In this section you will find guidance on finding both print and e-books in the Library collections.
The Library holds many books and e-books by Black authors and on topics relevant to Black Studies. The best way to find these is by using Explore and doing a simple search using keywords.
You can also find relevant literature by searching or browsing the subject headings. Subject headings are like tags, or labels, which describe what the book is about. Browsing or searching the subject headings will enable you to find all the books on a particular topic. See below for guidance on how to search using subject headings.
We welcome suggestions for new books and e-books that contribute to the diversification of our collections.
Please note: UCL Library uses Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) to describe and index much of UCL’s collections on Explore. While comprehensive and widely used throughout UK and US academic libraries it is recognised as largely reflecting a predominantly white, non-disabled, cis, male, western worldview. Work is ongoing to make fixes but some terminology may be offensive to library users. UCL Library is committed to addressing these issues and would welcome the thoughts of library users about any terminology used in Explore records.
Image: Selma Burke with her portrait bust of Booker T. Washington, 1935-43. New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Print books are distributed across multiple libraries and located within a range of subject collections. Contact your Subject Liaison or Site Librarian for more detailed guidance on finding Black scholarship across the print collections, but some key areas related to the study of Africa, the Afro-Caribbean, and the Black diaspora are listed below.
You can use UCL Explore to find books in UCL libraries. In Explore, you will find the location details of the materials you are looking for: library site, collection and shelfmark. An advanced search by shelfmark will allow you to browse all titles at that location.
In the Main Education Collection on Level 5 of the IOE Library there are several subject collections of interest at the following shelfmarks:
The Library holds many texts on topics relevant to Black Studies in e-book format. The best way to find individual ebooks is by using Explore and searching using keywords, or by browsing the subject headings. Some larger collections are listed here.
This section lists reference works and handbooks which are a good starting point for discovering further literature.
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.
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.
Jackson's paintings synthesize connections shared by local residents of color around experiences of transportation, housing, agriculture and labor. The first monograph on Tomashi Jackson (born 1980), The Land Claim illustrates the Cambridge- and New York-based artist's unique work and research methodology that focuses on the historic and contemporary lived experiences of Indigenous, Black and Latinx families on the East End of Long Island, and how the role of women, the meaning of labor and the sacredness of land link these communities.
Rarely seen installation works that exemplify this pioneering artist's critical focus on Black identity and Black feminism. Showcasing a lesser-known aspect of Saar's art, Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight provides new insights into her explorations of ritual, spirituality and cosmologies, as well as themes of the African diaspora.
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.
Between Afrofuturism, fantasy and postcolonialism: the most comprehensive monograph to date on the fantastical worlds of Wangechi Mutu. Wangechi Mutu takes viewers on journeys of material, psychological and sociopolitical transformation; this volume explores her most recent groundbreaking work. Over the past two decades, Mutu has created chimerical constellations of powerful female characters, hybrid beings and fantastical landscapes.
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 artists featured in The Black Index--Dennis Delgado, Alicia Henry, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Titus Kaphar, Whitfield Lovell, and Lava Thomas--build upon the tradition of Black self-representation as an antidote to colonialist images.
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.
The purpose of this book is to excavate and recover a wealth of under-examined artworks and research materials directly to interrogate, debate and analyse the tangled skeins undergirding visual representations of transatlantic slavery across the Black diaspora.
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.
Building on concepts from Black studies and cultural studies, Towns develops an insightful critique of this dominant conception of the human in media philosophy and introduces a foundation for Black media philosophy.
Unique exploration of how the cultural renaissance following independence evolved into today's dynamic African fashion revolution. Africa Fashion explores how radical post-independence social and political re-ordering sparked a cultural renaissance across the continent. With contributions from experts on cloth, fashion and cultural history as well as the voices of makers and designers, this inspiring and arresting book offers a window into one of the most innovative, exciting and thoughtful areas of fashion today.
Black Celebrity examines representations of postbellum black athletes and artist-entertainers by novelists Caryl Phillips and Jeffery Renard Allen and poets Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, Adrian Matejka, and Tyehimba Jess.
A brief guide to finding and accessing e-books via UCL Explore.