she decorated with found-object installations, handmade dolls, chewing-gum sculptures and hundreds of drawings.
This volume considers innovations, transitions, and traditions in both familiar and unfamiliar texts and moments in 1960s African American literature and culture. It interrogates declarations of race, authenticity, personal and collective empowerment, political action, and aesthetics within this key decade.
The First Black Archaeologist reveals the untold story of a pioneering African American classical scholar, teacher, community leader, and missionary. Born into slavery in rural Georgia, John Wesley Gilbert became a nationally known figure in the early 1900s, but his achievements are little known today.
How should articulations of blackness from the fifth century BCE to the twenty-first century be properly read and interpreted? This important and timely new book is the first concerted treatment of black skin color in the Greek literature and visual culture of antiquity. In charting representations in the Hellenic world of black Egyptians, Aithiopians, Indians, and Greeks, Sarah Derbew dexterously disentangles the complex and varied ways in which blackness has been co-produced by ancient authors and artists; their readers, audiences, and viewers; and contemporary scholars.
African Art Now is an expansive overview featuring some of the most interesting and innovative artists working today. Far-reaching in its scope, this book celebrates the diversity and dynamism of the contemporary African art scene across the continent today.
In this bold and provocative new book, Damani Partridge examines the possibilities and limits for a universalized Black politics. German youth of Turkish, Arab, and African descent use claims of Blackness to hold states and other institutions accountable for racism today. Partridge tracks how these young people take on the expressions of Black Power, acting out the scene from the 1968 Olympics, proclaiming "I am Malcolm X," expressing mutual struggle with Muhammad Ali and Spike Lee, and standing with raised and clenched fists next to Angela Davis.
Ryan Johnson and Biko Mandela Gray study the relationship between Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Black Thought from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis. This staging of an elongated dialectical parallelism between Hegel's classic text and major 19th-20th-century Black thinkers explodes the western canon of philosophy.
Subversive Habits, Shannen Dee Williams provides the first full history of Black Catholic nuns in the United States, hailing them as the forgotten prophets of Catholicism and democracy. Drawing on oral histories and previously sealed Church records, Williams demonstrates how master narratives of women's religious life and Catholic commitments to racial and gender justice fundamentally change when the lives and experiences of African American nuns are taken seriously.
As downward mobility continues to be an international issue, Robin Brooks offers a timely intervention between the humanities and social sciences by examining how Black women's cultural production engages debates about the growth in income and wealth gaps in global society during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
What is Black art? This vital anthology gives voice to a generation of artists of African, Asian and Caribbean heritage who worked within and against British art institutions in the 1980s, including Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Eddie Chambers and Rasheed Araeen. It brings together artists' statements, interviews, exhibition catalogue essays and reviews, most of which have been unavailable for many years and resonate profoundly today.
Revolution Is Love: A Year of Black Trans Liberation is the powerful and celebratory visual record of a contemporary activist movement in New York City, and a moving testament to the enduring power of photography in activism, advocacy, and community. Through photographs, interviews, and text, Revolution Is Love celebrates the power of shared joy and struggle in trans community and liberation.
In the early twentieth century, Brazil shifted from a nation intent on whitening its population to one billing itself as a racial democracy. Anadelia Romo shows that this shift centered in Salvador, Bahia, where throughout the 1950s, modernist artists and intellectuals forged critical alliances with Afro-Brazilian religious communities of Candomblé to promote their culture and their city.
In Panama in Black, Kaysha Corinealdi traces the multigenerational activism of Afro-Caribbean Panamanians as they forged diasporic communities in Panama and the United States throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on a rich array of sources including speeches, yearbooks, photographs, government reports, radio broadcasts, newspaper editorials, and oral histories, Corinealdi presents the Panamanian isthmus as a crucial site in the making of an Afro-diasporic world.
The first major publication to explore the work of Sonia Boyce, one of Britain's most exciting contemporary artists, including her newest and most ambitious work to date. The British artist Sonia Boyce (b. 1962) is celebrated for depicting intimate social encounters that explore interpersonal dynamics in drawing, photography, video, and installation, using images and sounds captured during the participatory art events she initiates.
The diverse musics of the Caribbean form a vital part of the identity of individual island nations and their diasporic communities. At the same time, they witness to collective continuities and the interrelatedness that underlies the region's multi-layered complexity. This Companion introduces familiar and less familiar music practices from different nations, from reggae, calypso and salsa to tambú, méringue and soca.
This is the untold story of black music - its triumph over racism, segregation, undercapitalised record labels, media discrimination and political anxiety - told through the perspective of the most powerful office in the world: from Louis Armstrong's spat with President Eisenhower and Eartha Kitt's stormy encounter with Lady Bird Johnson to James Brown's flirtation with Nixon, Reaganomics and the 'Cop Killer' scandal.
A journey into the hidden, vibrant world of Black African London. What makes a Londoner? What is it to be Black, African and British? And how can we understand the many tangled roots of our modern nation without knowing the story of how it came to be?
In Black Disability Politics Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present. Schalk shows how Black people have long engaged with disability as a political issue deeply tied to race and racism.
This is more than a book - it's an incitement to change people's perceptions.
Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation questions how the Black female body, specifically the Black maternal body, navigates interlocking structures that place a false narrative on her body and that of her maternal ancestors. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly inquiry and contemporary art, this book addresses these misconceptions and fills in the gaps that exist in the photographic representation of Black motherhood, mothering, and mutual care within Black communities.
In the Black Fantastic assembles art and imagery from across the African diaspora that embraces ideas of the mythic and the speculative. It brings to life the forces that shape Afrofuturism - the cultural movement that conjures otherworldly visions out of the everyday of Black experience - and beyond, looking at how speculative fictions in Black art and culture are boldly reimagining perspectives on race, gender, identity and the body in the 21st century.
A critical approach to blackness in devolutionary Scottish writing Writing Black Scotland examines race and racism in devolutionary Scottish literature, with a focus on the critical significance of blackness. The book reads blackness in Scottish writing from the 1970s to the early 2000s, a period of history defined by post-imperial adjustment. Critiquing a unifying Britishness at work in black British criticism, Jackson argues for the importance of black politics in Scottish writing.
What does it mean to be Black in Scotland today? How are notions of nationhood, Scottishness, and Britishness implicated in this? Why is it important to archive and understand Black Scottish history? Reflecting on the past to make sense of the present, Francesca Sobande and layla-roxanne hill explore the history and contemporary lives of Black people in Scotland. Based on intergenerational interviews, survey responses, photography, and analysis of media and archived material, this book offers a unique snapshot of Black Scottish history and recent 21st century realities.
This book explores how decolonization and decoloniality provide liberationist knowledge to question and replace the hegemony of Western knowledge systems imposed on Africa. It critically examines the silencing and exclusion of subalterns in global knowledge production and the far-reaching implications of this for pedagogy and policy.
At the March on Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker reflected on her life and her legacy. She had spent decades as one of the world's most successful entertainers but told the crowd, "I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too". Inspired by these words, celebrated poet and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound meditation on Black performance in the modern age, in which culture, history and his own lived experience collide.
This book brings together chapters authored by leading African American Studies/Black Studies scholars in the USA and the UK. It focuses on the roots of the discipline, reaching back to early brilliant Black intellectuals, discusses the historical and epistemological development of formal Black Studies, setting these in their socio-political contexts, and presents research methodologies and guidelines that are appropriate and valid for people of African descent.
Taking as its starting point the London-based Caribbean Artists Movement, this concise introduction showcases the work of over sixty Black British artists from the 1960s until the present.
A groundbreaking A-Z survey of the work of over 300 modern and contemporary artists born or based in Africa. Modern and Contemporary African art is at the forefront of the current curatorial and collector movement in today's art scene. This groundbreaking new book represents the most substantial appraisal of contemporary artists born or based in Africa available.
An updated and expanded edition of this classic, illustrated survey of Caribbean art, featuring the work of over 100 artists from the period of colonialism to the present day.
As We Rise presents an exciting compilation of photographs from African diasporic culture. With over one hundred works by Black artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, the United States, South America, as well as throughout the African continent, this volume provides a timely exploration of Black identity on both sides of the Atlantic.
Black Artists Shaping the World celebrates the diversity of work being produced today by Black artists from around the globe, introducing twenty-six contemporary artists from Africa and of the African diaspora.
The first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of black skin--an indispensable chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism.
In the 1940s, folks at bars and restaurants would gather around a Panoram movie machine to watch three-minute films called Soundies, precursors to today's music videos. Susan Delson takes a deeper look at these fascinating films by focusing on the role of Black performers in this little-known genre.
During the antebellum period, slave owners weaponized southern Black joy to argue for enslavement. In contrast, abolitionists wielded sorrow by emphasizing racial oppression. Both arguments were so effective that a political uneasiness on the subject still lingers. In this book Lindsey Stewart analyses Zora Neale Hurston's uses of the concept of Black southern joy.
This groundbreaking collection of thirty-eight biographical and autobiographical texts chronicles the lives of literary black Africans in British colonial America from 1643 to 1760 and offers new strategies for identifying and interpreting the presence of black Africans in this early period.
The first oral history to fully explore the contributions of black women intellectuals to the Black Arts Movement, Sistuhs in the Struggle reclaims a vital yet under-researched chapter in African American, women's, and theater history.
For more guidance on searching for material in your subject area, contact your specialist librarian via our Subject Guides.
Other guides of particular relevance are:
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.
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."
The Edge of Eachothers 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
MEF Stuart Hall Collection: a collection of films featuring Stuart Hall
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.
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)
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)
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.
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)
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)
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.
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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
