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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.
UCL Library Services currently has a trial for the Africa Commons database. Access the trial and send us your feedback on this resource. The trial ends on 31st March 2025. For more information see this blog post.
Africa Commons is a project from Coherent to digitize, disseminate, and discover African cultural materials. The database consists of five collections:
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
Showing how twenty-first-century Black theater and media arts challenge dominant conceptualizations of time Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture examines works by contemporary Black artists in multiple media--drama, film, performance art, and photography--that trouble dominant conceptualizations and normative configurations of time in relation to race in the twenty-first century. Isaiah Matthew Wooden explores the ways in which an intentional and sometimes ludic engagement with time and temporality has enabled these artists to probe urgent questions and themes concerning the conditions of contemporary Black life. Wooden surveys a diverse array of performance-based and visual texts to explore the rich practices of contemporary Black expressive culture: dramatic works by playwrights Eisa Davis, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Robert O'Hara; performance art and photography by visual artists Jefferson Pinder and LaToya Ruby Frazier; and feature-length cinema by director-producer Tanya Hamilton. These works expose normative time as specious and evidence the transformative potential in honing practices of Black temporal experimentation and intervention.
From hip-hop moguls and political candidates to talk radio and critically acclaimed films, society communicates that Black girls don't matter and their girlhood is not safe. Alarming statistics on physical and sexual abuse, for instance, reveal the harm Black girls face, yet Black girls representation in media still heavily relies on our seeing their abuse as an important factor in others' development. In this provocative new book, Aria S. Halliday asserts that the growth of diverse representation in media since 2008 has coincided with an increase in the hatred of Black girls. Halliday uses her astute expertise as a scholar of popular culture, feminist theory, and Black girlhood to expose how we have been complicit in the depiction of Black girls as unwanted and disposable while letting Black girls fend for themselves. Our society's inability to see or understand Black girls as girls makes us culpable in their abuse.
Beyond Death and Jail: Anti-Blackness, Black Masculinity, and the Demonic Imagination calls for a complete reassessment and overhaul of ethical, political, and religious thinking with respect to anti-Blackness and Black masculinity in the United States. In light of the prison industrial complex and a decade of homicide (2012-2022) of Black men and Black boys which spawned the Movement for Black Lives, Ronald B. Neal calls attention to a crisis of imagination on the part of elite social activists and intellectuals. Neal questions more than four decades of academic theory concerned with justice which has and continues to inform the most popular expressions of Black American activism. Readers are asked to grapple with the dilemmas which plague Black men and Black boys as a starting point for a reinvigorated imagination including new theories of justice and new paradigms of action.
This book centers a qualitative study exploring the experiences of 15 Black undocumented students and the author's own experiences as a Black DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipient, highlighting the invisibility and lack of belonging Black undocumented students face in the undocumented community and the United States at large. Access and success within higher education for undocumented students cannot be achieved unless those implementing policies understand the full context of the community. Through both an interpretative phenomenological approach and biographical memoir, this volume makes meaning of the experiences of undocuBlack students, a group who do not often see themselves being represented in the immigrant narrative. It argues that without visibility, undocuBlack students are rarely the beneficiaries of advocacy and become targets of overcriminalization.
Based on ethnographic research and her experiences growing up in Brazil, the author tells the stories of communities in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Belo Horizonte Unsettling Brazil offers a powerful account of five urban Indigenous and Black communities and movements in Brazil that illuminates their struggle for land, dignity, and their ways of life amid historic and ongoing settler colonialism, marked by militarization and dependent capitalist development. The in-depth case studies are the Indigenous movement Aldeia Maracanã and the quilombola community Sacopã in Rio, the Quilombo dos Luízes in Belo Horizonte, the Indigenous movement behind the Pindorama scholarship program in São Paulo, and the Complexo da Maré favela in Rio. For each, Poets vividly documents the intersectional and transnational structures of power that perpetuate the erasure, dispossession, and exploitation of nonwhite populations and the creative ways that Black and Indigenous communities have mobilized to unsettle these structures.
Poor Black women who benefit from social welfare are marginalized in a number of ways by interlocking systemic racism, sexism, and classism. The media renders them invisible or casts them as racialized and undeserving "welfare queens" who exploit social safety nets. Even when Black women voters are celebrated, the voices of the poorest too often go unheard. How do Afro-descendant women in former slave-holding societies survive amid multifaceted oppression? Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour offers a comparative analysis of how Black women social welfare beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States defy systems of domination. She argues that poor Black women act as political subjects in the struggle to survive, to provide food for their children and themselves, and challenge daily discrimination even in dire circumstances. Mitchell-Walthour examines the effects of social welfare programs, showing that mutual aid networks and informal labor also play important roles in beneficiaries' lives.
A heartbreaking account of grief, Black boyhood, and how we can support young people as they navigate loss. JahSun, a dependable, much-loved senior at Boys' Prep was just hitting his stride in the fall of 2017. He had finally earned a starting position on the varsity football team and was already weighing two college acceptances. Then, over Thanksgiving, tragedy struck. An altercation at his older sister's home escalated into violence, killing the unarmed teenager in a hail of bullets. JahSun's untimely death overwhelmed his entire community, sending his family, friends, and school into seemingly insurmountable grief. Worse yet, that spring two additional Boys' Prep students would be shot to death in their neighborhood. JahSun and his peers are not alone in suffering the toll of gun violence, as every year in the United States teenagers die by gunfire in epidemic numbers, with Black boys most deeply affected. Brothers in Grief closely attends to the neglected victims of youth gun violence: the suffering friends and classmates who must cope, mostly out of public view, with lasting grief and hidden anguish. Set at an ambitious urban high school for boys during the heartbreaking year following the death of JahSun, the book chronicles the consequences of untimely death on Black teen boys and on a school community struggling to recover.
This book is a provocative and fresh look into how Black women display an authentic identity in the face of constant negative images and portrayals of themselves in the media over time. Idrissa N. Snider explores noteworthy occurrences when prominent Black women, including First Lady Michelle Obama, Oscar-winning actress Viola Davis, and Grammy-winning songstress Beyonce Knowles, have used their platforms and notoriety to push back against age-old stereotypes used to justify their subjugation and mistreatment, such as the mammie, angry black woman, jezebel, or the tragic mulatto. Snider emphasizes and honors how Black women uniquely identify as a form of resistance and positive self-actualization and argues that both everyday and socially elite Black women and girls can - and do - utilize self-definition to disrupt and reject inauthentic and harmful representations of themselves.
In Beyond Constraint, Shona N. Jackson offers a new approach to labour and its analysis by demonstrating the fundamental relation between black and Indigenous People's sovereign, free, and coerced labour in the Americas. Through the writings of Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, and Sylvia Wynter, Jackson confronts the elision of Indigenous People's labour in the black radical tradition. She argues that this elision is an effect of the structural relation of antiblackness to anti-indigeneity through which native and black bodies are arranged on either side of a split between unproductive labour and productive work necessary for capital accumulation and for how we read capital in political economic critique. This division between labour and work forces the radical tradition to sustain the break between black and Indigenous peoples as part of its critical strategies of liberation. To address this impasse, Jackson reads the tradition against the grain for openings to indigeneity and a method for recovering lost labours.
In Learning While Black and Queer, Ed Brockenbrough outlines common obstacles to educational equity for Black youth in the LGBTQ+ community and suggests ways for educators to foster the success of Black queer students. This compassionate and actionable work advances what Brockenbrough calls a queerly responsive pedagogy, which addresses the nuances of LGBTQ+ youths' learning experiences in ways that other assets-based approaches, including culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies, do not. Providing evidence-based recommendations for creating educational spaces and school cultures that promote safety and belonging, Brockenbrough draws on recent empirical studies of urban Black youths aged fourteen to twenty-four who identify as LGBTQ+, as well as personal accounts of Black queer individuals and his own experiences as a secondary school teacher and teacher educator. Among other suggestions, he advocates the adoption of a queer-inclusive curriculum that covers health and sexuality, queer-affirming classrooms, and access to peer and intergenerational kinship networks for Black queer students.
Telling Blackness begins with two simple premises: conventional models of the ways people make meaning of the world fail to account for the particularities of Blackness; and accounts of Black life often miss the significance of the smallest and subtlest acts that sustain it. With this introduction of raciosemiotics, Smalls remaps the field of semiotic anthropology around the specificities of race and the body, and remaps contemporary Black diaspora through the embodied significations of a group of young Liberian women in the US. This transdisciplinary ethnographic account of their lives helps us reimagine their talk, twerks, and tweets as "tellings" that exceed our understandings of narrative and that potentially act on the world of meaning. And, with careful historical contextualization, we see how such acts reproduce, refuse, or powerfully disregard racial logics that have entangled the US and Liberia for two centuries. Led by Black feminist scholarship, Telling Blackness also provides a semiotic glimpse into ways of relating that help create complex diasporic intimacies and that sustain Black life beyond survival.
What does existence mean for Black women without the anchor of humanity and the struggle to inhabit it? How can one be oneself without being human? What is it to become a fugitive from the confines of 'the human'? Humanity has always excluded Others on the basis of race and gender. What happens to people who choose to flee, following in the footsteps of those who resisted enslavement? This audacious manifesto draws on the legacies of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and others to consider the ways in which Black women have been excluded from, struggled to achieve and opted to reject the category of 'human'.
Through interviews, news analysis, and personal observation, Meredith D. Clark presents the first book about how Black Twitter users carved out a vital space for fast-paced, incisive commentary on Black life in America not found in the mainstream press. Since 1827, when Freedom's Journal, the first newspaper to be published by free Black men in the United States, Black folks have been making use of the media technologies available to them to tell their own stories in their own ways. In We Tried to Tell Y'all: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives, Meredith D. Clark explains how Black social media users subvert the digital divide narrative while confronting centuries of erasure, omission, and mischaracterization of Black life in 'mainstream' media.
Hortense Spillers is one of the most important literary critics and Black feminist scholars of the last fifty years. Her 1987 scholarly article "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" is one of the most-cited essays in African American literary studies. Edited by Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton, The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers is the first collection to take up directly how Spillers's writing on literature, culture, and theory have been signal posts to the varied and universal threads of Black thought, as well as countless other areas of the academy.
This book provides unique insights into both historical and contemporary issues that impact Black women, their families and their communities, including immigration, education, policing, domestic violence and poverty. It fills a void in sociological and feminist literature by centring the voices, lived experiences and perspectives of women of the African and Caribbean Diaspora in the UK. Through the use of research, archival materials, narrative interviews, photographs, poems and reflective conversations, the authors explore the social issues which inspired these women's action for change.
A tribute to the power of self-determined stories. This dynamic collection spotlights the relational and political desires of Indigenous, African, and Afro-Indigenous people to overcome historical genocide, displacement, and disposability in an imperialist culture and nation. Activists, organizers, and academics gather to interrogate capture, care, environmental justice, sovereignty, and resistance. Engage is an invitation to interrogate everything, a toolkit to build a future free from the harmful legacies of colonialism, racism, and genocide.
How do young Black men navigate the transition to adulthood in an era of labor market precarity, an increasing emphasis on personal independence, and gendered racism? In Brotherhood University, Brandon A. Jackson utilizes longitudinal qualitative data to examine the role of emotions and social support among a group of young Black men as they navigate a "structural double bind" as college students and into early adulthood. While prevailing stereotypes portray young Black men as emotionally aloof, Jackson finds that the men invested in an emotion culture characterized by vulnerability, loyalty, and trust, which created a system of mutual social support, or brotherhood, among the group as they navigated college, prepared for the labor market, and experienced romantic relationships.
This second volume of Black Communication Theory extends the Black communication sphere to include digital as well as non-digital modes of communication for the Black community on the continent of Africa and the Diaspora. The authors of this edition have been able to build on from the conceptualizations enshrined within the first volume and expanded it to include other Black communication contexts be they on gender, race, ethnicity, or class. Continuing the journey of populating the Black communication public and private sphere on the cyberspace as well as non-cyberspaces, this volume will provide an invaluable resource to students and researchers of Afrocentric communication theories.
Since the Age of Enlightenment, Black bodies have been sites of trauma. Drawing on anti-colonial theory, From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter interrogates how this has shaped understandings of Black life, Black trauma and Black responses to trauma within psychiatry and other mental health professions. Focusing on the impact of racism on the mental health of Black communities in Canada, the UK and the US, author Ingrid R.G. Waldron examines the structural inequities that have contributed to the legacy of racial trauma in Black communities.
Mamas, Martyrs, and Jezebels: Myths, Legends, and Other Lies You' ve Been Told about Black Women revisits notions of Black womanhood to include the ways in which Black women' s perceived strength can function as a dangerous denial of Black women' s humanity. This collection addresses the stigma of this extraordinary endurance in professional and personal spaces, the Black church, in interpersonal partnerships, and within the justice arena, while also giving voice and value to Black women' s experiences as the backbone of the Black family and community.
Concepts of 'race' and racism are central to British history. They have shaped, and been shaped by, British identities, economies and societies for centuries, from colonialism and enslavement to the 'hostile environment' of the 2010s. Yet state and societal racism has always been met with resistance. This edited volume collects the latest research on anti-racist action in Britain, and makes the case for a multifaceted, historically contingent 'tradition' of British anti-racism shaped by local, national and transnational contexts, networks and movements. Ranging from Pan-Africanist activism in the 1890s to mutual aid women's groups in the 1970s, from anti-racist trade union marches in Scotland to West African student groups in North East England - this book explores the continuities and interruptions in British anti-racism from the nineteenth century to the present day.
Valencia presents the most comprehensive, theory-based analysis to date on how society and schools are structurally organized and maintained to impede the optimal academic achievement of low-SES, marginalized K-12 Black and Latino/Latina students--compared to their privileged White counterparts. The book interrogates how society contributes to educational inequality as seen in racialized patterns in income, wealth, housing, and health, and how public schools create significant obstacles for students of color as observed in reduced access to opportunities (e.g., little access to high-status curricula knowledge). Valencia offers suggestions for achieving equal education (e.g., implementing fairness of school funding, improving teacher quality, and providing students of color access to multicultural education) by disrupting structural racism.
Using a Black decolonial feminist approach, this book deconstructs 'the white sambo psyche' of white European settler colonialism, which classifies the colonised and enslaved into 'sambo': a category of racial subjection and utter negation which is now so normalized that we are inured to it. Drawing on voyages both real and metaphorical Decolonizing Sambo positions itself amongst the global entanglements of white European settler colonialism, racial capitalism and contemporary culture. This cultural analysis analyses archival data, artefacts, commemorative spaces, films, children's books, and sweets to show sambo's genealogy, transculturation, fungibility, and continuation in contemporary racialising assemblages.
On Blackness, Liveliness, and What It Means to Be Human extends Wynter's critique to human development and academic knowledge production, arguing that Black specificity can create new possibilities for Black being. Wilson Kwamogi Okello closely examines holistic development theory, aiming not to reform but to reimagine the "self" it presupposes. Taking what he describes as a multimodal and multisensory approach, Okello engages a chorus of writers, thinkers, and cultural workers to reframe Blackness as a social, political, and historical matrix, going beyond the study of Black experiences, biology, or culture. The book proposes and enacts a methodological attunement to Blackness that can guide theory, policy, and practice toward an alternative praxis for the benefit of Black living.
Out of the Sun demonstrate Esi Edugyan's commitment to seeking out the stories of Black lives that history has failed to record. In five wide-ranging essays, written with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the background, Edugyan reflects on her own identity and experiences. She delves into the history of Western Art and the truths about Black lives that it fails to reveal, and the ways contemporary Black artists are reclaiming and reimagining those lives. She explores and celebrates the legacy of Afrofuturism, the complex and problematic practice of racial passing, the place of ghosts and haunting in the imagination, and the fascinating relationship between Africa and Asia dating back to the 6th Century.
A powerful biography that presents analysis of a black working-class woman who rose from a tenement slum in intensely racialized British Guiana to become a leading anti-colonialism, workers' rights and women's liberation activist in Britain. Jessica Huntley's Pan-African Life celebrates Huntley's importance as a leading figure in the Windrush-era resistance to the multiple, racialized injustices faced by black settlers, children and communities in Britain. Claudia Tomlinson details how Huntley became the elder stateswoman of radical black activism of her era through participation in decolonization movements and actions such as the Black Parents Movement and the International Bookfair of Radical Black and Third World Books, as well as her foundational role at Bogle L'Ouverture Publications, the leading black-led, pan-African publishing house and its associated radical bookshop.
How do Black women writing speculative fiction explore the use of memory as a potential strategy for liberation? In Black Speculative Feminisms, Cassandra L. Jones looks at the writings of Octavia E. Butler, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Rasheedah Phillips, and Nnedi Okorafor to chart those moments where characters harness, or fail to harness, the power of memory. These instances transform memory--individual and collective, bodily and archival--from passive recollection into direct or indirect social action. Taking a Black feminist approach, Jones addresses several emancipatory themes within Afrofuturism: the decolonization of time that can be found in fiction employing non-Western and non-linear expressions of time.
From 1987, when Rita Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, to 2021, when Amanda Gorman skyrocketed to celebrity status after performing during Biden's inauguration and the Super Bowl, Black women have seemingly attained secure, stable positions at the forefront of American poetry. But this prominence comes at a price. As figures like Dove and Elizabeth Alexander have become well known, receiving endorsements and gaining visible platforms from major prizes, academic institutions, and publishing houses, the underlying terms of evaluation that greet Black women's poetics often remain superficial, reflecting efforts to co-opt and contain rather than meaningfully consider new voices and styles. In Pitfalls of Prestige, Laura Elizabeth Vrana surveys how developments in American literary institutions since 1980 have shaped--and been shaped by--Black women poets.
In The Second Battle for Africa, Erik S. McDuffie establishes the importance of the US Midwest to twentieth-century global Black history, internationalism, and radicalism. McDuffie shows how cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, as well as rural areas in the heartland, became central and enduring incubators of Marcus Garvey's Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its offshoots. Throughout the region, Black thinkers, activists, and cultural workers, like the Grenada-born activist Louise Little, championed Black freedom.
Black women writers and scholars have been engaged in the process of repairing and restoring history especially as it documents the experiences of Black women in America. They restore the historical record by centering women and women's stories in their poetry and fiction. These stories repair decades, if not centuries, of damage and erasure throughout American literary history. "Womb work" is one way of framing these reparative and restorative writing processes that includes both the writers of these works and the audiences/readers that engage the work. Womb Work argues that Black women's stories are essential to advancing a more comprehensive and critical understanding of American literary history. "Womb work" requires an interdisciplinary approach to Black women's literature through the lenses of the medical/health humanities.
In a society shaped by the legacies of enslavement, white supremacy, and sexism, who has the right to a voice? In this elegant essay, Djamila Ribeiro offers a compelling intervention into contemporary discussions of power and identity: the concept of "speaking place." A crucial component of conversations on race and gender in Brazil, speaking place is the idea that everyone has a social position in the world and that what we are able to say, and how it is received by others, depends on it. Ribeiro traces the history of Black feminist thought through several centuries, examining the ways that Black women have been silenced, ignored, and punished for speaking.
Narrative Wisdom and African Arts explores how historical and contemporary African arts make visible narratives rooted in collective and individual memory and knowledge. Historical works made by artists across sub-Saharan Africa during the thirteenth to twentieth centuries dialogue with contemporary works by African artists working around the globe. This is the first book to offer a comparative examination of intersections between African arts and narrative across expansive genres, cultures, periods, and contexts of patronage. More than two hundred color images explore an extensive array of media including sculpture in wood, ivory, metal, textiles, works on paper, photography, painting, and time-based media works.
From Elephant and Castle to Southwark, from London Bridge to Westminster, Black History Walks takes you to historic locations around the city of London and gives in-depth historical context for each place, illuminating the presence of Black history throughout Britain's capital city.
From application through to graduation and beyond, this book offers key insights into the workings of higher education, highlighting the structural barriers that impede progress. Challenges and recommendations are issued for the sector and wider community. This text is a witness to the tenacity and brilliance of Black students to achieve against the odds.
In Grime, Glitter, and Glass, Nikki A. Greene examines how contemporary Black visual artists use sonic elements to refigure the formal and philosophical developments of Black art and culture. Focusing on the multimedia art of Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Greene traces the intersection of the visual's sonic possibilities with the Black body's physical, representational, and metaphorical use in art. She employs her concept of "visual aesthetic musicality" to interpret Black visual art by examining the musical genres of jazz and rap, along with the often-overlooked innovations of funk and rumba, within art historiography.
Africa Beyond Inventions is a rich critical engagement with the work of V.Y. Mudimbe. For decades, Mudimbe advanced a distinctive and erudite critical project that contributes to various bodies of knowledge in fields such as philosophy, anthropology, theology, postcolonial studies, decolonial theory, literary criticism, cultural studies, prose fiction, and African studies more broadly. A decade after his retirement and in the expansive spirit of his work, this volume stages a productive engagement with Mudimbe's remarkable and capacious body of work and the conceptual, epistemic, methodological, and ethical challenges it poses for the modern disciplines, specifically in relation to Africa.
The African Gaze is a comprehensive exploration of postcolonial and contemporary photography and cinema from Africa. Drawing from archival imagery and documents, interviews with the photographers and filmmakers (in some cases family members/close associates if the artist is deceased), and contributions from writers, scholars, and curators, it maps a comprehensive introduction to African moving and still imagery. This is a hugely important and timely publication--engagement with Black and African histories is stronger than ever before (and long overdue). The major names of African photography, such as Malick Sidibé, Sanlé Sory, and Seydou Keïta, have become highly collectible in the art market, while African cinema, pioneered by filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène in 1960s Senegal, is now recognized for its creative innovation and storytelling. For anyone drawn to African photography and film, this book will provide an exciting and accessible overview. Featuring interviews with Samuel Fosso and Souleymane Cissé.
This book presents a comprehensive exploration of Critical Race Theory, offering a clear understanding of its origins, the way it has been problematized and its potential for societal change. By examining the historical influence of imperialism and capitalism, the author critiques both liberal and conservative perspectives. Centring the voices of marginalized groups, the book highlights their position as agents of change who have been consistently rejected, ignored or attacked by both the right and the left. Providing a unique perspective on Critical Race Theory, this book is a valuable resource for readers seeking to navigate the complexities of systemic racism and how to dismantle these systems.
Features the experiences of African American artists in Nordic Europe During the twentieth century, Black Americans visited and lived in Nordic countries, performing, studying, working, and seeking adventure, love, freedom to explore sexuality, and distance from Jim Crow segregation. Drawing from film, photographs, paintings, music, textiles, and dance, Nordic Utopia captures these journeys and ultimately reflects on how some African Americans have called and continue to call Nordic countries home. Calling on voices from hip-hop artist Jason Diakité to novelist and essayist James Baldwin, this book tells how African Americans were transformed through their Nordic encounters.
Whether invisible or hyper-visible, adored or reviled, from the inception of American literature the Black body has been rendered in myriad forms. This volume tracks and uncovers the Black body as a persistent presence and absence in American literature. It provides an invaluable guide for teachers and students interested in literary and artistic representations of Blackness and embodiment. The book is divided into three sections that highlight Black embodiment through conceptual flashpoints that emphasize various aspects of human body in its visual and textual manifestations. This Companion engages past and continuing debates about the nature of embodiment by showcasing how writers from multiple eras and communities defined and challenged the limits of what constitutes a body in relation to human and nonhuman environment.
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.
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.(1943-2024) was 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
